ALB
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“The transformation of a highly cultivated society like Germany in the 1930s into a murderous death cult provides all the evidence we need for the existence of the ‘death instinct’.”
No it doesn’t. It is possible to give a more rational account of the rise of fascism in Germany in terms of economic, social and historical circumstances.
In any event, to prove the existence of a “death instinct” you need to show that this exists in every individual human. Which, quite apart from other considerations, what happened then in Germany does not provide.
There is simply no such thing as a “death instinct” in humans.
Here’s two passages quoted in this article from the Socialist Standard, in which Marcuse contemplates a minority dictatorship to unbrainwash the majority:
In An Essay on Liberation (1969) he writes:
“True, such government, initially, would not have the endorsement of the majority ‘inherited’ from the previous government—but once the chain of the past governments is broken, the majority would be in a state of flux and, released from the past management, free to judge the new government in terms of the new common interest.”
and, in a talk given to Berlin students in 1967 (published in Five Lectures):
“You can of course say, and I say it to myself often enough, if this is all true, how can we imagine these new concepts even arising here and now in living human beings if the entire society is against such an emergence of new needs. This is the question with which we have to deal. At the same time it amounts to the question of whether the emergence of these new needs can be conceived at all as a radical development out of existing ones, or whether instead, in order to set free these needs, a dictatorship appears necessary, which in any case would be very different from the Marxian dictatorship of the proletariat: namely, a dictatorship, a counter administration, that eliminates the horrors spread by the established administration. This is one of the things that most disquiets me and that we should seriously discuss.”
More good news about technologies that could be applied in socialism and may even be under capitalism:
Your critic seems to be assuming that you were advocating a system of central planning (as proposed by Lange, Lerner, Taylor, etc) in which the state tries to price goods at the same level that they would be if the market had been allowed to establish them. This wouldn’t be socialism but some form of state capitalism. The critics might be right that such a system wouldn’t work, at least not for long or not as intended but it is not what socialists advocate.
Socialism is a system where, on the basis of the common ownership of productive resources, goods and services are produced directly to satisfy people’s needs. The problem socialist society will have will not be how to sell what has been produced (since what is produced will be commonly owned) but how to distribute it to people for them to satisfy their needs.
In some cases this could be by the direct allocation of something; in others by the provision of a free service; in yet others it could be left for people to take from the common stores what they consider they need. In all cases there would be no buying and selling, no pricing and no money. It is this that the partisans of the ECA say is impossible and irrational.
Their arguments are full of holes.
When Hayek’s argues that when people buy something they are voting for that to be produced he ignores — in fact accepts — the unequal distribution of purchasing power under capitalism with what the majority can buy being rationed by how much they are paid as wages.
It’s the same with Mises. He criticises socialism as not been able to make rational decisions about production but that’s because he defines rational as decisions made by the market. But that is not the only definition of rationality.
Both of them are assuming that “scarcity” exists but, again, this is a matter of definition. They define this not in the usual sense of a shortage of something or an inability to produce enough of it but as the absence of “sheer abundance”(everything growing on trees waiting to be picked).
Here is an example (there are others, but this is the only one in the internet) of a polemic against an ECA critic of socialism refuting their arguments point by point. There might be something there you could use for your rebuttal.
Incidentally, can your video be seen somewhere?
Looking at the trailers and other stuff in that link, it seems that the film is about the new human rights movement that he wrote about in the book of the title that was reviewed in the Socialist Standard in 2017.
So it will criticise capitalism but he is also presenting it as an experimental avant-garde film in keeping with his profession as a filmmaker. Sounds as if it might be too avant-garde for most of us.
“the dialectical relationship between Eros & Thanatos which was later taken up by the Frankfurt School to great effect.”
I am afraid that the temptation to pursue this is too much ! This is an example of what I meant of trying to introduce the dialectic into “Nature”. While it could be said that there is a “life wish” amongst humans (indeed amongst all life-forms) as a “wish” to survive (though this is not just about sex, more about food I would have thought), I can’t see that there is any evidence for the existence of a “death wish”. That does not fit in with what we know about human and other life-form behaviour. It seems to have been introduced just to demonstrate a internal dialectical contradiction in humans. No wonder the Frankfurt School liked Hegel.
The Frankfurt School had some good ideas, as putting the emphasis on criticising capitalism as a “civilisation” rather than just an economic system, but I think they were wrong here. In fact, their theory that capitalism has manipulated the psychology of the working class to make them want capitalism raises the question of how this can be undone or whether in fact it could be. The theory risks proving too much and making a mass socialist consciousness impossible under capitalism. No wonder Marcuse thought that the only way out would be for some minority to seize power and unbrainwash the majority.
I’d forgotten, Wez, that you used to call yourself a Freudo-Marxian. Lucky I didn’t include Freud along with Jung as a philosopher rather than a scientist! Nobody has been able to discover in human physiology the special “sexual energy” that his school posits and that gets repressed, diverted and whatnot. But that’s another thread.
“As a form of logic it goes way back to ancient Greece.”
So that’s all you mean by dialectics? Thesis and antithesis confronting each other, resulting in a synthesis? A bit trite, I would have thought, as it’s something that happens everyday in numerous meetings. Who, as you say, can be opposed to that? It will go on as long as there are decisions to be made. In fact, I am sure it has been going on ever since Homo sapiens evolved and so pre-dates Ancient Greece.
The real argument is over whether or not it extends outside the field of human thinking and decision-making. Is it something more than “a form of logic”? Does it apply within (for want of a better term) “Nature”?
Of course everything everywhere is always changing; nothing remains the same. If accepting this is what dialectics is then that’s not a problem. But did and do the changes take place through internal contradiction? Does the fact that the water in a river is not the same as it was a moment before due to some internal contradiction? Does the evolution of a species of life-form that can be traced from the fossil record take place because of internal contradictions within the preceding form? Does water change from liquid to gas spontaneously through internal contradiction?
It is possible to describe some of these changes using the language of Hegelian dialectics (interpenetration of opposites, changes in quantity leading to a change of quality, etc) — Marx himself said he “coquetted” with doing this — but this is still only a way of describing what humans perceive is happening, and not necessarily the most useful or insightful.
Yes, that it’s. It all here (which also has relevance for the other thread on “philosophy”).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
That’s a matter of opinion. I’ve seen the term “Jungian philosophy” bandied about. In any event he was a dealer in wild, unprovable speculations typical of “philosophers”.
Just been reading in the latest number of the Skeptical Inquirer about poor “Typhoid Mary” who was an asymptomatic typhoid carrier (ie had typhoid but showed no symptoms or effects of it). In the end, she had to be locked away until she died.
Apparently there are hundreds of thousands of asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers out there. They can only be discovered by mass testing but nobody knows for how long they are carriers, at least according to this from the early days of the pandemic.
Let’s hope for their sake that they can get rid of it. Otherwise they could end up being treated like Typhoid Mary or like lepers used to be.
Incidentally this is one good reason why for the moment everybody (else) should wear a mask—not to protect themselves but to protect others. That doesn’t apply to me of course since I’ve not got it and I doubt if I’m asymptomatic.
“You have previously poured scorn on the philosophy of science.”
I don’t recall doing that. In fact I am all in favour of the theory of science, i.e., discussing what we mean when we say we know something and the methods of verifying this. Nothing wrong with that at all. That’s all that’s left of “philosophy” (except, I suppose, folksy sayings about what attitude to take the vicissitudes of life and wild theories often linked to religion, eg Nietzsche, Jung, etc).
Actually, if you read it carefully it is not saying what you seem to think it is saying. It was in fact carefully crafted (it was redrafted several times by the editorial committee) to take into account different emphases while respecting the general position of the author.
All it is saying is that the laws of physics and laws of social evolution are not “entirely equivalent” and that it is rather “contentious” to say so. They may both act on humans as a coercive force but the difference is that the laws of physics, etc are external and operate independently of human action whereas the laws of social evolution are carried out by the actions of people eg through class struggles and through developing new technologies.
We will probably get stick from the other sides as well, eg from those who think that there is no end (aim) of history or who think that the laws of physics are human-made too as well as those who think that the dialectics applies to nature as well as human thought.
Bit of a cheap jibe incompatible with your usual respect for the rules of logic, isn’t it, to say that the passage signals junking the theory of surplus value? Even if the article did say (which it didn’t) that there were no laws of historical and social evolution, it would not follow that the theory of surplus value was wrong.
As you know, A junks B does not imply that A junks C.
A counter-challenge, Wez. Can you point to Marx having written anything or even expressed an interest in philosophy after he had settled his accounts with German philosophy in 1845?
Of course this could just be a question of semantics about what the word “philosophy” means. For Marx it seems to have been German (mainly Hegelian) philosophy. These were the philosophers who he said had only interpreted the world, even the best of them Feuerbach.
After he had settled with them, Marx only expressed ideas on the methodology of economic, social and historical research and analysis. Which falls into the realm of the theory of science not speculative philosophy.
Marx’s contemporaries in the communist movement who did speak about philosophy after 1845 said like Engels that philosophy came to an end with Feuerbach or like Duetzgen that the positive outcome of philosophy was science. Dirtzgen was interested in epistemology, which is a branch of science not philosophy.
As has been pointed out here, it was only an accident of history that the communist who first development a coherent explanation of capitalism and its economic laws happened to have come from a background of German philosophy. I doubt if anyone other communist did. And there is no reason why they should, certainly not today. Marx’s intellectual development is interesting from some points of view but not crucial to being or becoming a socialist/communist.
“In Delray Beach, Florida, several hundred people marched, some carrying signs reading “Count every vote” and “We cannot live under a Marxist government.”
I think we can agree with both those slogans, especially the second. A “Marxist government” is an irrational concept so it can’t exist. So we can’t live under one.
