Os Cangaceiros
11th September 2012, 22:20
Debates regarding the theoretical beliefs of rather esoteric philosophers who lived 150+ years ago appeals to nerds like me!
Anyway, the Weekly Worker wrote an article about Proudhon a couple months back, and Iain McKay (the editor of a recent Proudhon anthology) recently responded:
Dear Weekly Worker
I am flattered you found my anthology of Proudhon of such interest (Mike Macnair, No Guide to revolution, Weekly Worker, July 19 2012). While it is nice to read that overall McKay and his translator collaborators have done a significant service to the Anglophone left, I fear that the review gets much wrong.
I am surprised that Macnair spends so much time disputing that Proudhon matches the profile of a worker, artisan or peasant autodidact given that he admits Proudhon had to work for a living. Macnair is alone in this: every writer on Proudhon including Marxist John Ehrenberg acknowledges his working-class roots.
The facts are clear. His father was employed in a brewery and as a cooper and, after failing as a self-employed brewer-publican, worked the small family farm of his wife. Proudhon only attended secondary school thanks to a bursary arranged with the help of his fathers former employer, forced to leave in 1827 because of family poverty to become employed in a print shop. After a failed attempt to become a master printer and winning a scholarship, he became the employee of a transport company before, in 1848, finally becoming a full-time writer.
Is Macnair really suggesting that someone who had to sell his labour to capitalists is not a worker? Or is he taking Kautskys and Lenins elitist nonsense that workers cannot develop socialist theory to new lows? He is correct that being working class does not automatically make you right, but rather than leave it at that he denies that Proudhon was working class! Which should make you wonder how accurate the rest of his piece is. Sad to say, it is riddled with errors and often repeats distortions refuted in my introductory material.
For example, to proclaim Proudhon was an opponent of political democracy as such is simply nonsense. He was opposed to democracy limited to picking masters in a centralised political hierarchy, favouring one based on mandated and recallable delegates: as implemented, with praise from Marx, in the Paris Commune by Proudhons followers. (Property is Theft!, 28-9, 41) His summary of The social revolution demonstrated by the coup dtat of December 2shows he has not read it.
He is wrong to assert that System of economic contradictions is a deeply incoherent book, precisely because of its methodology. It is only incoherent if you fail to understand that he is analysing an economic system riddled with contradictions, aspects of which he discusses in turn. True, his presentation is flawed but with patience his argument becomes clear particularly as it expands on the one presented in What is Property? Sadly, Macnair does not understand that work, proclaiming it an internal critique of defences of rent-bearing property. This is not the case, as it also explicitly addresses how surplus value is produced by wage-labour. (116-7).
To reduce Solution of the Social Problem to a polemic against political democracy as involved in the solution to the social problem is misleading. It is a critique of bourgeois representative democracy in favour of a delegate democracy based on mandates and recall (273). During 1848 he urged workers to go beyond political reform into social reform to secure the revolution and so sought to extend democracy (crucially into the economy), making it genuine. (55)
It is also strange to see it proclaimed that Proudhons political ideas were somewhat closer to the small is beautiful (Schumacher) approach when my book shows, Marxist myths not withstanding, that he was not against large-scale industry. To present him as urging peasant and artisan production is simply untenable. (10-1, 73) He also states that Proudhon thought the right of withdrawal could provide the only real controls against managerial power. Yet Proudhon explicitly argued for industrial democracy, the election of management (11-2) something Mondragon is deficient in.
Then there is the claim that I sidestep Proudhons patriarchalism while proclaiming that he sought to hive off family relations by making them into a separate sphere handled by women, under the authority of men. So rather than apply his ideas on federalism to relations between men and women as between communes and workplaces, he embraced the hierarchy he rejected elsewhere. Macnair misses the obvious: Proudhons sexism is, as I state, in direct contradiction to his own libertarian and egalitarian ideas. As for my alleged discomfort with it, in reality little discussion is needed to prove this (48) showing Macnair speculations to be false.
The problem with Proudhon, apparently, is that he does not avoid the problem of political ordering. Yet he repeatedly argued for socio-economic organisation hence the universal association of the 1840s, which became the agricultural-industrial federation of the 1860s. Rather than the tyranny of structurelessness, Proudhon advocated non-statist federal socio-economic structures. And if Macnair considers that federations immediately pose within themselves the same problems of political ordering as states then he is implying that the state will never wither away
Macnair wonders why the texts included were picked my biographical sketch indicates why for the major works. As for the shorter pieces, those I felt those speak for themselves. As for What is Property?, how can you have a Proudhon anthology without it? It would be like excluding The Manifesto of the Communist Party from one on Marx.
As my book is about Proudhon, not Marx I did not spend too much time on works by Marx that he was not aware of. Apparently, I accuse Marx of having in The poverty of philosophy misread Proudhon, which is not true I show how he repeatedly misrepresents Proudhon (and contradicts himself in later works). As I note, Marx at times does point to flaws in Proudhons ideas but to state my objections to Marxs critique are largely extremely secondary fails to acknowledge that Marx does not meet the basic standards of honest debate. He also wonders if I included Proudhons letter to Marx as as evidence of Marxs sectarianism. How paranoid to ponder the reasons for the inclusion of a famous letter between two giants of socialism!
Macnair concludes it is worth reading Proudhon, then. But not in any sense as a guide, as McKay suggests, to the general idea of the revolution in the 21st century. It sad that he takes my obvious rift on Proudhons General idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century to imply that I am urging people to accept all of his ideas when, being a revolutionary class-struggle anarchist, I explicitly did not: we should not slavishly copy Proudhons ideas, we can take what is useful and, like Bakunin, Kropotkin and others, develop them further in order to inspire social change in the 21st century. (51) Still, I hope your readers will take his advice but spend more time actually reading what Proudhon (and I) wrote!
Finally, Macnair states that Marx and Engels from 1846 onwards more or less constantly urged the organisation of the working class for political action. He fails to discuss its outcome unsurprisingly, given its utter failure. Perhaps because these dire results were predicted by anarchists helps explains the current rise in our ideas?
Yours sincerely,
Iain McKay
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/letter-weekly-worker-proudhon
Weekly Worker article here:
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/923
Anyway, the Weekly Worker wrote an article about Proudhon a couple months back, and Iain McKay (the editor of a recent Proudhon anthology) recently responded:
Dear Weekly Worker
I am flattered you found my anthology of Proudhon of such interest (Mike Macnair, No Guide to revolution, Weekly Worker, July 19 2012). While it is nice to read that overall McKay and his translator collaborators have done a significant service to the Anglophone left, I fear that the review gets much wrong.
I am surprised that Macnair spends so much time disputing that Proudhon matches the profile of a worker, artisan or peasant autodidact given that he admits Proudhon had to work for a living. Macnair is alone in this: every writer on Proudhon including Marxist John Ehrenberg acknowledges his working-class roots.
The facts are clear. His father was employed in a brewery and as a cooper and, after failing as a self-employed brewer-publican, worked the small family farm of his wife. Proudhon only attended secondary school thanks to a bursary arranged with the help of his fathers former employer, forced to leave in 1827 because of family poverty to become employed in a print shop. After a failed attempt to become a master printer and winning a scholarship, he became the employee of a transport company before, in 1848, finally becoming a full-time writer.
Is Macnair really suggesting that someone who had to sell his labour to capitalists is not a worker? Or is he taking Kautskys and Lenins elitist nonsense that workers cannot develop socialist theory to new lows? He is correct that being working class does not automatically make you right, but rather than leave it at that he denies that Proudhon was working class! Which should make you wonder how accurate the rest of his piece is. Sad to say, it is riddled with errors and often repeats distortions refuted in my introductory material.
For example, to proclaim Proudhon was an opponent of political democracy as such is simply nonsense. He was opposed to democracy limited to picking masters in a centralised political hierarchy, favouring one based on mandated and recallable delegates: as implemented, with praise from Marx, in the Paris Commune by Proudhons followers. (Property is Theft!, 28-9, 41) His summary of The social revolution demonstrated by the coup dtat of December 2shows he has not read it.
He is wrong to assert that System of economic contradictions is a deeply incoherent book, precisely because of its methodology. It is only incoherent if you fail to understand that he is analysing an economic system riddled with contradictions, aspects of which he discusses in turn. True, his presentation is flawed but with patience his argument becomes clear particularly as it expands on the one presented in What is Property? Sadly, Macnair does not understand that work, proclaiming it an internal critique of defences of rent-bearing property. This is not the case, as it also explicitly addresses how surplus value is produced by wage-labour. (116-7).
To reduce Solution of the Social Problem to a polemic against political democracy as involved in the solution to the social problem is misleading. It is a critique of bourgeois representative democracy in favour of a delegate democracy based on mandates and recall (273). During 1848 he urged workers to go beyond political reform into social reform to secure the revolution and so sought to extend democracy (crucially into the economy), making it genuine. (55)
It is also strange to see it proclaimed that Proudhons political ideas were somewhat closer to the small is beautiful (Schumacher) approach when my book shows, Marxist myths not withstanding, that he was not against large-scale industry. To present him as urging peasant and artisan production is simply untenable. (10-1, 73) He also states that Proudhon thought the right of withdrawal could provide the only real controls against managerial power. Yet Proudhon explicitly argued for industrial democracy, the election of management (11-2) something Mondragon is deficient in.
Then there is the claim that I sidestep Proudhons patriarchalism while proclaiming that he sought to hive off family relations by making them into a separate sphere handled by women, under the authority of men. So rather than apply his ideas on federalism to relations between men and women as between communes and workplaces, he embraced the hierarchy he rejected elsewhere. Macnair misses the obvious: Proudhons sexism is, as I state, in direct contradiction to his own libertarian and egalitarian ideas. As for my alleged discomfort with it, in reality little discussion is needed to prove this (48) showing Macnair speculations to be false.
The problem with Proudhon, apparently, is that he does not avoid the problem of political ordering. Yet he repeatedly argued for socio-economic organisation hence the universal association of the 1840s, which became the agricultural-industrial federation of the 1860s. Rather than the tyranny of structurelessness, Proudhon advocated non-statist federal socio-economic structures. And if Macnair considers that federations immediately pose within themselves the same problems of political ordering as states then he is implying that the state will never wither away
Macnair wonders why the texts included were picked my biographical sketch indicates why for the major works. As for the shorter pieces, those I felt those speak for themselves. As for What is Property?, how can you have a Proudhon anthology without it? It would be like excluding The Manifesto of the Communist Party from one on Marx.
As my book is about Proudhon, not Marx I did not spend too much time on works by Marx that he was not aware of. Apparently, I accuse Marx of having in The poverty of philosophy misread Proudhon, which is not true I show how he repeatedly misrepresents Proudhon (and contradicts himself in later works). As I note, Marx at times does point to flaws in Proudhons ideas but to state my objections to Marxs critique are largely extremely secondary fails to acknowledge that Marx does not meet the basic standards of honest debate. He also wonders if I included Proudhons letter to Marx as as evidence of Marxs sectarianism. How paranoid to ponder the reasons for the inclusion of a famous letter between two giants of socialism!
Macnair concludes it is worth reading Proudhon, then. But not in any sense as a guide, as McKay suggests, to the general idea of the revolution in the 21st century. It sad that he takes my obvious rift on Proudhons General idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century to imply that I am urging people to accept all of his ideas when, being a revolutionary class-struggle anarchist, I explicitly did not: we should not slavishly copy Proudhons ideas, we can take what is useful and, like Bakunin, Kropotkin and others, develop them further in order to inspire social change in the 21st century. (51) Still, I hope your readers will take his advice but spend more time actually reading what Proudhon (and I) wrote!
Finally, Macnair states that Marx and Engels from 1846 onwards more or less constantly urged the organisation of the working class for political action. He fails to discuss its outcome unsurprisingly, given its utter failure. Perhaps because these dire results were predicted by anarchists helps explains the current rise in our ideas?
Yours sincerely,
Iain McKay
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/letter-weekly-worker-proudhon
Weekly Worker article here:
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/923