On
Mike Roberts's blog The Next Recession (arguing that the most important factor driving the current crisis in capitalism is the tendential fall in the rate of profit/LTRFP), there is a lively discussion in progress taking its starting point in the misrepresentations of Marx and his ideas perpetrated by Marxists without Marx such as Michael Heinrich and his sponsors the Monthly Review group. The discussion has ranged well beyond Heinrich and his shallow work and moved on to important differences between serious Marxist economists. These differences include the approach to fundamentals of scientific inquiry, which induced me to make the following proposal for a Hegel Boot Camp to bring all would-be Marxists up to speed on the Hegelian foundations of Marx's work:
Well, I’d like to send everybody here on a summer boot camp
to work through Hegel’s Logic together.
Programme:
Prepare by reading the lot — Part One, Objective Logic, Book One: Being, Book
Two: Essence; Part Two, Subjective Logic: The Concept.
Daily routine: participants take turns presenting papers in
plenum, followed by group sessions. Morning and afternoon same story. Evening
free form social hive buzzing over day’s harvest.
Expected course of events:
First week, “Being”: leads up to dissolution of Kant’s mind-forged manacles and
Saturday night dance and barbecue round the bonfire of the Antinomies.
Second week, “Essence”: leads up to acknowledgment of contradiction as
fundamental and inescapable ground of knowledge, thought and being. Dissolution
of “induction” as a possible source of knowledge ;-)
Third week, “The Concept”: leads up to acknowledgment that Kant’s a priori
insight was a damn sight more powerful than he ever imagined ;-) , and that Hegel
didn’t exactly stand him on his feet regarding this but rather blew open the
gates of concrete and steel that he misused the antinomies to construct in the
path of scientific and philosophical inquiry.
Fourth week, Science and Philosophy: papers and discussion on Anti-Dühring,
Dialectics of Nature, Empirio-Criticism, and free choice topics. Purpose: to
digest general methodological consequences of weeks one to three.
Fifth and final week, Economics and Politics: “Capital” and Marx’s and Engels’s
trajectory from the 1840s using the methodological foundations and consequences
thrashed out previously.
After such a learning experience our present discussion
would be much less of a mess. Fewer misunderstandings and grabbing the wrong
end of sticks. Because everyone would have a much better grasp of criteria for
scientific validity in general, and of Marx’s understanding of scientific
procedure in particular.
For instance, we wouldn’t be sloshing around in the dark in
an Arctic quagmire trying to wallop each other with cudgels labelled
“induction” or “inevitability”. We’d have a much better idea of what Marx
considered his categories of the theory of capitalism to be, as he presented
their unfolding and development from the simplest “cell” of economics, the
commodity, into the most advanced organism the capitalist mode of production
could generate – the credit system.
There’s a technology of thought as well as machines, and
except for a very few exceptions (Boolean logic, for instance) it’s been stagnating
since 1848. The suppression of Hegel’s revolutionary advances on Kant, and
Marx’s revolutionary advances on Hegel has been much more effective in crushing
progress in thought than even the institutional and legal instruments of
patents and copyright have been in crushing progress in material technology and
culture.
As I’ve written earlier, there’s a difference between the
collapse of capital as a mechanism of production and circulation (the immanent,
ideal, “mathematical”, pure, deductive, theoretical, whatever aspect) and the
collapse of capitalism as a social formation, a mode of production. Capital is
a process involving dead elements of completed labour. Capitalism is a social
formation composed of living human producers caught up in the capital process.
Living labour trying to orient itself and navigate a violent ocean using alien
instruments in a ship it has been forced to build to an alien design.
The better we understand the design of this ship Capital,
and the currents swirling under it, and the strengths and weaknesses of its
boiler and hull, and the way it is being sailed, the easier it is for us to
mutiny, seize it and expel the capitalists from the bridge, sail it into calmer
waters, and carry out a complete refit to our own design for our own ends.
This discussion is not just about Economics, it’s not even
just about Political Economy. It’s about understanding political economy in the
context of human society and history in general. And while digging into what
Marx actually wrote is a sine qua non for being able to do this, and
consequently a huge benefit emerging from this discussion of Heinrich and his
distortions of what Marx actually wrote, we mustn’t stop there or we’ll just
end up being so many clever dick Jack Horners admiring the plums our thumbs
have pulled out of the pudding and pie. We have to understand why he wrote it,
and how he was able to write it, and in what circumstances, both material and
immaterial.
This is the challenge of social-historical practice, of
thinking politics, and it is the challenge that would make our Hegel boot camp
into a more exciting intellectual experience than most of us might imagine.
Hegel is no agnostic, unlike Kant. He is after the Truth and won’t rest till he
can grasp it, judging the correlation between ideas, reality and experience.
And once you are in the hunt for the truth, you’re hooked: “das einzig
konsequente Mittel gegen die Vernunft ist, sich mit ihr gar nicht einzulassen”
(“the only consistent way to fight reason is not to engage with her at all”).
Andrew Kliman was good enough to comment on this:
I
don’t think Morph’s comments sufficiently appreciate the differences between
(a) philosophical knowledge of the kind that Hegel sought, (b) the kind of
knowledge that Marx understood the LTFRP as providing, and (c) what people are
engaged in when they make inductive inferences, which is not knowledge-acquisition.
AFAICS, Hegel was saying that philosophy needed its own methods, not that other
methods are incorrect in their own spheres.
and I responded:
Thanks for “engaging with reason” ;-) We shouldn’t forget
that our Reason is not just thundering in revolt, but is also Red in tooth and
claw!
Hegel was concerned with the processes of thought and logic in relation to the
truth. The energy with which he explored the foundations of every element
involved in this is unexampled – his intensity is on a par with Marx’s and I’m
not exaggerating. But it was a different field and more in thought than reality
– although once he came to a conclusion he applied what he had learned in more
applied fields of knowledge. So I think Andrew K needs to be more specific
about “philosophical knowledge” before we can start comparing. But let’s say
that Hegel sought the ultimate foundations of knowledge, continuing and
developing Kant’s almost equally ferocious and dedicated drive in the same
direction.
We can’t single out Marx’s view of the place of the LTFRP and compare it to
this. We have to see it in its place in the totality of Marx’s public work,
both intellectual and political to make a fair comparison. Marx tackled the
whole of Western Philosophy head on as a student, as we know from his doctoral
thesis among other things, and came to the conclusion that Hegel, using the
whole of this tradition, had found the ultimate foundations of knowledge as far
as they could be discovered using an idealist perspective. From then on Marx
applied himself to continuing and developing Hegel’s revolutionary work on a
materialist basis – the dialectical aspect of Marx’s work coming in from
Hegel’s fundamental solutions of the problems of thought, which Marx had no
reason to reject or modify, except as regards their roots in the spirit. We
know this from his comments in the correspondence with Engels regarding the use
he made of Hegel’s logic. (And as we also know, Marx never regarded anything as
correct unless it arose from first principles, and he applied first principles
everywhere and always, with a speed and sure-handedness that comes from long
practice that makes it hard to spot sometimes).
So Andrew’s distinction between Marx/LTFRP and Hegel’s search for philosophical
knowledge doesn’t really hold water. Marx was criticizing a whole mode of
production, a whole civilization, and this is a very general agenda that has
clear parallels with Hegel’s criticism of all hitherto practised philosophy,
especially given Hegel’s extremely broad and inclusive view of philosophy as
including thought and human practice – maybe I should have mentioned the
Phenomenology or brought it in as part of the preparatory reading for my boot
camp to make this clear.
As for inductive inferences not being knowledge acquisition this is nothing but
verbal wand-play. I brought in induction in a slighting (not sleighting ;-) ) way because all
induction is based on principles and axioms that can only be teased out
deductively. This is the inescapable a priori of thought so to say, the
revolutionary insight Hegel acknowledged in Kant, and an insight that freed up
Marx to pursue such a ferociously (again) deductive method in his study of
capital.
We could compare it to the gravitational power of a black hole – the deductive
theoretical black hole of Capital centred on the commodity and the value theory
sucking astronomical quantities of inductive empirical material into its orbit
(eg the material on the 10-hours day, primitive capitalist accumulation and all
the parliamentary Blue Books). Only I won’t, because we’d have to invert the
whole metaphor and turn a black abysmal Inferno of a black hole into a Paradiso
of clarity and light.
