* From: Sandwichman
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > > A lot of good stuff in Marxism, some say, comes from religion, > mediated by left-Hegelianism. So, I'd say influences have been > mutual. Thinking specifically of "The German Ideology," iIt seems to me that there was a materialist anthropology in Marx's early writing that was a step out of the shadows but that subsequent marxism has mistaken it for the sun itself. I would like to refer to that anthropology as "productivist" to distinguish it both from "materialist" (as the broader concept) and "economic determinist", the perjorative description. If I may sum up that productivist anthropology is a single well-known quote it would be: "Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life." ^^^^^ CB: Sandwichman, I've focussed some attention here too. I believe we can say that Marx and Engels anthropology here is off in that humans ( "men") begin to produce their own means of subsistence , which sounds like agriculture to me, tens of thousands of years after becoming human. So, it is not producing their own subsistence that distinguishes humans from animals. It is having kinship systems, i.e. living people relating to each other based on their descent from a common, _dead_ ancestor. We might say ancestor "worship" , though the religious connotation of "worship" is problematic, especially on this thread. What distinguishes humans from animals is culture. ^^^^^^ Sandwichman: Now let's zip ahead 50 years or so to the end of the 19th century. I want to suggest a comparison of two texts: Engels's fragment, "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man," published in 1895-6 but written 20 years earlier and "Der Rhythmus als ökonomisches Entwicklungsprinzip" (Rhythm as a Principle of Economic Development), the last chapter of Karl Bücher's Arbeit und Rhythmus, the first edition of which was published in 1896. Engels flounders badly in what looks to be an attempt to elaborate on the thesis of the passage quoted above. ^^^^^^ CB: Agree. The title of Engels' article should be " The transition in human labor in the transition from apes to humans. " Engels' title sounds like he wants to say that labor sort of "caused" the transition from apes to humans. But it is false to say that a group of apes started laboring harder than other apes - worked more hours, and worked more intensely - and this caused the origin of the species human. What happened was that with culture the _quality_ of proto-human productive activity changed. It changed because with culture, there was an accumulation of knowledge across generations. Living generations could learn from the experience of dead generations. Labor inventions and knowledge in tools and techniques could be passed on from on generation to the next and onward. This caused the quality of labor, productive activity , to change, to "transition". The key quality of primitive socalled religion is that it involves "communications" through symbols with dead ancestors whose experiences thereby inform the living generation. This allows from accumulation of knowledge. The quality of symboling - using something to represent something that it is not - allows the transition across the death barrier, because this quality of the symbol allows overcoming learning only by imitation. Symbolic learning, unlike imitative learning, allows learning from people who are dead but leave behind symbols of their living experiences. ^^^^^^ By comparison, Bücher impressively supports his thesis of a distinctively human "rhythm activity" with extensive empirical research. The difference being that for Bücher, "producing their means of subsistence" is only part (and not really a distinguishable part) of a behavioural complex from which labor, music and play would only subsequently be differentiated. If religion traditionally emphasized an aesthetic abstraction at the expense of subsistence, it seems that the traditional marxist anthropology has emphasized subsistence at the expense of the aesthetic (notwithstanding that there has always been a strong current of marxist aesthetics that resists such a reductionism). The fact that we don't yet have an unambiguous name for what I provisionally called this primordial "rhythm activity" -- part proto-labor, part proto-dance, part instinctive play -- suggests to me that the shuffling back and forth between religion and productivist historical materialism is likely to be the best we'll manage to do for some time to come. The two can take turns at being the chess playing dwarf inside the automaton. "After you, Alphonse." "No, after you, Gaston!" -- Sandwichman
