Tuesday, May 29, 2012

HALF MARX

HALF MARX

A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri – March 2012


A pleasant consequence of being an unemployed bum (oops, sorry, mature student) is the possibility it affords for erudite but pointless discussion. One such was about which author was most known more than actually read. The champion was, you guessed it, Salman Rushdie. I for one have made many assaults on his books and don’t think I have survived more than twenty pages on any one except ‘Shalimar the Clown’, which I managed to plough through thanks to an avid interest in Kashmir. The reason, according to one of the discussants (who claims to have read Rushdie), is not that I am too stupid but that I don’t have an understanding of ‘magic realism’, whatever that is.


But, I digress! This note is actually about the runner up, Karl Marx, possibly the most divisive figure in the history of humankind. We all know him and have our opinions (and I have no intention of attempting to change them), many of us can quote him, and some can even expound on him, but few of us have actually read him. Knowing something about Marx’s work, and being able to discuss it, has its uses. It can convey a dimension of intelligence and/or sensitivity to one’s personality – useful as a means of blindsiding women/men one is looking to impress. It can also irritate – I managed to make myself unpopular at a World Bank training (the kind you want to be unpopular in – full of paternalistic assholes who’ve never faced a community and who’ve divided the world into the enlightened ‘us’ and the unwashed ‘them’) by quoting the line ‘unemployment is the luxury of the bourgeoisie’ – I was later informally informed that Marx is an unmentionable in those haloed quarters. And it can help to advise young people who don’t want to become software engineers or MBAs and have a bit of revolutionary fire in their eyes – that what’s said about Marx and Marxism may not be what Marx said.


So, what did Marx actually say? I will confine this note to his writings in his younger days, in his twenties, mainly because of the sheer volume and variety of his output and the difficulty in pigeonholing him into any particular subject. He is seen as one of the three most influential sociologists of all time (along with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim), but his writing spanned economics, and political science as well, and his PhD was in philosophy – a subject upon which he famously said ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.’ And also because his thinking changed as he grew older, from the young radical on the run from the authorities across Europe to the older radical bringing up his family in penury in London.


A short word about the Europe of Marx’s time, a world of Kings and Tsars and Kaisers looking to ruthlessly protect and preserve class and national interests against those of a burgeoning business class and a teeming proletariat. It reads a bit like Mubarak’s Egypt, or Assad’s Syria, or the Uzbekistan of today.


A little about the young Marx himself, as well! He was born in 1818 to a prosperous family in Trier, a beautiful little town in the wine-growing Moselle valley in Germany that I happen to have cycled through in 1991 (and imbibed a fair bit of that wine). Trier at that time was part of Prussia, and Marx’s father converted to Christianity in order to practice law, which as a Jew he was forbidden to do. The family also owned some of the vineyards around Trier, and Marx’s mother was from a rich Dutch-Jewish family that later went on to found Phillips Electronics. Marx himself received a secular education and was sent off to the University of Bonn where he wanted to study philosophy and literature and where his father insisted he study the more practically oriented law. He was fond of boozing and socializing, and joined a drinking society in Bonn (and later served as its co-President), and his poor grades had his father force him to transfer to the far more academically inclined University of Berlin, where the excursions into philosophy and history began. Somewhere along the way, he fell in love with a beautiful baroness of the Prussian ruling class, Jenny von Westphalen, described as ‘the most desirable young lady in Trier’, who broke off her engagement with an aristocratic Prussian Army officer to marry him. His doctoral thesis of 1841, “The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature”, a daring and original piece of work that suggested that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy, was controversial among the conservative professors of the University of Berlin. Marx decided to submit it to the more liberal University of Jena instead, whose faculty awarded him a PhD based upon it. He then looked for an academic job, didn’t find one , and turned instead to writing.


I will now focus on four works that he wrote before the age of 27, i.e. when he was at the age of many post-graduate students here at IRMA.


On the Jewish Question – 1843: In this text, Marx introduces the distinction between political emancipation (or the grant of liberal rights and liberties) and human emancipation. He argues that political emancipation is insufficient to bring about human emancipation, and it is also a barrier towards this. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings; liberal rights are rights of separation, and freedom is a freedom from interference. Marx suggests that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people, in communities, not in isolation. Insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to view each other in ways that may undermine the real freedom to be found in human emancipation. Marx did not oppose political emancipation, seeing it as a great improvement over the prejudice and discrimination of the Germany of his day, but did feel that it must be transcended on the route to human emancipation. Marx does not, in this text, say what human emancipation is, and we can only assume that it is related to the idea of un-alienated labour of future texts.


Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Introduction – 1843: This is the one that describes Marx’s views on religion in most detail, and is famous for the remark that religion is the ‘opiate of the people’. It also considers how revolution might be achieved in Germany, and sets out the role of the proletariat in bringing about societal emancipation.

An earlier viewpoint (Feuerbach, et al) opposing theology was that human beings had created God in their own image, and that worshipping God diverted humans from enjoying their own powers. Marx criticised this, saying that religion is a response to alienation in material life – alienation of labour from their work and alienation of people from their communities. Religion deviously promotes a false idea of community in which we are all equal in the eyes of God, and the state offers the illusion of a community in which we are all equal in the eyes of the law. Both state and religion can be transcended when a genuine community of social and economic equals is created. How can such a society be brought about? Marx suggests that it has to be through self-transforming action by the proletariat. Indeed, if they do not create the revolution for themselves (if enlightened philanthropy, for example, brings about change instead), they will not be fit to receive it.


Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts – 1844: This text is most famous for its description of the way labour is alienated under the capitalist system. Marx suggests four forms of alienation. First, from the product, which is taken away from the producer upon its creation. Second, in productive activity (or work), which is seen as a torment. Third, from their own powers, as they produce blindly and not in accordance with their skills and inclinations. And fourth, from other humans, with a relationship of exchange replacing the satisfaction of mutual need. Non-alienated labour, on the other hand, comes about when the immediate producer enjoys a product as a confirmation of his/her powers, and with the idea that production meets the needs of others so that both parties have a human essence of mutual dependence – individual human powers and membership in the human community.

For Marx, alienation is not merely a matter of subjective feeling, or confusion. And there is a sense of inevitability about it, given the tenets of capitalism. As long as a capitalist intends to stay in business, he must ruthlessly exploit his workers to the legal limit whether or not he is wracked by guilt. The worker must take the best job on offer; there is no other sane option. By doing these, they reinforce the very structures that oppress. The urge to transcend this, and to take collective control of destiny, is important in Marx’s social analysis.


Theses on Feuerbach – 1845: This is a compilation of Marx’s reaction to the philosophy of his day. He compliments materialism for understanding the physical reality of the world, and criticizes it for ignoring the active role of the human subject in creating it. And idealism is said to understand the active nature of the human subject, but confines it to thought or contemplation – creating categories upon which we can impose the world. Marx combines these insights to propose a view that human beings do indeed create, or at least transform, the world they find themselves in, but this transformation happens not in thought but through actual material activity. This historical version of materialism is the foundation of Marx’s theory of history.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Let's Talk About Sex, Baby!

LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX, BABY

By Ajit Chaudhuri – May 2012

“Our youth love luxury! They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders, contradict their parents, gobble up their food, and tyrannise their teachers!”


First, a disclosure! This note is about sex – the use of the word in the title is not a ruse to get you to read it. It is also about postmodern philosophy, and about making sense, for relics of my generation, of contemporary society. Most of us have relatives, friends and colleagues from subsequent generations, and most of us struggle to understand them; the sense of entitlement, the priority of the immediate, the importance of image over substance, the trivialization of relationships, and the lack of a sense of future consequences for today’s actions. This note covers sex, eroticism and love and relates them to changing times, attitudes and behaviour. It is based upon the paper ‘On Postmodern Uses of Sex’ found, of all places, in the reference material for the course on ‘Philosophy of Science’ at IRMA’s PhD programme.

So, let’s first talk about sex! This is a natural, and not a cultural, product that we share with most non-human species, and in its natural form it is always the same. To quote another author that struck a chord on this matter, ‘there has been more progress in cooking than in sex’. Its basic function is reproduction, and since this function is critical to the perpetuation of the species, nature has taken no chances – it has erred on the side of wastefulness by providing reproducing species with sexual energy and a capacity for sexual encounters far in excess of what the reproduction function would require.

Eroticism is about recycling that waste – filling the sexual act with surplus value over and above its reproductive function. It begins from reproduction and then transcends it, and reproduction turns into a constraint, simultaneously an indispensable condition and a thorn in the flesh of eroticism. There is a constant tension between the two. And the history of sex, according to the paper, is that of strategies to manage this tension.

In the modern era, two strategies vied with each other for domination. The first was of imposing the limits of the reproductive function of sex upon the freedom of erotic imagination, and relegating surplus sexual energy to the culturally suppressed and socially degraded spheres of pornography, prostitution and illicit liaisons. The second was the romantic strategy of linking eroticism to love and cutting its ties to sex, with love legitimising eroticism. Both strategies saw eroticism as needing a functional justification, and sought to anchor it in something other than itself – reproductive sex or love.

And now we come to the contemporary postmodern era, where eroticism becomes its own reason and purpose – it has lost its links with reproduction and love, and acquired lightness, volatility and the freedom to enter and leave any association of convenience. This emancipation of eroticism from sexual reproduction and love has been termed as ‘the erotic revolution’.

Now, your cynical minds at this stage would be telling you that all this is probably a marketing stunt concocted by some MBA-types to sell sex toys. Join the club! The paper, however, begs to differ with this view and says that it takes more than market forces, slick advertising, and a greed for profit to bring about a cultural revolution of this scale and depth.

So, how did this revolution come about? The author cites two causes, both relating to changes that came about with the advent of postmodern culture.

The first is that the earlier modern era had institutions charged with the responsibility of instilling discipline into and obtaining socially desirable conduct from people, institutions such as industrial factories and conscript armies. Most males passed through them and acquired habits that guaranteed obedience to social rules and societal order (and enforced them on females and children via the home and school). Contemporary society has no such institutional disciplining treadmills – it needs neither mass industrial labour nor conscript armies. The loss of these institutions led to a generational gap in the understanding of and adherence to traditional social mores, and therefore to the development and establishment of new mores.

The second relates to one of the features of postmodern culture; the condensed perception of the flow of time into ‘a series of self sustaining episodes, each to be lived in the fleeting moment, cut off from its past and its future consequences, with immortality to be lived instantly and enjoyed now, not hostage to the uncontrollable flow of objective time’. This tendency to cut the present from both the past and the future is paralleled by the tearing of eroticism from reproductive sex and love. Erotic imagination and practise, like all postmodern life practices, has acquired the freedom to experiment – to sail freely under the banner of pleasure seeking, and to negotiate its own rules.

The effects of the erotic revolution are many, and the author describes two of these. The first relates to the construction of postmodern identity. In traditional societies, identity was a given – it was based upon ethnicity, class, caste, race, etc. – you were born with one, and you were stuck with it. In the modern era, identity was a life project – you built up and worked towards a desired one, and stuck to it. Postmodern identities, however, are flexible, light, and rearrange-able at short notice. Solidity, permanence and commitment are seen as dangerous maladjustments to an unpredictable world, to the opportunities it offers, and to the speed with which it transforms yesterday’s assets into today’s liabilities. And eroticism, free from amorous and reproductive constraints, fits this well; it is made to measure for the multiple, flexible and evanescent identities of postmodern men and women. Sex can be framed into an episode, gender and other aspects of identity can be chosen and discarded, and sexuality need bear no relation to its reproductive role.

The second is the way all human relations are being vigilantly re-assessed for sex. In the home, with children, one has to be careful of overt and tangible expressions of parental love – children are now seen as sexual objects, and potential victims of parents and other adults who are sexual subjects. In the office, a casual remark can be construed as sexual provocation, and an offer of coffee sexual harassment. Sexual undertones are sniffed out in every emotion, and a threat suspected in every smile, gaze, and form of address. Every act can be seen as an act of sex, and every act of sex as a form of rape. This leads to human relations sans intimacy and emotionality, and the wilting of the desire to enter into them and keep them alive.

So, what do I think about all this? Well, though this paper pertains to western societies, and though the postmodern society in India coexists with traditional and modern ones, the points made do strike a chord. Young people are different in the ways described, and it is heartening to know that they are merely products of their times. The changes in homes, educational institutions and offices have taken place – speaking for myself, I am a regular recipient of dirty looks for holding doors open for ladies (and I promise you I had no intention of sex with any of them), and my wife recently fired me up for waking up the children (who were late for school) with a threat to pinch
their bums.

But, how does one develop as a sexual subject without committing the sin of treating another as a sexual object? In a sexual encounter, are participants not simultaneously required to be subjects and objects of desire?

And, what about love? Is it an outdated human construction, dreamed up as a way to absorb excess sexual energy and to give eroticism space and respectability in an era gone by, as the paper suggests? Or does it have a role in human relations, irrespective of the era? As one who has experience of its pleasures and pain, I personally have difficulty subscribing to the former view. And those of you who have read ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ would remember the confusion the protagonist Lisbeth Salander, that poster girl for postmodernism, underwent when she experienced an emotion that she was unable to recognize or categorize – an emotion called love. It still exists! Yippee!!