Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 07:39:17 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Re: AUT: Thanks Harry. Toxic logic


On Sun, 3 Feb 2002, dannylambert wrote:

> hi harry
> i'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your time and
> effort, i know you're a busy man. however you've been at this lark a lot
> longer than i,

Danny, I get the feeling that if you stick your tongue any further into
your cheek you may lose track of it......

> so would you be so kind as to try and decipher for me
> what engels is going on about in the piece that follows. i'm having
> difficulty squaring it with the views you are putting forward.

Danny, last time I looked there were some 50 volumes of Marx and Engels
Collective Works in English and that doesn't include lots of stuff
published in other languages or never published at all. Those works
spanned many decades, and evolved. Their writings are not some Holy
Scripts that one examines for Truth, but efforts to understand the world
and intervene in it --efforts that evolved over time. Their theory and
their politics changed and with a little effort you can find passages here
and there that are contradictory, that don't "square" with each other.

Moreover, if you are perusing my stuff, you can easily find passages that
don't "square" with many things they wrote. Why should they? Marx and
Engels are "sources" for me, their writings are terrains where I spend
time on archeological digs for interesting ideas. I do not take them as
graven tablets handed down by God and therefore feel no need to "square"
my ideas with theirs. If you do, then you have not yet begun to think
independently. Better, I think, to read such passages as you cite below
critically, trying to understand what Engels meant and trying to decide
what of it is useful, and what of it is not, in your mind, in your
situation and with your understanding based on studying almost a century
of experience Engels never had.

Harry

>
> thanking you in advance.
> dan lambert
> spgb s/london branch.
>
>
>   III. Proletarian Revolution

Bad term. For Engels "proletarian" seemed to mean waged factory workers.
Today the working class is far more complex and this term does not evoke
that complexity.


>- Solution of the
> contradictions.

jargon from the "dialectic" --but there is nothing but temporary solutions
of contradictions, solutions means more contradictions endlessly and thus
no escape from the dialectic, not Hegel's not Engels'.

> The proletariat seizes the public
> power, and by means of this transforms the socialized
> means of production, slipping from the hands of the
> bourgeoisie, into public property.

"public power", "public property" ? what do these things mean for Engels?
Not obvious here. The Soviets felt that both of these had been
accomplished with the bolshevik revolution but if that is what Engels
meant then he was on the wrong track as the Soviet experience shows.

"public" is a vague and not very helpful notion. "power" is also vague.
"public power" doesn't make it any clearer.

"socialized means of production" is clearer, given Marx's analysis of the
rise of cooperation, manufacturing and machinofacturing. production
carried out by interconnected systems of cooperation.

> By this act, the
> proletariat frees the means of production from the
> character of capital they have thus far borne, and
> gives their socialized character complete freedom to
> work itself out.

two things here: "frees the mp from the char of capital" and "freedom to
work itself out". But what gives mp the 'character of capital"? To me it
means that the means of production are used to subordinate everyone's
lives to work, endlessly, as opposed to freeing them to choose "work" as
only one self-determined activity among others. So freeing them means to
subordinate them to "workers'" own, self-determined needs. In this sense
then freeing them is certainly a worthwhile goal. But then we are back at
the "public property" business and thus the vagueness of exactly what has
to happen for machinery to be transformed from an instrument of social
control to one of self-determination... "working itself out" seems to mean
self-determination, which presumably means people can reorganize
cooperation according to their mutual and differing needs. While there are
probably many ways of doing this the question still remains how..

> Socialized production upon a
> predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible.

This is very dated, especially given Panzieri's "Surplus Value and
Planning" that traces the spread of capitalist planning in response to
working class insurgency, the notion ofthe planner-state, etc. And, as
with the notion of a unified "socialism", that of a unified "plan" smacks
of a degree of centralization that reeks of domination. (predetermined
plan is redundant anyway)

> The
> development of production makes the existence of
> different classes of society thenceforth an
> anachronism.

and this a priorism reeks of technological determinism

> In proportion as anarchy in social
> production vanishes, the political authority of the
> State dies out.

The "state" seen as balancing the anarchy of market regulated production?
How much of "anarchy in social production" is market anarchy and how much
class conflict and how much is the former just a form of the later? He
doesn't help here.

> Man, at last the master of his own
> form of social organization, becomes at the same time
> the lord over Nature, his own master - free.

Just about as judeo-christian and anthropocentric as you can get. Freedom
by becoming the lord/master? He he, Hegel would smile. Too bad these city
boys had no notion of being free within a constellation of uncontrolled
forces.

> To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is
> the historical mission of the modern proletariat.

see above

> To
> thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and
> this the very nature of this act, to impart to the now
> oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the
> conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it
> is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the
> theoretical expression of the proletarian movement,
> scientific Socialism.
>
Well, Fred, you certainly gave everyone from Lenin to Adorno justification
for raising themselves up as "the gate and the way" to enlightenment, as
the keepers of the the only narrow path to salvation, didn't you? Tsk,
tsk. Ah, and here we also have Danny's "scientific socialism" "communism"? But here "scientific socialism" is the body of enlightened
knowledge that permits its priests to lead the ignorant to the promised
land of communism, not the promised land itself (or as, Marx argued, the
very process of getting there).

Nope, doesn't "square" much. A bit here and there, but mostly out of
alignment. Oh, well. On to the next passage....



............................................................................
Snail-mail:
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA

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http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
............................................................................



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