File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9709, message 525


Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 00:58:22 -0400
Subject: Re: M-I: Marxism, genocide and morality
From: farmelantj-AT-juno.com (James Farmelant)



On Thu, 25 Sep 1997 10:05:03 -0400 Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
writes:
>Jim Farmelant:
>>
>>Lou Proyect argued that moral culpability for the Holocaust falls 
>solely
>>on
>>the German leaders.  Proyect cited the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam
>>War to support his point.  Lou points out quite correctly that much 
>of
>>the
>>left argued at the time that Lt. Calley and his men should not have 
>been
>>held responsible because they were simply being "good Germans" who
>>were simply following orders (the right of course also supported 
>Calley
>>presumably because they approved of what he and his men did).  Now,
>>I seem to remember Herbert Marcuse (in either an essay or an 
>interview)
>>challenging this kind of reasoning.  Marcuse argued that while 
>primary
>>responsibility must fall upon those who give the orders, the 
>underlings
>>who actually carry these orders out cannot escape culpability simply
>>because they were following orders (that is  being "good Germans).
>>
>
>Actually, I don't think it is very useful to couch the discussion in 
>terms
>of morality. That is a very slippery question that Marx and Engels had 
>very
>little interest in examining on its own merits. Trotsky wrote an
>interesting article on Marxism and morality, but it was not an
>all-consuming topic for him.

Lou, you might want to take a look at Rodney Peffer's *Marxism, Morality,
and Social Justice* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). In
chapter 6-"Morality and Ideology"- Peffer (who BTW is a friend of Justin
Schwartz) argues contends that Marx and Engels' rejection of morality
and moral discourse as inherently ideological must be judged as having
been mistaken in light of contemporary metaethical theory.  


>
>I have since discovered that the Analytic Marxists are very much
>preoccupied with this topic and that Roemer in particular has made a 
>career
>out of establishing the Marxist basis for justice. Roemer's main drive
>seems to be to show that John Rawls does not have the last word on the
>question of right and wrong.
>
>The problem with Roemer, and I think it has rubbed off on Jim to an 
>extent,
>is that such questions are focused on the behavior of individuals in
>isolation from society. Roemer's notion of socialism proceeds from the
>individual to society, via game theory. He extrapolates what would be
>workable rules for a socialist society on the basis of what would be 
>in the
>self-interest of an individual. Put crudely (I haven't looked at the 
>AM'ers
>in a while), the basis of socialism seems to be self-interest, but not 
>so
>much self-interest as to harm others.
>
>As I recall, there is a passage in Roemer that examines the question 
>of
>whether or not a worker should take a job with a factory that is 
>producing
>deadly toxic wastes. Roemer attempts to provide guidelines for how to 
>make
>a decision. Private gain for the individual versus harm to society. 
>What is
>left out of the discussion entirely is political action to abolish 
>private
>ownership of the means of production, including the very factory under
>investigation.

I am not sure that is a fair characterization of Roemer.  Even liberal
justice theory (Rawls and Dworkin) is concerned with evaluating the
moral acceptability of social institutions and not simply passing 
judgements on the behavior of individuals.
>
>Getting back to the question of the German worker, it seems that he or 
>she
>was no better or worse than any other worker at any time in history.
>Workers universally behave in a brutish manner when capitalist society 
>has
>taken on a brutish character[...]
No doubt true that when capitalist society turns brutish workers will
tend
to behave brutishly but does this mean that they are robbed of their
moral agency?
>
>Andy's problem is that he didn't follow through. He was impressed with
>Goldhagen's work and said that it could be integrated with a Marxist
>approach. Nearly everybody, myself especially, fell out of our chairs. 
>I
>never expected anybody to defend Goldhagen on a Marxism list. But what 
>the
>heck, I said to myself, what does Andy have up his sleeve. After all, 
>this
>guy pumped out hundreds of thousands of bytes on an average week on 
>m-i.
>The problem is that for all his talk about the viability of combining 
>Marx
>and Goldhagen, he did not do this. And the longer he went without
>delivering the goods, the less credibility he had.

Andy has emphasized in private email that he is very much interested 
in synthesizing Marxism with the work of George Herbert Mead.  Mead
was a sociologist and philosopher (he was a pragmatist and close friend
of Dewey) who concentrated primarily on social psychology and micro-
sociology.  Andy views the work of Marx and Mead as being complementary.
The fact that both Marx and Mead share a common Hegelian heritage and
that they both 'naturalized' Hegel meant that they viewed society in
dialectical
terms.  In Andy's view their differnces lie primarily in the fact that
Marx 
concentrated on macro-sociological level issues whereas Mead 
emphasized the micro-sociological level.

Andy interprets Goldhagen's HWE as an exercize in Meadian social
psychology
as applied to the analysis of why so many ordinary Germans seemed to 
willingly participate in the Holocaust.  Therefore, for Andy Goldhagen is
of interest as an example of how Marxian and Meadian analyses can be
brought together. Goldhagen is compatible with Marxian analysis because
his work concentrtaes primarily on the micro level while a Marxian
analysis
would concentrate on the macro level.

			James F.

>
>That being said, I am grateful to Andy for being such a stubborn mule 
>on
>this question. It has provoked me into a rather exhaustive study of 
>the
>question. I thought that my last article was pretty good stuff and my 
>next
>one, which should appear this weekend, should be even better.
>
>In my next article, I want to review A. Leon's theory of the Jews as a
>people-class and then hold it up to a recent reevaluation of the 
>theory in
>Traverso's "Marxism and the Jewish Question." Once we have satisfied
>ourselves that a historical materialist rather than an idealist
>interpretation is more viable for an understanding of the Judeocide, I 
>will
>post my final article which will be a review of some of the more 
>recent
>research into the topic.
>
>Louis Proyect
>
>
>
>
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>---
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