From: yahpgill-AT-lisp.com.au Date: Sun, 1 Jun 1997 22:52:42 +1000 Subject: Re: M-TH: Hannah Arendt, Simone Weill Rob's generous response to my post about Simone Weil raises many issues, but I'll just take up one that seems relevant to Marxist fundamentals. >... >>She asserts that Marx was mistaken in attempting to base a social science >>on needs. It is force [ie what Weber defines as 'power'] which determines >>social life. >[snip] > Arendt explicitly distinguishes between 'power' and 'force'. >The latter refers to an action type which is oriented to individual >achievements whereas the former emphasises a consensus reached by free >agreement among participants.[snip] This constitutes a communicative >action >model (Habermas's point of departure), with a strong emphasis on >intersubjectivity as a viable alternative to coercion. Others on the list will correct me if I phrase this wrongly, but I understand Arendt and Habermas to assert that in theory it is always possible for the parties in any human situation to achieve agreement in communication, ie to arrive at the 'same truth' (about themselves, the world, their situation in it). (Whether consensual (unforced) *action* follows depends on the situation: I suppose Marxists would (or should) say that it all depends on class situation.) Anyway, the starting point is the basis of the philosophical tradition descending from Socrates - truth is reached through the work of dialectic. This seems to me to be a fundamental tenet of both liberalism and Marxism. Weil, reader of Augustine and the Baghavad Gita, friend of Bataille and Camus, stands away from this 'western rationalism' (loose label, I know). 'The afflicted silently beseech to be given the words to express themselves', In fact a major cause of affliction is having no words which avail to express one's situation. It might be that one has never learnt such words, or even that there *can be no such words*. The Leninist conception of the vangard party was based precisely on the idea that the working class needed to be informed of the words which (supposedly) would express its situation correctly, thus enabling it to act effectively to be rid of affliction. But Weil compares truth in the face of rational discourse with 'a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field... before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments, and witticisms.' So in terms of Arendt's distinction, for Weil 'power' always has at least the potential of being 'force' for those who cannot adequately express themselves within the prevailing discourse. Lyotard is interesting to bring on here.( The Postmodern Condition is, more than anything else, an attack on Habermas.) For Lyotard, both liberal and Marxist conceptions of justice harbour a nostalgic yearning after the ideal of communication whereby 'an author can write while putting himself at the same time in the position of the reader'. 'He who lodges a complaint is heard, but he who is a victim, and who is perhaps the same, is reduced to silence' (Le Differend). But while Lyotard argues for a pragmatic conception of justice which can apply in spite of irreducible differences of language or understanding, Weil believed that there must always be an unbridgeable gap between 'truth' and 'language'. This gap is a necessary tragedy of the human condition. (I guess this makes her an 'existentialist' rather than a 'postmodernist'.) Question: can Marxism (or 'post-Marxism') deny that consensus about 'what is true' is always (*potentially*) achievable? What would Marxism look like without this Socratic assumption? (My hunch is that it would look awful, but I'm interested in how others react to the question.) Paul Gillen PS > >Paul goes on:] >>She believed strongly in the value of manual work, and did it often in >>spite of poor health. > >[But would she have starved if she didn't do it?] > There's more to say here (especially in the light of Russell's comment on Arendt and human activity) - maybe later... --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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