Ted,
How do you integrate Marx's concept of "necessity" into your analysis ?
Charles
* From: Ted Winslow
Louis Proyect pointed to Zizek on Mao:
http://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm
There we find the following:
The further key point concerns the principal ASPECT of a
contradiction; for example, with regard to the contradiction between the
productive forces and the relations of production,
the productive forces, practice and the economic base generally play
the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist.
But it must also be admitted that in certain conditions, such aspects as the
relations of production, theory and the superstructure in turn manifest
themselves in the principal and decisive role. When it is impossible for the
productive forces to develop without a change in the relations of
production, then the change in the relations of production plays the
principal and decisive role.
The political stakes of this debate are decisive: Mao's aim is to
assert the key role, in the political struggle, of what the Marxist
tradition usually refers to as the "subjective factor" - theory,
superstructure. This is what, according to Mao, Stalin neglected: "Stalin's
Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR from first to last says nothing
about the superstructure. It is not concerned with people; it considers
things, not people. /.../ /It speaks/ only of the production relations, not
of the superstructure nor politics, nor the role of the people. Communism
cannot be reached unless there is a communist movement."
This misinterprets Marx. Forces and relations of production are
"subjective." They express the degree of development of human
"subjectivity," the degree of "development of the human mind."
"accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive powers of social
labour, so that the accumulation of the skill and knowledge (scientific
power) of the workers themselves is the chief form of accumulation, and
infinitely more important than the accumulation - which goes hand in hand
with it and merely represents it - of the existing objective conditions of
this accumulated activity. These objective conditions are only nominally
accumulated and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew."
<http://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-
surplus-value/ch21.htm>
Marx opposes this "idealism" to "the crude, material fetishism into which
the Ricardian theory develops in the writings 'of this incredible cobbler',
McCulloch" and to the mistaken interpretations of his own "materialism" such
as Mao's and Zizek's.
"The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities', vanishes here as a
mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly performed anew, of
socially producing men. Compare this 'idealism' with the crude, material
fetishism into which the Ricardian theory develops in the writings 'of this
incredible cobbler', McCulloch, where not only the difference between man
and animal disappears but even the difference between a living organism and
an inanimate object. And then let them say that as against the lofty
idealism of bourgeois political economy, the proletarian opposition has been
preaching a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction
of coarse appetites."
<http://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-
surplus-value/ch21.htm>
"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs,
self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural
material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human
participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the
human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed
capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a
direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the
process of social life itself have come under the control of the general
intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the
powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of
knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life
process."
http://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/
ch14.htm
The related failure to perceive relations of production as "subjective,"
i.e. as the creation of human subjects and, hence, as alterable by them, is
another key expression of "fetishism."
Marx conceives the labour process as developmental of human mind and, hence,
successive forms of this process as internally related stages in an
historical process of "education."
Conceived in this way, the development of "forces of production" within a
stage comes into contradiction with the "relations of production" that
define that stage because those relations ultimately "fetter" this
development. The development of mind expressed by the development of these
forces, however, creates a "subjectivity" with the power to transform these
relations in a positive way i.e. with the power to create new relations more
compatible with individual development.
Ted
