File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/97-02-10.192, message 121


Date: 09 Feb 97 05:00:21 EST
From: Chris Burford <100423.2040-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-TH: Marxism vs libertarianism


I am taking the liberty of changing the thread title, for this 
post, since Chris Sciabarra's reply to my post yesterday 
essentially accepts the challenge of how far marxism and libertarianism
are counterposed.

BTW sorry about the word-wrap when my posts get copied. I have set this
screen for 73 characters.

As I wrote yesterday's post I realised I was most unlikely to be able to 
press CMS into a corner as a crude libertarian, nevertheless the 
exercise IMO was useful. In writing I became aware of an ambiguity
in my criticism. I am powerfully influenced by the critical 
tone of Marx's remarks about civil (buergerlich) society in 
"On the Jewish Question". I see the soul-less picture there as 
describing in part powerful tendencies we see enacted everyday
fragmenting the quality of human relationships, but against which
IMO people constantly rebel in other ways. I accept what I see as 
the thrust of Marx's argument that the economic nature of capitalist
commodity society is the base powerfully promoting these patterns.

On the other hand I also read the description as a description of 
an ideological and political position of libertarianism, and I was
pressing CMS to say whether he subscribed to this in its pure form.

I accept his post that he does not. 

However if capitalist commodity 
production gives rise repeatedly to a) these phenomena and b) these
ideas, then a fair part of showing the relevance of a marxist 
analysis is in getting to grips with them and CMS presents 
most testing challenges.

All identities are simplifications. CMS identifies himself as 
a libertarian. My view is that as long as capitalism
exists, its most powerful critique will exist also; it is worth trying
to make that critique more relevant and effective.

So let us see how much we can step across the polar identifications.
First I will say where I have long suspected CMS to be at his 
strongest. I hardly dare say this, but I fear he has put his finger
on the achilles heel of marxism - the extent to which there is a 
utopian current within it from the beginning. As I understand it 
the problem is whether in applying a dialectical method to the 
critique of capitalism Marx delineates entities that are 
contradictory opposites philosphically, and implies that this 
philosophical and analytical contradiction is also a temporal 
contradiction. That the time will come when the meek shall inherit 
the earth.

By contrast I would start to say that under any change of property
law over the means of production, there will in any future foreseeable
society be contradictions between for example the leaders and the led.
That contradiction could be handled with much more 
subtlety and equality than is often the case (especially with the 
sharing of knowledge) and the most sophisticated and often 
successful leadership styles are those that are integrative of the 
leadership contributions of everyone else. But the contradiction will
remain even if it does not have a capitalist legal form.

So while I do not want to even start thinking of myself as a market
socialist (my copy of Schweickart has not yet even arrived by post)
I see other advances to be made before we abolish commodity 
production altogether, and I fear that it may be a utopian aspect 
of marxism to think that is possible. This may become clearer 
towards the end of the 21st century. (!)

But of CMS's comments:

>>>
> 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. :)
<<<<<<

Just to be a bit wary of the agreement here - my remarks applied
to the capitalist west in general and not just to state capitalism
in the capitalist west.

Chris's main response I welcome very much:

>>>	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."
<<<

I am very attracted to a systems type of analysis. Indeed some of 
CMS's posts over the last four weeks seemed to me to come from
a nuanced sense of the interconnectedness of such phenomena - I am
thinking particularly of his posts about Trust and the extent that
rules are formalised, and sanctions are imposed when they are broken.
Here I see many gradations of formality from the interpersonal to 
the state institutions.

CMS:
>>>	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.
<<

Good, let us stand together on the organic totality of society.
If CMS does not defend an abstract and unreal model of the rights
of atomised individuals, I think self-identified marxists should meet
him in agreeing that the contradiction between the economic base and 
the superstructure has often been discussed by marxists as 
in practice counterposed, although these are abstractions, that in 
concrete reality are always admixed. 

I agree that the sentence of Engels that CMS quotes is one sided

"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".

(The correct point is that robbery and force although relatively common 
are not the explanation for the accumulation of capital. The marxist
critique of capitalism rests ultimately purely on an analysis of 
the development of commodity exchange according to "fair" and 
equal conventions.)

But from the point of view of marxist philophy, every argument runs
the risk of being one sided, and the most sophisticated exchanges
recognise this. Engels it was who also said, "everything is connected 
with everything else" (if I recollect correctly). His late letters 
make clear also the relative autonomy of for example the law, and the
value of struggle in this area. 

CMS seems here to me to be not inconsistent with Althusser's critique
of actually existing marxism, which had got bogged down in the
economic struggle of the trade unions. His emphasis on the ideological
state apparatus, including for example the powerful acculturating 
processes that occur in schools, I imagine,  should be much
more acceptable to Chris S. 

This I would have thought is the answer to 
the power of the 20th century state. In practice right wing 
governments are trying to modify it, not in fact by abolishing social
control but by devolving it to other areas of society. It is not 
a very pure example but during that last 10 years in Britain, the 
self-consciously libertarian government in Britain, has presided over
very substantial increases in the effective social controls over 
motor cars and traffic. But not by government edicts. That would lose
them middle class votes. By stealth.

It is helpful in taking these arguments forward that Chris S, while
continuing to identify himself as a libertarian, also makes criticisms
of libertarians. If he recognises that they can argue as if lopping off
the state is sufficient for human liberation, we have come a long way
towards common ground.

That common ground I think has to be about how in complex concrete
reality, polar contradictory opposites that exist for analytical
abstract purposes, are necessarily intermingled. Furthermore, as 
someone who has spent quite an amount of time trying to read beyond 
the initial hype of popular science, I continue to think that new
non-linear models of science such as chaos theory and complexity 
theory are not incompatible with marxism. In particular
the strange fractal nature of phenomena helps to explain some of 
the step-wise but interconnected nature of the interaction between
those atomised bourgeois individuals on the one hand and the state on 
the other. And though I am having difficulty keeping up with the Bhaskar
list without a copy of the book under study, and I do not feel 
confident about the intricate categories he uses, it seems to me 
that Bhaskar's emphasis on the "layered" nature of reality, 
coupled with his continuing commitment to dialectics, is not just his
personal idiosyncacy, but is a personal response to the nature
of reality with which we are all trying to grapple.

As I end this too long a communication, I fear that Chris S and 
I may have tried too hard to bridge gaps that are safer kept 
separate. I therefore hope that if he comes back, he has no compunction
about sharpening up the areas where he would still have differences.


Chris Burford
London.






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