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[Marxism] Kant & Bhaskar Tom Chisholm thomaswchisholm at yahoo.com <mailto:marxism%40lists.econ.utah.edu?Subject=%5BMarxism%5D%20Kant%20%26%20B haskar&In-Reply-To=87F06FD09BE35548B3675FBD4FEA419C010D4AD6%40EXA1.lse.ac.uk > Fri May 19 03:38:59 MDT 2006 * Previous message: [Marxism] Kant & Bhaskar * Next message: [Marxism] Latest outsourcing trend * Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] ________________________________ Dear I, I don't think inserting Kant into Marxist historical materialism, understood as Marx did in an undogmatically non-mechanical fashion (in fact, there are those who argue that the concept of historical materialism, a term Marx never used, as too limiting for the horizon of Marx's own ideas), is at all incongruent. Apart from Karatani's effort I mentioned, some of the liveliest debates in the Second International revolved around precisely such intersections. Rakesh mentioned Max Adler and the Austro-Marxists, who were critical in these debates and whose important, if flawed, works definitely deserve critical resuscitation today. Kant's categorical imperative is based on the universally humanist conception of being as an end in him or herself, a position that absolutely rejects the reduction of any person or action as a means for some other end. Marx articulated the same point, though with the more historically situated concept of capitalist alienation, in relation to the proletariat, whom Capital subordinates to its imperative of accumulation. Kant's deontological ethics establishes duties and rights of others as a categorical imperative that requires mercilessly absolute application, regardless of consequences. This appears on the surface to contradict the historical materialist view that morality is more often than not the dominant ideology of the ruling class rooted in a particular mode of production and one could argue, for the sake of vulgar Marxist argument, that Kant's absolutism concerning duty betrays the Prussian monarchical bureaucracy under which he lived, albeit in critical tension. But, as with Hegel, who became arguably more reactionary insofar as his personal political opinions were concerned (Prussian state as the embodiment of Reason, etc.), this is to lose sight of the fact that genuinely labored ideas materially transcend the limits of the thinker's class and political consciousness. Marx reconstituted from Hegel a dialectical method to understand the world and from Kant a deontological grounding of his materialist critique on the species being of constitutive labor (cf. Kant's central discussion in Critique of Pure Reason re: constitutive activity of the subject of knowledge to order the world). Moreover, the moral injunction of the categorical imperative, namely "act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law", is not antithetical but a necessary constituent of historical materialist practice. That is, a genuine historical materialist would, through each historically constituted class struggle he or she takes part in, seek to act the categorical imperative (e.g., the abolition of capitalism that alienates and instrumentalizes workers into objectified means for the ends of accumulation or abolition of wars which treat soldiers as cannon fodder for and the enemies as impediments to the ends of the nation-state and its ruling class). Needless to say, such practices, just as the individual historical materialists themselves, invariably change and will not look objectively the same in historical actuality--and this is where Marxism offers its greatest explanatory power and guidance. Without the Kantian categorial imperative, Marxist historical materialism faces the danger of turning into an ideology of revolutionary political expediency (or radically dressed-up academic economics/philosophy) or establishment of bureaucratic and exploitative reasons of a collectivized state (Stalinism). On the other hand, without histomat, catego-imp has the danger of becoming an ahistorical, abstract ideology of moral absolutism that finds no meaningful application in the contingency of history and individual human lives. Of course, Kant himself did not historicize ideas, did not see the subject in materialist class terms, and, in his ethics, placed excessive hope on the possibility of individual freedom and will to follow the categorical imperative. But that is because his major ideas were developing in tandem with the contemporary European revolutionary forces of his day: the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1786, Critique of Judgment in 1790, and Perpetual Peace in 1795 just as the French as well as trans-Atlantic revolutionary struggles, from Haiti to Ireland, circulated explosively throughout the world. Kant's admiration of the French Revolution is famous, as his great respect for Rousseau, the most radically egalitarian of the French philosophes. The power of the individual will posited in his philosophy is in part an intuitive reflection of the power of the late-seventeenth-century revolutionary popular forces. As to how this fits into your critique of the neo-classical economic model and liberal capitalism in relation to utilitarianism and consequentialism, any form of consequentialism (utilitarianism is, of course, a species of such) is at once a philosophically idealized image of liberal capitalism, for which everything comes down to the "consequence" of the economic bottom-line, and at once an inconsistent means of ethically compromising with the most egregiously destructive and dehumanizing impact of capitalism. Jeremy Bentham and his disciple John Stuart Mill vividly encapsulate these contradictions of utilitarianism. The Benthamite panopticon is, of course, a practical application of his Taylorist-like conception of labor-discipline on the prison proletariat while J.S. Mill's work for the East India Company was justified on the grounds of liberal imperialist benevolence even as the British were ruthlessly torturing and massacring Indians in their suppression of the Sepoy rebellion. The utilitarian doctrine of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" (happiness here reduced to quantitative measurement, with its behaviorally abstracted dichotomy of pain and pleasure, indicating further "alienation" of philosophy correspondent with the maturation of industrial capitalist developments) or the generally consequentialist point that one should look at the fruit to judge the tree is ideologically convenient for it a priori abandons all attempts to analyze the moral and historical structure of the tree, i.e. the system, out of which such consequences are drawn, accepting the fundamental assumptions and correctness of the capitalist status quo (differences of opinions relegated to differences among the different factions of the ruling class, as in the US two-party system). Not only does this bring back the "ends justify the means" doctrine under the guise of liberal reformism (Bentham opposed slavery and his private papers even contained critique of discriminations against gays and, of course, Bentham and Mill advocated equality for women--all of which, defined in the way utilitarians do, are perfectly consistent with the imperatives of bourgeois capitalism, whose abstract theorizing, of course, have fallen in these evil days to the hands of neo-classical modelers). Marx's critical comments on Mill's economic ideas is worth quoting: "The Continental revolution of 1848-9 also had its reaction in England. Men who still claimed some scientific standing and aspired to be something more than mere sophists and sycophants of the ruling-classes tried to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to be ignored, of the proletariat. Hence a shallow syncretism of which John Stuart Mill is the best representative. It is a declaration of bankruptcy by bourgeois economy, an event on which the great Russian scholar and critic, N. Tschernyschewsky, has thrown the light of a master mind in his "Outlines of Political Economy according to Mill." 1873 Afterword to Capital Volume One With Mill, classical economics is thus killed off (in chapter sixteen of Capital, Marx points out how Mills manages to equate workers' wage as a form of profit and to ahistorically, to say nothing of nonsensically, argue that workers, peasants, all are proto-capitalists) and a morally meliorist, scientifically vacuous demon seed of neo-classical theory is planted. Unlike Kant and Marx, the consequentialists, one of whose most morally abject heirs are indeed these very neo-classical-economic exponents, have no coherent conception of present society and the future that emerges from this society because it is an ideological rationalization of market mechanisms (though completely lacking Adam Smith's analytically illuminating historical analysis of British imperialism or critical awareness of alienated labor, to say nothing of a genuinely labor-based conception of value). Consquentialism is not only unable to articulate a coherent moral theory that can adequately attack systemic and institutional immorality, let alone understand it (for example, if fascist Germany for a time raised the living standards of its working class, as it did, there would be no grounds for consquentialists to oppose the regime--consequentialist argument would be quite amenable to justifying Nazi extermination as it would be to merely limiting its excesses); it also negates social and individual subjects by ignoring the process in which such subjects historically constitute the world through their labor, in short, negates history in any meaningful sense, ever-rationalizing the perennially changing consequences of the present. There is no mode of production, no history, no class struggle, no system, no subject; as such, consquentialism, if it weren't for its pretense to science and guide to ethics, appears a caricatured expression of postmodern epistemology. For Marx, the "universal law" is, among other things, the "law of motion of a determinate mode of production", but, as with Kant's moral law, this is not a "law" in the sense Newtonian law of motion is but aspires toward such as yet-non-existing science to come in the future (the "form" of Newtonian physics anyway, as apart from its truth-content, is cruelly disciplinary in its conception of labor). Marx's "scientific socialism" is often misrepresented as an anti-utopian vision of a utilitarian, collectivist socialism based on a "socialist" law of motion; the latter, in fact, is a distortion of "socialism" into a monstrous mirror-image of capitalism (with its abolition, all such laws--fueled as they are on class struggle--would have to cease; otherwise it's again only a class system of expropriation by another name). The real "science" of "scientific socialism" is the science of historical class struggle that deconstructs and unravels the ahistorically reified "science" of political economy and embedded in Marx's notion of class struggle is the categorical imperative of species being whose desires and aspirations for freedom and autonomy against alienated labor are rooted in an Enlightenment and German Romantic view of human nature that Kant shares. The original theorist of historical materialism as such was Engels and, even as he noted the impotence of the Kantian categorical imperative in its initial form ("because it demands the impossible, and therefore never attains to any reality"), he viewed Kant's work as "epoch-making" and clearly placed Kant's cosmological theory as one of the foundational impetuses behind the formulation of historical materialism: "For Kant's discovery contained the point of departure for all further progress. If the earth were something that had come into being, then its present geological, geographical, and climatic state, and its plants and animals likewise, must be something that had come into being; it must have had a history not only of co-existence in space but also of succession in time." But there are still considerable spaces for us to think through Marx and Kant and even Engels didn't have the last words on historical materialism. Best of luck on your thesis. Tom Chisholm i.lagardien-alumni at lse.ac.uk <http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism> wrote: Louis About your Bhaskar reference This is actually very useful. While the philosophical orientation of my thesis is shaped by Historical Materialism, I apply concepts from Critical Realism in various areas of inquiry - especially Lawson's critique of New Classical Economics and its predilection for econometric modelling, formalism and a general 'lack of reality' I am presently preparing/reworking the chapter in which I put forward my case for egalitarianism (my thesis is a critique of the New Classical Model and Liberal Capitalist orthodoxy - in particular the way in which both legitimise inequality) and I am trying to forge my argument by using Kant's categorical imperative and especially his deontology in contrast to utilitarianism, and consequentialism... Still trying, need a lot of help... runing late on deadline. So, I sent in the original message to see if I can find anything or anyone who would/could tell me that inserting Kant in a Marxist critique is incongruous, daft, inconsistent etc etc. Peace (much appreciations) I --------------------------------- New Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Call regular phones from your PC and save big. ________________________________ * Previous message: [Marxism] Kant & Bhaskar * Next message: [Marxism] Latest outsourcing trend * Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] ________________________________ More information about the Marxism mailing list <http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism> _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
