Politics_Observer wrote:@Atlantis
That's not what I have read. Ph. D in Philosophy Stephen Hicks states:
https://www.stephenhicks.org/2013/02/18 ... -politics/
So there you have it, Karl Marx advocated violent revolution.
In regards to what Hicks states.
I'm not convinced by the point that the advocacy for revolution is simply a matter of speed/pace, but rather the inherent conflict between workers interests and that of capitalists. Those that tend towards reformism tend to mark out accidental features as essential while ignoring the things which necessarily mark the basis of class conflict.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfWhen Marx and Engels write of the need for revolution, their point is that the radical restructuring of society so that communism can be achieved can only be carried out by the proletariat. Of course, the proletariat does not currently lead society—and so a revolution would be necessary for that class to be in the position of leading humanity. Thus, the argument for political revolution—a transfer of political hegemony from one part of society to another—as a means to achieve communism is tied together with Marx and Engels’ identification of the proletariat as the progressive, existing force within society that can realize communism. Paden would be well within his rights to disagree with Marx and Engels that this is true of the proletariat, but insofar as he provides no argument to that effect, he does not provide adequate support for his decision to dismiss out of hand the idea that revolution might be necessary for communism to be realized, and that mere moralism might not do the job.
Additionally, with respect to Paden’s first objection, Paden seems to overlook that Marx and Engels’ belief that revolution may involve violence is based on the fact that the bourgeoisie is quite certain to violently oppose and suppress any attempts to infringe upon private property and bourgeois rule. It is not that Marx and Engels think violent revolution, taken abstractly, has some inherently progressive potential, considered in isolation from specific historical circumstances. (A “violent revolution” undertaken by a small, politically isolated sect would be nothing more than romantic adventurism, for example.) Rather, Marx and Engels do both seem to think that for the working class to be successful in its revolutionary or often, even in its merely reformist aims, it must be prepared to survive the brutally and violently reactionary forces that have historically been deployed to defend capital, from the Freikorps in Germany, to the Pinkertons in the U.S., to Pinochet’s DINA in Chile. I can see no reason to think it prima facie just up for grabs, as Paden seems to, that “the power of moral criticism” might be enough to see the working class through such tough times.
Paden’s second criticism of the kind of view I attribute to Marx and Engels is that it wrongly assumes that people’s actions and beliefs are strictly determined by their economic class interests. The idea here is, Who’s to say that a member of the bourgeoisie might not be swayed by moral argument alone? But I don’t think that reading Marx and Engels as critics of the mere moralism of the Utopian socialists in any way commits one to the view that moral argument never, in any case, can bring a person to the view that communism is desirable unless she already has economic interests that would be served by it. Certainly, Paden is quite right that historically, people from a range of social classes have been convinced of the need for communism and sometimes through moral argument. And I think Marx and Engels, of all people, were well aware that one need not actually be a member of the working class in order to be convinced of the need for communism. But Marx and Engels do think it is a mistake to advocate mere appeal to human beings’ moral sentiments without taking into account what their economic interests are and whether those interests are better served by the maintenance of the status quo or a transition to a different type of society. To interpret Marx and Engels’ critique of mere moralism as a criticism of the view that moral argument alone can bring about communism does not require one to show that no one ever responds to moral reasons even where they go against one’s self interest. Rather, the question is whether mere moralizing alone can ever galvanize the majority of society in the way that would be required for a transition to communism, and if Paden thinks that it can, then I think he owes us some argument for it....
The implementation of such a genuine, substantive freedom of course would require “despotic inroads117 on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production,” something Marx already wrote earlier, in The Communist Manifesto (Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW 6:504). It would neither be a realization of bourgeois freedom nor would it even be commensurate with, or justifiable on the basis of, bourgeois freedom and equality, even as it is bourgeois production which makes this substantive freedom first possible.
It is also quite a naive view that such radical changes based on essential opposition is something bestowed upon a people rather than forcefully taken. Even the progressive reforms in the US originate in illiberal struggles in civil society, they are benevolently given by the state out of nowhere but because pressure is exerted on them.
In regards to the characterization of human nature, Hicks is crude in his characterization.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htmMarx did not believe, as do many contemporary sociologists and psychologists, that there is no such thing as the nature of man; that man at birth is like a blank sheet of paper, on which the culture writes its text. Quite in contrast to this sociological relativism, Marx started out with the idea that man qua man is a recognizable and ascertainable entity; that man can be defined as man not only biologically, anatomically and physiologically, but also psychologically.
Of course, Marx was never tempted to assume that "human nature" was identical with that particular expression of human nature prevalent in his own society. In arguing against Bentham, Marx said: "To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticize all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch." [22] It must be noted that this concept of human nature is not, for Marx -- as it was not either for Hegel -an abstraction. It is the essence of man -- in contrast to the various forms of his historical existence -- and, as Marx said, "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual." [23] It must also be stated that this sentence from Capital, written by the "old Marx," shows the continuity of the concept of man's essence ( Wesen) which the young Marx wrote about in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. He no longer used the term "essence" later on, as being abstract and unhistorical, but he clearly retained the notion of this essence in a more historical version, in the differentiation between "human nature in general" and "human nature as modified" with each historical period.
In line with this distinction between a general human nature and the specific expression of human nature in each culture, Marx distinguishes, as we have already mentioned above, two types of human drives and appetites: the constant or fixed ones, such as hunger and the sexual urge, which are an integral part of human nature, and which can be changed only in their form and the direction they take in various cultures, and the "relative" appetites, which are not an integral part of human nature but which "owe their origin to certain social structures and certain conditions of production and communication." [24] Marx gives as an example the needs produced by the capitalistic structure of society. "The need for money," he wrote in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates.... This is shown subjectively, partly in the fact that the expansion of production and of needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural, and imaginary appetites." [25]
Man's potential, for Marx, is a given potential; man is, as it were, the human raw material which, as such, cannot be changed, just as the brain structure has remained the same since the dawn of history. Yet, man does change in the course of history; he develops himself; he transforms himself, he is the product of history; since he makes his history, he is his own product. History is the history of man's self-realization; it is nothing but the self-creation of man through the process of his work and his production: "the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the emergence of nature for man; he therefore has the evident and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own origins." [26]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch05-s02.htmlWhen discussing biological factors, one should not reduce them to the genetic. More attention should be given to the physiological and ontogenetic aspects of development, and particularly to those that evoke a pathological effect, for it is these that modify the biology of the human being, who is also beginning to perceive even social factors in quite a different way. Dialectics does not simply put the social and the biological factors on an equal footing and attribute the human essence to the formula of biotropic-sociotropic determination favoured by some scientists. It stresses the dominant role of the social factors. Nor does dialectics accept the principles of vulgar sociologism, which ignores the significance of the biological principle in man.
And learn of any modern biology course and will see how while there is the biological basis, it is inseparable from the environmental influence and that the point is how the human is shaped by ones conditions as we're not simply instinctly on many accounts but quite adaptable.
Man must always drink water, but how does he do it, what is the social form, his needs are quite different in modernity than ancient man.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1925/lenin/zetkin2.htmTo be sure, thirst has to be quenched. But would a normal person normally lie down in the gutter and drink from a puddle? Or even from a glass whose edge has been greased by many lips? But the social aspect is more important than anything else.
Although Marxists do emphasize the malleability and social nature of people against abstract individualism of people being prior to social relations and development.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Synopsis%20of%20Ilyenkov.pdf• Spinoza solved the puzzle that we perceive the form of external bodies
themselves, and not the impression they make on our sense organs, stating that
the capacity of human beings which made thinking possible was: “The capacity
of a thinking body to mould its own action actively to the shape of any other
body, to coordinate the shape of its movement in space with the shape and
distribution of all other bodies.” From this it followed that:
• It was this capacity to mould its actions to the form of any other body which
needed to be investigated, “to elucidate and discover in the thinking thing those
very structural features that enable it to perform its specific function.”
• Rather than seeing thought as something distinct and unique to human beings,
Spinoza held that all creatures, though especially the higher mammals,
possessed this capacity in degrees; the human body was marked out only by the
fact that our capacity was universal, and not limited to a specific range of
objects and environments.
• Spinoza eschewed introspection as a method for the investigation of thinking.
• It is in the activity of the human body in the shape of another external body that
Spinoza saw the key to the solution of the whole problem. “Within the skull you
will not find anything to which a functional definition of thought could be
applied, because thinking is a function of external, objective activity. And you
must therefore investigate not the anatomy and physiology of the brain but …
the ‘anatomy and physiology’ of the world of his culture, the world of the
‘things’ that he produces and reproduces by his activity.”
The tendency to consider things abstracted from their real worlds relations is an approach of ideology.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch08.htmThis is only giving a new twist to the old favourite ideological method, also known as the a priori method, which consists in ascertaining the properties of an object, by logical deduction from the concept of the object, instead of from the object itself. First the concept of the object is fabricated from the object; then the spit is turned round, and the object is measured by its reflexion, the concept. The object is then to conform to the concept, not the concept to the object. With Herr Dühring the simplest elements, the ultimate abstractions he can reach, do service for the concept, which does not alter matters; these simplest elements are at best of a purely conceptual nature. The philosophy of reality, therefore, proves here again to be pure ideology, the deduction of reality not from itself but from a concept.
And when such an ideologist constructs morality and law from the concept, or the so-called simplest elements of “society”, instead of from the real social relations of the people round him, what material is then available for this construction? Material clearly of two kinds: first, the meagre residue of real content which may possibly survive in the abstractions from which he starts and, secondly, the content which our ideologist once more introduces from his own consciousness. And what does he find in his consciousness? For the most part, moral and juridical notions which are a more or less accurate expression (positive or negative, corroborative or antagonistic) of the social and political relations amidst which he lives; perhaps also ideas drawn from the literature on the subject; and, as a final possibility, some personal idiosyncrasies. Our ideologist may turn and twist as he likes, but the historical reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day — an image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head.
And it is this abstract individualism Marx is hostile to and was prolific in economics with Robinson crusoe theories.
The claim of economic determinism is also weak and crude.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfWhat Marx describes when he addresses the way in which economic laws play a role in determining the actions of human beings, are tendencies of members of various social groups to act in circumstances shaped through those laws, and not iron-clad predictions for particular individuals. Howard Sherman, in his 1981 paper, “Marx and Determinism,” puts this point very nicely when he writes:
Marx pointed out that one can find regularities of human behavior, that on the average we do behave in certain predictable ways. This behavior also changes in systematic ways, with predictable trends, in association with changes in our technological and social environments. At a simpler level, the regularities of human behavior are obvious in the fairly constant annual numbers of suicides and divorces (although these also show systematic trends). If humans did not, generally, behave in fairly predictable ways, not only social scientists but also insurance companies would have gone out of business long ago. Any particular individual may make any particular choice, but if we know the social composition of a group, we can predict, in general, what it will do. Thus, on the average, most large owners of stock will vote in favor of preferential tax rates for capital gains; most farmers will favor laws that they believe to be in the interest of farmers109.
As a rule, a capitalist will tend to maximize his profit irrespective of the social repercussions. A bourgeois intellectual will tend to develop theoretical justifications for the continuation of capitalism, often in spite of the glaring social contradictions.
It seems to become increasingly clear Mr. Hicks can only see his own one-sided readings more so than he has been able to actually understand Marx. This si common to both detractors of Marx and those who are naive in their attempted charitable readings of Marx, they simply can't think along the lines he does as they don't understand the tradition he belongs to.
And as mentioned in the earlier quote about moralism, the point isn't that there isn't a basis of communication, but it is certainly the case that one's lives circumstance heavily shapes one's outlook on reality. This can sometimes be used crudely to denounce opposing views as inherently reactionary and class based, but this is once again, a crude and dogmatic use of Marxism.
I would also emphasize Marx's participation and support of the English Chartist movement which sought political representation.
And when there are essential oppositions of interest, why would one expect reason alone to change the conditions of the world? This is no better than simply wishing the ruling elite to dissolve itself and why? Why would it oppose its interests because some people are getting hurt? I don't see many Robert Owen's around.
I think Hicks has to, like the earlier writer Make a coherent case for why moralizing ones oppressors somehow changes the world? What historical examples show people listening and benevolently changing things before things get ugly and unable to be ignored?
In the case of Karl Marx, revolutionary violence was not the only option and what he would have accomplished in the end with that revolutionary violence would not have helped society anyway. The ends didn't justify the means and probably would have left society worse off than it was previously.
Do you oppose revolutions entirely? I always find this peculiar among Americans when it was founded by revolutionaries and seems only to reflect attachment to a status quo and disagreement with the ends more so than a categorical opposition to violence as a means.
Your response to Atlantis even shows the nuance of violence as a moral good and appropriate means. Even the Buddhist pacifists marks violence as appropriate for what they consider an unreasonable evil that does harm to others and will not stop and thus warranting the greater good of violently opposing them.
And even in your defense of the US' governments foreign policy and interventionism is interesting as there is a strong tendency among Americans to assume a kind of benevolence to the intentions of US political actors such that if the intervention is based on the idea of righting some wrong and makes things worse for people, it is an honest mistake. Which is a sorry excuse as me saying I didn't mean to hurt my wife but alas she is still hurt by what I did, ownership for actions not always arising in the history of US wars.
There is pressure at times for the US to intervene but the track record is only agreeable if you oppose the very ends which the government sought to oppose.
Which is fine but sincerity shows itself in a clear stating of such interests and allying with goals, but less so in detracting the methods which are allowable for ones agreed to ends.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By FiveofSwords
- By wat0n