G'day Chas,
I reckon you sound like a good historical materialist in this post -
especially here:
"Marx says that the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism,
Feuerbach included, is that it is contemplative and not active. "
here:
"History is made by active classes"
here:
"Feuerbachian and the other materialisms are errors of mechanical or vulgar
materialism, treating history like a giant clock that mechanically unwinds
without human agency."
and here:
"Engels says exactly that knowing something in nature is to change it from
a thing-in-itself to a thing-for-us. This is the Marxist ( and Hegelian)
solution to the Kantian problem of the unknowable thing-in-itself. Engels
says we know something when we can make it."
Welcome aboard!
You also write:
"Also, in the Preface to the First German edition he says that he treats
economics like natural history."
I'll take a tentative (somewhat vague) stab at this ... 'Economics' here is
that of capitalism - a dynamic mode of production which he reckons hides
its driving force behind our backs (the exchange relation). In that which
human consciousness does not enter (ie that which we do not perceive as we
live our lives), a natural science approach is tenable. His method is
revolutionary because it unmasks the hidden and thus makes us conscious of
it. Consciousness constitutes a systemic disruption to the giant clock.
Natural science gives you the OCC, the corresponding TRPTF, and the
tendency to periodic crises. Consciousness (arising where the once
conducive social relations suddenly fall out of kilter with whatever
developments the definitive drive for accumulation forces upon the mode)
manifests in stuff like superstructural ameliorations of the base (such as
the welfare state arising out of one such crisis), societal quakes (such as
your beloved Bolshies arising out of another), and the spectre of
democratic socialist transformation (well, we'll see).
It's when (inevitably present) social relations are factored into the
clockwork of (inevitably impossible) pristine capitalist economics that we
arrive at the 'materialist conception of history'. History needs human
society. Capitalism in its abstracted self (and it is capitalism that is
the subject in *Das Kapital*), is a finite dynamic - its historical context
and the concomitant question of what might succeed it - are matters outside
that neat natural scientific box. History is social, and it is this
dimension that reduces the apparently natural and everlasting to an episode
of becoming and begoing (well, it *should* be a word!).
"Also, the last time we discussed this, Chris Burford found many examples
of Marx using natural science dialectics as heuristics in Capital to
explain human historical dialectics."
I've been using Gould's 'punctuated equilibrium' notion as a heuristic,
too. And the processes of the San Andreas fault. And the dynamics of an
arm wrestle. In none of these cases do I feel the need to demand identity
with my object (social history), 'coz that's not what 'heuristic' means.
That lot may not all make sense - and I wouldn't blame you if it didn't.
But a bloke can but have a go.
Cheers,
Rob.
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