Historical Materialism problem

[Rafiq]

Is it true that Marx said that the behavior of humans stems fully from the mode of production, or the economy? Because I know that can't be true, social factors also effect how people behave, as well as the level of ' freedom'.


Also, Marx did not think there was a human nature...

Is our brain pretty much empty when we are born?

Also, is there any valid arguments against Human nature genetics?

[caramelpence]

Is it true that Marx said that the behavior of humans stems fully from the mode of production, or the economy? Because I know that can't be true, social factors also effect how people behave, as well as the level of ' freedom'.


Also, Marx did not think there was a human nature..

Marx did have a concept of human nature. His basic understanding of the nature of man is that man is an active being who is compelled to work on and interact with the natural world in order to secure the things he needs to survive, and in putting forward that perspective Marx distinguished himself from Feuerbach, amongst others, who, in Marx's views, did not acknowledge how the natural world is changed throughout history as a result of man's action on it as well as how man himself is changed and transformed as a result of his ongoing interaction with the world around him. In putting forward his conception of human nature, which receives its most advanced expression in The German Ideology and the 1844 Manuscripts whilst also being an important part of his other works, Marx was concerned not only with giving an empirical characterization of man's condition, but also provided a basis for the moral critique of capitalism, in that capitalism involves the subversion of man's active nature, as man finds that the products of his labour come to dominate and control him, and ceases to recognize them as the product of human activity.

I stress Marx's concept of human nature because it is also relevant to your actual question. Marx certainly did not believe that human actions and ideas are determined by material conditions, rather, it is the state of the productive forces and the relations of production that determine the constraints within which man is free to act at different points in history. The productive forces are the existing condition of man's technology, knowledge, and the other resources that allow man to exploit the natural world, whereas the relations of production are the relations of effective ownership and control over human labour and the productive forces, that is, the way in which production is organized, in specific societies, and depending on the level of the productive forces. It is the latter of these, the relations of production, that comprise the basis from which what Marx terms the superstructure emerges, but this is not meant to be a deterministic relationship, in that Marx does not think that all capitalist societies automatically have the same political institutions, for example, and it is probably not the case that Marx includes things like ideas as part of the superstructure. For Marx, then, human beings retain the freedom to act within wide-ranging constraints. Or, as he puts it in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), "men 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".

[Rafiq]

But what about the whole "Matter before thought" idea? Is the material world what makes what we think? Are our thoughts, merely reflections of the material world around us?

[Dunk]

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica]Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under the collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.[/FONT][/FONT]

I think nature (genetics) gives us a wide range of behavior we're capable of, it's just that our environment determines which behavior we're most likely to act on. Capitalism demands greed and violence to function, and thus many of us are violent and greedy. I think it's a testament to what we're capable of that we have good, honest, caring people in this world at all - and that if we change our environment, the behavior we find it necessary to act out will change as well.

[Rafiq]

Zathorus is active, awesome. My favorite people on this forum are the Marxian all knowers.

And i'm not being sarcastic by any means.

[caramelpence]

But what about the whole "Matter before thought" idea? Is the material world what makes what we think? Are our thoughts, merely reflections of the material world around us?

Is that quote from The German Ideology? Or is it a paraphrase of the ideas posed in that text? In any case, you have to remember that The German Ideology was a highly polemical document in that it was concerned with refuting the prevalent ideas about the relationship between ideas and material conditions and it was partly for that reason that Marx and Engels were prone to adopting very stark expressions (for example, describing ideology as "phantoms" or as "illusion" even though their actual understanding of ideology was much more complex than that) that may give the impression that they had a simplistic or determinist understanding of where ideas come from, purely because they wanted to demarcate themselves from other philosophical perspectives as clearly as possible. Even in the text itself, however, there are a number of points that are clear and which are worth stressing. Firstly, Marx and Engels had a distinctive understanding of the nature of the material world and material conditions, in that they understood those concepts in terms of practice, that is, the process of constant change and transformation, so that the entity from which ideas emerge is practice itself, matter in the process of transformation, rather than a stable and unchanging world. Secondly, Marx and Engels had a holistic understanding of what practice or production involves, in that they did not see it as synonymous with the economy, or understand it only in terms of the production of physical goods, rather, practice is simultaneously the transformation of the natural world and the transformation of man himself in the course of production, which means that man acquires his ideas about the world at the same time as working on it, rather than the two being separate processes.

This may seem highly deterministic (...whilst also in conflict with some of the other formulations they adopt in the same text!) in that it posits the possibility and fact of immediate knowledge, rather than allowing for reflection and contemplation, but it is important for Marx and Engels' philosophical bases, and overall, their strong formulations in The German Ideology aside, their conception of man is not a determinist one, in that they do not believe that man's behavior and thought is straightforwardly determined by any material factor. Their main concern in The German Ideology is both to attack the primacy given to ideas and to attack any sharp distinction between ideas and material conditions, by emphasizing the concept of practice, embodying both material production and the production of ideas.

[Zanthorus]

Zathorus is active, awesome. My favorite people on this forum are the Marxian all knowers.

As much as I love to debate the minutia of Das Kapital, this kind of discussion is not exactly my thing because it involves heavy loads of philosophy. It's the kind of thing that ZeroNowhere could probably steamroller through though. I hear he's recently finished exams and has a lot more time to spend wasting time on Revleft so hopefully he'll be along at some point.

That said, I think caramelpence is basically spot on in his first post. Marx's conception of the essential human or species-activity is that of labour, which Marx conceives as a transformative practice by which human beings interact with and change nature to suit their own particular ends. The one thing I would add to what he says is that for Marx the labour process is irreducably social. "Production by a solitary individual outside society – a rare event, which might occur when a civilised person who has already absorbed the dynamic social forces is accidentally cast into the wilderness – is just as preposterous as the development of speech without individuals who live together and talk to one another." (Grundrisse) I am also wary of the idea that this constitutes the foundation for a purely moral critique of capitalism. Indeed, I think the revolutionary nature of Marx's theory of alienation is such that it permeates his entire critique of political economy, until we finally have the highest expression of the conflict between man and his own social productive forces in the periodic crises, during which on the one hand we have a commercial crises due to the overproduction of the means of production, and on the other we have the inability of capitalism to satisfy the basic needs and wants of it's working-class.

The discussion about determinism and freedom of action is more vague and philosophical so I have not much to contribute on that front. Although I am not sure about caramelpence's quote from the 18th Brumaire. It is often read as such, but I personally did not read it as a quote about human agency, but rather one about how previous revolutions brought up the tradition of 'dead generations' as a language for expressing their own aspirations. I think the rest of the passage which talks about the French revolutionaries expressing themselves in the language of the Roman republic and the Roman empire, as well as the 1848 revolutionaries veiling themselves in the traditions of 1789, brings this out fairly clearly.

[graymouser]

Zanthorus is on the right tack above, I think, as far as this whole concept of "human nature" goes. Marx was not a philosopher pondering the isolated individual in society; he would probably have found it as risible as the economist's Robinson Crusoe examples, which he mercilessly lampoons in The Poverty of Philosophy and Capital. His writing was intended to focus on social classes. This is why after all he began the Communist Manifesto's main text with the sentence "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." While at certain points in his writings Marx does use the word "man," as in the quote from the 18th Brumaire, he was generally discussing class struggle in his historical materialism.

I think this is why it's important to grasp Marx's method. For Marx, an individual person was surrounded by and caught up in struggles much larger than himself or herself. One person's actions are of course not wholly determined by these forces, but they are powerful enough to bring wide swaths of people in one direction or the other. Indeed, this is the power of his critique of capital; the problem is not the "greed" of one person or another but the laws of the system of accumulation itself, that destroy the "good" capitalist and replace him with a worse one. Likewise, although workers may not always be the most enlightened people in the world, their fight for freedom from this system nevertheless means fighting to end the system of exploitation.

Of course, none of this really answers the OP's question. But that's because I'm trying to point out that the OP is using a tool for discussing classes to discuss humans. It simply doesn't work that way.

As far as freedom of the will and individual humans go, Marx didn't write too much about it. He thought it was an absurd thing to bring into social theory, as seen in an extract from an 1853 letter here:

There is no doubt something specious in this formula, inasmuch as Hegel, instead of looking upon the criminal as the mere object, the slave of justice, elevates him to the position of a free and self-determined being. Looking, however, more closely into the matter, we discover that German idealism here, as in most other instances, has but given a transcendental sanction to the rules of existing society. Is it not a delusion to substitute for the individual with his real motives, with multifarious social circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of “free-will” — one among the many qualities of man for man himself!

Generally I don't think Marxism contemplates libertarian free will in the philosophical sense, as Marx seems to mostly regard it in the compatibilist sense where free will simply means what a person does without compulsion.

[mikelepore]

Is it true that Marx said that the behavior of humans stems fully from the mode of production, or the economy? Because I know that can't be true, social factors also effect how people behave, as well as the level of ' freedom'.

Quoting:

"According to the materialist conception of history, the _ultimately_ determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the _only_ determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogma, also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles, and, in many cases, preponderate
in determining their _form_."

---- F. Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch, Sept. 22, 1890

[black magick hustla]

of course there is such thing as "human nature" in the same sense there is duck nature or squirrel nature. homo sapiens sapiens is part of the animal kingdom and there is an invariance in certain drives and behavioral patterns that it has. marx wasnt dumb enough to state it was a tabula rasa, which seems a lot of social sciences assume in the name of localism and discourse. one of the reasons the communist program is invariant is because it is the defacto human program, doesnt matter if people call it communism or not. of course, the material conditions given rise by capital make the communist program take a particular form, which is the one of world communism through world proletarian revolution. but even slaves and peasants under the roman empire, dreaming of a world without money through christianity could grasp an aspect of their invariance as homo sapiens sapiens and the invariance of the communist program. same with christian communist heresies, slave insurrections, etc. i am trying to write an essay about this. marx approach, not necessarily every aspect of his theory on species being, is central to the communist project and those who do not grasp the invariant-human aspect will be doomed to irrelevance.

[Hit The North]

I don't really follow what maldoror means when he writes about the "invariant-human aspect" or the communist program being "invariant" and "the defacto human project". But I don't agree that human beings have a"nature" that determines their behaviour in the same way as ducks or squirrels, . One crucial thing that humans possess, and which separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, is culture - a phenomenon that is variant, in that it is historically emergent, changing according to time and place. Human beings can only become recognisably human to other humans when they adapt their behaviour to the culture they are born into. Every aspect of human behaviour is socially determined. Even basic biological drives such as sexuality are mediated and expressed culturally. This is why Marx insists on a focus on "socialised man" as no other man is available to our scrutiny. To argue otherwise is to lapse into the irrelevancy of pre-Marxist notions of an abstract, unchanging human nature which belong to the fetid fantasies of either religious systems of thought or amongst Enlightenment thinkers, who merely substituted Nature (with a capital 'N') in place of God.

Meanwhile, it is not true that "even slaves and peasants under the roman empire, dream[t] of a world without money", because money, or capital, was not the factor of their enslavement as it is with modern wage slaves. Of course, they may have dreamt up their own utopian visions - a return to the "garden" or a world where the Empire no longer exists, but this is far from arguing that communism is the "defacto human project" - a formulation which strikes me as a metaphysical delusion.

[caramelpence]

I think BtB and maldoror are correct on some things and wrong on others. In the first place, I don't think it is right to treat millenarian religious movements and similar phenomena as movements that anticipated communism or gave momentary insight into man's true nature, at least in the sense of what Marx thought about this issue - in the 1844 Manuscripts he explicitly critiques Cabet and others who looked through history in order to find supporting evidence (in the form of "disconnected historical phenomena") for the practicability of communism and Marx also never had a "communitarian moment" in the same way that Engels did in 1843-4, that is, Marx never looked to contemporary utopian socialist experiments and intentional religious communities as a way of answering criticisms about how communist methods of production and distribution would work out in practice, whereas Engels did do this. So I disagree with maldoror in that respect. In the second place, however, in the same part of the 1844 Manuscripts where Marx critiques Cabet for his approach to human history and the immanence of communism, Marx also specifies that human history up to the present is the "actual act of genesis" of communism, and just prior to making that comment he also characterizes communism as "the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being". I think Marx ultimately did see communism as the "defacto human project" and as the realization of a human essence that does remain unchanged throughout history in the sense that man's possession of an active and transformative essence (to give a very short and inadequate description of Marx's understanding of human nature) is what allows man to have a history in the first place - if it were not for the fact that man is an active and purposeful being it would not be possible for human phenomena like culture and technology to develop over time and for man to be able to reflect on his cultural context and the ways he makes use of different kinds of technology, and it is precisely because animals are not active in the same way that humans are that animal species do not have a history and do not exhibit historical development. So in that sense the communist project is invariant, it does spring from man's eternal nature.

It is in fact hard to see how any theorist whether Marx or Hegel or Schiller would be able to make use of the concept of alienation in a central or significant way (which is definitely the case with Hegel and more controversially with Marx) without having an underlying understanding of human nature because the basic meaning of alienation is that it involves an unnatural and destructive separation between man and his nature or his essence - without specifying what that nature or essence involves how would it ever be possible to distinguish between otherness or separation as such and the kinds of separation that are constitutive of alienation?

[Hit The North]

I concede to Caramelpence's point, having considered it. Marx, at least, must concede to some invariants in the human condition, in order to sustain his concept of alienation and his general materialist conception of history. As a species we are the result of a long process of evolution. But at a certain point we enter a new stage of development, social development, of human history, where we are both the autonomous, self-reflective and creative beings of praxis and also the creatures of historically determined relations. At this point it is the social relations that govern our behaviour, not the biological inheritance. So, still, I would reject the idea that we have a nature in the same way a squirrel has a nature.

I'm also uneasy with the obviously teleological, essentialist and, ultimately, metaphysical approach which states that the communist project "springs from our eternal nature." I understand that there are passages in Marx's writings which indicate that this is his position. But it is also at variance with the notion that communism only becomes a possibility as a consequence of the development of the means of production under the capitalist mode of production. It gives an unhealthy tinge of myth to historical materialism, whereby capitalism is a preordained and inevitable necessary evil on the path to realising our already predetermined nature.

[Zanthorus]

BTB, I think you are still somewhat confused. The 'invariant human nature' Marx speaks of does not refer to a set of behaviours which humans are biologically preprogrammed to prefer, but to the capacities which mark human beings out as distinct from other animals.

[Hit The North]

Well I think my confusion derives from this use of 'nature' in 'human nature', because this term is usually applied in order to explain the behaviour of other species as resulting from genetically programmed responses.

Further to that, I'd still argue that observable human 'capacities' are developed by society and are, therefore, largely historically emergent and do not emerge from some primordial 'nature'.

EDIT: Otherwise we would fall into the essentailism of pre-Marxist, bourgeois thought where we picture human beings flourishing and reaching their capacity in 'nature' and this being corroded by the intrusion of society.

[black magick hustla]

I don't really follow what maldoror means when he writes about the "invariant-human aspect" or the communist program being "invariant" and "the defacto human project". But I don't agree that human beings have a"nature" that determines their behaviour in the same way as ducks or squirrels,

I think the problem is that the term human nature is associated with all sorts of garbage. perhaps, it might be more useful to say human beings have certain biological drives and necessities that are made manifest in different ways that are particular culture and particular material conditions. despair and alienation are despair and alienation, does not matter if its felt by a haitian slave or an indutrial worker. Human beings are certainly not tabula rasa, and to argue otherwise is to deny that we are animals that are product of evolution.

. One crucial thing that humans possess, and which separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, is culture - a phenomenon that is variant, in that it is historically emergent, changing according to time and place. Human beings can only become recognisably human to other humans when they adapt their behaviour to the culture they are born into. Every aspect of human behaviour is socially determined. Even basic biological drives such as sexuality are mediated and expressed culturally. This is why Marx insists on a focus on "socialised man" as no other man is available to our scrutiny. To argue otherwise is to lapse into the irrelevancy of pre-Marxist notions of an abstract, unchanging human nature which belong to the fetid fantasies of either religious systems of thought or amongst Enlightenment thinkers, who merely substituted Nature (with a capital 'N') in place of God.

I don´t deny the existence of material conditions and culture. I do argue that that culture and language give particular forms to express those drives.

In the first place, I don't think it is right to treat millenarian religious movements and similar phenomena as movements that anticipated communism or gave momentary insight into man's true nature, at least in the sense of what Marx thought about this issue - in the 1844 Manuscripts he explicitly critiques Cabet and others who looked through history in order to find supporting evidence (in the form of "disconnected historical phenomena") for the practicability of communism and Marx also never had a "communitarian moment" in the same way that Engels did in 1843-4, that is, Marx never looked to contemporary utopian socialist experiments and intentional religious communities as a way of answering criticisms about how communist methods of production and distribution would work out in practice, whereas Engels did do this

I dont think they anticipated communism. Anybody who says communism is inevitable sounds teleological. Nor I say utopian socialist experiments answered the problem of how it should workout in practice. I do say that millenarian religious movements did contain within them vestiges of the communist program, in the sense that there is communism as a formal program and communism as an informal movement (those who fight against class society for a human community).

Anyway, my conception of the invariance of human essence and the invariance ofthe communist program is related to certain elucidations made by marx and the italian communist left, but its in no way exactly what they said. My goal is to try to fight against the postmodern and unscientific idea that human beings are just tabula rasa, which is not true, and to give a sort of ethical and somewhat objective consideration on why communists should not retreat nor concede our program under the idea that is unrealistic etc. If human essence was not invariant, the story of gonzalo guerrero would not be possible. To quote an essay that I am writing:

We are all fucking rats. Academia, in this era of decomposing capitalism, will deny there is such a thing as the nature of homo sapiens sapiens – everything is dissolved into discourse, everything is dissolved into localisms and culture. The talk of “being human” is a vain talk. Oh Gonzalo Guerrero! These people spit on your bones, and your dust! In 1511, your ship got wrecked and you entered the Yucatan Peninsula as a lowly sailor. You were not brought up in the customs of the New World, and your Spanish comrades died and it was you and your will that ended among a cosmic people that built white pyramids and beings that fed children to the Sun. Yet you died as Lord of Chactemal, a proud war leader among the Nachan clan. You married a Mayan woman and your children were handsome – blue-eyed and brown-skinned. The pathetic god-suckers of the West tried to bring you back under God and under the crown, but God and the crown were meaningless for you, for you have had a taste of the invariance of the human being! An invariance that could be found among both your brown and white brethren, even if they never met each other before. You are a hero to me because you are the angel of holiness-immolated, the hero of all of us human rats and human cockroaches that have thrown their lot with the invariance of our species in the face of a class society that is alien to our invariance. Guerrero, we will hopefully meet each other in Death, as dust.

[Hit The North]

maldoror, what scientific evidence do you draw on to confidently assert that the just born human mind is not a tabula rasa? It's not clear to me how the incident of Gonzalo Guerrero proves anything in this regard.

[black magick hustla]

maldoror, what scientific evidence do you draw on to confidently assert that the just born human mind is not a tabula rasa? It's not clear to me how the incident of Gonzalo Guerrero proves anything in this regard.

Well, Gonzalo Guerrero was a christian spaniard from the west that had no cultural common space with the Mayans. He naufrageated and survived by himself as a slave to the Mayans. My point is that he would have been unable to assimilate and make an enjoyable life if there was no such thing as a human common ground, to quote Gonzalo Guerrero:

"Brother Aguilar; I am married and have three children, and they look on me as a cacique (lord) here, and captain in time of war. My face is tattooed and my ears are pierced. What would the Spaniards say about me if they saw me like this? Go and God's blessing be with you, for you have seen how handsome these children of mine are. Please give me some of those beads you have brought to give to them and I will tell them that my brothers have sent them from my own country."

I think the burden of proof is on you to claim human beings are tabula rasa. You would have to make a particular exception that human beings are tabula rasa compared to other animals. Of course human beings are not, human beings are capable of feeling pain and alienation and there are indeed common traits found in all cultures and civilizations. I think the particular drives that define us in common are much more basic and primordial than saying human nature is greedy, or altruistic or whatever, but to claim there is nothing in common inbetween homo sapiens sapiens is denying the evolutionary element of us, which I doubt marx would have done as he was a big fan of darwin.