Bourgeois, Proletarians and Communists

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 1a

Various editions of the Communist Manifesto

Bourgeois, Proletarians and Communists

The Communist Manifesto was written in London by Dr Karl Marx when he was 29, with the help of his 27-year-old friend Frederick Engels, and it was published in January or February of 1848. It has been a “best-seller” ever since, is constantly republished, and is always in print.

Bourgeois and Proletarians

Marx and Engels saw the new masters, the formerly slave-owning but now capitalist bourgeoisie, also known as burghers, or burgesses, that had originally grown up in the towns under feudal rule, and had by then in some places taken over from the feudal lords by revolution.

Marx and Engels were already convinced that sooner or later, this bourgeoisie was going to be overthrown by the working proletariat (i.e. free citizens owning nothing but their Labour-Power) that the bourgeoisie had brought into existence.

Commissioned to write the Manifesto by the Communist League, Marx and Engels fell behind the agreed deadline, but came through with a magnificent text published just prior to the February, 1848 events in Paris - events which brought the proletariat as actors on to the stage of history to an extent that had never been seen before, thoroughly vindicating Engels and Marx.

The timing was great. The text turned out to be a classic to such an extent that every line of it is memorable.  The first two parts (“Bourgeois and Proletarians”, and “Proletarians and Communists”) given in the attached two files.

Short though it is, the Manifesto is so rich and so compressed as to be saturated with meaning and practically impossible to summarise. So without summmarising, here are some of the most extraordinary sentences of the first section of the Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

Proletarians and Communists

The second part of the Communist Manifesto contains statements about the Communist Party, about the family, about religion, and frank statements about the bourgeoisie.

It is included here with this set of readings of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, particularly because it shows, within the broadest possible context, the centrality of the relations of production that create and sustain the effect known as capital, which then in turn defines everything else in bourgeois society.

It also looks forward to the way that society can be changed yet again, and thus serves to remind us that Marx’s work is always intentional, and is never merely empirical, descriptive or disinterested.

“The average price of wage labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer,” wrote Marx and Engels, already making a great step forward from Marx’s “Wage Labour and Capital” that had been published in the previous year, 1847.  

“But does wage labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labour, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labour for fresh exploitation.”

“…a vast association of the whole nation… in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

• The above serves to introduce the original reading-text - Marx’s and Engels’ 1848 “Communist Manifesto”, Parts 1 and 2. 

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Marx's Capital: Wage Labour and Capital

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 1

Wage Labour and Capital

  

This is the first main post of our Communist University series on Karl Marx's Capital, Volume 1, which is to run over ten weeks in the first quarter of 2012.

“Wage Labour and Capital” and the Hunt for Surplus Value

Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, is a great work of literature and it covers many things; but more than any other thing, it is about Surplus Value, or “the secret of the self-expansion of capital” as Marx sometimes like to call it.

This week’s main work, “Wage Labour and Capital”, and especially Engels’ remarks about it, show that in 1847 Karl Marx was as yet not able to explain Surplus Value in terms of commodity Labour Power, as something distinct from Labour itself.

“Wage Labour and Capital” was given as a lecture to the German Workingmen's Club of Brussels (Belgium) in 1847. When he first gave the lecture, Karl Marx did not make a distinction between the act of Labour, and its prior potential, called Labour-Power. The latter is the commodity that the worker sells each day to the capitalist in exchange for the privilege of staying alive.

The capitalist makes the worker work and takes all the product of the worker’s Labour, giving back only just enough for the worker to survive as commodity Labour Power, and so to be up for sale again on the next working day.

The above is the reason for Frederick Engels’ 5-page 1891 Introduction to the subsequent editions of “Wage Labour and Capital”. It is the reason why Karl Marx had to press on with his researches for another 20 years until Capital Volume 1 was published in 1867 (and beyond). Only in 1867 was the true theory of Surplus Value fully published and placed permanently in the public realm.

Our starting point

Hence the main thing to read here, for the purposes of our series, is Engels’ Introduction to “Wage Labour and Capital”.  This Introduction is the main reason for including this text in the series. In other respects it is redundant to our needs. But it provides our starting point, and it defines the theme which will serve us throughout all the remaining parts of the series on Capital, Volume 1.

If you do go on from the Introduction to read the full text of “Wage Labour and Capital”, then please note that this is not Marx’s original version. It is the one doctored by Engels, as he explains in his Introduction.

Labour-Power and Surplus Value

The distinction between Labour and Labour-Power is the necessary basis upon which an understanding of Surplus Value can be built, and Surplus Value is the key to the whole project that Marx worked on for about forty years from at the latest 1844 until his death in 1883.

Said Engels: “Classical political economy had run itself into a blind alley. The man who discovered the way out of this blind alley was Karl Marx.”

This is true, but in 1847 it was not yet fully true. Engels’ Introduction to “Wage Labour and Capital” reveals Karl Marx’s quest. From this point on in this series, side-by-side with Marx, we are going in search of the mysterious beast called “Surplus Value” and all of its implications.

To sum up: Labour-Power is what you bring to your employer’s front gate in the morning. The employer normally pays you for it, in full (as Marx points out in “Value, Price and Profit”). After that, the entire product of any Labour you may do during the working day belongs to the employer.

“The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people's unpaid labour” wrote Marx, later on, in Capital, Volume 1 (Chapter 18).

• The above serves to introduce the original reading-texts: Marx’s 1847 “Wage Labour and Capital”, but more importantly for our present purposes, Engels’ 1891 Introduction to the same work

• PDF files of the reading texts are attached

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

  

Use Your Head

Pedagogy 2

  

Use Your Head

This is the last preliminary posting before the courses re-start next week. It is a “conspectus” (overview) of Tony Buzan’s book, “Use Your Head”. Please find the file attached. The first instalment of the course proper will be sent out on Thursday, 12 January 2012.

The original author Buzan does not propose, or proceed from, any overt political premises. He appears at first sight to resemble a utilitarian bourgeois “management guru” or a “motivational speaker”. His work stands out from the others of that kind only because of its great practical effectiveness, and not because of any open political aspect.

But Buzan’s work also fits in very well, politically, with our Communist University pedagogy, because it is dialectical. And it is intentional.

Practical

From a practical point of view, Buzan’s appeal is that he offers assistance with faster, more purposeful reading; with memorising; and with note-taking, particularly using his invention, the “mind-map” technique. An example of a mind-map is reproduced above.

These techniques are just what students need to help them get through their studies, and just what conventional education often failed to give them. Students used to be obliged to learn before having learned how to learn. Buzan filled this gap very well.

But what underlies Buzan’s approach? It is not that he was just lucky to stumble upon three techniques, like an old-time prospector discovering gold in a lucky strike.

Dialectical

What distinguishes the mind-map, in particular, from other forms of note-taking characterised by lists and bullet-points, is that it begins and ends as a “unity and struggle of opposites”. It is a representation, in one glance, of the way in which any concrete phenomenon, or discrete system, is the product (or resultant) of many abstract dynamic forces (or vectors) pulling in different directions.

The mind-map is therefore a very good illustration of exactly what is meant by “dialectics”.

Intentional

The other main underlying characteristic of Buzan’s approach is its “intentionality”, to use a term from Paulo Freire’s vocabulary.

Towards the end of Chapter 1 of Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, Freire quotes Alvaro Vieira Pinto saying that intentionality is “the fundamental property of consciousness”, remarking that this concept is “of great importance for the understanding of a problem-posing pedagogy”.

Buzan’s approach is full of intentionality. There is no question, for Buzan, of wandering, or learning for learning’s sake, in a random, eclectic way. Buzan says that you must be looking for a result.

Karl Marx, in the 11^th Thesis on Feuerbach, said that while the philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. That’s intentionality.

Intentionality, as well as dialectics and dialogue, are common themes in Freire, Buzan and Marx – and in the Communist University.

• This introduction serves to introduce the original reading-text which is the CU’s Conspectus of Tony Buzan’s “Use Your Head”. 

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Pedagogy by the method of Paulo Freire

Pedagogy 1

Paulo Freire, 1921-1997

Pedagogy According to Paulo Freire

The Communist University has a tradition of starting every year with a reflection upon our methodology, and on the theory of pedagogy (i.e. theory of learning and teaching) in general, and on the way that practical pedagogy relates to politics.

The great 20^th-century theoretician of liberation pedagogy was Paolo Freire. It was Freire who gave us the word “conscientise”. It was Paulo Freire, more than any other, who showed how the bourgeois education system, with its “banking” theory of pedagogy, is not well designed to educate. Instead, its primary purpose is to reproduce the class relations that suit the ruling class. Please read Paulo Freire’s own words about this, in the attached file.

Education, which should by nature liberate the student, is made by the ruling class into a means of repression, said Freire.

How can revolutionaries ensure that education ceases to reproduce oppressive landlord-dominated or bourgeois-dominated class relations, and instead starts to generate socialism and communism?

Problematising Education

To ask such a question is to “problematise” education. To ask such a question is to begin a “dialogue” about education. Freire thought that for the political education of the oppressed, if it was not to be patronising and therefore counter-productive, by reproducing and reinforcing the features of the oppressive state, then the educational method for this revolutionary purpose would have to be different and new.

In the dialogical method that Paulo Freire devised and called the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, or otherwise Critical Pedagogy, there is no elementary, junior, senior, matriculation, undergraduate, post-graduate, doctorate or professor level. Teachers are learners and learners are teachers; yet all are free-willing “subjects”, having “agency”, capable of leadership.

As much as there may be a room and a gathering of individuals, each known by name, and a “codification” which is the text or other object for the occasion, yet the dialogue admits no limits. The Freirean gathering is not sheltered. It is one of the essentials of Freirean Pedagogy that we refuse the fiction of the sheltered classroom. Instead we recognise that the oppressor is around us and even within us, while we strive to liberate ourselves through our mutual, socialising pedagogical dialogue.

In Freirean practice, there is no such thing as a basic level, or an advanced level. All that we can do is to begin a process of “problematising”, beginning with education itself.

As a rule, the CU uses original authors, and not commentaries on their original texts. In that spirit, text attached today is the second chapter of Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, here supplemented with a glossary of “critical pedagogy” terms (the link to the download is below). This text provides an opportunity to reflect upon what you are trying to do by learning and teaching. You may ask each other: What is political education for?

For the late Freire (pictured above), and for the Freireans of today, all education is a political act and a social act, an act of liberation and of self-liberation.

There will be one further preliminary posting. The first instalment of the course proper will be sent out on Thursday, 12 January 2012.

• This introduction only serves to introduce the original reading-text. In this case it is Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

• A PDF file of the reading text is attached

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Capital, Volume 1: A Quest for a Secret

Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Part 0

First Edition, 1867

A Quest for a Secret

Capital, Volume 1

---

Next week, the Communist University begins posting a ten-part course on Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. This will be the first of four ten-week courses to be run through this and its related e-mail channels in 2012. The first Johannesburg Communist University live session is scheduled to take place on 25 January 2012.

The course on Capital, Volume 1 will be followed by three further ten-week courses, on Capital Volumes 2 and 3, on The Classics, and last but not least, our course “No Woman, No Revolution”. This year’s courses therefore amount to a comprehensive run-through of the most fundamental texts of Marxism – all three volumes of Capital, plus the most salient of the other Marxist Classics, plus indispensable material on revolutionary women.

---

Karl Marx’s “Capital, Volume 1”, published in 1867, is the most outstanding product of a long project that Marx begun in the 1840s, when he was still a young man in his twenties.

Volume 2, edited by Marx’s lifelong comrade and intellectual collaborator Frederick Engels, was published two years after Marx’s death, in 1885. Volume 3 was published in 1894, one year before Engels’ death.

The entire project is a quest for a full explanation of what Marx called, at the end of Chapter 18 of Volume 1: “The secret of the self-expansion of capital.”

This secret is what Marx called Surplus-Value, gained by purchasing the commodity Labour-Power at its full value, and then putting it to work and expropriating the entire product of the actual Labour expended. This constantly-repeated process sustains the otherwise unstable thing called Capital, rather as a table-tennis ball may be kept in the air by a fountain of water or of air.

In studying this book, it helps to be able to follow the development of Marx’s quest for “the secret of the self-expansion of capital” consciously.

Karl Marx’s thought did not spring forth fully-elaborated in one moment. Especially in the early years, Marx had to work very hard, and his quest was still work-in-progress when he died. All this is apparent from works produced prior to 1867, as much as from Volume 1 itself, and from the papers he left for Engels to put together for publication, up to the very last page the last chapter of Volume 3, which ends: “[Here the manuscript breaks off.]”.

Reading it as a quest, which it was, makes it more understandable.

The size of Capital, Volume 1

One challenge presented by Volume 1 is its uneven shape and large size. The Communist University’s method, strongly influenced by the work of Paulo Freire, relies on certain simple principles and practices. We discuss original texts. We use extracts from books to create “Short Texts” that can be used as Freirean “codifications”. The point is not to learn the work s if for an examination, but to have a discussion, and thereby to socialise our collective understanding of it.

In the case of “Capital”, this principle of discussion is no less crucial; but the huge size of the project made the search for “Short Texts” difficult. Please note that the source of all our texts for this series on Capital Volume 1 has been Marxists Internet Archive. You can consult that text to fill in any omissions you may find in the material presented.

The shape of Capital, Volume 1

Capital, Volume 1 contains 33 chapters. Most of them are short, but there are five long ones, starting with Chapter 1 (Commodities).  Chapter 3 (Money) is also long, as is Chapter 10 (The Working Day), Chapter 15 (Machinery and Modern Industry), and Chapter 25 (General Law of Capital Accumulation).

The structure of the book is deliberate, not accidental. Commodity is the right point of departure, and together with the subsequent two chapters on Exchange, and Money, it sets the scene for Chapters 4 and 5 which give the outline “General Formula for Capital”.

The remaining 28 chapters are a carefully-paced rolling out of the idea of Surplus-Value, with all its implications, in short, easy, and sometimes repetitive steps. Exceptions are Chapters 10, 15 and 25, which are “books within the book”. Yet these inner books are also part of the quest for “the secret of the self-expansion of capital”.

Consequent design of the CU series on “Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1”

The above considerations led to the following decisions (which will be explained further in the introductions to the individual texts):

• The series begins with Marx’s 1848 study-circle text called “Wage Labour and Capital”, and specifically with Engels’ 1891 Introduction to the first publication of that text, because it explains why Karl Marx worked for so many years on the question of Surplus-Value, a question that had not been fully answered in 1848, by anyone.
• There are also two other texts showing the development of Marx’s work in the two decades prior to 1867. These help to get an overview of the main work, and should assist the reader/student to get a grasp of Karl Marx’s overall intention. One of these consists of parts from the 1848 “Communist Manifesto”. The other is extracts from Marx’s 1865 talk to workers called “Value, Price and Profit”.

The above three instalments constitute the first part of our ten-part course.

Capital Volume 1 itself is reduced, where necessary, in the following ways:

• Some text is left out (i.e. “redacted”). This has been done with the third section of Chapter 1, with six of the ten sections in Chapter 15, and with part of Chapter 25.
• Footnotes are sometimes left out. This is regrettable! The footnotes to “Capital” are a treasury of great worth. For this reason, wherever there is spare space in terms of working to multiples of four pages for printing purposes, footnotes have been retained.

Capital Volume 1 is then re-divided in the following ways:

• Short Chapters are combined together.
• Long Chapters are divided.
• In one situation (Chapters 2 and 3) a chapter is divided and part of it is added to the previous chapter

The above results in a division of Capital Volume 1 into 20 parts, which are than divided in an appropriate way among the remaining 9 parts (weeks) of the course, with one main text in each part and the others given as alternative or additional reading.

So that we end up with a ten-week course – our standard CU course length. After completing Volume 1, we will follow on with a ten-week combined treatment of Capital, Volumes 2 and 3.

By completing this collective, co-operative reading of Marx’s Capital, you will join a relatively small group of people in this world who have actually read it all. You will know by then that it is an enjoyable work and not at all the terrifying thing that may at first appear to be.

• To download the full Capital, Volume 1 course in PDF files, please click here

CU next year

CU next year

The Communist University publishes in multiple media, but the only register of "students" is the Communist University Google Group, and some other Google Groups.

Taken together with the YCLSA Discussion Forum the CU channel has about 4000 (four thousand) subscribers. Parallel channels contain another approximately 2000 subscribers, for a grand total of more than six thousand, all together.

There are no fees, and there is no certification. We will return to the question of certification, below. First let me give you some more information.

The year-end break is a time of completing preparations for the next year, and preparations for the CU in 2012 are well advanced. There will be a fuller announcement in early January. In the mean time, here are some details.

We will us take it in parts. This is because the Communist University is multi-media, and because it is necessarily to some extent different in each different medium.

E-mail

We start with the Google e-mail discussion groups. The 12 (twelve) Communist University courses are serialised in 40 instalments via these groups, between January and November each year. That is four ten-week courses, delivered via three parallel channels. The whole 2012 schedule looks like this:

  

SADTU Political Education	Communist University	CU Africa
African Revolutionary Writers	Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1	Development, Rural and Urban
Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace	Karl Marx’s Capital, Vols. 2 and 3	National Democratic Revolution
Hegel, Dialectics, Right and Logic	The Classics	State & Revolution
Basics	No Woman, No Revolution	Philosophy and Religion

For each of the three e-mail channels, there is a corresponding blog, where the serialised course material is archived each time it goes out. The blogs also carry information and links that amount to permanent access to all of the course material, to the above schedule, and to suggested dates for your study-circle live sessions.

Live sessions

Among other things, the CU functions as a systematic server of political education material to people's self-organised study circles around South Africa, Africa and the world.

The schedule of posting and meeting dates is designed to facilitate the synchronisation of the e-mailings, such that the material can be printed in hard copy and distributed in good time for the subsequent scheduled meeting dates.  The several hundred reading texts of original revolutionary literature are formatted for printing as booklets (A4 folded to A5). The reading texts are attached to the e-mails, and are also constantly available as downloadable files.

Principles of learning for political purposes

In all cases, the CU believes that for politically-useful learning to take place, there must be dialogue, and not monologue. Hence the "many-to-many" e-mail discussions, and hence also the nature of our live sessions, which are seminars, and not lectures. In our pedagogical practice we follow the teachings of the late Paulo Freire.

Hard copy

Work has been under way for many months towards a re-launch of the (now) twelve Communist University courses as Print-On-Demand course packs of booklets, packaged in a specially-designed and convenient way. The full design was realised in hard copy only yesterday, for the first time.

These packs should be available for political schools all over the country via a well-known chain of print-shop franchises. At the same time, the newly re-formatted text files will be made available on the Internet, and may also be circulated in a CD format.

The above are the main CU media at present. There can be more. For example, if people wish to carry the CU into other media like Facebook, or talk-show radio, or any other, they are welcome to do so, provided that the two-way dialogical character is maintained as far as possible in each medium.

Let us now proceed to the question of

Certification

Certification is a major operation that involves the creation of a permanent bureaucracy of reliable record-keeping, and a stable formalisation of the courses.

The formalisation of the courses is well under way in terms of the defining of the 12 Communist University generic courses listed in the table above. But there is no external validating authority that will sanctify the CU's efforts in this regard.

There are no resources and there is no legal entity that can hold resources as Communist University. There is no organised collective behind the CU other than the group (study circle) that meets in Johannesburg, currently at the Vincent Mabuyakhulu Conference Centre, on Wednesday evenings during the CU season.

One way forward might be to award peer-group recognition. This would be given, in the first place, to those who have mastered the principles and the practice of critical pedagogy (the Freirean "praxis"). It would be some kind of certificate that could be signed by all the available peers. In Freirean education, the teachers are learners and the learners are teachers, so it would be appropriate to that extent. Peer recognition is the historically oldest form of "degree", by the way.

We should note here that there is a contradiction between open-ended Freirean education, and "qualification". Freire would criticise the latter as being part of the "banking" theory of education that he opposed.

Further discussion

As always, we must go to discussion, if all of the above is to be internalised, and equally importantly, socialised.

Please ask more questions and please, all CU subscribers, do give your contributions on the question of certification.

VC

Living Communism

CU Course on Hegel, Part 10a

Corporate image of a collaborative project

Living Communism

Bourgeois propaganda would have everyone believe that communism is an impossible utopia, and that class relations as we know them now are all-pervasive in human society, to the exclusion of every other kind of social behaviour.

But, on the contrary, the development of class relations and the State (which as Lenin says, is not only the inevitable product of such relations, but also the proof of their irreconcilability) did not expunge all previous forms of human relation.

Humans already had language, and language is a powerful, stateless system. It has no fixed centre.

There are many other examples of communistic human relations which have survived, like language, and remain as the bulk of our social fabric. There are even apparently new kinds of communistic social structures appearing, such as the Internet.

What Andy Blunden has done in the writing that we have sampled for the sake of illuminating the questions raised in particular by Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”, is to begin to theorise the communistic patterns of social activity, mediated by artefacts, that characterise human social existence in general.

This is the on-going body of humanity upon the back of which the class struggle is carried, for the time being, like the cross of Christ.

Andy Blunden’s book (from which these excerpts, downloadable via the link below, are taken) is called “A Critique of Activity Theory”. It is concerned in part with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, or “CHAT”, but we can pass over the specifics of “CHAT”, and look at what Andy means by “collaborative projects” in these chapters.

Collaborative Projects and Artefacts

Collaborative Projects are how people do stuff. Even capitalist companies are collaborative projects.

One characteristic that Andy Blunden identifies is that collaborative projects are always mediated by an artefact, or artefacts. Artefacts are things made by people (but words are also artefacts, by the way).

What Andy therefore begins to theorise is the social place of things, or goods, made by people. This is different from the understanding of such goods as being commodities, which is all that capitalism can manage to see them as.

Another insight of Andy’s is the way that collective agency is both expressed, and also formed, within collaborative projects. We may say that we are humanists, believing in the rational free will of social beings. But how does this actually proceed? Andy provides a description, rooted in politics, philosophy and educational theory.

Our own method, following Paulo Freire, is to have dialogue involving two or more people, centred on a “codification’, which is an artefact (text or image), conforms to the structure of a “Collaborative Project”.

But the aim within this course on Hegel is not necessarily to follow Andy into educational theory. The aim within this particular course is to consider what may already exist under the shell of the class-divided bourgeois State, so that what will remain if and when that State withers away can be apparent to us now, today.

What is the living communism of today? This is the question that is being answered, intentionally or otherwise, by Andy Blunden’s writings sampled here.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Collaborative Projects, 2011, Andy Blunden (9923 words)

Further reading:

New tools for Marxists, 1995, Ron Press (5101 words)

New Tools for Marxists

CU Course on Hegel, Part 10

Polynodal semi-chaotic social-system diagram

New Tools for Marxists

This is the last part, and the second last item, in our series on Hegel’s Logic. It is the late SACP stalwart Ron Press’s article “New Tools for Marxists” (see the download linked below) on the application of Chaos Theory to revolution, written in the heat of the post-1994 election moment.

History has not actually ended. Closure is not appropriate. Hegel’s theories have served us well and will continue to serve. There are not two branches of philosophy. We live in a Hegelian world, no matter what the reactionaries and the post-modernists may wish to think. The unity of human history is a hegemonic idea. Science is well established and universally revered, if not always for the right reasons.

If, because of the collapse of the Soviet Union a generation ago, we are forced to conclude that the Bolsheviks failed in their revolution three generations earlier, then it is more than likely that the reason they failed was lack of philosophy.

Philosophy and the withering away of the State

The revolutionaries must have a clear philosophical theory of how the coming classless society is going to work without a state.

In “New Tools for Marxists”, Ron Press wrote:

‘“…the standard Marxist idea that society passes in a linear manner from primitive communism via class struggle to the ultimate victory when the working class replaces capitalism with a classless society is an unattainable myth. Especially when a classless society was taken to mean the establishment of order and stability, in fact stasis. The theories outlined above indicate that stasis means the inevitable sudden crossover into chaos and collapse.

‘Lenin in State and Revolution continued the work of Engels and Marx in outlining the parameters which form the basis for the definition of systems indicated by points (a) and (b). It is interesting that they did not define the form or structure which socialism will have. Lenin recognised these new structures when they emerged. He initiated the slogan “all power to the soviets”.’

Ron Press is saying that the theory of the State, and of the “withering away” of the State, in Marx, Engels and Lenin is not wrong, yet these three did not have the full theoretical means to appreciate in full how “stateless” systems can, and already do, work in nature and in human society.

The revolutionaries of today need a Hegel for today: a Hegel up-to-date.

Let’s finish with two short quotes from our late comrade Ron Press:

“In the Soviet Union the “Soviet” i.e. committee system was destroyed by restricting the bandwidth of communication, and making one node all powerful.”

“But if there is a lesson to be drawn from the study of complexity it is that a complex system given a very “simple” goal (in our case the well being of humankind) develops its own best methods of operation and organisation. Solutions emerge from the system itself.”

Solutions emerge from the system itself. 

Hegel could have said that.

Please download and read this text via the link:

New tools for Marxists, 1995, Ron Press (5100 words)

Further reading:

Collaborative Projects, 2011, Andy Blunden (9923 words)

Lenin on the Theory of Knowledge

CU Course on Hegel, Part 9a

Pablo Picasso, 1937: “Guernica”

Lenin on the Theory of Knowledge

The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge

Lenin’s 1908 “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” is a full-length book, but a difficult one to include under any particular category. It is a polemic against Ernst Mach and his Russian followers, whom Lenin said had little to distinguish themselves from the 18^th-century subjective idealist Bishop Berkeley. This controversy does not seem so important today as it was then.

Our text from Lenin’s book is “The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge” (download linked below).

It begins: “We have seen that Marx in 1845 and Engels in 1888 and 1892 placed the criterion of practice at the basis of the materialist theory of knowledge.” This shows up some of our difficulty in the field of Marxian philosophy. As the footnote says, Lenin is referring to Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) and to the works by F. Engels: “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” (1888) and the “Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892” of his “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”.

The latter pamphlet is made out of excerpts from Engel’s “Anti-Dühring”, while the “Theses on Feuerbach” are part of “The German Ideology”, a book written between 1845 and 1847 by Marx and Engels and then abandoned “to the gnawing criticism of the mice”.

Karl Marx had a Doctorate in Philosophy but he did not write a book of philosophy as such, except insofar as his long “Capital” project could be taken as philosophy, and there are indeed some philosophical statements here and there among the preparatory works and in the three originally-published volumes of “Capital”.

So, what is linked from this post comprises the major part of the philosophical work of Marx, Engels and Lenin. It is a tiny amount when compared to the world’s literature on philosophy.

It is therefore clear that the classical literature does not provide us with a full, exclusively Marxist exposition of philosophy. Perhaps this is fitting, because Marxism is after all not outside of the main stream of learning. As we have seen, it is a continuation of, as well as a reaction to, Hegel’s work, while Hegel’s work stands in a similar relation to Kant’s, and so on.

Taken together, all this means that for the philosophy that is necessary for revolution, the revolutionaries will have to go beyond Marx and Engels, and study the full discipline of philosophy, its history, its development and its meaning. This is exactly what Lenin began to do in the early 1900s.

In “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” Lenin quotes Hegel several times in passing, and briefly, though not in this particular chapter. It would seem that Lenin’s interest in Hegel really only got going later, at about the time (1914) when he prepared his ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s book “The Science of Logic”’. The Lenin Philosophy Archive on MIA is here.

Lenin is saying in this short chapter that that the test of truth is practice, and this provides us with a continuity in relation to our previous instalment, from Ilyenkov.

The next part will be the last in this Hegel series.

Picture: Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”. Picasso was the most distinguished painter of the 20^th Century, and a communist. His famous mural depicting the fascist aerial bombing of the Spanish village of Guernica is now at the United Nations.

Please download and read this text via the link:

The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge, Lenin, 1908 (2273 words)

Further reading:

Hegel’s Conception of the Concrete, Evald Ilyenkov, Ilyenkov, 1960 (3751 words)

Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete

CU Course on Hegel, Part 9

Pablo Picasso, 1908: “Three Women”

Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete

There is no a priori humanity, or presupposition of humanity. There may be a God, or not. What is human is not given, but made, by humans. We are made as humans by the knowledge that we continue to get and to share, socially.

The knowledge that humanity has accumulated, altogether, is science. Objective things-in-themselves that are parts of the universe become known through labour and are thereby brought into that sphere which is humanity. So, the Object becomes part of the Subject.

Similarly, thoughts and decisions become facts of a social and political kind and become objects of science, including Scientific Socialism. In this way, Subject becomes Object.

These reversals, inversions (or “reciprocal actions” as Clausewitz might have called them), are critical transformations and are noticed and incorporated into the philosophy of Hegel and of Karl Marx.

We cannot say that everything is thought, and we equally cannot say that everything is matter; and to say that reality is an unqualified mixture of thought and matter is only to enter a hall of mirrors.

Hegel creates an escape from this maze into a better, and dynamic, form of understanding.

Hegel’s solution is to demonstrate how the movement takes place, not once and for all, but constantly. In the previous part of this course, Andy Blunden’s lecture explained it like this:

“The categories of Being which come into being and pass away, continue to come and go indefinitely. The succession of oppositions which overtake one another in Essence continue to generate polar opposite pairs of determinations. As these unfold, a new form of social practice develops self-consciousness, with a succession of new qualities, new entities, new relations, both incidental and necessary, registered in thoughts and purposive activity and representations, and judged and people may draw from these experiences a more concrete understanding of the new social practice as it develops. So in terms of time, all these relations are happening at the same time, although there is a logical dependence of the later categories on the former.”

This movement is an ascent from the abstract to the concrete.

What is “concrete”? It is the unity and interaction of the parts of a system. It is a dialectical unity-and-struggle-of-opposites. In philosophy, “concrete” has nothing to do with being hard or permanent. In philosophy this word has a special meaning.

Our main document in this part is “Hegel’s Conception of the Concrete” from Chapter 2 of Evald Ilyenkov’s “Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital”. Ilyenkov (1924-1979) was a first-class Soviet philosopher. The full Ilyenkov Archive on MIA is here. Here are a couple of quotes from Ilyenkov:

“As we know Hegel was the first to understand the development of knowledge as a historical process subject to laws that do not depend on men’s will and consciousness. He discovered the law of ascent from the abstract to the concrete as the law governing the entire course of development of knowledge.”

“In reality, the immediate basis of the development of thought is not nature as such but precisely the transformation of nature by social man, that is, practice.”

Picture: Pablo Picasso’s “Three Women”. “Cubism” in visual art was a conscious attempt to represent the relationship of the abstract and the concrete on a two-dimensional surface.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Hegel’s Conception of the Concrete, Evald Ilyenkov, Ilyenkov, 1960 (3751 words)

Further reading:

The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge, Lenin, 1908 (2273 words)