At 08:44 01/03/00 -0800, you wrote:
>At 07:18 AM 3/1/00 +0000, you wrote:
>>At 15:00 29/02/00 -0800, Jim Devine wrote:
>> >Maybe it's already been done, but could someone give a short summary of
>> >what Marx says about suicide? is it a class analysis?
>>
>>I would say yes.
>
>of course, there's an alternative Marxian analysis of suicide: suicide is a
>second-best solution to societal alienation.
The post I sent was based on reading the footnotes to the article to test
the hypothesis of Eric A. Plaut and Kevin Anderson that Marx's article is
qualitatively different from Peuchet's even though the text is 90% Peuchet.
Yes it is very instructive to see how Marx adjusts the article, and what a
big signficance he gives to it. However on second reading of my letter I
did not emphasise enough I think, how much respect Marx is also showing for
this impressive survey of suicide data by the French police archivist.
Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.
Marx's welcome and treatment of this data seems to me that of a serious
social scientist, and social psychologist, at an early stage of the 19th
century. The use of systematic bourgeois data is comparable to the work of
Engels on the findings of the Poor Law comissioners.
Although Marx particularly highlights the effect of marriage as being in
bourgeois law a sort of private property, on the whole the explanations of
suicide he discusses are very general and not simple and reductionist. They
are at the level Jim suggests here, of suicide in bourgeois society
sometimes being linked to social alienation.
Suicide is a rare but very concrete event. Just because it is so definite
and concrete does not mean there is only one cause for it. It may result
from a number of causes and it is a probabilistic phenomenon, as you would
expect from a rare event. In the UK with roughly 50million population there
are under 50,000 attempted suicides a year, say 1/1000, and under 5000
successful suicides, say 1/10.000.
The mixture of features that go into the heterogenous group of people who
attempt suicide are not the same as the mixture of features of the smaller
heterogenous group who commit suicide successfully.
Analysing back from those who define themselves by completing or attempting
the deed, as is well known, this act may be quite angry in nature. It
conveys the most powerful and painful message to others at the moment the
individual makes their departure from society final. Others may be in
complete despair. Others may be a mixture of motives. Analysing forward
from the population as a whole, there are many ways of dealing with the
anger and frustration of bougeois society.
The working class women who typically killed themselves by drinking
disinfectant were perhaps making the most heroic and defiant gesture that
they could against the inhumanity of bourgeois society. Nevertheless even
if we were to return to reanalyse Peuchet's data today it would be
difficult to prove that. Other forms of resistance might be just going to
church with similar working people, or helping out with childcare and
somehow reproducing the working class against all odds. They too were
heroines.
Marx's approach in this article is to leap from much empirical data to the
highest level generalisations, almost above any individual causative theory.
No one has commented on my observation that his attitude to Peuchet's work
shows a breadth of interest in the failings of bourgeois society more
reminiscent of "western marxists" than that of highly focussed
revolutionary followers of Lenin.
Chris Burford
London
