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Theory vs Practice
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Whether you are liberal has little to do with how you see yourself or with what you profess to be. I am a Marxist but if I say something liberal, I either need to correct it or I will become a liberal. I must rely on others' criticism and my own self criticism to spot liberalism, and to correct my ways.
If I repeatedly did and said liberal things, it wouldn't matter if I still called myself a Marxist because that would rest on an idealist version of myself – and preferring the ideal over the material is theoretically liberal, not Marxist. I would be liberal, not Marxist in praxis (liberal thought and liberal action), regardless of what I wanted to be or thought I was.
Marxists are dialectical materialists. Which is a theory of change or of becoming. There is no 'stasis' or things, only processes, relations, and various levels of abstraction: nothing stands still. I am an individual, a worker, a prole, a human. I am always in a state of becoming. Either becoming a Marxist or becoming a liberal or, god forbid, becoming a fascist. The latter isn't very likely but it would happen if I were to start doing and saying fascist things even if I didn't like to be called it.
According to Bertell Ollman in Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method (2003, pp. 88–91) when Marx does 'abstraction', he moves between seven levels of generality:
Marx/ists use/s all seven, but mainly the first five. Others flit between all seven, but inconsistently and incompletely.
The liberal/bourgeois framework works primarily on two levels. The first, the abstract, unique individual. And the fifth, the abstract human society. Hence liberals talk about people or humanity as a whole. Rarely, if ever, will liberals – or, to be trite people looking through a lens of liberal ideology – abstract to another level of generality.
So when you abstract to the level of individual people or to the level where 'human nature' appears coherent, when you refuse to abstract to the other levels of generality, you are, whether consciously or subconsciously, being liberal.
Notice how Giyuu traced through the history of human society to explain that class society arose at a certain point, and that humans in different class societies display a different kind of 'nature' than those in other class societies or in pre-class society. Giyuu concluded that under socialism, human relations will develop until the motivation e.g. for what we might call greed and corruption will dissolve. 'Human nature' will again look different to what it looks like under capitalism/class society.
It is not possible – at least, it will be very difficult – to see or accept what Giyuu describes without opening up to the idea of different levels of generality, beyond the individual or the human society. To reject or dismiss the other levels of abstraction, to insist on using only two, is almost if not by definition, to be liberal.
Edit: rejecting somebody's argument for 'framing the problem as caused by the system' is the type of dismissal/rejection that I'm taking about in the last paragraph.
Thank you for your in depth reply, while I don't fully agree with everything I do appreciate the insight. Also tying in @Giyuu's comment, which seemed to be a summary of a longer argument but missing important detail.
I don't agree with your definition of liberal. Stealing a definition off the internet, I think the most appropriate one in this context is:
Loosely applying those 7 stages, I'd say it covers 1) The individual, 3) Capitalism, and 5) Human society. So I agree that the definition primarily covers 2 levels of generality (1 and 5).
However, to say that "a liberal only abstracts to these levels of generality" is nonsense. It's like you're taking a stencil of the definition, then saying anything that fits inside the stencil meets the definition, even if it looks nothing like the definition.
I wrote a short, simple statement:
You've assumed that because I only mentioned "the system" and "people" that I am talking in stages 1 and 5 (I would argue it's more 1 and 3). By applying your stencil that means I'm liberal (or what I'm saying is, and because I said it I am). However, to expand it and flavour it with your stages, I could say:
The point of what I'm saying is that there will always be the potential of an individual (1) stepping out of line and screwing things. That could cover a political system (3), inter- or intra-class relationships (4), or social status (5); an individual can poison any or all of them. You may argue that a different political system could reduce the likelihood of individuals stepping out, with greed and corruption dissolved, but they will never truly be gone as people as individuals will always have that capacity.
Furthermore when you look at this statement it all but contradicts the definition of liberal - "individual rights" being the first tenant, when I'm saying the individual is the issue. I did stop short of saying individual rights aren't important, however I'm clearly pointing towards the need for limits on those rights. So I firmly reject labelling my initial statement as liberal - it might fit the stencil, but it doesn't fit the actual definition.
Thanks for responding. You’ve made some good points. Let’s keep this conversation going as I’m enjoying it and I appreciate good faith challenges. Before I address the other points, I’ll recommend Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology if you want some of the detail that will flesh out Giyuu’s comment.
To clarify, I wasn’t defining liberalism. I was describing some characteristics of liberal/bourgeois world outlooks: the tendency to treat the individual as the most important unit. This tendency is dialectically related to the features of liberalism that you identify in the quote.
And it’s a tendency not a universal law. To a Marxist, everything is contradiction; which leaves open the possibility that liberals will contradictorily elevate the individual and e.g. capitalism or human nature, etc, at the same time.
There are many types of liberalism: classical liberalism, neoliberalism, ordoliberalism, so we can only speak in general terms when talking about liberalism in general. Still, I agree that ‘individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise’ are common to different liberalisms.
Sometimes liberal thought abstracts to the level of humanity. This is often faulty as liberals tend to ascribe current features of human relations to ‘human nature’ in general. In reality, those features are bespoke to the political economy, which is either class society or capitalism.
Liberalism prefers to universalise; whereas Marxists insist that processes and relations are historically contingent i.e., for example, people act in a certain way because their society is set up in a certain way.
I agree that
Although I may get close to saying this kind of thing in the heat of an argument, I didn’t say it in this thread. You should only use quotation marks in this way for direct quotes. I said (emphasis added):
Let me address your definition of liberalism and application of the seven levels of generality. All four features, ‘individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise’ can be viewed from multiple levels of generality. I assume you say that the definition involves the third level of generality, capitalism, because it mentions ‘free enterprise’? That’s not necessarily the case.
Liberals often frame ‘free enterprise’ solely as a relation between individuals. It’s a mainstay of legal argument in that persons entering into contracts are deemed to have equal bargaining power. So if they didn’t like the terms, they shouldn’t have entered into the contract. It tends not to be for the courts to strike a fair bargain retroactively. As Pashukanis argues, the legal subject is the commodity owner ‘abstracted to the heavens’. It takes conscious effort to look at free enterprise other than through the lens of individualism. I am glad to see you do that; it suggests you are willing to move away from the liberal perspective.
Even if you reject that you are looking through a liberal lens, and indicate that you are willing to move past it, the rest of your comment makes several liberal assumptions. I’ll stick with the levels of generality idea to address the issue. You said:
I haven’t assumed anything, here. I've analysed. When you say ‘system’, you are talking about capitalism (level 3) (what you said would not make sense to me otherwise). I’m suggesting that your comment is speaking from the position of liberalism because you are emphasising the individual over the capitalist mode of production (the ’system’) or over the logic of class society. You next said, reiterating my point:
Again, this emphasises the individual (this could be an example. I’m unsure if this is what you would say). A Marxist (illiberal by definition) would say that while an individual has some power to make individual decisions, only certain options are logically available. Those options are determined by the political economy i.e. class-based capitalism.
We’re not really talking about people working together. Capitalism already entails a socialised mode of production (i.e. a division of labour, which entails a certain level of cooperation). (Again, it takes a liberal perspective to emphasise ’individuals’ working together in a socialised mode of production.) The reason that individuals working within the socialised mode of production of capitalism can game the system to their benefit is because this is hard-wired into the rules of the game.
You also said:
No substantive argument from me about that. The question is—does your analysis pre-suppose that the individual has primacy or does it pre-suppose the primacy of the class-based political economy of capitalism? Liberals emphasise the individual. Marxists accept that the individual has a role but insist that this is subservient and dialectically related to the rules of the ‘system’ (capitalism or class society, depending on the argument).
If liberals move away from the individual, it tends not to be to look at the level of the system or of class society but to ‘human nature’. This can be applied to your statements about ‘people’ because, at first, it implied that people in all times and places will act in the same way, according to human nature:
You later appeared to move away from this claim:
I’m unsure if you’re summarising what I said or whether you agree. If you agree, it contradicts you:
This is only the case when generalising at the level of the individual or of human nature. ‘Bad’ behaviour, e.g. corruption, is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged within capitalism. So too is acting within and according to one’s class interests (favouring some interests over others, or: corruption) even if one consequence is personal enrichment.
The most straightforward way to settle this is to answer a question in the positive rather than the negative: if you’re not a liberal, what are you? I’m a Marxist.
I’m happy to address your final point, ‘when you look at this statement it all but contradicts the definition of liberal’, but I’m not wholly sure what you mean, and I don’t want to misrepresent your view.
From what you’ve said, I think you might be quite amenable to Marxism/communism. The German Ideology, cited above, will answer some questions but it’s not the easiest text to begin with. For that, I would suggest, in this instance, The three sources and three component parts of Marxism.