Presentation on chapter 2 of" Philosophy and revolution" - - PDF document

Presentation on chapter 2 of" Philosophy and revolution" Brendan Cooney May 2019 The transformation of the Russian Revolution into its opposite, State capitalist authoritarianism, caused RD to re-examine Marx’s philosophy of historical materialism in order to exhume the liberatory core of this philosophy. In so doing, she was able to locate the struggle for freedom at the center of historical materialism, a struggle which permeates all of its categories. In the same way that concrete events and concrete struggles caused RD to find the essential liberatory thread in Marx in a way that spoke to and informed contemporary struggles, she also examined the way Marx as well never stopped developing his ideas in response to the concrete struggles of workers for freedom in his time. Thus, in this chapter there are two dialectical processes at work. We see Marx at work, compelled by the struggles of his day, digging deeper and deeper into the economic and philosophic categories to make them relevant for his time. At the same time, RD, compelled by the rise of state capitalism and the resistance to this state capitalism, digs deeper and deeper into Marx and Hegel, in order to grasp the dialectical process at play in her time. In order to do this, RD begins by identifying how and why the struggle for freedom is central to historical materialism, a process requiring a deep dive into Hegel's categories, specifically the concept of negation of negation. All along, her intellectual opponents are those who want to sever the link between Marx and Hegel. This is not merely an academic question of the degree

• f Hegel’s influence on Marx. For RD, this is not merely a question of Marx using the hegelian

language at times, or the similarities between certain categories in the two thinkers. Rather, there is an essential thread which Marx picks up from Hegel which allows Marx to put human liberation at the center of his Philosophy of revolution. Thus, for RD, the quest to understand Hegel’s influence on Marx, to identify the liberatory, humanist thread in historical materialism, has immediate, concrete political ramifications. Those who want to sever the link between Marx and Hegel, also want to purge all of the liberatory elements from Marx. Thus, when RD discusses categories like abstract labor and commodity fetishism, differentiating her interpretation of Marx from that of Stalin and others, the issues at stake are not merely academic, nor is it a matter of degrees of correctness. In other words, it is not as if Stalin's interpretation of Marx sits on a spectrum of correctness, in which he got certain categories correct while making errors in other areas. Rather, Stalin's interpretation of Marx is the polar opposite of the Philosophy of freedom which RD develops, a philosophical difference that parallels the transformation of the Russian Revolution into its opposite. We see this difference reflected in all of the categories that RD examines. Part of RD’s argument is exegetical/historical, identifying the birth of historical materialism in Marx’s engagement with Hegel as well as the continuity of these humanist ideas in both the young and mature Marx. For those of us who don't need to be convinced of the continuity in Marx’s thought, the more interesting issue is the question as to what precisely historical materialism is, what precisely is its relation to Hegel, and how, precisely, does it permeate all of the economic and philosophical categories of the mature Marx. For RD, historical materialism is Marx’s philosophy of liberation. From Hegel, Marx takes the idea of "self development through double negation.” As opposed to Feurbach, who argued that the negation of the negation was a reactionary device that lead Hegel to accommodate existing religion and society, Marx argued that second negativity contained a positive movement

necessary for historical development. For Marx, the source of Hegel's accommodation lay in the fact that his philosophy was constrained to the realm of abstract thinking. For Marx, and for RD, philosophy should "turn outward” and "engage the world”. Not only must it recognize that humans are both created by history and the creators of history, but it must also recognize that this historical process is not merely one of abstract thinking, but also

• ne which entails real human subjects engaged in the every day process of transforming their
• bjective world.

Through this understanding, Marx was able to break with Hegel, bourgeois political economy, the materialists, and vulgar communism. According to RD, this break with previous traditions of thought is made possible because Marx’s new philosophy was a philosophy of human activity. Neither Hegel or the political economists saw labor as the subject of their Science. Political economists had identified labor as the source of value, but had stopped there. Rather than attributing the various forms of surplus value (profit, rent, interest) to the exploitation of labor, the political economists had fetishistic-ly attributed these forms of surplus value to nonhuman sources like the land, Capital, and time. By placing humans and human labor at the center of his Philosophy, Marx was able to pierce through these bourgeois fetishes to unmask the real social processes the lay behind the various forms of the appearance of surplus value. Vulgar communism, as well, was handicapped by its failure to put the human subject, and its struggle for freedom, at the center of its philosophy. Thus Marx critiques vulgar communism for treating the abolition of private property as an end in itself rather than a necessary mediation along the way toward the goal of creating new conditions for human freedom. Because human beings strive for freedom, this causes them to seek to negate the conditions of their

• unfreedom. But this act of negation itself must be negated in order to find positive ground for

the creation of new conditions. Thus, in 1844 Marx criticizes vulgar communism’s "Sham universality” in that it sees transcending private property as a goal onto itself rather than a first step toward the creation of new conditions for human freedom. RD finds Marx’s critiques of vulgar communism full of powerful lessons for her own time. The centrality of absolute negativity which she identifies in Marx suggests that all historical formations, even those that may claim the mantle of communism, even those which may negate certain features of capitalism, contain movement. And this movement is the movement

• f absolute negativity, as humans struggle to create new conditions to realize their own
• freedom. She sees the struggles against Soviet state-capitalism as an example of second

negation carrying out its never-ending battle. Because this philosophy understands historical development to be the product of the struggles

• f real people, and because this philosophy itself is a part of this struggle to change the world,

this philosophy must also develop in response to and with the process of absolute negativity as it is carried out in real life through the various struggles of people fighting for freedom. While many scholars examine Marx’s Grundrisse from all sorts of different angles, RD’s analysis in this part B of this chapter focuses on two places in which Marx’s thinking evolved overtime in response to historical developments. The first instance concerns Marx’s understanding of the "asiatic Mode of production”. In 1847, when writing the Communist Manifesto, Marx had welcomed the bourgeois revolutions which broke down the" Chinese walls of barbarism". But just a few years later he wrote critically of Western influence in China and praised the Taiping rebellion. As opposed to interpretations of Marx which impose a Eurocentric teleology on his theory of historical development, RD argues that Marx’s evolving understanding of the Asiatic mode of production, as well as his comments about the possibility of revolution in Russia, suggest a different way of seeing the matter. She

argues that Marx neither supported the Asiatic mode of production or capitalism. Rather, he was interested in the contradiction between the forces and relations of production and the way this contradiction open the space for revolution. As she puts it later in chapter 4, the real question is not one of geography, but of what constitutes a self-developing subject. The second example which RD turns to is Marx’s writing on machinery. Here too, RD reminds the reader that the subject, the proletariat, re-creates the dialectic from practice, creating forward movement. Thus, Marx’s writings on machinery evolve and deepen as the contradiction between labor and machinery deepens and evolves in real life. She contrasts Marx’s writings on machinery in the Grundrisse, which took place during the relatively quiescent decade of the 1850s, with his writings on the same topic in Capital, which were informed by the class struggles of the 1860s. In the Grundrisse, Marx emphasizes the development of machinery to form the material basis capital’s dissolution. The worker appears as merely a regulator of the machine. But in Capital, Marx captures the dynamic of machinery and labor as a dialectical conflict between labor and capital, between subject and object, in which the development of machinery is a part of class struggle, and in which the workers are not mere appendages, but active subjects engaged in struggles. This second perspective puts the human subject at the center of historical development, rather than seeing technological development as something that happens on its own. This contrasts with the views of Marcuse and others who argued that machinery, through automation, had absorbed the proletariat. Marcuse’s thinking eliminates humans as the active agents in the creation of their own history, replacing them with a technological determinism. Fetishism. RD’s discussion of Marx’s writings on the fetishism of commodities both serves as an another example of the way in which Marx developed his philosophy in response to the concrete struggles of workers in his time, and also an example of the way in which her deep dive into Marx’s humanism illuminates all his essential philosophical/Economic categories in ways that are sharply opposed to the perversions of Stalinism. At the center of the critique of State capitalism and its Stalinist ideology is the question of the historic nature of economic categories like the commodity, value, abstract labor, and commodity fetishism. While the Stalinists wanted to claim that these categories were ahistorical (or abolish/Hide some of these categories altogether) so as to obfuscate the continuity between private capitalism and state capitalism, RD argues that these categories are historically specific to capitalism. Thus she exposes the Soviet system for what it is, another form of the domination of capital over labor. The Commodity, and the fetishism which attaches itself to it, is central to the analysis of capitalism because the commodity contains all of the major contradictions of capital within it. The contradiction between use-value in exchange-value is an expression of the opposition between concrete labor and abstract labor. The opposition between the concrete abilities of the worker on the one side, and domination of capital which disregards the worker’s concrete abilities, forcing her to work at the socially necessary labor time, treating all labors has the same abstract mass… this opposition is a reflection of the perverse subject/object inversion of capitalism, in which objects (Machines) and objective forces dominate the worker. And this subject/object inversion is also a reflection of the opposition between capital and labor. RD’s ability to locate these categories in production itself, rather than the market, is crucial for her critique of state capitalism. For RD, replacing the market with state planning does not eliminate value, abstract labor, socially necessary labor time, or commodity fetishism. Rather, State planning and markets are just two different ways of enforcing the law value.

RD’s discussion of commodity fetishism is an example of this line of thought. Every student of Marx knows that commodity fetishism describes an appearance that hides/masks a social reality: the material relations between things, i.e the value relations between commodities, seem to be an inherent quality of these things themselves rather than the result of social relations between people. This could be interpreted as a product of the market: when linen and coats are equated in the market their relative values appear as innate qualities rather than the results of the labor that happen in production. RD takes a different stance, instead pointing out that human relations have been turned into things prior to market exchange. Already, in the act

• f production, the concrete labors of millions of people have been treated as one homogenous

mass of abstract labor. Treated by capital has one abstract mass, stripped of individuality, denied control over their own labor process, workers become another commodity and the relations between people in production become material relations between things. Thus, the commodity doesn't just hide the relations between people in the workplace. The commodity’s fetishistic appearance is a necessary form of appearance. It is an appearance which reflects the way things actually are in production. RD argues that Marx’s point of the necessity of this form of the appearance appears in the last, French, addition of Capital, and that this appearance reflects the continued development of Marx’s thought, especially as inspired by the developments of the Paris Commune. It is a point which she argues in more detail in "Marxism and Freedom” where she writes that in the first edition “the main emphasis is on the fantastic form of appearance of production relations as exchange of things. It is only after the eruption of the Paris Commune that his French edition shifts the emphasis from the fantastic form of appearance to the necessity of that form appearance because that is, in truth, what relations of people are at the point of production: ‘material relations between persons and social relations between things.” She argues that what was new about the Paris Commune was that it demonstrated for the first time "how people associated freely without the despotism of capital or the mediation of things.” [Marxism and Freedom] This brought to light the unique form labor takes under capitalism, the value-form. The Paris Commune exposed not just the hypocrisies of the political ruled capital, not just the illusions of the marketplace, but also the historically transitory nature of capitalist production itself. The opposite of commodity fetishism, RD argues, is freely associated labor. It is the dialectical self-development through absolute negativity, the proletarian creativity in the act of transforming society which discloses the fetishistic form of capital’s rule. This is why the section on commodity fetishism was so threatening to Stalin. Marx’s ability to comprehend the commodity form was due, according to RD, to the fact that he saw the world not from the perspective of a philosopher, but from the perspective of the “Gravediggers" of capitalism, the workers who struggled for a new society. Rather than a history of ideas and theories, Marx embarked on a history of production relations. This focus on the masses of people shaping history gives historical materialism its uniqueness and also opens up a new dimension in thought.