Date: Sat, 8 Feb 1997 22:36:34 -0500 (EST) From: "Chris M. Sciabarra" <sciabrrc-AT-is2.NYU.EDU> Subject: Re: M-TH: Whether freedom has a chance On 8 Feb 1997, Chris Burford wrote: > Although in a sense headlines, I think this clarification is useful, and would > like to comment. > The other tests Chris S gives, do not of course present the capitalist west > with a very glowing score card. On every point very serious evidence could be > presented. Agreed... I'm certainly no proponent of state capitalism. :) > But OK, I understand that Chris bases his criticism of actually existed socialism > here, as well as the fact that it was beaten economically in commodity production. > I would still argue the latter was the factor that caused the haemorrhage through > the Berlin wall. By comparison few atrocities have been effectively laid at the > door of the Stasi in later years. Less than two years ago I walked round the > former Stasi headquarters in Berlin. What was remarkable was how little there was to > see and how impoverished and amateur the displays were. The government had > not seen the opportunity of making a major propaganda show here. > The society was stuffy, and undemocratic certainly. There was little freedom > of manoeuvre to speak contrary views, but that is the case under capitalism too. > Your career and prospects can effectively be considerably hampered by being > indiscrete. > But what I take Chris S to be arguing for is for the freedoms of pure bourgeois > (buergerlich) society, alongside efficiency in commodity production. Now can those > freedoms exist in reality? > I do not feel I understand his viewpoint well, but it seems > to be essentially that they should, and that it is exogenous factors that get in > the way - socialists, or in the west, the interfering state. I don't really believe these are "exogenous factors" -- I actually believe that the SYSTEM constitutes political and economic conditions, but whereas Marxists tend to emphasize the economic as the "base" with the political as a "superstructure," I refuse to disconnect the economic from the institutional, since it is the institutional that very much affects the economic... how it evolves, the directions it takes, the tendencies it has, etc. I think there is a kind of internality between the political and economic, but in my study of contemporary political economy, it is the political that I stress, it is the political that I privilege, analytically, in a kind of "asymmetric internality." > Chris S seems to argue that strata and privilege are political factors that > intrude from the outside into the workings of the pure society of libertarian > atomised equals. They are not something that grows inevitably out of the > granularity of human social life, and need to be consciously handled and controlled. I don't think a pure society of libertarianism is a society of "atomised equals." I think the very concept of the individual can't be abstracted from context, and that the "bourgeois" concept of Economic Man is something that needs to be given a good funeral. This said, I think we must ALWAYS grasp society as an evolving organic totality, but I simply think too many Marxists have fallen into the trap of a one-dimensional emphasis on the economic, as if the political has no vitally important reciprocal connections with it. In the 20th century, the state has simply become the most important single force in social life, in my view. And any approach to social inquiry which does not take this into account, must invariably internalize certain theoretical weaknesses. That is not to say that all Marxists are oblivious to the political; Poulantzas and Althusser had some important things to say. And I think Marxists need to listen to libertarians as much as libertarians need to listen to Marxists in this regard. We might really learn something from one another. > Similarly Chris S does not see that independently of men's will, under > capitalist commodity exchange there will be a tendency towards the uneven > accumulation of capital. Instead he argues that monopolies are imposed by > government interference. It is not that monopolies are imposed -- I readily agree with Adam Smith's own insight that capitalists rarely get together if not to restrict this market or that in some conspiracy against the "general public." The point, for me, as a libertarian, is that monopoly, cartelization, and the like, cannot be maintained, perpetuated, or reproduced IN THE ABSENCE of political factors. Here is an example of what is wrong with a typically one-dimensional perspective within Marxism. Engels writes, in his ANTI-DUHRING: ". . . the progressive develoment of production and exchange nevertheless brings us of necessity to the present capitalist mode of production, to the monopolisation of the means of production and the means of subsistence in the hands of the one, numerically small, class, to the degradation into propertyless proletarians of the other class, constituting the immense majority, to the periodic alternation of speculative production booms and commercial crises and to the whole of the present anarchy of production. The whole process can be explained by purely economic causes; at no point whatever are robbery, force, the state or political interference of any kind necessary (pp. 200-01). Now, Engels for sure, knew better than this; granted ANTI-DUHRING was a polemic against an arch-opponent of the day. But to say "at no point whatever are robbery, force, the state or political interference of any kind necessary" is -- quite simply, ahistorical, and incorrect. The libertarian would maintain that at virtually EVERY point, some kind of political interference is necessary. Now perhaps this is an issue of emphasis -- but in this case, it is an issue of ESSENTIAL emphasis; the analysis is simply incorrect if it abstracts from the institutional-political context within which economic forces exist, which shape these forces, for better or for worse. > In terms of power the debate on thaxis seems less polarised, with different > "sides" adopting heterogeneous postions, but there is a tendency to regard the > state as having the monopoly of power, which must be broken down. I would argue > instead along with various marxist currents that have seen the widespread > ramifications to the concept of the state, embedded in society, > that there are many forms of power and many inequalities of power at all > levels of social organisation, including power inequalities in personal > relationships of considerable dynamic complexity. > > The abstract buergerlich society is an impossibility, and socialism should > not be criticised for transgressing it, nor for developing the means of > production more slowly than capitalism, and being beaten in the economic > warfare of the 80's. Rather we must analyse more subtly the social and > economic phenomena at all fractal levels of complexity from the contact of two > individuals to the power structure at the top of the state. > We must help to understand the necessity of many of these processes, > and then in that recognition of necessity, > lies the only meaningful sense of freedom in our personal, social and economic > lives. > This of course includes the social control of the means of production, even > if we cannot see at present how to abandon commodity exchange. > Chris Burford > London. I would agree wholeheartedly that there are many dimensions of freedom. My central CRITICISM of libertarians, or at least some important libertarians, is that they tend to focus ONLY on the political, as if merely lopping off the state is both NECESSSARY and SUFFICIENT for human liberation. It isn't; there are a host of economic, cultural, psychological, and ethical factors that must be grasped, understood and transcended. And too many libertarians tend to oppose the overemphasis on economics among left academics with an overemphasis on politics. I'm working hard to transcend the false alternative here... and among Marxists, my exposition tends to focus on those aspects that I think Marxists need to pay more attention to. Marx tells us, correctly, that exposition must always take into account the interests of one's audience. The moment of exposition is an important aspect of Marx's overall dialectical mode of inquiry. I have a very long way to go myself, in terms of coming up with sufficient answers. First, we need to ask the right questions. One of the things that separates Marxists and libertarians, it seems, is that they sometimes are asking different questions. - Chris ==========================================Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ph.D Visiting Scholar New York University Department of Politics Email: sciabrrc-AT-is2.nyu.edu Website: http://pages.nyu.edu/~sciabrrc ========================================== --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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