At 08:02 PM 05/22/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>Rob Schaap wrote:
> >if memory serves, Marx held out hope for revolution by constitutional
> >means within monarchies during his 1873 speech
>
>Memory serves you poorly. By 1873 Marx had already given up any hope or
>expectation of proletarian revolution anywhere. He'd based his life on the
>great throw of a dice: staked it on the belief that a newly-emergent
>social class, the working-class, would become a class-for-itself, with its
>own political culture, leadership and trajectory to power - a naïve belief
>based probably in an overestimation of Rousseau's conception of a civil
>society, in which 'classes' of people succeed one another in a kind of stately
>historical minuet;
do you have any evidence that Marx followed Rousseau in this way?
>the fact that Marx's own conception of the w/c was protean, apocalyptic
>etc, that this was not a class so much as a furnace
>consuming history and reforging the world, was in contradiction with his
>optimistic Enlightenment core beliefs. When it became clear to him that
>this proletariat did not exist, and the one which DID exist was and would
>ALWAYS be quite incapable of reshaping the world,
do you have evidence that this "became clear to him"? where does he say
these things?
> he turned to ethnography and begun blindly clutching at anthropological
> straws, in other words he abandoned the western European political field
> aka actually-existing Capitalism in toto, along with all its classes,
> cultural impedimenta etc.
actually, given the way in which capitalism develops unevenly, with
backward countries (like Russia) getting the worst of the exploitation and
crises and rich countries (like England) having the most organized working
classes and the kind of wealth that Marx saw as a needed component of the
development of socialism, this kind of "clutching at straws" seems
prescient, presaging the ideas of people like Luxemburg and Lenin, who
turned their attention to the poorer countries and the impact on them of
the imperialistic countries.
But even though Marx turned his attention more and more outside of Europe
as he grew older, I'd like to see some sort of evidence that he was the
discouraged old man described here.
>Right at the end one of the straws he clutched had Russia written on it
>and, poignantly, beside his death-bed was a large box stuffed with various
>pamphlets and writings about or from Russia. But this was just piling pain
>onto grief. It had all been the forlorn pursuit of will o'the wisps.
yes, it's true that the actual revolution in Russia turned into the kind of
sh*t that he and Engels predicted would occur if a revolution occurred in a
poor country (in the GERMAN IDEOLOGY).
>Marx's political ideas were driven, as he was driven, by a burning desire,
>lust, for POWER (the next person on the scene to be similarly motivated
>was Lenin;
What evidence do you have for this psychoanalysis? It's hard to imagine
that anyone would spend years reading obscure books in the British Museum
in order to get power over others.
>Engels, that genial old duffer, had no such yearnings and by the time his
>life-juices ran into the sands of the latter-day 2nd International, his
>personal accommodation to the world had also, tragically or bathetically,
>become his political accommodation to late-Victorian politics, an
>accommodation to which he, fondly but quite impermissibly, assimilated
>his old friend Karl, whose days of incandescent political passion he no
>doubt remembered sentimentally.
do you have any evidence at all for these assertions? They make Brad happy,
but is there anything else? Even he doubts their veracity.
>The sheer extent of Marx's despair at the end, his absolute repudiation of
>events as they'd turned out, his remorseless cynicism about the everyday
>world of labour-bureaucracies, with their time-serving placemen and greasy
>little deals -- this is something we barely know and can hardly guess at,
>but in fact his latter writings, as do his latter SILENCES, his failure to
>complete any of Capital after vol I (pub 1867) speak eloquently enough,
>once you understand what's going on.
he never was good at finishing _any_ of his books. I'd say that this was a
_constant_ in his life. I also wouldn't try to get too much out SILENCES in
anyone's work.They might indicate what kind of problems exist in their
theory that they don't look into, but they don't say anything about their
real attitudes.
>This was a man who had not expected to end his days in Bournemouth
>watching young governesses push prams and ply their
>trade; he'd expected volcanoes to erupt and to transfigure the geology of
>human civilisation, let alone its routine history. He'd expected to win
>power, to be a statesman for his elective class, and to begin epochal
>processes of change. It was not to be.
It's true that Marx was a failure in terms of his immediate political
goals. (It seems to me that the only people who are successful in attaining
their immediate political goals (given the massive forces marshalled
against progressive change) are opportunists or knaves. But I've never seen
any evidence that he thought that he was a failure.
>He was a man who above all others had relentless and self-sacrificially
>sought after the truth, JUST BECAUSE he sought after power,
repeating such assertions doesn't make them true.
>and who had always striven to interrogate the world in the way which was
>MOST inimical to himself, in order not to hide from the truth, had
>therefore indulged himself as a thinker less than almost any scientist;
>one thinks of Plato, Newton (who also went mad, for the same kinds of
>reasons), Darwin, maybe Godel and a few mathematicians, but there are
>precious few others in the entire unfolding of western civilisation
>and none whose devotion to the unyielding perverse malice of facticity
>was more true, than Karl Marx's. Yet at the end of his life he was obliged
>to face the unyielding facts of absolute failure, absolute
>seeming-miscomprehension of the world he'd striven so hard to deconstruct.
>It is hard to imagine a more profound personal tragedy, a sense of a life
>completely wasted, than this, than must have afflicted him.
>
>The man's life was a tragedy consumed by terrible poverty and personal
>disaster. What sustained him through all of that, and made him hope that
>the bourgeoisie would rue his painful illnesses,
my reading of his quote about hoping that the bourgeoisie would suffer for
his carbuncles was that it had an element of humor.
>was an incorrigible belief in the certain outcome of events, but it was
>not to be. He was not justified by events, and died painfully, in despair,
>defeated and in obscurity.
Marx was great because he developed a great theoretical framework, one that
swallows the valid components of neoclassical economics the way Einsteinian
physics swallowed Newton's physics. (NB: I'm not talking about specific
predictions, the way that the so-called Analytical Marxists do, but rather
to the general framework.) Even though I understand that he worked hard for
some very good causes, it's not Marx's _biography_ that concerns me. One
can't conclude that physics is corrupt or hopeless or whatever simply
because Newton was into astrology. Similarly, one can't come to any
theoretical conclusion from Marx's biography
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
