File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 172


Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 00:06:20 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re:  Essentialism, Morality & Communism


On the whole, another great post, Hugh, but a couple of quibbles.

>Point b) brings in "human nature" quite unnecessarily. It might just as
>easily read "what's hiding us from us", and ditch the invitation to
>metaphysics

I agree 'human nature' is potentially a rod for all backs, and certainly
problematic beyond the point I was trying to make - that as we are inclined
to see our social being in terms of a rule-governed civil society of
competing individuals, we need telling we are constitutionally capable of
being another sort of society altogether - that Kant's categorical
imperative points us to such a society - where to communicate is not to
manipulate, where we may benefit from each other without using each other,
and where, ultimately, the habits born of freedom undo the need for the
rules of civil competition.

As to that last formulation, I do tend to think Marx implicitly relies on
an empirically unsubstantiated (by which I do not, and dare not, mean
'untenable') human essence here (it's certainly in his language too).

>After all, if you're looking into something that's hidden,
>first you've got to have an inkling of what it might be you're looking for,
>and second, you've got to try and find what's doing the hiding.

If you take out private ownership of production and its attendant exchange
function, you'd be doing the equivalent of taking the lid off a box.  The
lid is easily recognisable as that which is doing the hiding, but the
hidden is unknowable until the lid is lifted.

So yeah, you'd want an 'inkling'.  It can't be purely empirical, because
democratic control of society's resources in conditions of plenty is not in
our experience.  What's more, it was humanity that produced the empirical
truth that is capitalism (one mode of organisation we *know* we're capable
of producing and sustaining as human beings).  So our inkling must come
from a more elaborate source.

Is 'capitalism is today logically an obscene nonsense' enough?  I reckon
this only makes sense if we have it in us, as humans, to make a world more
amenable to our desires.  And this only makes sense if those desires can be
established to have their roots somewhere other than in the hegemony of
capitalism.  As Marx writes in the GI, any given order produces desires
specific to it.  These then are desires we cannot trust - indeed, if I take
the big fella right, they are desires that will fade away when capitalism
is no longer there.

What then is the status of those desires that demand social transformation?
Me, I reckon they're to do with an essentially human demand for recognition
and a sense of agency - indeed, for subjecthood.  It can't just be a
yearning for material comfort, because the discomfort suffered by the
visionary and the revolutionary are often formidable.  Here I see Kant,
Hegel and the pre-1845 Marx as in accord.  And here I see a humanism based
on a claim of the human nature type.  This is standard enlightenment *locus
communis*, I know, but it ain't 'dry and boring'.  I mean, how great a
mistake would we really be making if we projected this notion back to the
first tool makers, or Gilgamesh, or Antigone, or Hannibal, or Spartacus, or
the first Protestants, or the Dutch flooders of the homeland, even up to
Charles 1's executioners (excuse glaring limits of an Anglo-Saxon education
- and a bit of the 'great man' schema too, I notice - but you take my
point)?  Not much, I reckon.  At least it would make sense of it all ...

>Once again, I'd refer to the utter simplicity and economy of the opening
>section of The Grundrisse on the universal conditions of human production
>and distribution. Not a word about human nature there.

Well, actually he does pause explicitly to throw the notion out the window
on page one of the introduction - but he's highlighting the historicity of
civil society and chucking stones at Smith and Ricardo here - and I'm
clearly with him on that issue.

>c) Point c makes a valid point but expresses it in perverted and agnostic
>language. "Discomfort" is a misleading word for what people will feel when
>their innate subjective interests are allowed freer play untrammelled by
>hidden social barriers.

Then I'm an agnostic pervert - I should feel both ecstatic and
uncomfortable, I imagine.  And Marcuse (*Eroc and Civilisation*) and Fromm
(*Fear of Freedom*) have something to say about this too.

>The basic
>perversion in Saul's line, and I wonder if Rob has swallowed it, is that
>the totalitarian repression and fetishization of human needs (by the social
>forces represented by the list of scum given (ie "progressive" imperialists
>or their reformist or revisionist agents in the working class) is somehow
>"comfortable".

Well, Howard didn't give a clue as to his intentions during the election
campaign here - he literally went with the word 'comfortable', full stop.
And we handed him a land-slide!  Keating had tried, in vain as it
transpired, to turn TINA into the oft-quoted
'great-opportunities-for-the-daring' line - it didn't wash (neither should
it have) - we weren't even daring enough consciously to give up!  There is
'comfort' in sticking your head under the blankets when unsettling noises
come from without - and that seemed the only comfort going.  Alienation
from the agentic self?

>He is ideologizing the "security" of a prison, the "peace"
>of a graveyard, the "ease of mind" that comes from the predicability of
>knowing that you're going to be flogged every day at ten in the morning and
>four in the afternoon. This is reactionary crap. It's petty-bourgeois
>raving against the welfare state and socialist rights in favour of
>"bracing" Thatcherite laissez-faire and the war of each against all.

On the evidence I proffered it could be just this.  I don't think it is in
fact though.  Saul's no socialist, more a radical democrat (certainly an
individualist of sorts) - but he does hate the spectre of homo oeconomicus,
he does actually defend the welfare state, and he does sink the slipper
into TINA.  His whole argument seems to be based on rejecting Hobbes's
lonely brute and framing corporatism as the institutional perpetuation of
said brute.  He's a bit all over the place, but you won't see him making
eyes at Maggie.

>"Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains" -- Jesus!)

A sentence that punches you in the guts every time it's uttered.  I can't
think of a rival for it either.

>Just like a good game of whatever sport you play (say rugby), or falling in
>love with someone in a setting you feel safe and at home in, it won't be
>easy, and you'll lose some of the time, but the rewards will more than make
>up for any difficulties or resistances met on the way ("discomforts"), and
>keep you coming back for more. It'll be like a meeting with close comrades
>who agree on basics but all have different ideas about the best way to get
>something done, or what should be done first. Given the liveliness of
>unrepressed minds and the power of unsuppressed emotions, life will be full
>of enormously absorbing conflicts and cooperative efforts for *everybody*
>whose victories and defeats will provide an enriching breadth and depth of
>experience we find it hard to even imagine today.
>
>And not the slightest need for any "human nature" to understand any of it.

You do me good, Hugh.

All the best,
Rob.




************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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