Marx and Democracy (notes)

Just as it is not in fact religion that creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution that creates the people but the people which creates the constitution. In a certain respect, Marx maintains, democracy is to all other forms of the state what Christianity is to all other religions: deified man under the form of a particular religion, and, in the same way, democracy is the essence of every political constitution: it is socialized humankind under the form of a particular constitution of the state. Marx says (note male referent) that while Hegel's idealism proceeds from the state and makes man into the subjectified state, democracy begins with man and makes the state objectified man. He directly counterpoises democracy to Hegel's idealism. From this it becomes evident that "all forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy". Marx explains that the right to pardon is the ultimate expression of contingent and arbitrary (undemocratic) choice, and significantly this is what Hegel makes the essential attribute of the monarch: he defines the source of pardon as the 'self-determined' or 'groundless' decision [die grundlose Entscheidung].

...the Estates are, according to Marx, the sanctioned, legal lie of constitutional states, the lie that the state is the people's interest or the people the interest of the state. From here he proceeds to the question of elections: staying within the critique of Hegel, he criticizes the concept of representation: in a choice of such individuals, as have a better understanding of these affairs than their electors have, it is supposed to follow that the relationship which deputies have to their electors is not that of agents. But he says it is only by means of a sophism that Hegel may declare these individuals understand these affairs 'better' and not 'simply'. His conclusion that they do understand these affairs better could be drawn only if the electors had the option of deliberating and deciding themselves about public affairs or of delegating definite individuals to discharge these things, precisely if representation, did not belong essentially to the character of civil society's legislature. But in the state constructed by Hegel representation constitutes precisely the legislature's specific essence, precisely as realized. What is significant for Marx is that Hegel here designates trust as the substance of election, as the substantial relation between electors and deputies, and trust is a personal relationship.

Excerpts from "Marx, Democracy, and the Aesthetic Level" by Gary Tedman.

Determining Your Philosophy Dialectically

By Gary Tedman
PoliticalAffairs.net

Philosophy, as it exists officially (academic and institutional), has a professional relationship to the sciences: it defends them, elucidates them, and provides a framework through which we can think them, especially in their combination. It tries to tell us what they mean, in human terms: how should we live our lives, according to science? You might say this is the function or purpose of philosophy today, it is its job.

Philosophy as we know it comes in two main strands, materialism and idealism.

Materialism is opposed to Idealism in the "theory of knowledge" - in the theory of how knowledge is derived. In the jargon, the "theory of knowledge" is called epistemology. For a Materialist, being (existence) comes before thought: you must be, first, in order to think. Idealists hold the contrary view: ideas come before existence. Note that we must not confuse the strict philosophical meaning of materialism with the casual sense of love of money and the things it can buy.

Marxism is essentially a materialist theory, but added to its theory of knowledge is always the dialectic, which furnishes the conception of development and change. This idea of development is known in philosophy as ontology, the theory of being or existence. So we have epistemology and ontology: materialism + dialectics, or dialectical materialism.

The dialectic was initially taken over by Marx from Hegel, the great idealist philosopher, but in a transformed way. To put it very schematically, Marx brought this process down to earth so that, afterwards, material (economic) factors determined social change in history, and not the human spirit or ideas. The resultant philosophy is materially "determinist," in that material factors cause events.

Determinism is the philosophical principle that material events that take place (in time) are caused by material events that happened previously, hence the simple idea of cause and effect in history. These causes can be worked out empirically, studied, tested, and in some cases reproduced, and so can also be predicted. This is a fundamental procedure of science (e.g. it leads to advances in technological products).

The Philosophy of Economics Today:

by Gary Tedman


As if it were in retreat but wanted to deny it, after the encroachment of Marxism and Freudianism on what it felt was its own hallowed territory, yet embarrassed by its Idealist past and wanting the fruits of the new materialism into the bargain, academia produced Analytic Philosophy to carry its contemporary positivist message. Inward looking navel gazing was the new emperor’s clothes, and a love for looking at the wood rather than the forest. The mechanisms of philosophy were to be examined in their 'purity', in the guise of logic and language, bereft of those awkward problem areas, such as politics and the passions, which hitherto had, on reflection they felt, sullied their most special realm. Here they surely must be on a stronger footing. This territory belonged to them by rights, for centuries it was at the centre of their endeavour. It did not matter that logic and language alone could not furnish meaning or understanding by themselves, in fact this was to be considered an added bonus, and something to be aimed for as a high achievement.

They would partner science’s groom with this suitable bride, able to fulfil all the duties it could possibly require, especially that of denying meaningfulness to anything that might be considered dangerous to the powers that be, while simultaneously allowing any affirmative meaning to accrue to whatever was deemed subservient to the political ideology of the day.

Such a flexible philosophy, such a denegated position, would be perfectly suitable for today’s human subject, the ‘virtualised’ individual, the flexible worker who can have his education downloaded by a mobile phone, who has all the information, the ‘data’ at his fingertips, ready to leap into whatever assignment that calls. And it would also be perfect for the new stock market, for the ever expanding economy, for world of eternal ‘growth’, for the standards of unquestioned confidence in confidence as the root of all goodness, for total moral relativism, for global competition, for the free and flexible market in every sphere of human activity, and for the ‘services based economy’ in a universe that must correspond to computer models. - My god, it a ‘services based philosophy’!

And so it came to pass that positivist Analytic Philosophy triumphed in academia, and this must at all costs keep at bay the inroads of Marx and Freud. It reached its apotheosis recently, when it lurked behind the Neo-Liberal ideology of globalism as, it has to be said, a very grey eminence, shamefaced and unaccountable. The apotheosis of this ideology thus came just before its most severe debunking. Yet still, like the bankers who have not quite run off (though a few have tried) with the money and awarded themselves with even bigger bonuses after being bailed out, there is nobody to admonish the Philosophical scoundrels. They still lurk in back of the stage, not too quietly, but quieter than the bankers, as is their habit.

What are we to think? We are, in a sense, on the outside of this argument looking in. We wonder what the deeper reasons are, why the ‘powers that be’ and the ‘pundits that be’ failed so utterly miserably to see the crisis coming and do anything about it. But just as official philosophy is ‘hands-off’ the realms of Big Meaning, so mainstream politics is ‘hands-off’ the Big Economy. In tandem they represent the wilful abdication of control and which is therefore also an abdication of their responsibility. In all the attempts to officially analyse the failures of the main players in the crisis we thus find the same feeble and impossible to believe excuse: “we didn’t know what was going on”. Lack of understanding is thus now an extolled virtue, meriting giant financial rewards, but such rewards are glossed as if it were a case of mere technical feedback.

The logic of the market can hardly be backed by the actual logic of Analytic Philosophy, especially not now, when we see that the rewards are enormous for failure, and we see the reality of the crisis unfold, and its miseries, unless the logic is only formal and has nothing to do with life, and unless the logic is able to make moral hazard its secret god. And this is indeed the case.

This Philosophy is not, apparently, concerned anymore with life; it is concerned with science. But its science is also not understood as concerned with life, except perhaps externally, as ‘behaviour’. But what science is not concerned with life? In the end this Philosophy undercuts its own base and rationale; it fades away as something irrelevant, as something only determined by this historical period, as a contingent factor of its political expediency, exactly what it supposed it sought to avoid in the first place. It did not want to be a ‘mere ideology’ like it caricatured Marx’s theory, it wanted to be the modest truth, that was all, but now Marx is seen again to be the real provider of this modest truth, we are back at crisis, and the Philosophers are the ideologists again.

Marxism was always at risk of having its philosophical edges muddied by empiricism, or vulgar materialism as Lenin called it. This was not just true in the annals of official Philosophy, where we might expect it, but in areas like art practice too, where ‘realism’, once a progressive movement, degenerated into a kind of aesthetic behaviourism, a voyeuristic fascination with the external. There is a whole industry bent, today, on continuing to muddy the Marxist waters with pseudo versions of Marxism of this nature. The ‘good’ Marx becomes analytic, and we find we are meant to ignore his politics; for he is a ‘scientist’ now. Marx had his rational system and it is not impossible to look at his work from the point of view of its formalism. Indeed, this is a necessity sometimes (Althusser). Analytic Philosophy and Positivism has, however, made this its sole virtue, if they are the official saints of the new religion (as Comte envisaged), these are its catechisms: its logic, its ‘data’, its unflinching obsession with detail, a passionless quest for validity in ‘correct’ language and its essentializing of ‘grammar’ even, contradictorily, against actual linguistic science and Chomsky. So the very point where it apparently tries hardest to grasp science, science ‘in its essence’, is where it most completely loses touch with it. Like its offspring behaviourism, it only reaches a superficial depth in its idea of depth, it deliberately limits itself, or you might say it willingly puts on blinkers for its masters, lest it let slip a few meanings that might have more than a topical value.

All such meanings are meant to be suspect, which leads to today’s quotidian principles of ‘political correctness’, an ideological panacea for all seasons, a super liberal but scathingly dictatorial “thou shalt” completely rigid in its total flexibility in whatever situation the ‘great and good’ find themselves, flexible because it is contentless. It is not that analytic philosophy has not had its political moments. Bertrand Russell for example; and it is not that it does not produce some good work, some knowledge; it would be more surprising if all this energy and expenditure and swallowing up of talent gave birth to nothing.

But, we are entitled to be angry with it, and especially in these days of extremity. Today it sits behind the arguments of bankers, of speculators automatic deals and the ‘solutions’ of IT departments, the rationale of call centres and computer mailshots; it is behind the endless rhetoric of technocratic instrumentalism, the loss of discretion and passion and, in a way, that old fashioned humanism that at least had humanitarianism sitting next to it.

Maybe the latter was just the result of embarrassment, though. Today’s hard nosed, dullard, vacuous attitude, picked up from the right wing capitalists, has lost that. The new figures for the vast gap between rich and poor are almost unbelievable, they are gross, yet there is hardly a bat of an eyelid. What has Philosophy got to say about that? Clearly very little, it is not its territory; of those things it has basically washed its hands.

What, therefore, can the academies offer us about the crisis? - The economic one, the moral one, the political one, the pedagogic one? A deafening silence, that is about all. There are a few glimmers of hope in that there is some small recognition, for example in economics after the dramatic failure to predict the crisis , that all is not working properly. To quote an extract from ‘The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics’ (from ‘Modeling of Financial Markets’ at the 98th Dahlem Workshop, 2008), which is worth a read:

“The global financial crisis has revealed the need to rethink fundamentally how financial systems are regulated. It has also made clear a systemic failure of the economics profession. Over the past three decades, economists have largely developed and come to rely on models that disregard key factors—including heterogeneity of decision rules, revisions of forecasting strategies, and changes in the social context—that drive outcomes in asset and other markets. It is obvious, even to the casual observer that these models fail to account for the actual evolution of the real-world economy. Moreover, the current academic agenda has largely crowded out research on the inherent causes of financial crises. There has also been little exploration of early indicators of system crisis and potential ways to prevent this malady from developing. In fact, if one browses through the academic macroeconomics and finance literature, “systemic crisis” appears like an otherworldly event that is absent from economic models. Most models, by design, offer no immediate handle on how to think about or deal with this recurring phenomenon.2 In our hour of greatest need, societies around the world are left to grope in the dark without a theory. That, to us, is a systemic failure of the economics profession.”

[Source: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/papers/Dahlem_Report_EconCrisis021809.pdf]

You would think from this we were in for some results, a breath of fresh academic air perhaps. Yet this effort unfortunately seems to be doomed before it is even begun because the task is understood already as fundamentally one of a ‘lack of communication’ of the difficulties they face (and have faced) and the limitations of the science, rather than anything inherent to their method; in other words it is seen as essentially a marketing problem! It is not our fault, they want to suggest, it is the media, the press, and so on, they all expect too much from us, they whine like the bankers: “…we may be the gods of today, but this doesn't mean all the problems should be placed at the foot of our doors, we cannot be held responsible”, “It is not the fault of our Economics, it is not the fault of our Philosophy, it is…”, they hurriedly look around for someone on which to pin the blame and see everyone looking back at them, for the moment they are waiting to see if there will be an answer dawning in their consciousness….

Naturally, in this text there is absolutely no mention of Marx. Are we surprised? - Of course not. Even in an essay which wants to address the question why ‘boom and bust’ has not been taken into account in the most up-to-date macroeconomic (etc., etc) economic models, Karl Marx is not mentioned. When you wear your philosophical blinkers so prominently we guess they must be very proud of them, or are they simply too afraid to grasp the nettle, even in amongst all this 'nettle grasping' that is supposed to be going on in the name of ‘getting real’? It would be hilarious if it were not so serious. But it is serious.

I have in my possession (smug old me...) a life size photocopy of Marx's 3rd 1844 manuscripts. This was part of research I started around 1981 (I published an essay in Rethinking Marxism journal on this research in 2004). Long ago I backed each page together and stuck them, and then turned them all into a big booklet. They are large pages and the faces are divided by Marx into (generally) two columns on which he has scrawled his characteristic hard to decipher writing (with his strange descending characters). You must read the text landscape with the hand sewn binding at the top.

I used to handle this and stare at it. It is not as unusual in structure as the 1st MS, but it is still unusual. A while ago I noticed the ink blots. Marx's pen left quite a few pools of varying densities, as well as swipes where he has wiped them, usually by accident.

Sometimes the blots went completely through the page and stained the other side. These blotches proved to me something empirically which I also thought from the rationale of the subject matter. Marx wrote this text in this way as it was planned and not in a haphazard manner just adding columns one after the other. The columns were meant to meet up and be juxtaposed at certain points given what was being stated by the words in each of them.

This has become a moot point in scholarship on Marx. You might say it is even repressed. Marx's works are meant to be taken like Bibles, as a long story in conventional form (at least). So publishers prefer to ignore this aspect of the MS and repeatedly put the text into conventional pages. It is also difficult for them to do anything else logistically, of course.

But some comrades say that this is after all easier for 'practical political purposes'. I disagree. The 1844 manuscripts are not, after all, minor election pamphlets, they are works of profound insight into the fundamental workings of capital and society and its philosophical view of itself. They are also a 'working out' and contain a kind of 'eureka' moment. It is necessary to understand Marx especially at this crucial point. What's more, the 1844 MS maintain a mystique precisely because of their poetic and unusual nature. Why the effort to diminish this and render it 'practical political'? If being 'practical political' means to dissolve this radical and deep aspect into the sea of the ordinary? To hell with it! for it is not really very practical or very politically aware to do that, is it?

I will take this opportunity to point up that I have recently been rushed (a bit) by an upsurge of this attitude to bring out the hypertext EBook version of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts (which I made freely available on the web here years ago

http://home.freeuk.com/lemmaesthetics/index.htm

…). This new text reveals, probably in a better way, the columnar structure and pagination, but it can also be read conventionally, yet without prioritizing which column comes first (which is very important). EBooks have this capacity, which at least is a benefit for that mode of reading. It is available for the mobipocket reader but is best seen on a PC because it needs a wide screen. See here:

http://www.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/eBookDetails.asp?BookID=263810

A materialist philosophical position means that we ought to take more note of such cultural objects as, yes, material objects, not just as repositories of 'floating meanings'.

Class Consciousness v Class Feelings

by Gary Tedman

I must admit to being uncomfortable with the concepts that surround the idea of 'class consciousness', especially the concepts of praxis, reification, and hegemony (incidentally, none of these are to be found in Marx and Engels). Not least problematic for me is the implied insult (to workers) in the notion that some people are unconscious of what they should be conscious of, and that there is a 'real' and a 'false' consciousness.

To Lukács, each social class has a determined class consciousness which it can attain. Class consciousness, as described in his 'History and Class Consciousness' (1923), is opposed to any psychological understanding of consciousness, which forms the basis of individual or group psychology (i.e. Freud). Although rightly opposing the liberal conception of consciousness as the foundation of individual freedom and so the social contract, Lukacs goes to the other extreme and is dialectically Hegelian in his idea of a social totality and essence. For Lukács, "ideology" or "false consciousness" is really a projection of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which functions to prevent the working class from gaining a true consciousness of its position; ideology to him determines the structure of knowledge itself.

Alternatively I believe that all consciousness can be regarded as 'real consciousness'. While it is obviously true that a person can have incorrect or wrong ideas, can be under illusions, this cannot really be a question of their consciousness, as such, being real or false, but just a question of its 'orientation', so to speak.

In any case, in the end there are reasons (material influences) that lead to a person being under the spell of an illusion about reality (for example the inversions and distortions generated by actual lived experience of the capitalist economy), so it is not a question, even, of being fooled by the ideology of the ruling class (not that Georg is this unsubtle). And often these same people still have their hearts in the right place, while I have noticed that those who talk a lot about 'raising consciousness' can be prone to wavering when the chips are down, mainly because their feelings are pointing in another direction.

The class bond, I would say, is always more a question of feeling than consciousness, and I think if you look for feelings you find a different landscape than if you expect to see evidence of 'consciousness' or not. The latter notion is after all very steeped in Idealist philosophy, which of course judges everything from the point of view of Ideas and 'consciousness'.

Nonetheless Lukacs and Gramsci's ideas about the importance of ideology and culture and its relative autonomy are certainly important (though I think Althusser's route with this is more productive, though Althusser as a person presents problems). But I maintain this is also an aesthetic struggle, not one of 'consciousness' especially.

It seems to me that the more Lukacs leans into a Kantian inspired dialectical Idealism in his Marxist philosophy, the more we find he defends the orthodox Marxist position on art (literary and visual), i.e. realism. It is as if he wishes to shore-up his tendency to a philosophical idealism contra Marx's materialism with overt shows of support for Marxism's most 'real' thesis. Wikipedia:

"It is clear that Lukacs regards the representation of reality as art’s chief purpose—in this he is perhaps not in disagreement with the modernists—but he maintains that “If a writer strives to represent reality as it truly is, i.e. if he is an authentic realist, then the question of totality plays a decisive role.” “True realists” demonstrate the importance of the social context, and since the unmasking of this objective totality is a crucial element in Lukacs’ Marxist ideology, he privileges their authorial approach."

Pasted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Luk%C3%A1cs

What Marxist would disagree with Lukacs on this? But the trouble is the objective totality that he understands is not in fact a complete one, which it needs to be to really perform the function he ascribes to it.

"Lukacs explains that good realists, such as Thomas Mann, create a contrast between the consciousnesses of their characters (appearance) and a reality independent of them (essence). According to Lukacs, Mann succeeds because he creates this contrast, conversely, modernist writers fail because they portray reality only as it appears to themselves and their characters—subjectively—and “fail to pierce the surface” of these immediate, subjective experiences “to discover the underlying essence, i.e. the real factors that relate their experiences to the hidden social forces that produce them.”…"

Pasted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Luk%C3%A1cs

This notion of an underlying essence/totality of capitalist society is a problem, because capitalism is not necessarily a totality or at least is not a unified totality, it is more of a chaotic whole which often comes into conflict with itself (contradiction). This fact means that a wide variety of literary techniques are and will be needed and can be justified to reveal the distinctions and differences between the psychology of a character (say, in a literary work) and the broad social dimensions. After all, the capitalist economic relations are only conventions, they are not natural, and so calling them an 'essence' is itself slightly mystifying about these relations.

Lukacs is right to be suspicious of subjective immediacy, for sure, but the alternative that he offers also has flaws that he fails to see or acknowledge. In this sense, realist art is only one type of art from one specific period of human history, we can understand and appreciate non-realist art from other (non-western) cultures and histories, yet they seem to be outside or excluded from Lukacs' scope: it is also a misnomer, 'realism' is not real (in the sense of materialism) but also a social convention, that of perspective, which indeed has become so common and well-understood that it seems natural to us: but it is not. So two aspects become over-validated and essentialized by Lukacs: the conventions of economic relations and the conventions of pictorial space (narrative realism in the novel).

I like Maxim Gorky's novels (Lukacs uses Gorky as a good realist example) for sure, but I do not rate them as highly as Dostoyevsky, Gogol, or Turgenev, or even Kafka. Gorky, like Zola, tends not to be able to provide a deep psychology for his characters, they seem a bit one dimensional in comparison, and while, like Zola, Gorky is able to describe things and situations very well so that we feel them, almost as well as Lawrence enables you to do, aesthetically, the inner life is missing the contradictions that should be present because of the conflictual circumstances, the 'crazy' contradictions of life in capitalist society. And unlike Lawrence, the inner psychology (or pathology) of the characters is not usually brought out by other alternative means such as in the contrast of this psychology with the natural (non-conventional) physical environment.

In short, Lukacs misses what I have termed the aesthetic level of practice, and his notion of ideological wholeness therefore jumps from the base to the superstructure and back again too quickly and suddenly to be able to capture these subtleties which nevertheless I think he wants to capture and save for us.

This is all mainly because Lukacs misunderstands Marx's initial concept of alienation as a spiritual rather than material-affective (Freudian, perhaps) one. The insistence on an autonomous struggle for class consciousness then in the end works out as yet another call (vulgar materialist Economism notwithstanding) for the supremacy of spirit over matter, and mysticism over science. As if the proletariat had only to grasp dialectical materialism in their consciousness (with the help of some specially 'conscious' people) and all would be solved. Lukacs tries very hard to escape Hegel's orbit, but does not quite succeed.

Bertrand Russell on Bolshevism (4)

by Thomas Riggins

Part One of Bertrand Russell's "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism" comprises eight chapters under the heading 'The Present Condition of Russia' [1920]. Briefly the main points of each chapter:

3. 'Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky'

This chapter is full of personal impressions of Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky. It is really very subjective, more so than many other opinions in this book, so I will pass it by after giving just a few examples.

Of Lenin, Russell says, "I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance." Lenin thought it would be difficult to build socialism with a majority population of peasants (little did he know). He told Russell that the world revolution was needed before any real achievement could happen.

Of Trotsky, Russell says the Russians don't regard him at all as equal to Lenin but he impressed Russell more as to "intelligence and personality" but he had only "a very superficial impression" of the man. He had "admirable wavy hair" and appeared vain. He brought to mind a comparison with Napoleon!

Gorky was ill when Russell interviewed him. "He supports the government," Russell wrote, as I should do, if I were a Russian-- not because he thinks it faultless, but because the possible alternatives are worse." If Russell really thinks that, then he, as a Leibniz scholar, should have recognized that the Bolsheviks were the best of all possible Russian governments and thus mitigated some of his criticisms since he could see the Bolsheviks were doing the best they could. He should have at least made constructive criticisms of the faults instead of comparing them to his ideal of Britain since 1688 and suggesting incommensurable historic parallels

Now for a more substantive chapter.

4. 'Communism and the Soviet Constitution'

Russell wanted to study and compare the Soviet system, set up by the Constitution, with the Parliamentary system but could not as he found the Soviets "moribund." The All Russian Soviet , the legal supreme body, hardly ever met and had already become a rubber stamp for the CP.

This was due to the fact that the Western blockade and the Civil War had reduced the country to the verge of collapse and the Bolsheviks could only hold out by extreme measures. The idea was first the government had to survive and after peace was established there could be a return to more democratic measures.

Russell was aware of the fact that the peasants were hostile to the Bolshevik regime. To feed the cities it was necessary to take food from the peasants and this was paid for by essentially worthless paper money which the peasants could not really spend.

Nevertheless, Russell thought the peasants "never better off" and their dislike of the Bolsheviks seemed unwarranted. He saw no "under fed" peasants and the big landlords' property had been confiscated for the benefit of the peasants.

The peasants were very ignorant, knowing little beyond the confines of their villages. Knowing nothing of the Civil War or blockade "they cannot understand why the government is unable to give them the clothes and agricultural implements that they need."

Russell saw the CP in Russia ('the bureaucracy") divided into three parts. First, the old Bolsheviks, "tested by years of persecution", who have the the most important positions. They are upset by the backwardness and hostility of the peasants and by the fact their ideals have to be postponed awaiting better material conditions.

Second, the second rank of "arrivistes" who have the second level positions. They benefit from the fact that the Bolsheviks are in power (the police, informers, secret agents, etc.,) From their ranks come the members of the Extraordinary Commission [i.e., the Cheka or,in 1920, All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption).

This was a violent revolution and the White Guards, the pro Tsarist side in the Civil War had unleashed the "White Terror" in areas it controlled and the Bolsheviks, fighting fire with fire, unleashed the "Red Terror" against their perceived enemies. Needless to say many untoward actions were taken by both sides.

Lenin addressed these issues of democracy and dictatorship in a speech he gave in 1920. "[In] the era of capitalism, when the masses of the workers are subjected to constant exploitation and cannot develop their human capacities, the most characteristic feature of working-class political parties is that they can involve only a minority of their class. A political party can comprise only a minority of a class, in the same way as the really class-conscious workers in any capitalist society constitute only a minority of all workers. We are therefore obliged to recognise that it is only this class-conscious minority that can direct and lead the broad masses of the workers.... What is this organized minority? If this minority is really class-conscious, if it is able to lead the masses, if it is able to reply to every question that appears on the order of the day, then it is a party in reality." And because of the dire situation in Russia it was really a small group of leaders at the top who actually ruled Russia.

Now for the third group in Russell's view. These were people who supported the government NOT because they were fervent communists but because the communists were in power and they could benefit from serving the communists-- either out of motives of patriotism or self interest (or both).

These people were of the same type as American businessmen (being motivated to advance themselves and take advantage of situations) and Russell "supposes" that if peace comes this group will help in the industrialization of Russia making it "a rival of the United States."

The Russian workers in 1920, Russel said, were lacking in the habits of "industry and honesty" and the "harsh discipline" of the Bolsheviks will allow Russia to become "one of the foremost industrial countries." This attempt will be made in the 1930s in earnest.

Coming up, 'The Failure of Russian Industry'

Click here for part one of this series
Click here for part two of this series
Click here for part three of this series

Bertrand Russell on Bolshevism (2)

Thomas Riggins

Part One of Bertrand Russell's "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism" comprises eight chapters under the heading 'The Present Condition of Russia' [1920]. Briefly the main points of each chapter:

1. 'What is Hoped from Bolshevism.'

Russell informs us that Communism inspires people with hopes "as admirable" as those of the Sermon on the Mount. So Christians at least should be willing allies of Communist movements if they only knew their own ideals (if Russell is right that is.) But then he says that Communists hold their ideals just as fanatically as Christians and since "cruelty lurks in our instincts" and "fanaticism is a camouflage for cruelty" Communism is "likely to do as much harm" as Christianity has done.

And it seems as if the tyranny of some Communist states has indeed equaled that of Christians when they have been in control of state power (and not only Christians: it seems almost all states based on religion have been just terrible and still are to this day.) Later we will see how he thinks a Communist state may avoid this pitfall although the Russians probably won't.

Russell says capitalism is doomed because it so bad, so unjust that working people will not put up with it much longer. In deed "only ignorance and tradition" keep it going. Well. "ignorance and tradition" still seem to have a lot of steam left. The exceptional power and efficiency of the US are such that it might hold up the capitalist system another 50 years or so-- but it will be weaker and weaker and will never have the dominance it had in the 1800s.

According to this the game should have been over in the 1970s. Russell may have been off by 30 years. It is possible that the world crisis ignited in 2007 will lead to a general collapse. The US is the mainstay of the capitalist order so if it does go down it may well take the rest of the capitalist world with it.

While Russell thought that the capitalism of his day was more or less ripe for replacement he did not think the Russian form of socialism could replace it. Because he thinks Bolshevism cannot be a viable way to build socialism in the West he opposes it-- but not from the point of view of defending capitalism in any way.

Bolshevism is the socialism of a backward undeveloped country with no democratic tradition. It is the right form for Russia "and does more to prevent chaos than any possible alternative government would do." The lack of personal freedoms Russell found in Russia he blames on its Tsarist past and it is that past rather than communism as such that it is to blame.

A Communist party taking power in England (and by extension in the US or any other country with a democratic tradition might not get such an irresponsible backlash as happened in Russia and would be able to be "far more tolerant." This is, I think, especially so for the US where the Communist Party advocates a form of socialism based on the Bill of Rights.

Looking at the historic conditions of the Bolshevik's coming to power (the wreckage of W.W.I and the almost complete destruction of the Russian economy) Russell thinks communism can only come about through "widespread misery" and economic destruction.

This seems historically to be the case-- Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, etc. However he leaves open the possibility that communism could be established peacefully without the destruction of a country's economic life. Russell would like to see the least possible violence in the transition to socialism/ communism.

However, he has a really goofy idea, based on half baked psychological notions he has developed, which is that revolutionaries find that "violence is in itself delightful" and so have no inclination to avoid it. This is too ridiculous to require further comment.

As far as a peaceful transition is concerned, there is no a priori reason to reject this notion, but it would probably take place as a democratic upsurge of class conscious workers responding electorally to anti-capitalist parties once they had realized that their disintegrating economic conditions could not be halted by the traditional political system and its representatives.

Next time we will look at Chapter 2: "General Characteristics" of the situation in Russia.

Click here for part one of this series
Click here for part three of this series
Click here for part four of this series

Reading Lenin 12

READING LENIN: Materialism and Empiro-criticism [ 12 ]
Thomas Riggins

Using our editor's blog to further Marxist education seems like a good idea. So here is a famous work of Lenin's that outlines what Marxist philosophy is all about. It's 100 years old this year and we might ask ourselves what is still valid in this classic. Have new philosophic developments in the last 100 years made this work outmoded? I'm going to post some reflections on the book section by section and anyone who wants to read along and comment is welcome to do so. I hope to post weekly updates and Sunday seems the best day to this as it is a free day for me.

CHAPTER THREE: THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM AND OF EMPIRIO-CRITICISM. III

SECTION THREE: "Causality and Necessity in Nature"

Lenin thinks the question of causality is important and wants to begin to look at this issue from the standpoint of materialist epistemology. To do this he turns to Feuerbach's criticism of the philosopher Rudolf Haym [1821-1901, member from the center right of the National Assembly at Frankfort in 1848 and best known for his 1857 biography of Hegel] who attacked him on this issue.

Feuerbach quotes what Haym says about Feuerbach's book "The Essence of Religion": "Nature and human reason are for [Feuerbach] completely divorced, and between them a gulf is formed which cannot be spanned from one side or the other."

Haym is responding to Feuerbach's statement in his book that we "apply human expressions and conceptions to [the phenomena of nature], as for example: order, purpose, law; and are obliged to do so because of the character of our language."

Feuerbach goes on to point out that the big split between nature and human reason that Haym sees is not really there. He says his statement "does not assert that there is actually nothing in nature corresponding to the words or ideas of order, purpose, law." He was just trying to deny their identity (Idealism).

Feuerbach in fact claims that it is theism that makes this division, not materialism. "The reason of the theists splits nature into two beings -- one material, and the other formal or spiritual." Lenin discusses this Feuerbach-Haym dispute and concludes, "Feuerbach's views are consistently materialist."

Lenin says, "The recognition of objective law in nature and the recognition that this law is reflected with approximate fidelity in the mind of man is materialism." We should keep in mind the expression APPROXIMATE FIDELITY as Lenin often gets a bit carried away and talks about PHOTOGRAPHIC equivalence which many interpret as ABSOLUTE FIDELITY. This may be too strong a claim.

Since Marx and Engels were influenced by Feuerbach (he was the bridge between them and Hegel his philosophy being a materialist mutation of Hegel's Objective Idealism), Lenin makes the following remark about Engels that "to anyone who has read his philosophical works at all attentively it must be clear that Engels does not admit even a shadow of doubt as to the existence of objective law, causality and necessity in nature."

Lenin now makes some comments about Joseph Dietzgen who had been portrayed by the Machists as a subjectivist with respect to causality. Lenin tells us that while "we can find plenty of confusion, inexactnesses and errors in Dietzgen" so that as a philosopher "he is not entirely consistent", nevertheless the Machist view of him is totally false. He was a materialist and, Lenin quotes him as saying "that 'the causal dependence' IS CONTAINED 'in the things themselves'."

Lenin now demonstrates that Avenarius' line on causality is the same as that of Hume and his agnosticism on this issue. Avenarius, just as Hume, says we do not observe "causes" in nature, ie., "necessity", "All we experience," says Avenarius, "is that the one [event] follows the other.... Necessity therefore expresses a particular degree of probability with which the effect is, or may be, expected." Lenin calls this "subjectivism." With the development of physics in the last one hundred years, especially quantum mechanics, this has become the standard scientific view regarding "causality" and Lenin appears to be wrong in this respect. Materialism can live with a probabilistic universe if it recognizes that probability is an objective feature of reality as it presents itself to us.

But Mach and Avenarius are not justified by these developments. Mach says, "In nature there is neither cause nor effect.... I have repeatedly demonstrated that all forms of the law of causality spring from subjective motives and that there is no necessity for nature to correspond with them."

Modern science and modern materialism detect probability frequencies as objective features of quantum interactions independent of "subjective motives." Since, as Lenin says, the real issue is whether causal connections are the result of "objective natural law or properties of our mind", there is nothing in modern science that does not support the materialist position.

Lenin deals in a similar fashion with Pearson (who says "MAN IS THE MAKER OF NATURAL LAW), Petzoldt (who says "Our thought demands definiteness from nature, and nature always accedes to this demand; we shall even see that in a certain sense it is compelled to accede to it"), Willy (who maintains "We have long known, from the time of Hume, that 'necessity' is a purely logical (not a 'transcendental' characteristic...".

Now, two new subjectivists pop up: Henri Poincare [1854-1912, world famous French scientist] ("The only true objective reality is the internal harmony of the world," and this does not exist except in us); and Philipp Frank [1884-1966, Austrian scientist who later became a logical positivist who taught at Harvard] ("experience merely fills in a framework which man brings with him by his very nature....").

All the above were anti-materialism, or at least agnostics, and the reason Lenin added them to his critique was because they only varied here and there from Hume and Kant. These variations led Yushkevich and other Russian Machists to hail them as producing new ideas in philosophy. Lenin thinks that nonsense. Lenin says the essence of these "new" viewpoints "does not necessarily lie in the repetition of Kant's formulation, but in the recognition of the fundamental idea COMMON to both Hume and Kant, viz., the denial of objective law in nature and the deduction of particular 'conditions of experience', particular principles, postulates and propositions FROM THE SUBJECT, from human consciousness, and not from nature."

Lenin then grants that the Russian Machists "would like to be Marxists" and have read Engels' views on causality but are utterly confused. Yushkevich [P.S. Yushkevich, 1873-1945 was a Russian Menshevick], for example, "preaches" a new fad called "empirio- symbolism" and informs us that energy, in his own words, "is just as little a thing, a substance, as time, space, mass and other fundamental concepts of science: energy is a constancy, an empirio-symbol, like other empirio-symbols that for a time satisfy the fundamental human need of introducing reason, Logos, into the irrational stream of experience."

And let us not forget Bogdanov's "Empirio-monism" where we can read that the laws of nature "are created by thought as a means of organising experience, of harmoniously co-ordinating it into a symmetrical whole." None of this derives from the thought of Marx or Engels but derives from the philosophy of Kant.

Next week we will pick up with Section Four "The 'Principle of Economy of Thought' and the problem of the 'Unity of the World.'"

See Reading Lenin 11 here.

Reading Lenin 11

READING LENIN: Materialism and Empiro-criticism [ 11 ]
Thomas Riggins

Using our editor's blog to further Marxist education seems like a good idea. So here is a famous work of Lenin's that outlines what Marxist philosophy is all about. It's 100 years old this year and we might ask ourselves what is still valid in this classic. Have new philosophic developments in the last 100 years made this work outmoded? I'm going to post some reflections on the book section by section and anyone who wants to read along and comment is welcome to do so. I hope to post weekly updates and Sunday seems the best day to this as it is a free day for me.

CHAPTER THREE: THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM AND OF EMPIRIO-CRITICISM. III

SECTION ONE: "What is Matter? What is Experience"

Lenin says the first question is posed to the materialists while the second is put to the idealists (including the Machists) and agnostics. About 'matter' Avenarius says, "Within the purified, 'complete experience' there is nothing 'physical'-- 'matter' in the metaphysical absolute conception -- for 'matter' according to this conception is only an abstraction...." This theory Lenin calls "disguised subjective idealism."

Mach says, "What we call matter is a certain systematic combination of the ELEMENTS (sensations)." This is also subjective idealism. Lenin also has a quote from Pearson's "The Grammar of Science" to the same effect. He also says that the Russian Machists are totally off base when they equate these views to those of modern science. They are simply the old views of the idealists dressed up in new clothing.

Matter, Lenin says, "is that which, acting upon our sense-organs produces sensation." Bogdanov doesn't like this formulation and complains that materialists are not advancing and that their arguments, in his words, "prove to be simple repetitions." This only shows his ignorance as there are in fact basically only two main lines in philosophy with regard to this issue.

"One expression," Lenin points out, "of the genius of Marx and Engels was that they despised pedantic playing with new words, erudite terms, and simple 'isms', and said simply and plainly: there is a materialist line and an idealist line in philosophy, and between them there are various shades of agnosticism. The vain attempts to find a 'new' point of view in philosophy betray the same poverty of mind that is revealed in similar efforts to create a 'new' theory of value, a 'new' theory of rent, and so forth."

So much for "matter." Now, how is "experience" used in empirio-criticism?
I should say right off the bat that Lenin says "experience"-- the major concept of empirio-criticism -- is NOT clearly defined by the empirio-critics! With Avenarius it is vague and circular as when he says "pure experience is experience to which nothing is admixed that is not in its turn experience."

This is a definition which the philosopher A. Riehl in 1907 said "obviously revolves in a circle". And, Norman Kemp Smith, in "Mind" vol. XV, remarked, "The vagueness of the term 'experience' stands him in good stead, and so in the end Avenarius falls back on the time-worn argument of subjective idealism." Mach even goes so far as to say, "The acceptance of a divine original being is not contradictory to experience."

The confusion over this term can be seen in its use by Bogdanov. According to Lenin, when Bogdanov says, "consciousness and immediate mental experience are identical concepts" and that matter is "not experience" but "the unknown which evokes everything known" he is being an IDEALIST. Yet he is being a MATERIALIST when he says that those who go beyond experience only arrive at "empty abstractions and contradictory images, all the elements of which have nevertheless been taken from experience."

Mach in several works makes pronouncements in a materialist vein, so much so in fact that Lenin says he "instinctively accepts the customary standpoint of natural scientists, who regard experience materialistically."

All this goes to show that Engels was correct in saying there are only two fundamental positions with regard to "experience"-- i.e., the materialist and the idealist.

SECTION TWO: "PLEKHANOV'S ERROR CONCERNING THE CONCEPT 'EXPERIENCE'"

This is a short section where Lenin wants to correct a statement Plekhanov made in his book "L. Feuerbach". Plekhanov wrote, "A German writer has remarked that for empirio-criticism EXPERIENCE is only an object of investigation, and not a means of knowledge. If that is so, then the contrasting of empirio-criticism and materialism loses all meaning and discussion of the question whether or not empirio-criticism is destined to replace materialism is absolutely vain and idle." Lenin thinks this is a "complete muddle."

According to Lenin, Plekhanov must have had in mind, and not really understood, the following from Avenarius filtered through his disciple F. Carstanjen. Lenin says, "Fr. Carstanjen is almost literally quoting Avenarius, who in his "Notes" emphatically contrasts his conception of experience as a 'means of knowledge' in 'the sense of the prevailing theories of knowledge, which essentially are fully metaphysical."

Now, Carstanjen maintains that Avenarius did not investigate if experience , i.e., "all 'human predications', as the OBJECT of investigation" was real or not. What he did was simply classify "all possible human predications, BOTH IDEALIST AND MATERIALIST, without going into the essence of the question." As a result, Plekhanov's muddled conclusion above is unwarranted and in error.

Next week we will begin with Section Three of this chapter: "Causality and Necessity in Nature."

See Reading Lenin 10 here.

Reading Lenin 10

READING LENIN: Materialism and Empiro-criticism [ 10 ]
Thomas Riggins

Using our editor's blog to further Marxist education seems like a good idea. So here is a famous work of Lenin's that outlines what Marxist philosophy is all about. It's 100 years old this year and we might ask ourselves what is still valid in this classic. Have new philosophic developments in the last 100 years made this work outmoded? I'm going to post some reflections on the book section by section and anyone who wants to read along and comment is welcome to do so. I hope to post weekly updates and Sunday seems the best day to this as it is a free day for me.

Chapter Two : Section Five: "Absolute and Relative Truth, or the Eclecticism of Engels as Discovered by A. Bogdanov"

This great discovery was made, says Lenin, in the preface to Book III of Bogdanov's Empirio-monism. Bogdanov thinks he is ridiculing Engels when the latter gives as examples of "eternal truths" such statements as "Napoleon died on May 5, 1821" or "Paris is in France." To Bogdanov this is too trivial for words.

"What sort of 'truth' is that?", he asks, "And what is there eternal about it? The recording of a single correlation, which perhaps even has no longer any real significance for our generation, cannot serve as the starting-point for any activity and leads no-where." For some reason Bogdanov calls such "truths" eclectic, as if Engels is just uncritically adopting them from all different forms of materialism.

Of course the examples given by Engels are "trivial", but they are given to make a point, which is that there are many examples of objective and eternal truths all around us and that idealist philosophers are just being foolish when they try to make a big mystery about "truth." Bogdanov's objections are just "turgid nonsense" according to Lenin.

"To be a materialist," Lenin writes, "is to acknowledge objective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense-organs. To acknowledge objective truth, i.e., truth not dependent upon man and mankind, is, in one way or another, to recognise absolute truth."

What we have to do is get away from these trivial criticisms and examine DIALECTICALLY the distinction that Engels was trying to make between relative and absolute truth in his criticism of Duhring's philosophy. By ignoring the context of Engels' argument Bogdanov only reveals his own incompetence.

By thinking dialectically Engels arrives at a concept of absolute truth that grows out of relative truth. Each one of us as an individual has a part of the truth, relative truth, but absolute truth is the whole which gradually reveals itself, but only partially at any one time.

"For Bogdanov (as for all Machists)," Lenin writes, "recognition of the relativity of our knowledge EXCLUDES even the least admission of absolute truth. For Engels absolute truth is compounded from relative truths. Bogdanov is a relativist; Engels is a dialectician."

Absolute truth (the reality behind the world of our sensations) is built of the relative truths we gain from experience. Towards the end of this section Lenin says, "Dialectics -- as Hegel in his time explained -- CONTAINS an element of relativism, of negation, of skepticism, but IS NOT REDUCIBLE to relativism."

What is at issue, and which Bogdanov and the other Machists fail to see, is "the CORRESPONDENCE between the consciousness which reflects nature and the nature which is reflected by consciousness." This is something that Marx and Engels understood (and Dietzgen and Feuerbach as well). Bogdanov and the Machists, under the guise of modern science are just repeating "ancient trash."

SECTION SIX: "The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge"

"'The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from from practice is a purely scholastic question,' says Marx in his second Thesis on Feuerbach,'' Lenin points out, and Engels repeats: "The success of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived."

And what does Mach have to say about the criterion of practice? According to Lenin Mach, in The Analysis of Sensations, makes a distinction between theory and practice. Mach: "Physiologically we remain egoists and materialists with the same constancy as we forever see the sun rising again. But theoretically this view cannot be adhered to."

This is supposed to be the newest scientific viewpoint (1908). I won't go into the newest viewpoints (2008), but will remark that the battle continues! But it is an old battle. A hundred years before Lenin it was raging, Fichte, and two thousand years before that with the Greeks as well as in other philosophical traditions.

"Of course, we must not forget that the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea COMPLETELY. This criterion too is sufficiently 'indefinite' not to allow human knowledge to become "absolute", but at the same time it is sufficiently definite to wage a ruthless fight on all varieties of idealism and agnosticism."

Next week we shall do the first 2 sections of Chapter Three.

See Reading Lenin 9 here...