I can't speak for the trends within Marxist Historiography, but I wish to aim thought at what I suspect is the direction of thought by Marx. I'm hesitant to say that I understand Marx but I do feel that I'm in my early stages towards his thought.
I suspect this a case where neglect to dialectical materialism leads to a unbridgeable divide where one emphasizes one to the expense of the other and there is no synthesis of the two. All those impossible dualities, mechanistic materialism Versus Subjective Idealism, empiricism versus rationalism and many more. I think should also distinguish methodological individualism/collectivism from metaphysical claims of the ontology of reality. That whilst accepting a methodology that emphasizes the economy, it doesn't necessarily mean it entails my metaphysical beliefs because there is always a degree of reductionism in any abstraction, one can't hold the entire world in every detail in one's maps of it, there are different emphasis. It's inevitable that any abstraction is
reductionist...
Because chaos is a science of whole dynamic systems, rather than separate parts, it represents, in effect, an unacknowledged vindication of the dialectical view. Up to now, scientific investigation has been too much isolated into its constituent parts. In pursuit of the "parts" the scientific specialist becomes too specialised not infrequently losing all sight of the "whole." Experimentation and theoretical rationalisations thus became increasingly removed from reality. More than a century ago, Engels criticised the narrowness of what he called the metaphysical method, which consisted of looking at things in an isolated way, which lost sight of the whole. The starting point of the supporters of chaos theory was a reaction against precisely this method, which they call "reductionism." Engels explained that the "reduction" of the study of nature to separate disciplines is to some extent necessary and inevitable.
"When we reflect on nature or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless maze of connections in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away…
"But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of phenomena as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we cannot do this, we are not clear about the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately according to its nature, special causes and effects, etc."
But as Engels warned, too great a retreat into "reductionism" can lead to an undialectical view, or a drift to metaphysical ideas.
And so it's not the case that by emphasizing one perspective that one rejects the existence of other parts not within that abstract framing. We necessarily zoom in on certain things, block out many things in order to make sense of things, otherwise we'd be trying to hold the entire reality in our heads, but fortunately we individuate and break things up.
The criticisms that apply to a purely individualist account just as aptly apply to the collectivist account and they remain a subpar grasp of reality to assert one as dominant as the other but an emphasis of both is necessary to begin picturing the whole. That it seems to me that Marx, though not everyone labelled a Marxist asserts the existence of both material limitations but also the agency of individuals who can then be positioned in wider groupings such as a class distinction (which isn't a strictly discrete classification I don't think). That it seems to me that Marxism isn't economic determinist, but is interpreted as such by those that don't grasp aspects of his dialectical thinking. I know from past experiences in trying to tangle with things like the framework of base and superstructure I felt a strong need to emphasize one over the other because I had views of a linear causality where one thing causes the other and so one needs a starting point. But reality is more complex as now seen with things like Chaos theory, where the apparent disorder that is seemingly impossible to predict in a linear fashion is still in its total, deterministic. The difficulty being that minor changes can change everything else, everything is pressing on everything else to various degrees, that can't look to things as one lead thing to another, they're all in a state of flux, in some sort of balance of different forces.
I take it the tough part is a materialist conception of human consciousness, that isn't to say that our thoughts aren't abstractions that don't have an immaterial existence. Thought can't be reduced to or made identical to the material processes that give rise to our consciousness.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/one1.htmThese views do not consist in deriving sensation from the movement of matter or in reducing sensation to the movement of matter, but in recognising sensation as one of the properties of matter in motion.
But human consciousness isn't than the result of something as abstract as the intervention of God with a separate ontology where our ability to act is treated as miracle that I think and then act in accordance with that thought. I think in another thread, that Potemkin fella does a nice summary of
Schopenhauer's essay On the Freedom of the Will? which critiques the metaphysical sense of free will.
Human free will is seen as being subject to mechanical forces, but human beings aren't so simple, our consciousness is something that complicate that deterministic view that was arrived at reasonably when applied to the laws of nature.
But man's free will relates to his conscious and approximate awareness of reality. That the practical conception of human's free will is the difference between not being aware of things and thus making decisions out of ignorance and that of making a decision under informed consent.
Here's a useful summary from
Engels...
Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.
Now when it comes to a Marxist view of human consiousness, I recommend reading
Feliks Mikhailov, 1976 - The Riddle of the Self as I won't do justice to his overall work here.
But if one reads it, begin to see how he understands the mind-body problem arises from the limitations of philosophical logic prior to Hegel and how Dialectics don't confront the issue because it goes beyond the problematic assumptions that inform previous logic.
Evald Ilyenkov Dialectical Logic is also a good piece on this but Feliks I think is easier for those of us like myself who aren't that philosophically switched on.
Really, I don't think I know the works well enough in a conscious way to summarize their points and can only recommend them as a read as I think they address the issue of the mind-body problem and give direction understanding human consciousness. Which relates to the assumptions that underpin one's logic and one's logic is the basis on which one derives a rational sense of the world.
That its emphasis on flux and other things avoids the problem arrived at from logic inherited and refined from the past.
So for example, in concieving of man as a passive reflector of the objective world end up with theoretical
framings such as:
The basic defect of all materialism before Marxism was, as Marx said, its contemplativeness. The rigid and one-sided line taken by contemplative materialism compels the scientist to view the subject as something passive, responding to the stimulus of external objects. The object is the seal and the brain is the wax. To examine the properties and attributes of the imprint one must naturally study the wax, which, of course, merely copies t e shape of the seal. This is the logic of the inventors of the notorious mind-body problem!
But the brain is not wax and the organism is not a lump of matter on which the external world leaves its imprints. And not just because of the different scales of their material and structural organisation. What matters is the way in which the problem is theoretically formulated.
Within Feliks outline there is a strong emphasis on the social nature of human consciousness, which hints at the material basis of our thinking. That we aren't imbued with knowledge from some metaphysical deity nor are things somewhere to be found in the brain from conception. But human's nature and his consciousness is a social process, one of activity with the world, one in which he inherits the history of humanity into his particular self objectified in the form of buildings, technology, and the writing that disposes acquired knowledge upon him.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mikhailov/works/riddle/riddle3b.htmAcademician N. P. Dubinin writes: “The possibilities of human cultural growth are endless. This growth is not imprinted in the genes. It is quite obvious that if the children of contemporary parents were deprived from birth of the conditions of contemporary culture, they would remain at the level of our most remote ancestors who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Whereas the children of such “primitive people” placed in the conditions of contemporary culture would rise to the heights of contemporary man.” [2]
To emphasize this I think
Vygotsky seems to be useful in a better emphasis on human development.
Human thought develops NOT from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual! What a stunningly correct and dialectical conception! So much for the subjective idealist prejudice that all human beings begin as individuals, their development consisting of the cancellation of their essential, inner individuality! In this approach, Hegel agrees with Vygotsky
The point of this is that one can't conceive of human agency without first understanding the nature of the human subject and his consciousness.
And whilst I see these works as hinting a better understanding, I've not yet arrived at any conclusion to the nature of the human subjectivity except that it is clearly derived from our experience of reality and shaped by social forces. This i suspect is still subject to being seen as ones consciousness is determined by social forces upon him, to which in some respect he may be manipulated in such a way and would be unfree in Engel's sense of freedom. That he can only be free by being aware, conscious of his own thought and the world around him. That there's still left unknown about human subjectivity in relation to the world around them, which opens up into all sorts of things around ideology and propaganda (superstructure) directing people. But this seems to be a case of people being unconscious to themselves and the world around them are the unfree, the ones that seem easily propalled by base desires. Not that anyone is above those base emotional tendencies, its an inherent vulnerability of ours. But it would seem that Marx and Engels perhaps thought one could acquire a scientific understanding of the world through the logic of their dialectical materialism. It would make mankind aware of its own thought as well as the conditions in which he existed in. From developing the philosophical outlook of Marxism, one is able to become conscious and thus become free in the sense of being a conscious agent who acts upon an informed sense of the world.
I'm trying to think how tensions within the base, social relations gives rise to changes in the superstructure/culture and thus people under stress from some conditions garner a new consciousness from the material world and leads to them acting on such a tension.
As it's quite clear that without human actions, nothing would be done, man is always in a state of action, society would stagnate and fall apart otherwise, things that seem to be in a static state are in fact actively maintained, in the same way one looks the same but one replenishes ones self with food and water.
So for one tension, I like to think of the shift from feudalism with the family unit as the mode of production having technological changes founded by the initiative of mankind. Who took advantage of natural laws for productive capacities which plays a role in the eventual shift to industrial capital and put pressure on pre-existing gender relations.
And from it emerges feminist consciousness as women find the conditions that actualize their ability to organize around one another in a shared interest as they get brought into capital relations, organizing their own unions, speaking out in their shared experiences of how mens actions leave them destitute when they spend their money on booze or victimization through sexual violence. The patriarchal relations inherited from past conditions, exaggerate themselves under industrial capital with a new ideology around gender relations with cult of domesticity. Men in the public life women in the private, which many women remain in terms of keeping their labor, even paid in the home. But soon women brought to public sphere when they and children are used for cheap labor for emerging industries. The conditions give rise to them to act out in their conditions, orgnaizing unions and so on, their agency has to be concrete and placed within its concrete context. That they weren't just subjectively aware of their situation in some sense, but the conditions played a part in bringing about that consciousness because they had to observe the world to see what was happening and it played a part in them then figuring out how to achieve their perceived needs in addressing those problems.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htmMen make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
To which I think it still might be taken that humans have no free will and are strictly determined by the material conditions, but I think this is still operating in the mechanistic materialist logic. Not seeing that its merely an emphasis that human beings consciousness and actions can not exist in a vacuum, their very being is made through their real world conditions. I suppose to consider how humans are special in regards to having developed language and communication where we have the means to act on things in order to support our material needs and society for many seems to be above the early conditions that gave rise to our being. To which I would recommend reading '
2. The Language of Real Life' of Feliks work to better consider the origins of humans nature and consciousness where man seems to have acquired an awareness and unique manner of considering things in order to consider the world, his needs and how to satisfy those needs through increasingly complex ways through improved consciousness.
All this doesn't allow for a predictable reality, in the same way that a cricket game can't be predicted in spite of knowing all the conditions available to it, many differences can lead to dramatically different outcomes whether it be the bowler's spin, the pitch, the skill of the batman, the quality of the bat and so on. So much to be accounted for simultaneously that one can only approximate and it can be really wrong because the likely outcome and better approximation can change as things change further in time.
https://www.marxist.com/science-old/chaostheory.htmlBut given the almost limitless complexity of human society and economics, it is inconceivable that major events like wars would not disrupt these patterns. Marxists would argue that society does lend itself to scientific study. In contrast to those who see only formlessness, Marxists see human development from the starting point of material forces, and a scientific description of social categories like classes, and so on. If the development of chaos science leads to an acceptance that the scientific method is valid in politics and economics, then it is a valuable plus. However, as Marx and Engels have always understood, theirs is an inexact science, meaning that broad trends and developments could be traced, but detailed and intimate knowledge of all influences and conditions is not possible.
And I suppose part of that unpredictability is humans, it adds a chaotic element that doesn't guarantee as much certainty as when considering nature mechanically. Not that nature isn't chaotic and difficult to predict in linear way because of flux of variables (weather).
There is a sense of determinism when looking to the past as there is a bias to thinking of how could it have been otherwise. But if one looks tot he future, like my example with predicting a simple cricket match, we see the uncertainty, that lack of predictability but only a framing of potentials and possibilities ever changing as conditions ever change. Nothing is guaranteed, because no person can adequately hold knowledge of everything about the world, something always in a state of change, where radically changes can occur suddenly due to mere quantitative increases in many different parts of reality. That one can give a certain direction to such chaos like one can the weather or the cricket match though, if one identifies the essential relations, the limits and components, then one sets a frame for what is possible within reality. That one doesn't draw from one's imagination the impossible but tries to rationally approximate things in a decreasing probability the further into the future one tries to predict things.
I will stumble here as I'm just trying to work out my thought and don't have a firm conclusion.
I think we can certainly note the actions of very notable people because their actions played out through the organizations they worked with in. Someone like a Lenin is of great interest because of his place within history, but he is also a single individual within a particular time and place as well. He didn't single handled create the revolution and Soviet Union. He was but a man, and whilst one can consider actions for which he is responsible for and his influence within his context, we can also consider that there was an entire society of people who acted. And their consciousness was determined by their conditions, what they had inherited from the history of mankinds labour and works. And within all that is a complex interaction where many individuals acting isn't strictly deterministic in a linear fashion, but in a broader scope one can see how they as particulars relate to the universal. To which I imagine there isn't much attention to an individual because because examining an individual doesn't allow for a predictive sense of something as large as society. Looking at the particulars doesn't help us comprehend the universal, that there must be an awareness of the totality when considering the parts.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay2.htmAn immense role in the development of logic, and in preparing the ground for modern views on its subject matter, a role far from fully appreciated, was played by Spinoza. Like Leibniz, Spinoza rose high above the mechanistic limitations of the natural science of his time. Any tendency directly to universalise partial forms and methods of thinking only useful within the bounds of mechanistic, mathematical natural science was also foreign to him.
But it's from this that the individual is of interest as well and I imagine is something that still needs to be investigated, the particular being the human subject, who of course isn't isolated as his consciousness whilst residing in him is implicated in his social world, he isn't the feral child raised by animals. And even in understanding the individual, it is also part of understanding the social, one can't separate the to. And so someone like Lenin can't be separated and treated in an atomized fashion, his being like anyones is social.
And I suppose hard for me to pinpoint the sort of chaotic part where humans move. That its interesting that we seem to embody and retain our reality, that I can think of things which aren't objectively in front of me and such. Which is some quirk of consciousness I don't know how to explain, the sort of enduring nature of it and that we have memory.
All ends up feeling like what is a leader without the group and vice versa. Does the leader dictate the crowd or does the crowd dictate the type of leader that arises? Or is it a case of a dialectical relationship like the base structure where there isn't a clear starting point because everything is happening simultaneously, acting on one another, endless threads of factors to be included or excluded in one's conception of what caused things. That it does seem hard to quantify the influence and impact of Lenin, because in trying to isolate a thing one can end up going through all of history to many threads of factors that can all be considered to have played a part in the causality of things that lead to his place in history and outcomes of his actions. It just puts ones head in a whirl trying to grasp reality and its motion of everything and consider the effects of that motion. Because Lenins actions have real world effects just like anyones actions can have effects to certain degrees, where some actions play pivotal parts at what seem like pivotal events. To which I suppose someone like Lenin if we consider them free by Engels definition was able to be more active an agent in some ways, but then even those that might be seen as unconscious still have effects upon the world but they don't navigate it with the awareness of someone like Lenin. But then even someone who doesn't have a great grasp of things can react to things and cause significant change in what ever grasp they have of their situation, which can effect others and cause them to play a part. So an individual can be the small initial reaction that causes a cascade because somehow the conditions are ripe and so the cascade means that no individual is solely responsible for simply being the first in the reaction. Though this again sounds like mechanistic materialism and talking about a chemical reaction. To which I think of Billy Joel, We didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world's been turning. Reality came into existence somehow and we ponder a beginning, but regardless its being put into motion and the particulars are many and complicated.
eh struggling with my crass efforts on dialectics and failed to clarify the matter but hopefully point in some direction where a better understand might be developed and resolve this. I suspect someone who understood dialectics would be able to clarify the confusion here.
Good luck to resolving the matter folks
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics