[contd.]

Marx continues:

"And security?

"Article 8 ([French Republican] Constitution of 1793): “Security consists in the protection afforded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property.” "

"Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property. It is in this sense that Hegel calls civil society “the state of need and reason.”

"The concept of security does not raise civil society above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of egoism.

"None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community...."

Not a great deal of support for the concept of individuality there, nor much appreciation of the potential value of civil society either, Squeers :)

Marx's chapter on 'Co-operation', Ch. XIII in Capital Vol. 1, (which could have been titled, 'The Benefits of Economies of Scale') dovetails somewhat with this lack of concern for the individual, in its approval of capitalist innovation.

BTW, this is an interesting paper:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/marc-stears-anthony-barnett/everyday-ed-labour-can-win-by-leaving-democracy-to-us?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=0

Hi again Squeers,

These comments of Marx seem to wrap up his attitudes to both individuality and to Jewish civil rights:

"None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-like itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.

"It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and that indeed it repeats this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, and is therefore imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of all the interest of civil society must be the order of the day, and egoism must be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1793) This fact becomes still more puzzling when we see that the political emancipators go so far as to reduce citizenship, and the political community, to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore, the citoyen is declared to be the servant of egotistic homme, that the sphere in which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being, and that, finally, it is not man as citoyen, but man as private individual [bourgeois] who is considered to be the essential and true man."

[TBC]

contd.}

Not much there about people [men], free and equal individuals, coming together voluntarily to build and defend a better society.

So, in Marx's view, are people to be nothing more than citoyens, citizens, with no rights or legitimate interests, no rights to private lives, beyond what they share with other equally-circumscribed citoyens ? Doesn't sound like it. But it does sound like a full-on approval of all manner of Oprichniki, gulags, and lao gai, perhaps even of Pol Pot's killing fields. All for a good cause, of course.

I was raised as a Marxist, and I was given my name after Uncle Joe. I went Maoist in about 1962, but was always uneasy about Mao's pamphlet, 'On the People's Democratic Dictatorship', or something like that. "Democratic", I was okay with, but I tended to ignore the "dictatorship" part, to my shame. I still don't know how such a circle was to be squared, but I fear that it was certainly not by allowing or enabling the 'hundred flowers' of individuality to bloom.

In my view, unless socialist ideology can genuinely encompass the legitimacy, the NECESSITY, of individuality, then it doesn't deserve to get off the ground. Not individualism - individuality in all its creative potential.

Joe

Working all day today, Joe, but will get back to you when I can. In the meantime, what about page or paragraph numbers and texts cited? and a bit more of your own interpretation rather than just quotes?

*these are deep waters. As for myself, I don't pretend to be above my cultural conditioning*

Ok Squeers, thats an easy cop out. But hardly up to date with
what we know today about human behaviour. The Tabula Raza theory
is well out of date.

Yabby,

You're a great one for trumpeting the theories of others (or their debunking)...do you have any of your own?

Are you saying that humans aren't conditioned by the culture in which they are immersed?