ALB
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Marx was not advocating production for production’s sake. That was precisely his criticism of capitalism. However, he accepted that capitalism was a necessary stage through which society had to pass before socialism (and production for consumption’s sake, ie for use) could become possible and so therefore was a period of production for production’s sake.
In the passage Camus refers to, Marx is saying that Ricardo was right for his time (he died in 1823). Here is the whole passage in context (it’s from Theories of Surplus Value, Part II):
“Ricardo, rightly for his time, regards the capitalist mode of production as the most advantageous for production in general, as the most advantageous for the creation of wealth. He wants production for the sake of production and this with good reason. To assert, as sentimental opponents of Ricardo did, that production as such is not the object, is to forget that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself.”
In saying that Marx said Ricardo was “absolutely right” Camus was going too far (to put it politely), since Marx clearly says “rightly for his time” , i.e not absolutely right for all time. But Camus was really criticising Stalinism not Marxism (unlike Sartre, and to his credit, he was not a fellow traveller of state-capitalist Russia).
So, Marx was not advocating “production for production’s sake” as such for all time (that would be to advocate capitalism for all time) but merely that Ricardo was right to have advocated this in 1817 as, at that time, the forces of production were not yet developed enough, i.e. capitalism had still to create the material basis for socialism by developing the productive forces to the point where production for consumption could be inaugurated.
Of course you could argue that Marx was wrong to have said that capitalism had to have developed before socialism became possible, but was he?
But, annoyingly, you keep begging the question by assuming that Marx wanted to conquer nature in your sense and so contributing to making socialism repugnant to some people. And you are ignoring the fact that humans have to change nature to meet their needs even to grow vegetables. Or are you a nutarian? If not, why not?
“Sounds like a reiteration of the conquest of nature syndrome!”
Not unless you think that “controlling” “Nature,” i.e natural forces, is the same as “conquering” it. Is harnessing the Sun’s rays to generate electricity “conquering Nature”? Is controlling wind power, tidal power, rivers and waterfalls? Is in fact growing food? Surely not but, if so, how are humans supposed to survive as a natural species? Are they just supposed to sit naked, hungry and without shelter “contemplating” nature as Camus seemed to be foolishly suggesting in your opening post where you quote him as saying:
“they [Christians and Marxists] considered [nature] not as an object for contemplation but for transformation.”
I don’t know if Marx did write of the “conquest” of Nature (though he might have done, in the sense if controlling its forces) but William Morris did, as here in Useful Work versus Useless Toil:
“Nature will not be finally conquered till our work becomes a part of the pleasure of our lives.”
But I don’t think he can be accused of wanting to declare war on nature.
Exchange of correspondence (or, rather, polemics) with a Henry Dight, a defender of Bolshevism and of their view that Marx wanted to smash the state not capture it, which shows that we were on to their distortions from the earliest days:
Added to the Jack Fitzgerald Internet Archive:
Those Misrepresentations of Marx Turn Up Again October 1920
Mr. Dight says this is the “The Kybosh” November 1920
Dight’s Dilemma May 1922
Who Should Wear the Caps and Bells? July 1922I had always assumed that a fakir was someone who did the Indian rope trick or was a snake charmer etc ie some sort of conman or to be charitable a magician. I can’t imagine that those influenced by the SLP of America likened the Labour bleeders of their day to Sufi monks. I imagine that at the time fakirs were common in the US in circuses and the like. Does anybody know?
I think Marcos meant to post this on the thread vilifying Marx as “bourgeois” for not being a vegetarian and will be a reference to the forthcoming publication of more of his scientific notebooks (from which Kohei Saito has already drawn on to refute the lie that Marx wanted to subjugate nature). As these will be in German the question of copyright won’t arise. It only does and has in relation to translations.
There’s also this that was referred to the last time this criticism of Marx reared its ugly head here:
Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
Here’s one example of us refuting the view that JO has repeated yet again:
What is needed is a World Cooperative Commonwealth not lots of small scale coops competing to sell their products on the market with a view to making a surplus aka profit in order to survive.
Mind you, the Party didn’t think much of him, denouncing him in 1915 as a “fakir” (a common word at the time instead of “faker”):
Yes, I thought they got it the wrong way round (according to Barltrop’s account in The Monument, pages 29-30). They make him sympathetic to “industrial unionism” whereas he was very much against it. Labelling James Connolly “Catholic Connolly” was good — and prophetic.
I suppose we will need to send them a correction. I see they have a comments section.
In the House of Commons yesterday Johnson promised a “Golden Age”. That easily trumps Labour’s End of Austerity and Free Broadband for Everybody. But imagine the stick Corbyn would have got if he’d promised that.
A Golden Age is a longish period of peace, prosperity and great achievements. Given the state of the world economy Johnson is being bold, especially as the UK is about to make access more difficult to one of its best markets. In any event of course governments can’t control how the capitalist economy works. His wild promise assumes that his government can engineer continuous economic growth as the basis for his Golden Age. But it can’t. He will fail as miserably as all Labour governments have in the past and as a Corbyn government would have done too.
