Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 20:11:12 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Marx & "emancipation" (Was: reply to Jim) 



Gary's offhand rebuke to Irish "Maoism":

>Your comments on Irish Maoism were of course absolutely correct.  It
>represented and in the form of Paul Cockshott still does, a shameful
>degeneration of the emancipatory impulse of classical Marxism. 

I think the real difference between Gary M and myself lies in the fact that
he -- squarely in the tradition of Western Marxists --sees Marx primarily as
a social scientist confronting capitalism, and his vision of total social
emancipation through class warfare as the apotheosis of humanity's struggle
for true freedom.  Gary's vision of an "emancipatory" Marxism is, to me, a
palpable illusion.  

I, on the other hand, have come increasingly to see Marx as a sort of
metaphysician addressing a central question of philosophy: the nature of
freedom.  Traditional Western philosophy posits freedom as a negative --
freedom from external coercian -- while Marx's concept is wholly in the
positive, that is, the freedom to become one's real, essential self.  The
difference is important, for in many ways the whole history of Western
Marxism, beginning with Lukacs' and following down to our own day, rests
upon this subtle distinction.  

For Marx (as I see it), beginning with *The German Ideology* (1845), the
human condition is one of alienating dependence on nature, and alienating
division into warring social classes, a sundering of humanity's primal unity
created by the division of labor necessary to mater nature.  Marx's idea of
emancipation from these dehumanizing forces, therefore, does not mean
individual freedom; it means, rather, the liberation of the species as a
whole, and will come about over the long haul of history.

Of course, the collective emancipation will itself be produced by the very
process of dependence that is humanity's Way of the Cross, a sort of
"self-enriching alienation" (our friend Walicki's term).  Thus humanity must
go through the degradation of slavery, serfdom and wage-labor exploitation,
in order to build the productive capacity to free itself both from the blind
forces of nature and the class divisions within the body social, and so to
become at last its own master.  This will come about when humanity has
achieved full rational control over both its natural and social environment,
a rational reordering of the world that will witness the flowering of
humankind's creative potential.  Here, Marx is indebted to both Hegel and
Christian providentialism, both harbingers of the great millenarian utopia
of the modern age, the collective redemption of the species in secularlized
form.

Humanity's long march to utopia is reached, of course, through rational
mastery of the anarchy generated by the individualistic freedom of bourgeois
liberalism, which in fact means only the freedom to exploit labor.  To Marx,
the prime obstacles to human emancipation are the two deities of the liberal
pantheon, private property and the market.  And of these two, Marx held the
market to be the more sinister, since it spawns anarchy, whereas capitalist
private property at least organizes production rationally as a prelude to
communism.  Indeed, Marx pushed his refusal of "commodity production for
exchange" so far as to call for the abolition of money as the most
dehumanizing form of mankind's enslavement to things of his own creation.
Marx's concrete program for achieving communism, therefore, is the abolition
of private property, the market and money.  The freedom which follows is not
one of personal emancipation, but rather the salvation of the entire class. 

Now, here's the crux; when most speaks of the "emancipatory impulse" of
Marxism, they are, so far as I can see, referring to some paradigm of human
perfectibility that led most of Western Marxism to abandon Lenin's wager on
class struggle and political will in favor of some committment to
"historical necessity".  Who was it who coined the axiom that the socialist
"movement meant everything" and the "final goal nothing"?  Bernstein, I
think.  Anyway, I think it is the "Marxism as emancipation" canard that has
to be challenged here.  The history of Marxism, including that of its
concomitants Leninism and Maoism, vitiates that idea conclusively. 

Louis Godena



     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---