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