Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] relations of production as fetter on product... correction
CB: What do u mean by the Marxist standpoint ? WL: The standpoint of the class struggle. The class struggle is shortspeak for how society moves in class antagonism and on what basis this takes place. What do u mean by stating that viewing relations of production as more than simply property relations is at variance with Marx? Please explain. Production relations or relations of production are the laws defining property and the relationship of people to property in the process of production. Relations of production seems much broader than simply property relations because property means ownership of something. This something is the process of production and the actual things by which the productivity infrastructure and all that arises from it constitutes social production. To continue. What is meant by the Marxist standpoint is the lens he uses to view society or how he position his approach to society. In general and in the specific context of this discussion of the relations of production, the Marxist standpoint means his materialist conception of history or what in shortspeak is called historical materialism. The materialist conception of history has a theory grid, on which sits or arises a general vision of the direction of society and a method, that is at times incorrectly called a philosophy - in my opinion. Marx method approach is to view things in their interactivity, in/as part of their environment and taught the workers to disclose the unity and strife within a particular thing and that which is fundamental to a thing and upon which all other things are dependent. This method of viewing is generally called dialectical materialism and I agree with Engels description of dialectics as a form of thinking rather than a philosophy as such. In discussing history, Marx and Engels presuppose the existence of human beings as a species and their collective species activity and strivings as that, which is fundamental to history. This is an important part of the Marxist standpoint. Below is perhaps the most popular exposition on the Marxist standpoint. The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm Engels exposition on historical materialism or Marx and his materialist conception of history is worth examining anew. 1). The present situation of society — this is now pretty generally conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, . . . Here Engels states in clear terms that the capitalist mode of production is shortspeak for a mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie and in all their writings what both describes in detail is the development of the industrial system - the productive forces, and the mode of appropriation - the property relations of the bourgeoisie or what I choose to call the industrial system with the property relations within. This in no way is at variance with the writings of Marx and Engels. 2). Now, the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests. [2] This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. (IBID) The means of production, . . . had become . . . socialized. But . subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals . . . The mode of production is subjected to this form of
[Marxism-Thaxis] Graham Priest: dialectic dialetheic
Priest, Graham. 'Dialectic and Dialetheic', Science and Society 1990, 53, 388-415. Priest is an odd duck. He illustrates the problem of combining two disparate enterprises: the pursuit of logic as a pure formal enterprise (in his case paraconsistent logic, which admits of true contradictions, whose attendant doctrine is dialetheism), and the substantive engagement with philosophical issues and ultimately the real world. While logic was practically developed to study the nature of inference, valid and invalid argument (without larger philosophical claims), its formal form has never neatly meshed with the messiness of the real world nor with the structuring the categories of its fundamental understanding. Furthermore, mixing up logic with metaphysics has, historically, more often served the cause of mysticism than science. In his 1995 (with additions in 2002) book BEYOND THE LIMITS OF THOUGHT, Priest bravely reviews the history of western philosophy (with Nagarjuna thrown in in 2002) and attempts to unify all paradoxes in his Inclosure Schema. (I have uploaded his diagram to two discussion lists with the filename logicreal2.rtf) Paradoxically, paradoxically, by the time he has accomplished this task, he has left the philosophical content of all these philosophies embodying these paradoxes behind. In other words, the bare formal structure he seeks to generalize does not do justice to the nature of the philosophical issues involved. In a later paper on philosophy in the 21st century, Priest predicts that Asian philosophy will be the next big thing. Perhaps this ties in to his interest in Nagarjuna, Taoism, and the martial arts. About Marxism he seems to throw up his hands and suggest that somehow it drowned in the Sea of Ilyenkov. I'll review this article more extensively at a later date. However, back in 1989, Priest aggressively attempts to prove that Hegel, Marx, and Engels were adherents of dialetheism. What this amounts to may prove instructive. (1) That Hegel's dialectics is dialetheism should be a no-brainer, Priest argues. Hegel states that the very nature of motion embodies contradiction. (You will be familiar with the issue from Zeno's paradox.) But others have denied that Hegel affirms contradiction in the formal logical sense. Marxist philosophers have made similar denials about the marxist view of dialectical contradiction. Sometimes contradiction is characterized as the co-existence of conflicting forces, which is hardly a logical interpretation. Priest cites a few to that effect. After the Stalin era (in which contradiction hazily covered a variety of meanings), a growing number of Soviet philosophers dissociated the notion of dialectical contradiction from any taint of logical contradiction (Sheptulin, Narskii), and some maintain that contradictions hold in thought but not in reality (Narskii). (2) The arguments against this position: In Hegel's time, the only logic extant was Aristotle's logic, which Hegel deemed inadequate from a dialectical perspective. But Frege/Russell logic is far more sophisticated, and is the gold standard now. Contradiction is even more taboo. Note Priest's quotation of Popper on dialectic. Most Marxists, who know little of formal logic, have been browbeaten into retreating from dialetheism. But now we have paraconsistent logic to the rescue. (3) Dialetheic logic: Priest outlines the principles of paraconsistent logic, which may assign truth values of both true and false. He also discusses its semantics. He also introduces an operator ^ to nomialize sentences, e.g. ^A means that A (e.g. 'that Sam went to the store' is true). Further discussion. (4) Motion: an illustration. Priest claims that paraconsistent logic can easily render Hegel's notion of the paradox of motion into logical form. He also deals with an argument based on a distinction between extensional and intensional contradiction. In extensional contradiction, there is no intrinsic connection between the conjuncts. But for intensional (putatively dialectical) contradictions, there is an internal relation between the conjuncts not captured by a mere extensional conjunction (A not-A). Priest treats this latter qualification by way of example (with reference to Grice's conversational implicature), but leaves us hanging, and promises to pick up the argument again in section 8. (5) The history of Hegel's dialectic: This section is quite interesting, and appears to be remote from the realm of paraconsistent logic. Hegel draw on his predecessors Kant and Fichte as well as the medieval Neo-Platonists who held that the One embodies contradictions. Priest quotes Hegel's analysis of Kant's antinomies of reason. Hegel objects to Kant's banishing contradiction from the world and relegating it to the Reason claiming that reason falls into contradiction only by applying the categories. The postulation of the
[Marxism-Thaxis] relations of production as fetter on production
Pardon, my misquoting your definition of an epoch. ^ CB: This seems a disingenous pardon. ^ An epoch in the Marxist standpoint is a historical period of time distinguished in its geenral framework on the basis of the mode of production, rather than by more than one generation. In my estimate this more accurately pays homage to the spirit of Marx. CB: What do you mean by general framework ? ^ Again, I apologize for my misquoting. ^ CB: This seems a fake apology. Social revolution means the kind of change in the productive forces - tools, instruments, machines and underlying energy source of the production process, that compels society to reorganize itself around the new changes. CB: The Marx quote focused on here would seem to suggest that the social revolution begins when the property relations or relations of production prevent development of the productive forces, like levies, such that everybody gets pissed off and decides to change the property relations or relations of production so as to allow the levies and everything to fully develop and prevent disasters or prevent long term depressions. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] General Baker and Marian Kramer
http://www.michigancitizen.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Christopher Caudwell : His aesthetics and film
JUMP CUT A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA Christopher Caudwell His aesthetics and film by Ellen Sypher from Jump Cut, no. 12/13, 1976, pp. 65-66 copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1976, 2004 Christopher Caudwells career as a Marxist culture theorist was very brief. Two years after he began serious Marxist writing he was killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War at the age of thirty. Yet in that brief time his output was prodigious: a reputable book on physics from a dialectical materialist perspective (The Crisis in Physics) and four theoretical works on culture. One of these is dedicated to poetry (Illusion and Reality), another to the novel (Romance and Realism) and two to general essays in such fields as history, psychology and religion (presently combined in a single volume, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture). Caudwells reputation, based solely on these five works, is considerable. His name has been a familiar one to Marxists since his death, and he is known of by the literary establishment. Serious evaluation of his writings is, however, only a fairly recent phenomenon.(1) This more recent assessment of him from a Marxist perspective is generally that while immature and deeply flawed, he is so richly suggestive and often so sound that every serious Marxist thinker on culture should deal with him. He was and remains more or less of a maverick. From upper middle class roots, he left school at fifteen to work in aeronautics. After his commitment to Marxism he moved to Poplar, a working class section of London, where he wrote and did menial party work for the British Communist Party, whose leadership did not even know of him until after his death. He apparently undertook his serious theoretical work in isolation. His work bears all the weaknesses of such an individualistic position in that he uncritically accepts prevailing attitudes. Especially he ignores proletarian culture, and he depends too much on the then very influential Freud. Yet notwithstanding these narrow dimensions of his work, some of his perceptions of literatures basis and workings stand alongside those of the best of Marxist aestheticians. Caudwells work, undoubtedly because of its mixed character, has not substantially influenced any writer on aesthetics although he is undisputedly the major Marxist writer on aesthetics in the British and U.S. tradition. Literature and especially poetry is Caudwells first love. Yet in Illusion and Reality he frequently branches out to mention other cultural forms: music, dance, drama, and film.(2) The comments on film are theoretical and frustratingly brief, yet always provocative and never mechanical. By themselves they cannot stand as a cornerstone for a Marxist theory of film. Placed, however, in the context of his general views on culture and particularly literature, his comments form a springboard for other Marxist film theoreticians. Unlike more mechanical Marxist writers, Caudwell approaches art neither as primarily a reflection of historical reality nor as a mere vehicle for expressing the authors class perspective. Rather, for Caudwell art is ultimately an instrument in social production. For Caudwell as for Marx, it is the act of social production which makes humans human, non-animal. Art thus is guaranteed its place as a necessary feature of human social life. Science serves this same end of fostering social production and is likewise necessary. Science, however, operates more in the realm of cognition, while art operates primarily in the realm of emotion. Poetry seems to operate more directly on the emotions, while the novel in its more literal representation of social relations contains somewhat more of the reflective, cognitive, or as Caudwell calls it, referential element. Yet in each case, art serves ultimately to direct the participants subjective life toward social production. Art achieves this end by creating an illusion of reality which many people can participate in together. It draws out what is common in peoples socially formed, yet idiosyncratically experienced thoughts and emotions. Caudwell seems to suggest that the poem is more effective than the novel in ensuring this collective response. In any case Caudwell is insistent (see particularly his essay on D.H. Lawrence in Studies on a Dying Culture) that there is no area of consciousness or the unconscious, no area of thought or feeling, that is asocial as Freud and Lawrence believe. Both areas are repositories and transformers of ones social, historical experience. Thus arts effect in focusing common responses can be profound. Art can be a powerful instrument in encouraging social cooperation, social production. Caudwell recognizes, however, that in a class society all art is class art, or, the life experiences of people and their interests are class specific. The shared pool of experience and thus
[Marxism-Thaxis] Graham Priest: Dialetheism Marx
Priest, Graham. 'Was Marx a Dialetheist?', Science and Society, 1991, 54, 468-75. While I don't expect everyone to be held spellbound by this question, it is illustrative of a recurring problem in intellectual history (and also in popular intellectual culture, which is another story. Priest's views on dialetheism (logic which admits contradictions) is controversial among his fellow logicians, and he responds to objections in his book. Probably his fellow logicians (except those interested in Marx, among which there are more than a few) are not terribly concerned about his views on Marx, and in fact he says nothing about Marx in his book. However he did get a response to his earlier article on dialectics and dialetheism: Marquit, Erwin. A Materialist Critique of Hegel's Concept of Identity of Opposites, Science and Society, Summer 1990, 54, no. 2, 147-166. I haven't yet reviewed this article, so I'll move directly to Priest's response. Marquit himself is a Marxist (and a physicist, I believe) who maintains that logical contradictions are unacceptable. Priest counters this by reaffirming the existence of formal logics not susceptible to this limitation. Moreover, Marquit is wrong to claim that contradiction is intolerable in theoretical investigations, citing Dirac's early formulation of quantum mechanics and teh early infinitesimal calculus as examples. However, as all theories get replaced eventually, inconsistencies or no, one can't argue much on this basis. (Am I missing something, or is Priest undermining himself here?) Then there is Marquit's argument as to the difference between idealism and materialism. While Hegel's idealism requires an identity of opposites, materialism does not. Priest argues that the substantive differences between Hegel and Marx are irrelevant to the question of whether the entities in question have formally contradictory properties. Marquit argues that a succession of states in time (state A and state not-A) are contradictory or not depending on whether Hegel's or Marx's logical and historical dialectics are temporal or not. I'm not going to reproduce the confusing paragraph in question, but suffice it to say that Priest counters this argument. Finally, Priest claims that since Marx says that he took over his dialectic from Hegel, we should take his word for it, along with the criticisms he explicitly makes of Hegel's dialectic. Oy! In his earlier article, Priest cites three alleged examples of Marx's dialetheism; Marquit addresses only one, with the familiar ploy of reinterpreting a situation in which A not-A are both true as being so in DIFFERENT RESPECTS. The example in question is a famous one from Marx on the nature of the commodity, its use value, exchange value, and equivalency. Priest analyzes this example from CAPITAL as well as another one from A CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICAL ECONOMY to counter Marquit's argument. Priest segues to the contradictory nature of wage labor, both free and unfree. Here too he counters Marquit's attempt to weasel out of a contradiction in the same respect. Next Priest discusses the nature of motion, beginning with Zeno's paradox. Here I am confused about Priest's argument about the unsatisfactoriness of the Russellian argument, about which he claims to agree with Marquit. Then he throws quantum mechanics into the mix, and I can't make sense out of the argument anymore, as we move into paragraphs on the uncertainty principle and the two-slit experiment. Priest concludes that he is not suggesting that quantum mechanical descriptions are descriptions of an inconsistent reality. My point is just that it is premature to claim quantum mechanics as an ally against dialetheism. I don't know whether you can make any sense out of my summary of this article, but to me the article itself is an awful mess. I offer a few observations: (1) Priest treats disparate examples as if they are alike: (a) the nature of motion (implying, firstly, the nature of the continuum). There is a philosophical dimension, a scientific dimension, and a mathematical dimension to this problem. The ancient Greeks, lacking the calculus (though I'm told that Archimedes came close), could not handle the mathematical dimension, but they dealt with both the logical (philosophical) and scientific dimension of the problem as best they could. The strictly logical dimension--i.e. the nature of the continuum--involves the question of infinite divisibility of the line into points. If I remember correctly, already Aristotle challenged Zeno by denying that motion should be considered as a succession of states of rest, and that the line, while potentially infinitely divisible, should not be considered as a collection of points (or actual infinity of real numbers, a nondenumerable infinite set as Cantor proved it to be). Then there is the relation between the mathematical idealization and the
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re:Christopher Caudwell : His aesthetics and film
Terrific to see a piece on Caudwell I never read taken out of the mothballs. (did you find this on the web, perchance?) More has appeared since 1976, but I have apparently failed to document it comprehensively in my bibliography: http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/caudwell.html E.P. Thompson's essay is stupendous. As for Caudwell himself, I loved his STUDIES AND FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE, taking them in the '80s as a model for similar work for our time. I thought Romance and Realism was really weak and crude. No question, though, that Caudwell was an original. At 05:33 PM 9/11/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote: JUMP CUT A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA Christopher Caudwell His aesthetics and film by Ellen Sypher from Jump Cut, no. 12/13, 1976, pp. 65-66 copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1976, 2004 ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] relations of production as fetter on production
CB: The Marx quote focused on here would seem to suggest that the social revolution begins when the property relations or relations of production prevent development of the productive forces, WL: I believe you explain the exact nature of our discussion in the above. Social Revolution begins as the result of 1). changes in the productive forces 2). and these changes evolve in such a way as 3). to come into collision with the relations of production or the property relations . . . AFTER and on the basis of colliding with the actual properties - organization, of a given state of development of production. Actually, social revolution comes about as the result of a qualitative addition in the material power of production that demands the restructuring of the productivity architecture. The restructuring of the productivity architecture, does at a certain stage of this restructuring passes from contradiction to antagonism, with the old forms of property or what is the same thing, the expression of property as a given superstructure. The social revolution begins as the spontaneous development of the means of production or what is the same, a qualitative addition to the technological regime upon which sits and arises the entire productivity architecture. The contradictions within the productive forces are abstracted from the complexity that is the mode of production - with the property relations within, and this standpoint is referred to as the spontaneous development of the productive forces. The spontaneous development of the productive forces, manifest a law system of development that overlaps with and interpenetrate the mode of accumulation or the form of property, but in the last instance is not self driven by the property relations. In real life the above sentence does not exist as such because the complexity of actuality does not operate on the basis of our abstraction of the actual process. Property and thinking determines - to a considerable degree, everything. And the subjective factor - wo/man themselves, are the most revolutionary ingredient of the productive forces. The productive forces of society does not simply collide - come into contradiction, with the property relations because each successive stage in the development of production contains its own unity and strife -- contradiction, as a given. Your description of the process properly belongs to a period of Marxism that is the rising curve of industrial development. During this historical per iod or era - not epoch, the Marxists and communist insurgents were bound by a certain quantitative stage in the development of the industrial system, where it was impossible to predict or conceive of a stage where the industrial system passes over to a higher and qualitatively new beginning of a new mode of production. Jumping a little bit . . . this is my criticism of Rosa Luxemberg's writing on the accumulation of Capital and her conceptual framework of the boundary of the industrial system, with the property relations within. She is historically inaccurate and life itself has revealed itself to us. Hell . . . I will never be her intellectual equal. Or Leon Trotsky's for that matter. Or Comrade Stalin or Bukarin or a Cornel West. Marx most famous statement and quote on the general law of development of society can be understood anew. I of course have added nothing and nothing new to the treasure house of Marx and frankly do not possess the intellectual ability as such. Nor do I possess a profound grasp of dialectics and there are many sharper comrades on this list than I. What I possess is an acute power of observation unobstructed by ideology that allows me to present complex ideas and concepts worked out by others in either a complex or elementary manner. I am a communist propagandist. I have lived the actual industrial process for a lifetime directly as part of the industrial process and there are details I can speak of with a profound authenticity. In other words I grasped the boundary we passed wherein the industrial system began its leap - transition, to post industrial society and this was not simply an intellectual process, but is bound up with embodying three generations of industrial workers. I grapsed the passing of this boundary, after I was told we passed a certain boundary by others. The industrial system has an architecture, or complex series of pathways by which its interactivity sustains its reality. Qualitative changes in the components that are the pathways begins the restructuring of the pathways. The productive forces come into contradiction with themselves as development. Much of this we have personally discussed for at last the past 4 years and most communists and Marxist on various lists do not even have a modern conception of the productive forces we face or the relations of production, except as ideological proclamations. Most are stuck in
[Marxism-Thaxis] Christopher Caudwell : His aesthetics and film
Ralph Dumain : Terrific to see a piece on Caudwell I never read taken out of the mothballs. (did you find this on the web, perchance?) More has appeared since 1976, but I have apparently failed to document it comprehensively in my bibliography: http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/caudwell.html E.P. Thompson's essay is stupendous. As for Caudwell himself, I loved his STUDIES AND FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE, taking them in the '80s as a model for similar work for our time. I thought Romance and Realism was really weak and crude. No question, though, that Caudwell was an original. ^ CB: Yes. I just google the name. Something about that Caudwell, for sure. If I don't laz out as usual , I am going to try to annotatively discuss some and copy one of the essays from one of the collections. The first person I heard discuss Caudwell was Angela Davis, who is also officially a philosopher. I try to read her study of women blues singers as philosophical work. In general, I'd make the current changes in philo based on feminist critique. The long term of philosophers lacks women philosophers. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] relations of production as fetter on productionWaistline2
Waistline2 Actually, social revolution comes about as the result of a qualitative addition in the material power of production that demands the restructuring of the productivity architecture. ^^^ CB: In the New Orleans flood type of example, it might be better said that it is the failure to make an addition in the material power of production, failure to add to the material holding power of the levies, that might make masses demand a restructuring of the relations of production/property relations ,and the restructuring of the relations of production constitute a social revolution. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] that man and woman was born free, but was crippled through social organisation.
that man (sic) was born free, but was crippled through social organisation. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Key idea in Caudwell
Key idea in Caudwell is ye ancient antagonism between predominantly mental and predominantly physical labor. ^ Caudwell had sought to discern the most basic thought patterns and to discover the lines of connection between these and the most basic socio-economic realities. At the heart of it all was the subject-object dichotomy, that had its basis in the social division of labour, in the separation of the class that generated ideology from the class that actively struggled with nature. This dichotomy distorted all realms of thought and activity. It distorted art, science, psychology, philosophy, economics and all social relations. It was a disease endemic to class society that has become most acute in bourgeois society as the most highly developed form of class society. Only an integrated world view and a classless society could bring to a synthesis what had been severed and had grown pathologically far apart. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
