File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 220


From: "Bob Malecki" <malecki-AT-mail.bip.net>
Subject: SV: M-TH: Re: free will
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 17:49:53 +0100




Jim replies to Hugh!

>I must say that Hugh's posts are very good. But that's by way of a
>prelude to a disagreement.
>
>Your reading of the passage from Marx is, I think, wrong, at least as
>far as you can go in that short rendition. The problem is that you paint
>the relationship between freedom and necessity analytically as a
>definition between the two, as if the question was answered by
>indicating the boundary between them, where one ends and the other
>begins. This, I suggest is the reason that especially anglo-American
>philosophy has grappled so fruitlessly with the freedom/necessity
>counterposition.
>
>I think I am right in saying that the original quote from Engels is that
>freedom is the recognition of necessity and the leap from necessity, ie
>in coming into consciousness of itself, (human)necessity is transformed
>into freedom.
>
>By contrast the english freedom/necessity problematic is rigidly
>definitional. Freedom is the space in which round pegs rattle in the
>necessity of their square holes. But freedom must contain necessity as a
>subordinate moment, otherwise it is not freedom, to put it in Hegelese.
>
>Marx's more prosaic formulation was that the boundary between freedom
>and necessity changes - he used the example of an ocean, that at one
>moment represents a barrier to men's travels, and at the next becomes a
>means of their travels (by the development of navigation).
>
>This relates back to the previous discussion on agency. I say Marx's
>critique of the limitations of bourgeois freedom is not a rejection of
>the idea of freedom per se. On the contrary, it only makes sense in that
>it reveals the limited idea of freedom on the market, and therefore the
>broader conception of freedom in social revolution. Marx is not aiming
>to demolish freedom, but to save it from the cramped and truncated
>conditions it subsists under in a capitalist society.
>
>Fraternally
>--
>James Heartfield

Well, I don't know if I can buy this. Unless you mean the sea is the
proletarian revolution and the instrument is the vanguard party. Because if
you don't take your model to its conclusion you wind up being on the
capitalist "sea" trying to navigate with a compass that does not lead to
class freedom --but the illusion of self-freedom
in the capitalist ocean. Thus "freedom" becomes some bourgeois individual
selfish thing connected to making the best of things in the capitalist sea
rat race..

I wonder if Lenin had anything to say on this stuff?

warm regards
Bob Malecki




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