> Date sent: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 20:09:20 -0800
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: James Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: re: immanent critique
> The following continuation of my discussion with Ricardo is becoming
> extremely boring and repetitive -- not to mention long. Feel free to hit
> "delete" at this point. It is my last contribution on pen-l -- unless people
> really want it. If Ricardo wants to continue off-list, that's fine with me.
I agree, but there are too many disingenuous remarks on your part
to let then go. The problem with this whole debate, I have gradually
come to realize, is that you have very little understanding of what
"immanent critique" means.
>Marx's early immanent critique was
> that the world had not become rational in the way Hegel had argued. He saw
> no reconciliation between reality and the idealist assumptions of hegelian
> philosophy.<
Devine:
> Right. But his early writings were still mechanical in many ways. His 1844
> manuscripts are very much in the same league as Feuerbach, who he criticized
> in his 11 Theses and in the GERMAN IDEOLOGY (with Engels). Feuerbach's
> materialism was pretty mechanical (at least as I understand it) and Marx was
> right to reject it.
Mechanical?? The young Marx used Feuerbach to critize Hegel but was
never a follower of his mechanical materialism.
> As I've said before, I don't see him as "drop[ping] the philosophical
> critique." Rather, he drops the _purely_ philosophical critique. As Karl
> Korsch notes, Marx tried to abolish the artificial _division_ between
> philosophy and political economy. I've already noted how Marx's
> anti-alienation theme continues in CAPITAL. But he _adds_ "crisis theory"
> and the critique of political economy.
>
> The latter is an extension of his analysis of alienation, since the
> political economists of his day by and large suffered from commodity
> fetishism, which is one kind of alienation. Since he never repudiated the
> content of his early work on alienation, the new emphasis on crisis does not
> involve an subtraction of the old themes. (Similarly, he never repudiated
> his early editorials defending press freedom, as Hal Draper argues.)
Reading this, one would think the evolution of Marx's ideas were
merely a question of adding one concept on top of another without any
regard for systematic thinking. Marx always remained a "Germanic"
thinker in that, for him, knowledge, if it is to be
knowledge at all, must be systematic. I know this is difficult for
you to understand, since pilling one idea (or thinker) on top of
another is your trademark.
> Concerning economic crises, Ricardo had writtten: >>>The problem with
> crisis-theory is that it cannot set the boundaries of capitalism beyond
> which it will no longer be able to function. Why couldn't capitalism
> function with 40% unemployment?<<<
>
> Now he clarifies what he meant: >My point is that a purely objective
> critique of capitalism, based on its tendencies for crises, is impossible: a
> critique of unemployment presupposes certain normative standards. Can anyone
> specify the objective boundaries of the capitalist system beyond which it
> will collapse? <
>
> Your point is that you keep on changing the terms of the discussion. But no
> matter.
Look who's talking about changing?! I merely added to my initial
point.
> First, Marx's critique was NOT "purely objective," since he was talking
> about human beings who are inherently subjective. Part of "crisis theory" is
> that people's subjective aims are _alienated_, taking the form of an
> "Invisible Hand" independent of any individual's conscious aims. Unlike Adam
> Smith's conception, Marx argues that the IH causes people to get bad results
> (crises, etc.), contrary to their intentions.
Never said Marx had a "purely objective" theory of crises; I said
that any attempt at a purely objective theory is impossible,
THEREFORE, a subjective element will come in, as it does in Marx.
The point is, as I keep repeating, Marx does not have ethical
theory in Capital.
> Second, though Marx had his own normative standards for criticizing
> unemployment, he also pointed to the objective results of that unemployment.
>
How revealing.
> Third, Marx never purported to posit a theory of collapse, though he
> sometimes uses the word "collapse" to refer to what we now call a
> "recession" (e.g., in the GRUNDRISSE). A full-scale theory of collapse
> cannot be based solely on the objective tendencies of capitalism's laws of
> motion -- and I don't think Marx _ever_ said that "crisis tendencies" were
> the whole story of capitalism's abolition, even though it is part of the
> folklore of crude Marxism and crude anti-Marxism that he did so.
Read my response to your first point again.
> But you'll notice that even in the MANIFESTO, one of the books often
> denounced as crude Marxism, Marx and Engels mention an alternative to the
> "inevitable" victory of the workers: the mutual destruction of the
> contending classes. Marx _hopes_ that the workers of the world will unite,
> he argues that they _should_ do so, while he even optimistically
> extrapolates then-contemporary trends to predict that maybe this will
> happen. But it is not the mechanistic nonsense that crude Marxists and crude
> anti-Marxists love.
Yes, yes yes: workers unite!
> As Mike Lebowitz argues in his BEYOND CAPITAL, a full theory of
> collapse/socialist revolution involves Marx's unfinished book on Wage Labor.
> Marx never wrote it, but most of the elements of such a book exist in his
> writings. In this, the "objective laws" of capital lead to crisis, but it's
> only when workers have developed their own class consciousness and
> organizations with enough power to replace capitalism that the system
> finally collapses. Absent such conciousness and organization, a capitalist
> crisis purges profit-depressing imbalances from the system, so that
> accumulation eventually can restart.
Yes, yes, Lebowitz and the "missing book". If only one could live
forever, then no one would have a "missing book". Of
course, Marx is lucky; Lebowitz wrote it for him.
> Ricardo now writes: >And that precisely is the problem in Marx. He wants to
> talk about
> crises and contradictions without acknowledging that such talk presupposes
> certain normative criteria. So, there is an ethics in Marx which he never
> explicitly recognizes, and which he does not even wish to write about.<
>
> I don't see why crisis theory _presupposes_ normative criteria. One doesn't
> have to want to change the world in order to study it (though Marx's radical
> vision helped him understand the world better than the bourgeois economists
> do, IMHO). Similarly, contrary to Ricardo's earlier statements, studying the
> world doesn't mean that one can't criticize it.
If your are a critic, as Marx was, then it presupposes normative
criteria.
> Ricardo responds:> Ethics are always inescapable, that's not the point. It
> is that
> Marx's critique of capitalism is NOT based on an ethical THEORY. <<
> Of course ethics are inescapable. That's why Marx was no positivist and also
> why bourgeois readers of CAPITAL are upset by the moral fervor of the book
> (a fervor that Ricardo missed, if he ever read it).
Fervor does not = theory.
> Marx's critique of capitalism is pretty explicitly based on the immanent
> critique, the contrast between bourgeois propaganda ("values") and practice.
> It's also, as I said, based on his generally unclarified personal morality,
> which is in the same ballpark as Aristotle's.
Aristotle wrote two books on ethics; Marx none. Anybody (including
you) has a personal ethics, that does not mean you have a theory. No
wonder the debate gets boring...
> Ricardo responds: >I will agree that a critique of capitalism cannot be
> based solely on
> an immanent critique of the existing values of our society. But a critique
> which is monological - purely subjective - makes no sense either.<
> Then you agree with Marx: he never presented a "purely subjective" theory or
> a critique of the dominant valeus. He was much_ more consistent than Ricardo
> D., who contradicts himself quite a lot. First Ricardo wants Marx to have
> totally ethical theory clinging to so-called "universal ideals," while now
> he sees it as impossible.
This last statement sums up the whole problem with this "debate": you
don't have a clue what the concept "immanence" means.
ricardo
> Jim Devine
>
>
>
>
