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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2019-32
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Last week's regular posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Use as open thread …
@ Posted by: NemesisCalling | Jun 9, 2019 3:38:27 PM | 23
Marx never stated that the “individual is subsumed by the collective”. He simply stated that the human being is a natural being, and, as a natural being, it is part of nature as any other species in the world. And, as a species the Homo Sapiens had the particularity of thinking before acting (read the famous quote comparing the bee with the architect) and, as such being individual who create social organizations according to their own necessities.
And archaeological evidence indicate Marx was right: there’s absolutely no evidence that the Homo Sapiens ever was a pure solitary species (e.g. tiger, jaguar or the eagle) or a pure social species (eusocial species, e.g. bees, ants). Humans lived in groups as little as seven individuals, and in societies as large as billions (contemporary capitalism). The human being is neither purely collective nor purely solitary: it is just human. The only limit for the human being is that it is a natural being — this alone puts Marx apart from both Hegel and Kierkegaard (who I’ve never seen him quoting, but I may be mistaken), as both put the Homo Sapiens as a non-natural being, i.e. a spiritual being (Hegel in the form of the “Spirit of the World”; Kierkegaard in the form of the individual, atomistic soul).
I have nothing against a random individual reading Hegel or Kierkegaard, or Kant, or Heidegger or whatever. What I simply don’t accept is treating them as equals to Marx: all of them were, technically speaking, philosophers; but only Marx was a scientist. To dismiss Marx’s labor theory of value and the tendency of the profit rate to fall when studying capitalism is akin to dismissing Darwin’s evolution theory in biology. Sure you can do it — but you would be scientifically wrong.
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I don’t understand the obsession with some people with “Cultural Marxism”, for one simple reason: it is a fabrication of the post-1980s far-right. Here are the reasons why:
1) Those leftist postmodern groups that arose post-1968 never claimed to be the successors of Marx and never even used the term “Marxism” or even anything close to Marxist vocabulary; the Structuralist and Post-structuralist philosophical movements in France claimed to be so, but they were a late (1970s) and localized academic movement that quickly dissolved themselves and mutated to Postmodernism (also in France). Postmodernism proper was born at the middle 1980s, with the emblematic opus of Lyotard usually being used as the foundational stone;
2) In fact, if you study History of the 20th Century, you’ll quickly realize the embryos of those groups were actually anti-socialist/communist, petit-bourgeois marginal groups that were created to drive a wedge in the workers’ movement (e.g. Suffragettes). Sure, with the Cold War, socialism/communism was decimated in the West, so those movements occupied the political vacuum in the Left left by it;
3) It can be argued that even those identitary movements occupied the vacuum unwillingly: with the brutal crackdowns on the socialist left in the West came the brutal conservative offensive against identitarian movements from the right, which gradually expelled those movements to the left. Add to that that, in the USA, the process happened concomittantly with the Vietnam War and was married with the Black Civil Rights movement. Put it simply, it was a complex, uncommon alignment of historically specific factors which put those petit-bourgeois identitarian movements to the Left in the First World countries;
4) It is a myth that everything Left-wing is automatically Marxist in some way (even if somewhat unconsciously): the concept of Left and Right-wings came with the French Revolution of 1789, therefore long before Marx was even born. Even during Marx’s lifetime, socialists/communist “parties” were forbidden to dispute elections legally — so they were outside the Left-Right spectrum of bourgeois politics. The first relevant Socialist party to be legal was the SPD, with the foundation of Bismarckian Germany — at the end-half of Marx’s lifetime. Even in the 20th Century, many countries didn’t hesitate to outlaw the communist and socialist parties when revolution was a risk — that was specially true in Latin America during the Cold War;
5) Finally, the term “Cultural Marxism” saw its usage become widespread much later that even Postmodernism, in the 21st Century, specially after the 2008 meltdown in Wall Street. That was the moment the far-right saw the risk of a Marxist revival (because Marxism predicts crises in capitalism, being the only extant economic theory to do so) and, to kill two birds with one stone, fused together Postmodernism and Marxism in one term — Cultural Marxism — and created a (imaginary) chimera that we know today. But those are the same people who claim eveybody in California and some billionaries “communists”, so I don’t think they use the term scientifically.
Posted by: vk | Jun 9 2019 21:10 utc | 34
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