File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9709, message 334


Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 10:45:07 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: e-mail burnout


Andrew Austin:

>
>Here are just a few of the problems with the thinking on this list in the
>form of several questions: 
>
>(1) Can everything be reduced to social class?

I am not sure what this question is aiming at. The post-Marxists claim that
Marxism is class-reductionist. I disagree. For example, the phenomenon of
white racism in the South was a historical obstacle to union organizing.
Without unions, whites got lower wages. It was in their class interest to
defeat Jim Crow, but the dead weight of Slavocracy values prevented this.
In the 18th Brumaire, Marx said that men make their own history, but not of
their own choosing. The dead weight of tradition hangs heavily. The working
class is especially burdened by this, since in ordinary times its ideas are
those of the ruling class.

>
>(2) Can everything be reduced to technology or economics?
>

See above.

>(3) Do ideas have force?

See above.

>
>(4) Do human beings have feelings?

Everybody except me. My ex-girlfriend Alicia launched a career as a
performance artist with a repertory of stories that included a scathing
attack on me. She was on WBAI one morning (Doug's station) doing this piece
about me. She said, "Leonard (i.e., yours truly) never expressed any
emotions except when the topic was international politics."

>
>(5) Do human beings have cognition? Do people think and act? Do people
>have motives?

I took a class at Teachers College a couple of years ago on Computers and
Cognition. The dopey professor tried to make the case that human brains and
computers basically functioned in the same way. He was an artificial
intelligence fanatic and I hated AI. So from that point on, I developed a
deep trust of the buzzword cognition. What was your question...?

>
>(6) Can people share ideas? Is it possible that a people share a
>worldview?
>

The German people shared many ideas. In the nineteenth century and prior to
Hitler's assumption of power, one of the main ideas was socialism. The
German Social Democracy was the most powerful socialist party in the world.
Engels played a role in its formation. Kautsky, another leader, was
considered the most brilliant Marxist thinker in the world. Many, many,
many, many more Germans identified with the ideas of this movement than
with anti-Semitism. There were exceptions obviously. Among them, Richard
Wagner. These ideas had very little political impact while the ideas of the
social democracy had enormous impact. Germany had exceptional social
legislation at a time when the rest of Western Europe had none. This was
attributable to the impact of Socialist parliamentarians. Were there any
anti-Semitic laws passed prior to the rise of Hitler? No, there were none.
Why not? There was no powerful anti-Semitic movement as there was in
Czarist Russia or Poland. In these countries, there were restrictive laws.
Compared to them, Germany was Enlightenment incarnate.

>(7) Do people hate?
>

Yes.


>(8) Do people feel remorse?
>

Yes.

>(9) Do people share responsibility for their actions? Can individuals be
>held accountable for the behavior? 
>

This is a key question. Marxists like myself made every effort to put the
blame on the proper parties at the time of the My Lai massacre. The
bourgeois press wanted to affix blame to Lieutenant Calley, while
socialists tried to show that it was the top military brass and the
politicians who were responsible. Calley, like the cops Goldhagen wrote
about, were doing their job. They were good Germans, as Calley was a good
American. The whole point of Goldhagen is to deflect responsibility from
the capitalist class to the ordinary people who get turned into killing
machines.



>(10) Are human beings puppets on strings? Is there no such thing as
>freedom?
>

Under the capitalist system, there is no real freedom. In 1943 Germany,
there was even less real freedom than in bourgeois democracies.


>(11) Is psychology ever relevant to the study of human social action?
>

I think it is. I have several books at home in my queue that deal with
white racism. One is written by Noel Ignatiev, a brief subscriber to
marxism-international. The other is by David Roediger. They are detailed
studies of the Irish population at the time of the Civil War. The
relationship between Irish--who were considered the niggers of Europe--and
black Americans graphically shows the damage racism does to the class
struggle.


>(12) Is there such a thing as racism?
>

See above.


>
>Self-control wasn't even there. The Nazis said kill. Germans killed. No
>reason. Just killed. No feelings. Just killed. No belief system to negate
>remorse. No remorse. Germans didn't feel. They just killed. For no reason.
>Puppets on strings.
>

There was no self-control among cops and soldiers. They murdered Jews
indiscriminately. They murdered Gypsies and homosexuals indiscriminately.
They murdered millions of Russians. The Nazi regime was one of the most
irrational and demonic killing machines in the history of the human race.
The only incident that I can think of that compares is the Hutu slaughter
of the Tutsis. Hutus did not hire cops and soldiers to do their dirty work.
The genocide was a truly popular movement. Ordinary citizens took machetes
and hacked neighbors to death. Perhaps if the German people had been forced
to do their own killing in this manner, things would have turned out a
little differently. After all, taking a machete to another human being is a
pretty gruesome business. Many of Goldhagen's cops complained about their
job, that it was making them sick. (Browning reports about this, while
Goldhagen gives it short shrift.)

Much more to the point is how this killing-machine came into existence and
what class forces were responsible. In Goldhagen's view, this
killing-machine was the latency of German anti-Semitism made manifest. I
will present a class analysis of the Nazi state. My first post should
appear this weekend.


Louis Proyect



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