This thread is in response to a request from NeoP to explore studying Marx on SocIndy. I am more than willing to take a stab at this endeavor. This thread will focus on the Manifesto and draw heavily, when appropriate, on this thread from PopIndy:

http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=872&start=0

For my part, I will try to narrow the PopIndy topic down to no more than one idea and, sometimes, one sentence at a time, while deferring extraneous and tangential subjects to other threads. I will try to ask a few questions each time but if that becomes a diversion, I can easily be persuaded to stop. Mike has noted the importance of discipline and seriousness in staying on point in this subject matter and, hopefully, he and others will try to enforce that. Interactivity is very important (far more important than being “right”) so I hope we get a mass of comments. I am going to skip the Preamble, because it raises a host of historical questions. Perhaps, we can return to all that, afterwards.

One copy of the Manifesto on-line is here:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

Manifesto of the Communist Party
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
February, 1848 (text from the English Edition of 1888)

http://www.biblestudysite.com/communist%20manifesto%20-%20cover%20picture.jpg


A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

I am going to bypass this preamble, above, and move straight to the body. The above raises a series of historical questions which we might address at another time. For the time being, perhaps the commentary and questions below may help:

The Manifesto starts with a contradiction: "Communism" is already a power haunting Europe. The word is used by all of the major political parties to brand their opposition. Yet, "communists" have not yet, "openly, in the face of the whole world", published "their views, their aims, their tendencies". What then is this "communism" that has become a universal insult? Which views and aims are those that have become infamous through the use of that term?

More than this, who are these people who lay claim to the insult? "If you seek the 'communists', here we are." In fact, Marx and Engels lay claim to the insult in the same way that the narodniks lay claim to the similar Russian insult of nihilism twenty years later : “We are ‘those who believe in nothing’".

Who are these “communists”?

Also, what is the historical context of the Manifesto? It is first published in 1848, arguably the most important year of the 19th century. Why? What is the general historical setting of the Manifesto? We are looking at the end of period that begins with the French Revolution of 1789. The great Revolution dominates most of the thinking and references of the time, in a way that arguably an event like Vietnam dominates our own time. What had happened in the intervening 60 years and why does it matter?

The intent here is not to repeat a scholarly history, which can simply be linked and read, but to catch the "mood" and the significance of that "mood".

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v668/maryscottoconnor/AAAA/delacroix-liberty.gif

Part I: Bourgeois and Proletarians (1)

The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.




Notes:

1. By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour.

By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition]

2. That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]

3. Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]



"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

This is one of the most famous and oft-quoted statements in the history of political literature. The footnote reminds us that it is written history that we are talking about, i.e. since the "dawn of civilization". After the statement, Marx, lest we take his opening statement as rhetorical flourish or figure of speech, lays out the division of classes in previous epochs, as we know them, and will briefly explains where our current classes come from. These are no passing remarks. Marx does not say that class struggle is as old as the beginning of human civilization, nor does he say that it is one of several factors that influence history. He says that the whole of written history IS the history of class struggle... that everything else that we know derives from this. Marx doesn't exactly leave a lot of room for what passes as the "modern", complex perspective on social evolution. But... several questions arise:

What does this mean?

Is it true?

What is the basis of these social "classes" and how do they stand in relation to each other?

How are one set of class relations superceded by another?

How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?

http://library.thinkquest.org/C005121/data/romans3_files/image013.jpg

I will wait til tomorrow on this because it is pretty late for this

Ah very good. Thanks anax.

This statement warrants much thought -

"He says that the whole of written history IS the history of class struggle."

And this question -

"How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?"

Understanding this has been an interest of mine, since chlamor brought it to my attention -

"That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland."

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

This might be a digression to be avoided but I have had trouble understanding why the term hierarchy is not seen as appropriate. Seems to me that 'class' is a subset of hierarchy. Is this because of anarchists usage of the term and their dread of the 'vanguard party'?

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

This might be a digression to be avoided but I have had trouble understanding why the term hierarchy is not seen as appropriate. Seems to me that 'class' is a subset of hierarchy. Is this because of an


Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

This might be a digression to be avoided but I have had trouble understanding why the term hierarchy is not seen as appropriate. Seems to me that 'class' is a subset of hierarchy. Is this because of anarchists usage of the term and their dread of the 'vanguard party'?
archists usage of the term and their dread of the 'vanguard party'?


Which is more fundamental -- the pecking order or the forces and relations from whence springs the pecking order?

If hierarchy has primacy wouldn't it be most important to fight against despotism?

Which is more fundamental -- the pecking order or the forces and relations from whence springs the pecking order?

If hierarchy has primacy wouldn't it be most important to fight against despotism?

I was thinking of hierarchal societies of non-human primates. These are also conditioned by 'forces', habitat. Mebbe a stretch, but I look at these things as a continuum. Of course, we make our own habitat and this 'sets up' the 'relations'.

Is not any class society a despotism, at least in the long run?

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

This is one of the most famous and oft-quoted statements in the history of political literature. T

What does this mean?

Is it true?

What is the basis of these social "classes" and how do they stand in relation to each other?

How are one set of class relations superceded by another?

How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?

I'll take a stab...

He's commenting on the veracity of recorded history, and making an observation similar to "history is written by the winners."

He's telling people they need to re-examine what they think they know.

He's saying that if you have been taught X and always assumed X to be true, it is time to examine the point that what you were taught was taught to you for a reason -- to keep you ignorant, to keep you oppressed.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

This is one of the most famous and oft-quoted statements in the history of political literature. T

What does this mean?

Is it true?

What is the basis of these social "classes" and how do they stand in relation to each other?

How are one set of class relations superceded by another?

How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?

I'll take a stab...

He's commenting on the veracity of recorded history, and making an observation similar to "history is written by the winners."

He's telling people they need to re-examine what they think they know.

He's saying that if you have been taught X and always assumed X to be true, it is time to examine the point that what you were taught was taught to you for a reason -- to keep you ignorant, to keep you oppressed.


Such is the true meaning of nihilism, accept no 'common wisdom' unexamined.

Everything you know is wrong...

Which is more fundamental -- the pecking order or the forces and relations from whence springs the pecking order?

If hierarchy has primacy wouldn't it be most important to fight against despotism?

I was thinking of hierarchal societies of non-human primates. These are also conditioned by 'forces', habitat. Mebbe a stretch, but I look at these things as a continuum. Of course, we make our own habitat and this 'sets up' the 'relations'.

Is not any class society a despotism, at least in the long run?


What I mean is, liberalism of the last 300+ years essentially HAS vanquished despots, at least in the sense of monarchs, lords, nobility, aristocracy, etc. But the -- if you will, dictatorship -- is still omnipresent, despite lacking any sort of directly visible totalitarianism (with corporations filling the void)

The question is where does the power of the despot originate?

As for hierarchy - division of labor is pretty much hierarchical, although you can probalby spend a long while arguing the specific details of specific cases. If you follow the Max Weber school of thought then more hierarchy automatically produces an intensified totalitarianism. And this is not some sort of "implicit" totalitarianism either but a direct one tyrannically ruled by bureaucractic management and the iron-fist of state control.

The problem with all of this is: history has seen much worse in terms of despotic states and nations than exist now despite the fact that capitalist society is MORE hierarchical than anything imaginable until a few hundred years ago.

Orwell aside (and Huxley too) its not so cozy a hand-in-hand relationship. Civil society has actually moved in the completely opposite direction.

This might be a digression to be avoided but I have had trouble understanding why the term hierarchy is not seen as appropriate. Seems to me that 'class' is a subset of hierarchy.




I was thinking of hierarchal societies of non-human primates. These are also conditioned by 'forces', habitat. Mebbe a stretch, but I look at these things as a continuum. Of course, we make our own habitat and this 'sets up' the 'relations'.

Is not any class society a despotism, at least in the long run?



Seems to me that you answered your own question in the two quotes above.

"Hierarchy" is one of those squishy, meaningless, open-ended terms favored by liberal commentators. If it is to have any meaning at all, it is defined in terms of equally squishy concepts which are also open-ended. What is "hierarchy"? Well it is a tendency towards "despotism". What is "despotism"? Well it is a thirst for "power". What the hell is a "thirst for power"? Well, that is when one "group" of people seek to "oppress" another... you know, the opposite of "freedom". In no time at all, we are off to the races - a regular DU discussion spinning into "human nature" and "democratic institutions" and, yadda, yadda "the kitchen sink" - without ever having said or understood a thing. Even when we substantially constrain "hierarchy" to make it useful, as in describing a natural order or a human one, we have no clue as to what we are really looking at beyond our description. Consider a perfect "hierarchy": a prison. There are prisoners, trustees, guards, staff, the Warden, and the DOC. Within each division, further divisions (gang members, gang leaders) and alongside the one "hierarchy", many others. If it is a private prison, there is a company hierarchy that exists both as a part of and separately from the main prison hierarchy (purchasing agents, managers, middle management, accountants, and executive management). There is a medical hierarchy which sits alongside it (aides, nurses, therapists, doctors). We have a perfect description when we are done and not a clue as to where the lines are drawn nor which ones are the important social relationships. Is the main line drawn amongst prisoners and staff? Between the prisoners themselves? Guards are clearly "under the thumb of management" but does that make them the natural allies of the prisoners?

From a political standpoint, the above is a complete circle-jerk. Marx doesn't make sense of the above. Instead, he throws it out whole.

Look at the quote and look at the footnote. Marx starts with classes as objective things, defined by their relationship to each other and in need of no further "definitions" or opinions. In each case that he lists, classes are a duality in which one group of people live by the labor of another.... slave and slaveholder, serf and lord, journeyman and guild-master. The relationship describes the form in which the labor of one "class" is appropriated by another - whether through the "ownership" of the slave or the "obligation" of the serf - but not the substance of that appropriation. There is no waxing on about "fairness" or "power" or any of the rest of that jive. That is simply not the point.

Marx is attempting to derive the motive force of class society. Why not use "hierarchy" in place of "class? Same reason you shouldn't use "hope" in place of motor oil.

Hey Anax,

It seems like "hierarchy" is really just a code-word for bureaucracy which is simply a convenient way to introduce the spectre of "Stalinism" and the soul-killing Soviet Union into the picture..and from there its a red-baiting bonanza.

So I was thinking it might help to start from the premise of "the despot" and work back to the social primacy of class. But that might not be the right approach for this discussion, I don't know

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

This is one of the most famous and oft-quoted statements in the history of political literature. The footnote reminds us that it is written history that we are talking about, i.e. since the "dawn of civilization". After the statement, Marx, lest we take his opening statement as rhetorical flourish or figure of speech, lays out the division of classes in previous epochs, as we know them, and will briefly explains where our current classes come from. These are no passing remarks. Marx does not say that class struggle is as old as the beginning of human civilization, nor does he say that it is one of several factors that influence history. He says that the whole of written history IS the history of class struggle... that everything else that we know derives from this. Marx doesn't exactly leave a lot of room for what passes as the "modern", complex perspective on social evolution. But... several questions arise:

What does this mean?

Is it true?

What is the basis of these social "classes" and how do they stand in relation to each other?

How are one set of class relations superceded by another?

How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?
What does this mean?

Fear strikes me here, the fear of seeming dopey, and perhaps I'm still wearing the blinders given to me at birth, but ...

I took the statement to mean that, history is simply defined as worker against boss.

Is it true?

Provided my simplistic answer above is correct, the answer is yes. Actually, even without my answer above being correct, I'd say yes.

What is the basis of these social "classes" and how do they stand in relation to each other?

I suppose the basis is: who maintains dominion over the essential (and non-essential, yet desired) elements for living.
Relation: adversaries

How are one set of class relations superceded by another?
When the boss becomes the worker of a different boss.

How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?
The boss provides to the worker a set of beliefs.

Shit, and I was going on about chimpanzees and baboons.....suppose therein lie the problem, I take the term from the study of animal behavior.

"Hierarchy" became a big issue in musical circles starting in the mid 70's. I was at a lot of traditional music festivals, fiddle contests in the 60's, 70's and 80's. At one time it was mostly rural and blue collar people, a lot of farmers. Starting in the mid 70's hordes of suburban liberals descended and eventually dominated and took over the festivals, driving all of the old timers and blue collar people out.

The old "hierarchy" that the newcomers were bent on eradicating was determined by musicianship. The better players got more time, attention, recognition and the best slots on stage. "Of course" I am thinking to myself. The one exception was respect for the old timers. There was a lot of deference to the old timers, since that was who we had all learned from, and so even the hot younger players respected and deferred to the old folks.

But the new people thought this was hierarchical and patriarchal (90% of the players were men) and that fairness need to be imposed and enforced. Bad players deserved equal rights, and we needed some sort of bureaucracy to define and police the new rules.

The hierarchy of musicians was replaced by a hierarchy of assholes and bullies.

Hey Mike, offtopic, but is that pic in the galley yours? Hard to identify who put up what unless I am missing something

Shit, and I was going on about chimpanzees and baboons.....suppose therein lie the problem, I take the term from the study of animal behavior.


Yes indeed, therein lies the problem. None of them critters are involved in any substantive social labor as yet.

labor -> value -> appropriation -> classes -> class struggle

Shit, and I was going on about chimpanzees and baboons.....suppose therein lie the problem, I take the term from the study of animal behavior.


Yes indeed, therein lies the problem. None of them critters are involved in any substantive social labor as yet.

labor -> value -> appropriation -> classes -> class struggle


Yez, their hierarchal relationships are primarily sexual dominance oriented with preferred access to choice snacks a bonus. Yet they provide a model of something like a precursor to human behavior. Or mebbe not, mebbe the split between us and them is defined by that.

Hey Mike, offtopic, but is that pic in the galley yours? Hard to identify who put up what unless I am missing something


No, that is a couple of old blues guys from near here. We have a musicians collective going, jam sessions and once a week variety show I am emceeing, and open mike. I have been getting shots of the other performers. As soon as the economic bad news happened, the musicians suddenly all want to pull together. Haven't seen this since the 60's. Big change. Like the 30's maybe.

We have a lot of refugees - people who had relatively successful performing careers and have the scars to prove it, and young people and amateurs and people starting out. Had a couple of kids play last night.

I think that most musicians hated going for the brass ring, anyway, and felt forced into it. Once things started collapsing many are saying "fuck it, everybody is going to be poor now. I am all through running" Tired of the yuppified world, tired of chasing fame and fortune - just in order to be seen as legitimate and not treated like dirt - tired of the suits, tired of the hype and bullshit.

Start a fire, toss a buck in the kitty if you have one, heat up some beans, and someone brought some bread they baked (and no, please, I am not talking about some yuppie fantasy of the simple life here) fuck 'em we are going to play and let people find us - or not. We lined up a space, and a sound system, put refreshments together one way or another. Rigged up some spots last night, but candles on the table. Couches, easy chairs. Great performance space now, small and intimate. All sorts of people just showing up. Refugees. Everyone is a refugee now.

Last night one of the musicians said to me, damn I have toured all over the world but these are the best musicians here tonight I have ever heard, and the music is better than you will hear anywhere. What did you guys do to put this together? Nothing. For once we are doing nothing. Fuck something. I am not going to tell you who that was because we are nobodies. We don't want to be somebodies. That will fuck it all up again.

I think we underestimated how much the yuppie culture has dominated everything for the last 30 years or so and destroyed everything and made life miserable. The musicians were the first to recognize that the tyranny of all of that is over. Over. Take your fucking portfolio, and your dream home, and your frantic scrambling for the suburban life, and the phony prosperity that made you think you were a millionaire, but somehow you didn't have a c-note to give to a musician for a hard night's work and shove it. We aren't going to chase after you, kiss your ass, and beg for your approval anymore.

Blur collar factory workers used to pay us $100 a man to play a party back in 1970. Try to pry $25 bucks today out of the hands of these yuppie assholes. But we had no choice, They dominated everything, and were riding high. "Living large," bossing you around, looking at you with a mixture of envy and contempt, and constantly cramming their idiotic "success" ideas down your throat and demanding that you meet their fussy and gentrified standards for what successful people do and say.

Hard times are a big relief. The assholes who have been tormenting us and their fucking suburbia fantasy have come a cropper - their smug and malevolent reign is over. We can finally breathe again.

Your new venue sounds great, Mike. Attending a performance has become an expensive chore in recent decades, the 'hip' and 'gray-ponytail' clubs all suck. Of course ya can't smoke, hell, ya can't sit down in most of them, if yer lucky, some sorry assed folding chair. The listeners are treated like cattle and god help the performers.

My ideal is a small jazz/blues club or something like the Cellar Door in DC, tiny tables with ash trays, $5 cover with 2 drink minimum, Muddy Waters & Pinetop Perkins on the stage with nobody more than 50' from them. Throw in a pastrami sandwich and my eyes roll back in my head.

Love to see what yer up to.

This is from Mike from the other big thread on Obama right now


The old reality, people's control over their own self-identification and their own perceptions and reality, must be destroyed to make room for the new reality - miserable existence as a slum-dwelling wage slave.

Maybe it is leaping ahead too much but it is pertinent because the Manifesto paints the same picture of the miserable condition of the wage slave. The problem I've run into is that most people don't think it is that miserable even in cases where I would consider their condition pretty miserable.

I realize that my anecdotal sample is not representative of much since we live in the richest country in the world, but still. Maybe this also goes to the idea of everything that's "true" is wrong, although I'm not 100% sold that it is.

This is from Mike from the other big thread on Obama right now


The old reality, people's control over their own self-identification and their own perceptions and reality, must be destroyed to make room for the new reality - miserable existence as a slum-dwelling wage slave.

Maybe it is leaping ahead too much but it is pertinent because the Manifesto paints the same picture of the miserable condition of the wage slave. The problem I've run into is that most people don't think it is that miserable even in cases where I would consider their condition pretty miserable.

I realize that my anecdotal sample is not representative of much since we live in the richest country in the world, but still. Maybe this also goes to the idea of everything that's "true" is wrong, although I'm not 100% sold that it is.


You're quite right, there's a lot of that going around and has been going around all my life. People make do, people survive, all of the signals tell them that there is no alternative but submission . When things were easier, that worked. Not so much now, I'm getting the premonition of an avalanche.

The problem I've run into is that most people don't think it is that miserable even in cases where I would consider their condition pretty miserable.

I realize that my anecdotal sample is not representative of much since we live in the richest country in the world, but still. Maybe this also goes to the idea of everything that's "true" is wrong, although I'm not 100% sold that it is.


You would be amazed at how fast things can change. I saw it in the 60's.

All hell is about to break loose.

I'm getting the premonition of an avalanche.


Even with the people still bullshitting and denying it, you can see the fear in their eyes now.

You have to be blind not to see that money determines everything for people. There is virtually no problem that throwing money at it won't solve it, and no problem that anything other than money will solve, and no possibility of doing anything without money. People pretend that isn't the case, but we shouldn't. Now that is all coming crashing down.

Lots of folks trying to walk the $70,000 walk on $40,000. And there are only 10% of the people at that $70,000 and up level. Lots of people who thought they were doing well based on stock and real estate. That is gone.

And that is just the people the kid is worried about. (seriously kid who are you hanging with?) The other 90% is sinking fast. They were never on board much to begin with, and are under no illusions now.

There is virtually no problem that throwing money at it won't solve it

I was surprised to hear about Steve Jobs' pancreatic cancer history last week when the fawning media fell all over his new ailments for days (not so much because of him, but "What might happen to our corporate giant that makes some of our Very Fav Trinkets???!!!111???"

A quick google yields: "The overall five-year relative pancreatic cancer survival rate for 1995-2001 was 4.6 percent."

Money may not be able to buy one love, be old Mr. Jobs seems to have bought quite a bit of LIFE.

I am free.

To die.

My health "insurance" is vitamins and veggies.

I'm getting the premonition of an avalanche.


Even with the people still bullshitting and denying it, you can see the fear in their eyes now.


On the music board I post at the Obama fans are still denying it. One of them told me:

"I think we need these 4 days of parties and positive symbolism. Now more than ever. There was some noise about Obama forgoing parties and such - I think that would have been a huge mistake because life is as much about imagination as it is about hard reality. It's a little like when Hillary used to pooh-pooh Barack's speeches as 'just speeches.' Speeches matter. Symbols matter. I think that whether we pull ourselves out of this mess or not will largely depend on whether we can replace national pessimism with national optimism. IMO, planning an austere inauguration and banning people from coming (which is the only way to save all that money) would be cutting off our noses to spite our faces. I know I for one need to party. "

It is going to be quite a crash.

On the music board I post at the Obama fans are still denying it. One of them told me:

"I think we need these 4 days of parties and positive symbolism. Now more than ever. There was some noise about Obama forgoing parties and such - I think that would have been a huge mistake because life is as much about imagination as it is about hard reality. It's a little like when Hillary used to pooh-pooh Barack's speeches as 'just speeches.' Speeches matter. Symbols matter. I think that whether we pull ourselves out of this mess or not will largely depend on whether we can replace national pessimism with national optimism. IMO, planning an austere inauguration and banning people from coming (which is the only way to save all that money) would be cutting off our noses to spite our faces. I know I for one need to party. "

It is going to be quite a crash.


They are depraved.

NOW symbols and speeches matter?

They argued the opposite point of view over the Warren controversy - "it is just a 2 minute speech. It doesn't mean anything."

"I need to party" - WTF?

This statement is interesting -

"Whether we pull ourselves out of this mess or not will largely depend on whether we can replace national pessimism with national optimism."

"We" means liberals, the enlightened and evolved ones. "This mess" means the threat to their white collar jobs and portfolios. "Optimism" means denial. "Pessimism" means the cries from the suffering and the calls for resistance.

After all, "life is as much about imagination as it is about hard reality" and of course the Obama zealots have had just about enough of worrying about all of that hard reality stuff, and want their fantasies restored, and they want them restored now.

Absolutely. It's often the teachers, former union workers, nurses who will respond to my posts (or more often send me pms) telling me they agree and sharing their fears. The suburbanites are still gliding along on a wing and a prayer. Until they themselves are laid off.

What does this mean?

I took the statement to mean that, history is simply defined as worker against boss.

Is it true?

Provided my simplistic answer above is correct, the answer is yes. Actually, even without my answer above being correct, I'd say yes.

What is the basis of these social "classes" and how do they stand in relation to each other?

I suppose the basis is: who maintains dominion over the essential (and non-essential, yet desired) elements for living.
Relation: adversaries

How are one set of class relations superceded by another?
When the boss becomes the worker of a different boss.

How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?
The boss provides to the worker a set of beliefs.





In a sense, at a very high level, what you wrote is so good that I hate to touch it. Let me try to elaborate on your answers because the detail matters... otherwise we would not be trying to read Marx together.


What does this mean?
I took the statement to mean that, history is simply defined as worker against boss.

Yes, but it is not perpetual. It appears that human beings have lived on the earth for a million years and all of that time without private property or class society. With that, it also appears that not a trace of what we refer to as "human nature" existed. The way that we know this is not simply that the evidence for the contrary does not exist but also because the basis for it doesn't exist either... as it doesn't exist in the traditions and oral histories, as well as the conditions, of indigenous peoples. This realization was one of the foundations of the thought of the Enlightenment - that the condition of their feudal society was not ordained by some inner flaw in the "human condition" and sanctified by God, but rather, was a corruption of a previous state of grace... of the natural condition of the "Noble Savage". This is an important tangent we should talk about someday, of "Rights" and "Freedom", not invented but restored - the language of the "Democratic Revolutions".

For the early socialists in general, this idea had great validity if not in the sentimental and exclusively anti-Feudal way in which it was articulated by the radical bourgeoisie. Marx described the previous condition, before classes as "primitive communism", a state in which personal property of a sort but no social property existed and in which no classes could arise. In unromantic terms, that condition existed because human beings basically produced at a level of subsistence. Certainly surpluses were produced and incidental trade existed but "theft" took place across peoples and not within them, there was never enough to normalize "theft" as a social form, and captives were either killed or adopted into the capturing tribe.

The two things which were needed to upend primitive communism were the introduction of agriculture and the herds on the one hand, and the development of trade on the other. The first factor created the possibility of surplus labor, i.e. labor which produced more than it took to maintain the laborer while the second allowed the transformation of the surplus product produced by surplus labor into many other kinds of products. The incentive for keeping captives, and then, war for the purpose of capturing people who acquired the status of having no call on their own labor, was assured.

Oddly, this surplus labor didn't accrue to the whole people who enslaved but, instead, accrued to individuals. Slaves begat slaveholders, and civilization, writing, written history, and the rest following immediately behind. The writers of the Enlightenment had no need for extensive Archeology or Anthropology. They had the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans, laboriously transcribed and translated over many generations by the monks. In these, the story is detailed and straightforward: of the Greek Gens with their equality and simplicity; of the advent of slavery; of the rise of the Greek States and the division of the Greeks into Slaveholders and ever more impoverished freeholders; of the instant development of the instruments of the modern State, primarily military and police, for the express purpose of maintaining those class relationships, of the substitution for the old tribal egalitarianism stretching back into time immemorial, the new “Democracy” based on 32 slaves for each “citizen”; and the creation of other, subsidiary classes each based on a different form of expropriation but destined to rise and fall against the fortunes of the ruling class of slaveholders.

Marx says, that since that time – the beginning of history, perhaps 5000 years ago – this class division, the relationship between the oppressed class and its oppressors and the relationship between the primary form of expropriation and lesser expropriators, is the basis of all history, all ideas, all “advances”, all politics, all beliefs, and all changes from that point forward. By virtue of this, two things would be true: 1) everything is understandable by understanding this process; 2) The process itself continues until class society itself disappears.


What is the basis of these social "classes" and how do they stand in relation to each other?

I suppose the basis is: who maintains dominion over the essential (and non-essential, yet desired) elements for living.
Relation: adversaries

Another way of saying the same thing is that they command social labor – not just the labor one does for himself but also the obligation to labor for others, beyond that which is required to sustain and reproduce oneself. In some cases, this takes the form of property, so called private property which should be called the private command of social property. By virtue of owning the slave, the slaveholder has rights to his labor. At other times, it is an obligation sanctified by law and church and enforced by force of arms. The serf is tied to his little plot of land and the land is obliged to provide so much product or so many days labor to the lord of the manor or to the church.


How are one set of class relations superceded by another?
When the boss becomes the worker of a different boss.

Yes. The boss isn't so much a “boss” as owner or lord. His under-bosses may well be slaves themselves. But, you are right. The expropriators are themselves expropriated. One of the odd things about the history of class society is that as more and more “Rights” and “Freedoms” are proclaimed, relatively fewer and fewer people have a call on social property.


How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?
The boss provides to the worker a set of beliefs.

Not just to the workers but also to themselves. It isn't just a racket or a scam. The ruling class actually believes what it promotes and is just as much a victim of the social conditions it creates as the workers are. The circumstances of the expropriation, or to say the same thing, the conditions of social labor, condition the “beliefs”. The slave believes that all of his labor belongs to the slaveholder. The serf believes that an arbitrary part of his labor belongs to the lord. The modern “free” laborer believes that all of his labor belongs to himself. In each case, however, the relationship is identical: the laborer only gets back subsistence (at some historically determined level) while the “surplus” accrues to

the ruling classes.

Aristotle saw as far into the future as anyone who has ever lived but he could not see the slaves who fed him each and every day.

http://dappledthings.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/marriage.jpg

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

This is one of the most famous and oft-quoted statements in the history of political literature. T

What does this mean?

Is it true?

What is the basis of these social "classes" and how do they stand in relation to each other?

How are one set of class relations superceded by another?

How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?

I'll take a stab...

He's commenting on the veracity of recorded history, and making an observation similar to "history is written by the winners."

He's telling people they need to re-examine what they think they know.

He's saying that if you have been taught X and always assumed X to be true, it is time to examine the point that what you were taught was taught to you for a reason -- to keep you ignorant, to keep you oppressed.


In a sense you are right, Monsieur Le Pyre. Marx is certainly commenting, backhandedly, on where history doesn't come from: i.e. it isn't arbitrary or predestined, it is not the product of great men, it is not (except distantly or indirectly) the "march of technology", it is not the result of the dawn of "Western Civilization" or the advent of "Abrahamic religions" or any of the rest.

But... Marx's statement is not about the veracity of history but about its content. What is the motive engine of history?

As far as the conditions creating ideas, rather than ideas creating conditions, that is something Marx does say elsewhere but that is true for everybody. "The ideas of any epoch are the ideas of its ruling class"... very true, but also true for that ruling class itself... more so for them.

http://www.artnotoil.org.uk/gallery/d/348-4/TheBlindLeadingTheBlind---T.jpg

What does this mean?

I took the statement to mean that, history is simply defined as worker against boss.

Is it true?

Provided my simplistic answer above is correct, the answer is yes. Actually, even without my answer above being correct, I'd say yes.

What is the basis of these social "classes" and how do they stand in relation to each other?

I suppose the basis is: who maintains dominion over the essential (and non-essential, yet desired) elements for living.
Relation: adversaries

How are one set of class relations superceded by another?
When the boss becomes the worker of a different boss.

How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?
The boss provides to the worker a set of beliefs.





In a sense, at a very high level, what you wrote is so good that I hate to touch it. Let me try to elaborate on your answers because the detail matters... otherwise we would not be trying to read Marx together.


What does this mean?
I took the statement to mean that, history is simply defined as worker against boss.

Yes, but it is not perpetual. It appears that human beings have lived on the earth for a million years and all of that time without private property or class society. With that, it also appears that not a trace of what we refer to as "human nature" existed. The way that we know this is not simply that the evidence for the contrary does not exist but also because the basis for it doesn't exist either... as it doesn't exist in the traditions and oral histories, as well as the conditions, of indigenous peoples. This realization was one of the foundations of the thought of the Enlightenment - that the condition of their feudal society was not ordained by some inner flaw in the "human condition" and sanctified by God, but rather, was a corruption of a previous state of grace... of the natural condition of the "Noble Savage". This is an important tangent we should talk about someday, of "Rights" and "Freedom", not invented but restored - the language of the "Democratic Revolutions".

For the early socialists in general, this idea had great validity if not in the sentimental and exclusively anti-Feudal way in which it was articulated by the radical bourgeoisie. Marx described the previous condition, before classes as "primitive communism", a state in which personal property of a sort but no social property existed and in which no classes could arise. In unromantic terms, that condition existed because human beings basically produced at a level of subsistence. Certainly surpluses were produced and incidental trade existed but "theft" took place across peoples and not within them, there was never enough to normalize "theft" as a social form, and captives were either killed or adopted into the capturing tribe.

The two things which were needed to upend primitive communism were the introduction of agriculture and the herds on the one hand, and the development of trade on the other. The first factor created the possibility of surplus labor, i.e. labor which produced more than it took to maintain the laborer while the second allowed the transformation of the surplus product produced by surplus labor into many other kinds of products. The incentive for keeping captives, and then, war for the purpose of capturing people who acquired the status of having no call on their own labor, was assured.

Oddly, this surplus labor didn't accrue to the whole people who enslaved but, instead, accrued to individuals. Slaves begat slaveholders, and civilization, writing, written history, and the rest following immediately behind. The writers of the Enlightenment had no need for extensive Archeology or Anthropology. They had the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans, laboriously transcribed and translated over many generations by the monks. In these, the story is detailed and straightforward: of the Greek Gens with their equality and simplicity; of the advent of slavery; of the rise of the Greek States and the division of the Greeks into Slaveholders and ever more impoverished freeholders; of the instant development of the instruments of the modern State, primarily military and police, for the express purpose of maintaining those class relationships, of the substitution for the old tribal egalitarianism stretching back into time immemorial, the new “Democracy” based on 32 slaves for each “citizen”; and the creation of other, subsidiary classes each based on a different form of expropriation but destined to rise and fall against the fortunes of the ruling class of slaveholders.

Marx says, that since that time – the beginning of history, perhaps 5000 years ago – this class division, the relationship between the oppressed class and its oppressors and the relationship between the primary form of expropriation and lesser expropriators, is the basis of all history, all ideas, all “advances”, all politics, all beliefs, and all changes from that point forward. By virtue of this, two things would be true: 1) everything is understandable by understanding this process; 2) The process itself continues until class society itself disappears.


What is the basis of these social "classes" and how do they stand in relation to each other?

I suppose the basis is: who maintains dominion over the essential (and non-essential, yet desired) elements for living.
Relation: adversaries

Another way of saying the same thing is that they command social labor – not just the labor one does for himself but also the obligation to labor for others, beyond that which is required to sustain and reproduce oneself. In some cases, this takes the form of property, so called private property which should be called the private command of social property. By virtue of owning the slave, the slaveholder has rights to his labor. At other times, it is an obligation sanctified by law and church and enforced by force of arms. The serf is tied to his little plot of land and the land is obliged to provide so much product or so many days labor to the lord of the manor or to the church.


How are one set of class relations superceded by another?
When the boss becomes the worker of a different boss.

Yes. The boss isn't so much a “boss” as owner or lord. His under-bosses may well be slaves themselves. But, you are right. The expropriators are themselves expropriated. One of the odd things about the history of class society is that as more and more “Rights” and “Freedoms” are proclaimed, relatively fewer and fewer people have a call on social property.


How can something so basic, if true, not be indisputably obvious?
The boss provides to the worker a set of beliefs.

Not just to the workers but also to themselves. It isn't just a racket or a scam. The ruling class actually believes what it promotes and is just as much a victim of the social conditions it creates as the workers are. The circumstances of the expropriation, or to say the same thing, the conditions of social labor, condition the “beliefs”. The slave believes that all of his labor belongs to the slaveholder. The serf believes that an arbitrary part of his labor belongs to the lord. The modern “free” laborer believes that all of his labor belongs to himself. In each case, however, the relationship is identical: the laborer only gets back su

bsistence (at some historically determined level) while the “surplus” accrues to the ruling classes.

Aristotle saw as far into the future as anyone who has ever lived but he could not see the slaves who fed him each and every day.

http://dappledthings.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/marriage.jpg



Fantastic, really clarifying, thanks...

Your new venue sounds great, Mike. Attending a performance has become an expensive chore in recent decades, the 'hip' and 'gray-ponytail' clubs all suck. Of course ya can't smoke, hell, ya can't sit down in most of them, if yer lucky, some sorry assed folding chair. The listeners are treated like cattle and god help the performers.

My ideal is a small jazz/blues club or something like the Cellar Door in DC, tiny tables with ash trays, $5 cover with 2 drink minimum, Muddy Waters & Pinetop Perkins on the stage with nobody more than 50' from them. Throw in a pastrami sandwich and my eyes roll back in my head.

Love to see what yer up to.


You fookin' guys... Talkin' shit about "focus and discipline" and first chance, you are off on some "hierarchy of music" shit. The last time it was fookin' turtles.

Some G.D. Moby Grape for youse guys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCK0SwW5kgo

You fookin' guys... Talkin' shit about "focus and discipline" and first chance, you are off on some "hierarchy of music" shit. The last time it was fookin' turtles.


Here is what is really weird - I am the one who complains about it, then I am the worst offender.

Turtles and music, though - who wouldn't be distracted?

One small question, anax. Reading your posts here I realized where I have been stumbling. My understanding is that in England, at least and maybe elsewhere, people were engaged in agriculture in traditional ways that Marx said derived from Teutonic customs, yet were not producing surplus and the fields were not owned, but were communal. That suggests that agriculture does not necessarily lead to upending primitive communism (though it could still be a necessary prerequisite to the upending of primitive communism, of course.)

But... Marx's statement is not about the veracity of history but about its content. What is the motive engine of history?

Haha, I was going to comment on this but figured that I couldn't formulate it so that anyone would find it intelligible and so all it would function to do is piss you off ;)

It is a big idea to say that history is not simply a narrative because this is one of the foundational pillars of Western Philosophy, taking center stage with David Hume (although it existed much earlier, see "the paradox of the ship")

I think we are constantly mistaking narrative for content or at least I am..it is not event correct to say "form" for content because there is more to form than simply "narrative" as well

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

But... Marx's statement is not about the veracity of history but about its content. What is the motive engine of history?

Haha, I was going to comment on this but figured that I couldn't formulate it so that anyone would find it intelligible and so all it would function to do is piss you off ;)

It is a big idea to say that history is not simply a narrative because this is one of the foundational pillars of Western Philosophy, taking center stage with David Hume (although it existed much earlier, see "the paradox of the ship")

I think we are constantly mistaking narrative for content or at least I am..it is not event correct to say "form" for content because there is more to form than simply "narrative" as well

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus


We've spoken of Theseus' paradox before...

But... Marx's statement is not about the veracity of history but about its content. What is the motive engine of history?

Haha, I was going to comment on this but figured that I couldn't formulate it so that anyone would find it intelligible and so all it would function to do is piss you off ;)

It is a big idea to say that history is not simply a narrative because this is one of the foundational pillars of Western Philosophy, taking center stage with David Hume (although it existed much earlier, see "the paradox of the ship")

I think we are constantly mistaking narrative for content or at least I am..it is not event correct to say "form" for content because there is more to form than simply "narrative" as well

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus


We've spoken of Theseus' paradox before...



I was looking for a quick entry on Hume to post instead but all I found some dumbass shit about "bundle theory". I vaguely recall talking about it before..was it on the Plato/Hegel thread from like 2 years ago? I just did a search on PI and found your stories about Theseus and Berlinguer. There's a thread thats worth moving over..I might do that one today sometime

You fookin' guys... Talkin' shit about "focus and discipline" and first chance, you are off on some "hierarchy of music" shit. The last time it was fookin' turtles.


Here is what is really weird - I am the one who complains about it, then I am the worst offender.

Turtles and music, though - who wouldn't be distracted?

One small question, anax. Reading your posts here I realized where I have been stumbling. My understanding is that in England, at least and maybe elsewhere, people were engaged in agriculture in traditional ways that Marx said derived from Teutonic customs, yet were not producing surplus and the fields were not owned, but were communal. That suggests that agriculture does not necessarily lead to upending primitive communism (though it could still be a necessary prerequisite to the upending of primitive communism, of course.)


It's a trifle and I was mainly joking as indicated by my invocation of The Grape.

Civilization and class-society did not appear all at once and everywhere simultaneously. In Britain, it stepped off the bow of a Roman bireme. In the Roman provinces in general, a patchwork of traditional and communal hamlets coexisted (sometimes) alongside the Roman Estates, in a very complex patchwork. The old tribal constitution, perhaps Romanized and corrupted, often survived long enough to later supply the framework of the emerging Feudal System in the cracks of the dissolving Roman Empire. In fact, communal land and more survived well into Feudalism. Britain may not have produced surplus prior to Caesar but its Romanized form created a very profitable province, well worth the trip for the raiding Danes of a later era.

In any case, it appears to have been neither essential nor common for ancient civilizations (or Feudalism) to transform land into private property. In truth, it was the modern bourgeoisie which finally transformed everything into alienable property, just in time to alienate it... and this not just in Europe but in Asia and Africa. Consider Russia where the Mir survived to just 150 years ago, although it had been undermined much, much earlier.

http://wilsonsalmanac.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/aug27_romans_landing-717315.jpg

You fookin' guys... Talkin' shit about "focus and discipline" and first chance, you are off on some "hierarchy of music" shit. The last time it was fookin' turtles.


Here is what is really weird - I am the one who complains about it, then I am the worst offender.

Turtles and music, though - who wouldn't be distracted?

One small question, anax. Reading your posts here I realized where I have been stumbling. My understanding is that in England, at least and maybe elsewhere, people were engaged in agriculture in traditional ways that Marx said derived from Teutonic customs, yet were not producing surplus and the fields were not owned, but were communal. That suggests that agriculture does not necessarily lead to upending primitive communism (though it could still be a necessary prerequisite to the upending of primitive communism, of course.)

Yes, must...have ...discipline. Discipline is the vehicle of joy.

Read of an archaeological site a while back, it appears to have been a ceremonial site or shrine of hunter/gather people. Besides the supposed shrine there were storage building and the middens showed all wild food remains. Was there alienation of labor going on here?

What does this mean? Probably an anomaly or dead end. Maybe a case of an agricultural people reverting to an earlier form of production due to crop failure, who knows? Like Anax said, civilization developed unevenly, all sorts of things were probably tried. What we got is what produced surplus best.

In a sense you are right, Monsieur Le Pyre. Marx is certainly commenting, backhandedly, on where history doesn't come from: i.e. it isn't arbitrary or predestined, it is not the product of great men, it is not (except distantly or indirectly) the "march of technology", it is not the result of the dawn of "Western Civilization" or the advent of "Abrahamic religions" or any of the rest.

But... Marx's statement is not about the veracity of history but about its content. What is the motive engine of history?

As far as the conditions creating ideas, rather than ideas creating conditions, that is something Marx does say elsewhere but that is true for everybody. "The ideas of any epoch are the ideas of its ruling class"... very true, but also true for that ruling class itself... more so for them.

http://www.artnotoil.org.uk/gallery/d/348-4/TheBlindLeadingTheBlind---T.jpg



Your detailed answer to neophyte was extremely helpful. Here's the part that was my "eureka!" moment as I considered the nature of money, and of capitalism, and how those two things have created the landscape for my time here on Earth:


It appears that human beings have lived on the earth for a million years and all of that time without private property or class society. With that, it also appears that not a trace of what we refer to as "human nature" existed.

and


Not just to the workers but also to themselves. It isn't just a racket or a scam. The ruling class actually believes what it promotes and is just as much a victim of the social conditions it creates as the workers are. The circumstances of the expropriation, or to say the same thing, the conditions of social labor, condition the “beliefs”. The slave believes that all of his labor belongs to the slaveholder. The serf believes that an arbitrary part of his labor belongs to the lord. The modern “free” laborer believes that all of his labor belongs to himself. In each case, however, the relationship is identical: the laborer only gets back subsistence (at some historically determined level) while the “surplus” accrues to the ruling classes.

not in your exact words, but the concepts -- these things tell me that we do not have to suffer under the present system, as it is not natural. It is a human creation designed to benefit a few select humans, not all humans.

It is a human creation designed to benefit a few select humans, not all humans.

Staying within part I: Bourgeoisie and Proletarians but going a bit ahead, the Manifesto says this:


Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells

Here he is talking about bourgeoisie society's inexorable tendency to outrun its own reason for being, but the theme of capitalism as a "Frankenstein" is revisited by Marx more than once. One of the defining characteristics of the system is that it is not consciously designed by any individual or singular group at all. While it is rife with conspiracy and shadowy cloak and dagger, it is not itself a conspiracy except in the broadest sense that the bourgeoisie conspired against the feudal nobility and aristocracy

Civilization and class-society did not appear all at once and everywhere simultaneously. In Britain, it stepped off the bow of a Roman bireme. In the Roman provinces in general, a patchwork of traditional and communal hamlets coexisted (sometimes) alongside the Roman Estates, in a very complex patchwork. The old tribal constitution, perhaps Romanized and corrupted, often survived long enough to later supply the framework of the emerging Feudal System in the cracks of the dissolving Roman Empire. In fact, communal land and more survived well into Feudalism. Britain may not have produced surplus prior to Caesar but its Romanized form created a very profitable province, well worth the trip for the raiding Danes of a later era.

In any case, it appears to have been neither essential nor common for ancient civilizations (or Feudalism) to transform land into private property. In truth, it was the modern bourgeoisie which finally transformed everything into alienable property, just in time to alienate it... and this not just in Europe but in Asia and Africa. Consider Russia where the Mir survived to just 150 years ago, although it had been undermined much, much earlier.



Thanks. Very helpful.

I hope that people can continue to ask questions without being immediately attacked as revisionists. Most of the questions I raise are for the purpose of discussion, not to initiate dueling talking points or promote a point of view - the "identity" question for example, or the infamous "were the Bolsheviks city slickers?" question.

It is a human creation designed to benefit a few select humans, not all humans.

Staying within part I: Bourgeoisie and Proletarians but going a bit ahead, the Manifesto says this:


Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells

Here he is talking about bourgeoisie society's inexorable tendency to outrun its own reason for being, but the theme of capitalism as a "Frankenstein" is revisited by Marx more than once. One of the defining characteristics of the system is that it is not consciously designed by any individual or singular group at all. While it is rife with conspiracy and shadowy cloak and dagger, it is not itself a conspiracy except in the broadest sense that the bourgeoisie conspired against the feudal nobility and aristocracy




Well I think that it helped matters along for people to have been convinced that "progress" and "growth" are, in themselves, values worth chasing. How did those outlooks first arise, and who or what group of people were instrumental in getting so many humans to think that "progress" and "growth" are such great things?

I like how you described the concerted result, how it works out as would a conspiracy, but without the conscious, affirmative, meetings-and-decisions formality of an organized conspiracy. As I see it, the results become more a product of people who just happen to want to reach the same goals, on an individual level.

As I have wondered myself about capitalism -- how is it that people are unwilling to acknowledge capitalism's propensity to revel in man's most sociopathic impulses: greed, envy, acquisitiveness, covetousness, waste, frivolity? How has our human society got to the point where nobody sees this?

Each time I continue, I will reproduce the section we have covered, with the material we have not yet covered appended and bolded:



Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
Part I Bourgeois and Proletarians

The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune(4): here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.


Notes:

1. By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour.

By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition]

2. That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]

3. Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

4. This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition]

“Commune” was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate". Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

From the general statement about history being nothing other than the struggle between classes, Marx moves very quickly to the history of the Bourgeoisie itself.

1. What is meant by: "the epoch of the bourgeoisie... has simplified class antagonisms"?

2. What is the detail to the narrative being told? The rise of the bourgeoisie within the cracks of the Feudal society shows us much. It describes not only how the bourgeoisie rose in economic importance but how it became more and more radical and came to adopt the slogans which are today so familiar. How did that work?

3. There is also a revolutionary interaction here, in which trade spurs exploration, exploration leads to colonization and new wealth, wealth leads to new political demands, and so on. It is an illustration of how social evolution leads to a revolution in the productive forces which, in turn, overturn the previous social relations. This whole is well worth talking about...

http://www.historiasiglo20.org/MEC-BC/images/medieval%20city.jpg
Chartered Town of the Middle Ages

1. What is meant by: "the epoch of the bourgeoisie... has simplified class antagonisms"?

I kind of anticipated this question and found that it was not quite so easy to answer since the Manifesto does not introduce the idea of the necessity of "free labor" until a bit later. So it seems that the "why?" of the matter is not really discussed in the above passage, or at least not directly

1. What is meant by: "the epoch of the bourgeoisie... has simplified class antagonisms"?

I kind of anticipated this question and found that it was not quite so easy to answer since the Manifesto does not introduce the idea of the necessity of "free labor" until a bit later. So it seems that the "why?" of the matter is not really discussed in the above passage, or at least not directly


If I might venture, the bourgeoisie have streamlined the exploitation of labor by stripping away the pretense of religion and custom. No more the multitude of religious festivals and complex arrangement of obligations of feudal society. Relationships become cut and dry, cash and carry, to the great advantage of the current model exploiter.

1. What is meant by: "the epoch of the bourgeoisie... has simplified class antagonisms"?

I kind of anticipated this question and found that it was not quite so easy to answer since the Manifesto does not introduce the idea of the necessity of "free labor" until a bit later. So it seems that the "why?" of the matter is not really discussed in the above passage, or at least not directly


If I might venture, the bourgeoisie have streamlined the exploitation of labor by stripping away the pretense of religion and custom. No more the multitude of religious festivals and complex arrangement of obligations of feudal society. Relationships become cut and dry, cash and carry, to the great advantage of the current model exploiter.


Yes, but why is this transformation a historical "necessity"?

1. What is meant by: "the epoch of the bourgeoisie... has simplified class antagonisms"?

I kind of anticipated this question and found that it was not quite so easy to answer since the Manifesto does not introduce the idea of the necessity of "free labor" until a bit later. So it seems that the "why?" of the matter is not really discussed in the above passage, or at least not directly


If I might venture, the bourgeoisie have streamlined the exploitation of labor by stripping away the pretense of religion and custom. No more the multitude of religious festivals and complex arrangement of obligations of feudal society. Relationships become cut and dry, cash and carry, to the great advantage of the current model exploiter.


Yes, but why is this transformation a historical "necessity"?


Tricky question, that. It reeks of determinism. Perhap rephrasing or tell me when 'historical necessity came into the conversation, I mighta missed it.

1. What is meant by: "the epoch of the bourgeoisie... has simplified class antagonisms"?

I kind of anticipated this question and found that it was not quite so easy to answer since the Manifesto does not introduce the idea of the necessity of "free labor" until a bit later. So it seems that the "why?" of the matter is not really discussed in the above passage, or at least not directly


If I might venture, the bourgeoisie have streamlined the exploitation of labor by stripping away the pretense of religion and custom. No more the multitude of religious festivals and complex arrangement of obligations of feudal society. Relationships become cut and dry, cash and carry, to the great advantage of the current model exploiter.


Yes, but why is this transformation a historical "necessity"?


Tricky question, that. It reeks of determinism. Perhap rephrasing or tell me when 'historical necessity came into the conversation, I mighta missed it.




Well, determinsism is "bad" but not everything needs to be methodically reduced to "determinism" and thereby dismissed. We're trying to examine the system that has come into being and the basis on which it reproduces itself. The mere existence of the system is not without consequences and impliciations.

By compulsion, humans organize themselves based on the productive forces at hands and the mode by which that production is allocated. This compulsion certainly appears as a system of laws governing humans and functions as a system of laws (more like laws of physics than a legal code) for all practical purposes.

The reason the question does not and cannot reduce to determinism is somply that the question is not one of philosophy but instead one of the consequences of actually existing conditions.

What's wrong with determinism... even "crude" determinism? Sheesh, in the center of a cyclone of mystical psycho crap, you guys are worried about getting a sunburn if it ever ends. Diderot says one thing at a time.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Denisdiderot.jpg/466px-Denisdiderot.jpg

Diderot looked just like William Hurt.

http://img5.allocine.fr/acmedia/rsz/434/x/x/x/medias/nmedia/18/36/11/53/18453738.jpg

Well Anax, you have alluded to the stodginess of old time commies, is this not the result of 'crude' or 'absolute' determinism? I think the idea of 'probabilistic determinism' is closer to the mark, is more functional and chimes well with evolutionary theory.


Another concept that needs signposting here is 'probabilistic determinism' (already mentioned in relation to quantum mechanics). Some things are very strongly determined and therefore virtually inevitable; some things are very probable but not certain; some things are likely; some things hang in the balance. Things which are only likely in individual cases become increasingly certain as the number of cases increases. It is certain that I will die. It is unlikely but not impossible that I will die tomorrow. It is probable but not certain that I will die before I reach 100. Given a million people it is virtually certain that the large majority die before the age of 100. If an individual middle class child is even marginally more likely to get to university than an individual working class child, it becomes virtually certain that a higher percentage of middle class children as a whole will go to university.

The concept of probabilistic determinism is politically important in at least three ways. First it plays a role in the current battle against ruling class ideology. The ruling class which is perfectly capable of grasping probabilistic determinism when it suits it (for instance when fixing insurance premiums) often denies it for propaganda purposes--as when rejecting a link between crime and unemployment. Secondly it is crucial in the understanding of history. Take the familiar question of the inevitability of the First World War. It makes no sense to argue that the outbreak of war was inevitable precisely at the beginning of August 1914. Princip might have missed his shot, the Austro-Hungarian government might have responded differently and so on. Nor should we be drawn into trying to prove the absolute inevitability of world war at some point. But it makes good sense to argue that given important rivalries the war was overwhelmingly likely (or virtually inevitable).

Thirdly it plays a central role in political tactics. The decision to call a strike or even a demonstration depends in considerable part on the assessment of the objective possibility of such an action taking place and being a success. Clearly there is no way in which such assessment can be rendered an exact science, but neither can it be dispensed with. Napoleon's oft quoted maxim, 'First engage, then we'll see', expresses an important truth, but only within definite limits. An army which engages in a pitched battle with an enemy that is better armed and many times its size will almost certainly be defeated, as will one which invades Russia without taking account of the highly deterministic effects of the Russian winter.

Finally it should be noted that, whereas absolute determinism renders conscious political action to change the world superfluous, and strong indeterminism renders it hopelessly ineffective, relative determinism puts a premium on such action. If in a given situation a particular desired outcome is either probable but not guaranteed or hangs in the balance, then every action taken towards that outcome (provided, of course, it is not counterproductive) increases the probability of it occurring and is therefore valuable. In the light of these theoretical considerations I shall now examine the extent and limits of determinism in the Marxist theory of history.

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj68/molyneux.htm

Yeah, I know I've been down this road before......

1. What is meant by: "the epoch of the bourgeoisie... has simplified class antagonisms"?

I kind of anticipated this question and found that it was not quite so easy to answer since the Manifesto does not introduce the idea of the necessity of "free labor" until a bit later. So it seems that the "why?" of the matter is not really discussed in the above passage, or at least not directly


If I might venture, the bourgeoisie have streamlined the exploitation of labor by stripping away the pretense of religion and custom. No more the multitude of religious festivals and complex arrangement of obligations of feudal society. Relationships become cut and dry, cash and carry, to the great advantage of the current model exploiter.


Yes, but why is this transformation a historical "necessity"?


Tricky question, that. It reeks of determinism. Perhap rephrasing or tell me when 'historical necessity came into the conversation, I mighta missed it.




Well, determinsism is "bad" but not everything needs to be methodically reduced to "determinism" and thereby dismissed. We're trying to examine the system that has come into being and the basis on which it reproduces itself. The mere existence of the system is not without consequences and impliciations.

By compulsion, humans organize themselves based on the productive forces at hands and the mode by which that production is allocated. This compulsion certainly appears as a system of laws governing humans and functions as a system of laws (more like laws of physics than a legal code) for all practical purposes.

The reason the question does not and cannot reduce to determinism is somply that the question is not one of philosophy but instead one of the consequences of actually existing conditions.


Not dismissing, rather trying to get at the nut of things.There are some assumptions here that I'm missing. Perhaps I getting ahead of things, or slept through that class.

Well Anax, you have alluded to the stodginess of old time commies, is this not the result of 'crude' or 'absolute' determinism? I think the idea of 'probabilistic determinism' is closer to the mark, is more functional and chimes well with evolutionary theory.


Another concept that needs signposting here is 'probabilistic determinism' (already mentioned in relation to quantum mechanics). Some things are very strongly determined and therefore virtually inevitable; some things are very probable but not certain; some things are likely; some things hang in the balance. Things which are only likely in individual cases become increasingly certain as the number of cases increases. It is certain that I will die. It is unlikely but not impossible that I will die tomorrow. It is probable but not certain that I will die before I reach 100. Given a million people it is virtually certain that the large majority die before the age of 100. If an individual middle class child is even marginally more likely to get to university than an individual working class child, it becomes virtually certain that a higher percentage of middle class children as a whole will go to university.

The concept of probabilistic determinism is politically important in at least three ways. First it plays a role in the current battle against ruling class ideology. The ruling class which is perfectly capable of grasping probabilistic determinism when it suits it (for instance when fixing insurance premiums) often denies it for propaganda purposes--as when rejecting a link between crime and unemployment. Secondly it is crucial in the understanding of history. Take the familiar question of the inevitability of the First World War. It makes no sense to argue that the outbreak of war was inevitable precisely at the beginning of August 1914. Princip might have missed his shot, the Austro-Hungarian government might have responded differently and so on. Nor should we be drawn into trying to prove the absolute inevitability of world war at some point. But it makes good sense to argue that given important rivalries the war was overwhelmingly likely (or virtually inevitable).

Thirdly it plays a central role in political tactics. The decision to call a strike or even a demonstration depends in considerable part on the assessment of the objective possibility of such an action taking place and being a success. Clearly there is no way in which such assessment can be rendered an exact science, but neither can it be dispensed with. Napoleon's oft quoted maxim, 'First engage, then we'll see', expresses an important truth, but only within definite limits. An army which engages in a pitched battle with an enemy that is better armed and many times its size will almost certainly be defeated, as will one which invades Russia without taking account of the highly deterministic effects of the Russian winter.

Finally it should be noted that, whereas absolute determinism renders conscious political action to change the world superfluous, and strong indeterminism renders it hopelessly ineffective, relative determinism puts a premium on such action. If in a given situation a particular desired outcome is either probable but not guaranteed or hangs in the balance, then every action taken towards that outcome (provided, of course, it is not counterproductive) increases the probability of it occurring and is therefore valuable. In the light of these theoretical considerations I shall now examine the extent and limits of determinism in the Marxist theory of history.

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj68/molyneux.htm

Yeah, I know I've been down this road before......


And Anax says I'm evil..(which I am bwahahahaha)

PS BP, read that passage you put up again..dude's a Plaotist..now there's something to grouse about

And Anax says I'm evil..(which I am bwahahahaha)

PS BP, read that passage you put up again..dude's a Plaotist..now there's something to grouse about

OK, whatever the fuck that is. Ya oughta know by now that I know nothing of that philosophy stuff.
http://www.robertcollectibles.com/Schulz%20I%20know%20nothing.jpg

To him the numbers are more real than, er, reality. He is taking probabilities to really BE the determination..it is unabashedly a-causal. There is no cause and effect in quantum mechanics, and what he is doing is no different than the New Agey "interpretations" of QM out there

I used Plato because I figured he was better known than the likes of Ernst Mach lol

OK, I got an inkling of that bit of Plato, and it is bullshit, but don't see it in that passage. Don't see what Plato has to do with it.

Fuck this, this whole diversion was about 'historical necessity'. Why is there such a thing? The way you stated it as a given is what put me off.

I hope that people can continue to ask questions without being immediately attacked as revisionists. Most of the questions I raise are for the purpose of discussion, not to initiate dueling talking points or promote a point of view - the "identity" question for example, or the infamous "were the Bolsheviks city slickers?" question.


Speaking only for me, that is the whole point. Quoting Marx is kinda redundant... he already wrote it. The only reasons for doing it is educational or to use him to back up a point about a modern issue of concern.

Believe it or not, I don't really believe in "revisionists" and all that, I think disputes are resolved in the actual struggle, that there is no such thing as "left" communists, and that knowing Marx inside and out does not help at all in distinguishing your ass from the proverbial hole in the ground. It really does come down to the soldier's story, "... you are either on one side or the other."

If you read my Foster story, that was kinda the point. He was "wrong" about nearly everything and couldn't tell a dialectic from a cement mixer but I think he was the most important American socialist by far, and American workers have never had a better champion (also goes for Flynn, Heywood, and many others, all of whom started out as dreaded anarchists...).

I'll revisit that "city slickers" thing sometime (there is interesting shit in there). I couldn't get in last time before the fur was already flying.

OK, I got an inkling of that bit of Plato, and it is bullshit, but don't see it in that passage. Don't see what Plato has to do with it.

Fuck this, this whole diversion was about 'historical necessity'. Why is there such a thing? The way you stated it as a given is what put me off.


"Historical necessity" is literature, not theory. More precisely, it is personification. "History" ain't got no "freedom"; nor does it have "necessity". Your protest is formally correct. Shit like that only appears "obvious", retrospectively.

Still... looking forward, the proliferation of many classes, their variation on how they appropriate surplus labor/product/value, and the eventual dominance of the one (the bourgeoisie) which transforms the whole universe of social connections into a simple reflection of its own mode of appropriation... that does have the smell of a certain "inevitability" to it. I grant that the details or timing are anything but certain.

I am standing down on the question, because if BP has asked me to rephrase in a more palatable way, it would be easy. Although I suppose "inevitable" may not be the easiest thing to swallow either.

It seems to me that the charge of determinism mostly superimposed bad philosophy on the question, but it is worth addressing becaues it is invoked frequently in these type of discussion in my experience -- and coming from both sides (ie there are plenty of Gottfried Leibnizs out there arguing FOR a universal script)

So I will stick to our script and shut up about it now ;)

In truth, "economic determinism" is a feature of much of the left but it is also pretty obvious. Vietnam had to have a direct economic cause. It must have been tin... or bauxite. Paulson's "bailout" had to be part of a bold-faced scheme to steal some or all of the $700 billion. The transparent links between economic and political acts are seen as too obvious to be plausible. This trait is interwoven, not only with the "analysis" of "shock capitalism" or the political economy of Air America, but also is common in the writings of Zinn or Chomsky. The problem is that it is not easy or straightforward to decide what is simple naivete and what is foul-shit in sheep's clothing.

The overall confusion and incoherence of it all doesn't exactly help, either.

I'll revisit that "city slickers" thing sometime (there is interesting shit in there). I couldn't get in last time before the fur was already flying.


I was comparing what Marx said about rural agricultural villages to what Lenin said to what the actual application of collectivization was in Russia.

It is a complex subject, and your comments about communal villages in history and pre-history help us to understand this.

With 144 million people living on farms in the Soviet Union out of 188 million total population, Russia was obviously a rural agrarian country at the time of the Revolution. How much of that village life was communal and cooperative, and pre-capitalist? How much did ignorance and anti-rural bias by party officials influence the practical application of collectivization?

I'll revisit that "city slickers" thing sometime (there is interesting shit in there). I couldn't get in last time before the fur was already flying.


I was comparing what Marx said about rural agricultural villages to what Lenin said to what the actual application of collectivization was in Russia.

It is a complex subject, and your comments about communal villages in history and pre-history help us to understand this.

With 144 million people living on farms in the Soviet Union out of 188 million total population, Russia was obviously a rural agrarian country at the time of the Revolution. How much of that village life was communal and cooperative, and pre-capitalist? How much did ignorance and anti-rural bias by party officials influence the practical application of collectivization?


This is a very complex subject. Cherneshevsky thought at first that it was possible to move directly from communal property to socialism and Marx learned Russian specifically to read this material. Both agreed that there was a window within which this was possible and both agreed that this window closed very rapidly. Unfortunately, we are talking about 60 years before collectivization. One relatively unknown aspect of Imperial Russian history is how quickly capital poured into the economy and how transformitive it was. Though few in number, the factories built were among the largest and most modern extant. In agricultural production, commodity and subsistence farming which had co-existed for over a century suddenly tilted toward the former.

I don't think anything but the impending international struggle (war) caused collectivization. The NEP (New Economic Program) was simply too successful. The Soviet Economy was growing too fast - faster even than the Chinese Economic Miracle. But, it was not industrializing. The only source of foreign exchange in sufficient quantity was agriculture. I think this is what drove collectivization (and also the end of the NEP and famine, although the magnitude of the last is subject to debate).

This is a subject we should tackle separately. I have a whole raft of economic data that I've been meaning to put up. It sets an interesting context around Rusty's argument (on Stalin) as well as yours. Unfortunately, the material doesn't simply hang together. I have to write a quick framework for it.

Now, if I could just find a day...

This is a subject we should tackle separately. I have a whole raft of economic data that I've been meaning to put up. It sets an interesting context around Rusty's argument (on Stalin) as well as yours. Unfortunately, the material doesn't simply hang together. I have to write a quick framework for it.

Now, if I could just find a day...



Very good.

I'll revisit that "city slickers" thing sometime (there is interesting shit in there). I couldn't get in last time before the fur was already flying.


I was comparing what Marx said about rural agricultural villages to what Lenin said to what the actual application of collectivization was in Russia.

It is a complex subject, and your comments about communal villages in history and pre-history help us to understand this.

With 144 million people living on farms in the Soviet Union out of 188 million total population, Russia was obviously a rural agrarian country at the time of the Revolution. How much of that village life was communal and cooperative, and pre-capitalist? How much did ignorance and anti-rural bias by party officials influence the practical application of collectivization?


This is a very complex subject. Cherneshevsky thought at first that it was possible to move directly from communal property to socialism and Marx learned Russian specifically to read this material. Both agreed that there was a window within which this was possible and both agreed that this window closed very rapidly. Unfortunately, we are talking about 60 years before collectivization. One relatively unknown aspect of Imperial Russian history is how quickly capital poured into the economy and how transformitive it was. Though few in number, the factories built were among the largest and most modern extant. In agricultural production, commodity and subsistence farming which had co-existed for over a century suddenly tilted toward the former.

I don't think anything but the impending international struggle (war) caused collectivization. The NEP (New Economic Program) was simply too successful. The Soviet Economy was growing too fast - faster even than the Chinese Economic Miracle. But, it was not industrializing. The only source of foreign exchange in sufficient quantity was agriculture. I think this is what drove collectivization (and also the end of the NEP and famine, although the magnitude of the last is subject to debate).

This is a subject we should tackle separately. I have a whole raft of economic data that I've been meaning to put up. It sets an interesting context around Rusty's argument (on Stalin) as well as yours. Unfortunately, the material doesn't simply hang together. I have to write a quick framework for it.

Now, if I could just find a day...



Anax, the data that surprised me most as I researched this some was that the kulaks under the NEP were not nearly as wealthy and the wealth not nearly as stratified as it had been previously during the Russian Empire. The curve was, so to speak, flatter

Also, apparently, one of the difficulties encountered within the NEP was that that although agricutlural output had returned almost completely post-war, not as much reached the market and we are talkiing a MAJOR shortcoming as maybe as little as 15-25% of pre-war levels entered the market. Foreign trade of course reflected this dire circumstance. It was partially due to pricing policies of the NEP but had just as much to do with the flatter curve described above and the decline of large estates coupled with substantial land redistribution. While its true that the Party was always confronting the antagonism of balancing the needs of the cities vs how much was allocated to the peasantry it is almost certain that under more accomodating circumstances, pricing adjustments could and would have been made.

It also had to do with a subject Lenin fretted over incessantly, that of delivering machinery and industry to the peasantry, something that the cities were simply not in a position to do at that time.

One of the ultimately deciding factors can be seen reflected in the massive urban unemployment..not simply an artefact of increasing industrial productivity but also the swell of peasantry into the cities..this put another very real and objective damper on the pace of industrialization constrained by the NEP

The grain shortages in which this complex of problems comes to a head is an amalgamation of all them really, including the fact that the Soviets were desperately playing catch up with the West industrially, trying to rebuild from the Civil War, and also under a very austere program you've called "war communism" (which differs from the official War Communism pre-NEP) which de-emphasized so-called "secondary goods" (ie consumables) and in particular was focused on producing machinery, coal, heavy equpment etc.

So, paradoxically, the policy "worked" but could not work.

Bukharin was the voice of continuing to make strides at a steady but unspectacular clip, thereby absorbing the peasntry and merchants into presumably more collectivized arrangements over time. But he was undercut by world events as the question quickly became moot.

The idea that industrialization must be throttled to the NEP and not vice versa and that the NEP in that context was a potentially successful plan for "modernization" appears to have come back in the very last death throes of the Soviet Union. In defense of this view it is true that investment in industry under the NEP eventually came to exceed that of the pre-war period which is a telling figure.

But there remained/s a pessimism that looming war, limited technological capability that could be brought to bear, and the inherent anarchy of the "market" were simply too much to overcome.

I was very surprised at some of the subtleties I found as I researched this. It was not simply the story of stark ideological struggle of retrograde peasants looking to consolidate their wealth arrayed against the needs of the collectivized State (ie the cities/towns and the army) as it is often presented. And other than perspective that presentation is strikingly the same on both "sides".

It is also worth noting that Trostky's position in this was a War Communist's War Communism: run the home country like a military barracks and export war and violence in pursuit of revolution in the advanced heart of capitalism.

I hope you write up an analysis buddy, because there is so much to grapple with that one can easily be mislead regarding what the central issues, themes, and concerns truly were. This is particularly paramount because in a real sense the same debates rage today, 90 years later.

I think Trotsky was right in this respect: Socialism will nevr be safe until the heart of the beast is cut out. It is upon the heads of we citizensof the Empire that the resposnsibility lie.

This is a very complex subject. Cherneshevsky thought at first that it was possible to move directly from communal property to socialism and Marx learned Russian specifically to read this material. Both agreed that there was a window within which this was possible and both agreed that this window closed very rapidly. Unfortunately, we are talking about 60 years before collectivization. One relatively unknown aspect of Imperial Russian history is how quickly capital poured into the economy and how transformitive it was. Though few in number, the factories built were among the largest and most modern extant. In agricultural production, commodity and subsistence farming which had co-existed for over a century suddenly tilted toward the former.

I don't think anything but the impending international struggle (war) caused collectivization. The NEP (New Economic Program) was simply too successful. The Soviet Economy was growing too fast - faster even than the Chinese Economic Miracle. But, it was not industrializing. The only source of foreign exchange in sufficient quantity was agriculture. I think this is what drove collectivization (and also the end of the NEP and famine, although the magnitude of the last is subject to debate).

This is a subject we should tackle separately. I have a whole raft of economic data that I've been meaning to put up. It sets an interesting context around Rusty's argument (on Stalin) as well as yours. Unfortunately, the material doesn't simply hang together. I have to write a quick framework for it.

Now, if I could just find a day...



Anax, the data that surprised me most as I researched this some was that the kulaks under the NEP were not nearly as wealthy and the wealth not nearly as stratified as it had been previously during the Russian Empire. The curve was, so to speak, flatter

Also, apparently, one of the difficulties encountered within the NEP was that that although agricutlural output had returned almost completely post-war, not as much reached the market and we are talkiing a MAJOR shortcoming as maybe as little as 15-25% of pre-war levels entered the market. Foreign trade of course reflected this dire circumstance. It was partially due to pricing policies of the NEP but had just as much to do with the flatter curve described above and the decline of large estates coupled with substantial land redistribution. While its true that the Party was always confronting the antagonism of balancing the needs of the cities vs how much was allocated to the peasantry it is almost certain that under more accomodating circumstances, pricing adjustments could and would have been made.

It also had to do with a subject Lenin fretted over incessantly, that of delivering machinery and industry to the peasantry, something that the cities were simply not in a position to do at that time.

One of the ultimately deciding factors can be seen reflected in the massive urban unemployment..not simply an artefact of increasing industrial productivity but also the swell of peasantry into the cities..this put another very real and objective damper on the pace of industrialization constrained by the NEP

The grain shortages in which this complex of problems comes to a head is an amalgamation of all them really, including the fact that the Soviets were desperately playing catch up with the West industrially, trying to rebuild from the Civil War, and also under a very austere program you've called "war communism" (which differs from the official War Communism pre-NEP) which de-emphasized so-called "secondary goods" (ie consumables) and in particular was focused on producing machinery, coal, heavy equpment etc.

So, paradoxically, the policy "worked" but could not work.

Bukharin was the voice of continuing to make strides at a steady but unspectacular clip, thereby absorbing the peasntry and merchants into presumably more collectivized arrangements over time. But he was undercut by world events as the question quickly became moot.

The idea that industrialization must be throttled to the NEP and not vice versa and that the NEP in that context was a potentially successful plan for "modernization" appears to have come back in the very last death throes of the Soviet Union. In defense of this view it is true that investment in industry under the NEP eventually came to exceed that of the pre-war period which is a telling figure.

But there remained/s a pessimism that looming war, limited technological capability that could be brought to bear, and the inherent anarchy of the "market" were simply too much to overcome.

I was very surprised at some of the subtleties I found as I researched this. It was not simply the story of stark ideological struggle of retrograde peasants looking to consolidate their wealth arrayed against the needs of the collectivized State (ie the cities/towns and the army) as it is often presented. And other than perspective that presentation is strikingly the same on both "sides".

It is also worth noting that Trostky's position in this was a War Communist's War Communism: run the home country like a military barracks and export war and violence in pursuit of revolution in the advanced heart of capitalism.

I hope you write up an analysis buddy, because there is so much to grapple with that one can easily be mislead regarding what the central issues, themes, and concerns truly were. This is particularly paramount because in a real sense the same debates rage today, 90 years later.


An analysis is daunting here, because the story is probably the story of how the Soviet Union ended in 1989. It is in many ways a very sad story because I can find no new classes, no revisionists, no serious "mistakes... it is a story of very few options and a very real self-conciousness/self-understanding that goes on and on and on without respite. The more I understand it, the more I am infuriated by every attempt to kibitz on it, particularly by those who don't bother to understand shit.

Much more narrowly, the bookends to the part you are looking at are these: On the front end of the story, you have a Russian Empire that has significantly fallen behind by the start of WWI in 1914, and the war destroys fully 80% of the GDP. Then comes Revolution, Foreign Invasion, and Civil War. By the time it is all over, the pre-revolutionary economic circumstances look like a veritable Golden Age. Mad Max lives in a Los Angeles suburb by comparison.

The other bookend is the end of World War II. By this point, the Germans have occupied and absorbed both the French and Eastern European economies, roughly tripling their economic output, while the Soviets lose two thirds of their agricultural output and three quarters of their industrial (of which only half is successfully relocated to the Urals) through physical occupation, yet they significantly outproduce the Germans both in quantity and in quality.

It is a miracle unique in history. Still, "economic miracles" are like "free lunches"... there ain't no such thing.

The "sympathetic" bourgeois economists (of whom there are a few) generally understand the motivations behind the end of the NEP and "forced collectivization" but claim that these did not produce the desired result. Having looked at it very closely, I'm not so sure. The second "bookend" above is astonishing. Arguing that it could have been achieve

d "more efficiently" in some "other way" seems to me to be quintessential leisure-chair quarterbacking... it misses the point that it was not possible to do it at all, even in the way in which it was actually done.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Lenin-poster.jpg/410px-Lenin-poster.jpg

We have strayed away from Manifesto but something we were building toward on Pop Indy was the notion of Marx as "philosopher", "economist", "social scientist", "scholar" or "academician" advancing a "mystical view of history" -- all of these labels/claims are shucked off in a hurry when you just sit down and read the document as it is written

Yes, Marx's writings were scholarly and touched on all of those topics in varying degrees, but Marx was a revolutionary first and foremost which is precisely where the rubber meets the road: the Manifeto reiterates that communism is nothing BUT the struggle of the working class in its most self-conscious form.

We have strayed away from Manifesto but something we were building toward on Pop Indy was the notion of Marx as "philosopher", "economist", "social scientist", "scholar" or "academician" advancing a "mystical view of history" -- all of these labels/claims are shucked off in a hurry when you just sit down and read the document as it is written

Yes, Marx's writings were scholarly and touched on all of those topics in varying degrees, but Marx was a revolutionary first and foremost which is precisely where the rubber meets the road: the Manifeto reiterates that communism is nothing BUT the struggle of the working class in its most self-conscious form.


This is from the afterwards of the 2nd German edition of Capital:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm



Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi [Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.

Karl Marx
London
January 24, 1873

This is a fairly prevalent quotation, but man that third paragraph gets abused by just about every "philosophe(r)" who comes down the pike.

( PS I think I see your point on Aristotle incidentally)

This is a fairly prevalent quotation, but man that third paragraph gets abused by just about every "philosophe(r)" who comes down the pike.

( PS I think I see your point on Aristotle incidentally)


Alright, then... if you are familiar with the quote, consider what comes immediately before:


That the method employed in “Das Kapital” has been little understood, is shown by the various conceptions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of it.

Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the one hand, I treat economics metaphysically, and on the other hand — imagine! — confine myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing receipts [4] (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future. In answer to the reproach in re metaphysics, Professor Sieber has it:


“In so far as it deals with actual theory, the method of Marx is the deductive method of the whole English school, a school whose failings and virtues are common to the best theoretic economists.”

M. Block — “Les Théoriciens du Socialisme en Allemagne. Extrait du Journal des Economistes, Juillet et Août 1872” — makes the discovery that my method is analytic and says: “Par cet ouvrage M. Marx se classe parmi les esprits analytiques les plus eminents.” German reviews, of course, shriek out at “Hegelian sophistics.” The European Messenger of St. Petersburg in an article dealing exclusively with the method of “Das Kapital” (May number, 1872, pp. 427-436), finds my method of inquiry severely realistic, but my method of presentation, unfortunately, German-dialectical. It says:


“At first sight, if the judgment is based on the external form of the presentation of the subject, Marx is the most ideal of ideal philosophers, always in the German, i.e., the bad sense of the word. But in point of fact he is infinitely more realistic than all his forerunners in the work of economic criticism. He can in no sense be called an idealist.”

I cannot answer the writer better than by aid of a few extracts from his own criticism, which may interest some of my readers to whom the Russian original is inaccessible.

After a quotation from the preface to my “Criticism of Political Economy,” Berlin, 1859, pp. IV-VII, where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on:


“The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own. ... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx’s book has.”

Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?

My memory might be faulty but I believe the correspondent from European Messenger is no less than N.G. Chernyshevsky his-self. If it is not, it might as well be because he carries the "spirit of Chernysevsky" comfortably.

Two conclusions:

1. You are right. Marx ain't about philosophy or economics or anything else but Revolution.

2. What is "crude" and what is "true" materialism gets foggier and foggier as we add detail. It is Marx himself who is uniquely precise... and this, not always. If you don't believe me, read even earlier in the same "Afterward"...

(Optional #3 - V.I. Lenin was probably the greatest of the "Marxists", despite being "crude" and a fookin' anarchist. He's the man...)

2. What is "crude" and what is "true" materialism gets foggier and foggier as we add detail. It is Marx himself who is uniquely precise... and this, not always. If you don't believe me, read even earlier in the same "Afterward"...

I thought we were defining crude as what Marx/Engels called the "blind play of forces" and leaving it at that. It is not really a topic that lends itself to "granulation". But even that definition is precarious because Engels goes through some pains to establish why it is that a social science parallel to natural science is possible in the first place. Even though Engels is very clear that there are natural (internal) laws, its still a tiny bit ambiguous it seems to me

But better a remote corner of ambiguity than the Broadway of sophistry that follows (see Lenin: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism)

PS in terms of Marx being uniquely precise, some of what Engels rights on the subject comes across as a mess..I realize that some of it is piecemeal and maybe even a bit slapdash but..

2. What is "crude" and what is "true" materialism gets foggier and foggier as we add detail. It is Marx himself who is uniquely precise... and this, not always. If you don't believe me, read even earlier in the same "Afterward"...

I thought we were defining crude as what Marx/Engels called the "blind play of forces" and leaving it at that. It is not really a topic that lends itself to "granulation". But even that definition is precarious because Engels goes through some pains to establish why it is that a social science parallel to natural science is possible in the first place. Even though Engels is very clear that there are natural (internal) laws, its still a tiny bit ambiguous it seems to me

But better a remote corner of ambiguity than the Broadway of sophistry that follows (see Lenin: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism)


Of course... but we have to decide in every era (and review over and over again), which is the "greater danger".

Perhaps I am re-fighting the battles of the last war with french filosophers talkin' shit and bein' "true dialecticians".

But, ya know us Fosterites don't really know nothin' cept "there are only two classes..."

My memory might be faulty but I believe the correspondent from European Messenger is no less than N.G. Chernyshevsky his-self. If it is not, it might as well be because he carries the "spirit of Chernysevsky" comfortably.

Two conclusions:

1. You are right. Marx ain't about philosophy or economics or anything else but Revolution.

2. What is "crude" and what is "true" materialism gets foggier and foggier as we add detail. It is Marx himself who is uniquely precise... and this, not always. If you don't believe me, read even earlier in the same "Afterward"...

(Optional #3 - V.I. Lenin was probably the greatest of the "Marxists", despite being "crude" and a fookin' anarchist. He's the man...)




I see that he is mentioned earlier in the passage:


The Continental revolution of 1848-9 also had its reaction in England. Men who still claimed some scientific standing and aspired to be something more than mere sophists and sycophants of the ruling-classes tried to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to be ignored, of the proletariat. Hence a shallow syncretism of which John Stuart Mill is the best representative. It is a declaration of bankruptcy by bourgeois economy, an event on which the great Russian scholar and critic, N. Tschernyschewsky, has thrown the light of a master mind in his “Outlines of Political Economy according to Mill.”