Marx the Humanist

Seltman Muriel

Description

Marx the Humanist presents Marx's writings in a different light. Instead of malicious denigration, which makes him responsible for everything done in his name after his death, it is recognised that Marx was not a prophet and could not have foreseen the changes that have occurred since then. His early writings reflect his humanism, and represent his long-term revolutionary appeal.Although the focus is on Marx's humanism, the first two parts initiate the reader into Marxism and provide an introduction to basic Marxist ideas, both philosophical and economic. This provides the context for his condemnation of the dehumanising impact of capitalism on workers through exploitation.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 09 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838599324
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 Muriel Seltman

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

ISBN 9781838599324

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To Peter
Contents
Preface
References and Their Abbreviations
Chapter 1. The Basics
Chapter 2. Capitalist Economics
Chapter 3. Alienation
Chapter 4. The Future
Appendix
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Preface
The principal reason for writing this book is to present the side of Karl Marx’s thinking that is normally ignored, and to present it in an accessible manner. This book is not academic and is intended for readers who have read little or nothing of his writing and who are interested and receptive.
That is why it begins with the basics – his philosophy and the economic ideas for which he is usually known – before it goes on to the main issues: his humanism and vision for the future.
The latter were written down mainly in his early works, written in the early forties before the well-known Communist Manifesto. Attention was paid to these in the seventies but mainly by academics who wrote in a rather obscure fashion, making it difficult for most people to understand Marx’s principal purpose in life – to assist in the return to the mass of the world’s population its genuine humanity and creativity.
The hostile establishment via the media associate Marx with the Soviet Union, China and other self-styled socialist countries. Nothing is said about his exposure and condemnation of the dehumanising effects of capitalism, or his vision for the whole of humanity of a transformed society in which that humanity would be restored. That was his dream and it shows through in all his later economic writing, especially in Capital. Readers may judge this for themselves from the following pages. I hope they will be encouraged to read further from the references.
An appendix has been added which is about the concept of class. This was written many years ago and recovered recently and edited. It is a modification and extension of Marx’s concept of class and stresses the need to emphasise the relational definition sooner than the ‘whole person’ version. This allows for a richer outlook and the possibility of a flexible and more mobile viewpoint.
The main references are abbreviated and a list of these can be found on the following page. References which are rarely mentioned are given in full in the text.
References and Their Abbreviations

BR
Karl Marx. Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. Ed. T.B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel. Penguin, 1976.
CM
Communist Manifesto.
EF
Marx in His Own Words. Ernst Fischer with Franz Marek, Tr. Anna Bostock. Penguin, 1981.
EPMC
Karl Marx. Early Writings. Intr. Lucio Colletti, Tr. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. Penguin, 1975.
RF
Marx on Economics. Ed. Robert Freedman. Penguin, 1962.
GI
German Ideology.
MES
Marx and Engels Selected Works. Moscow, 1962.
TSV
Marx. Theories of Surplus Value. Lawrence and Wishart, 1969.
Chapter 1 . The Basics
Preamble
If there is one slogan that Karl Marx would have approved of in any demonstration, it would have been that of the striking women textile workers in Massachusetts in 1912: “Give us bread but give us roses too.” Despite what is said and written about Marx by his detractors, he worked all his life for working people to have the “roses” as well as the “bread”. His writing on economics – principally his monumental work, Capital , which occupied much of his life – was undertaken mainly to uncover the factors in his contemporary world which were, he thought, leading inexorably to the transformed world he envisaged for the future of humanity.
What does this slogan mean? The answer to this question is profoundly important. The women were on strike for a living wage. This was not a surprising event. What was unusual was the awareness of the strikers that this was not sufficient. Enough to eat, etc., would not raise them much above the level of animals. They had a sense of their human dignity and wanted more than that. They not only wanted adequate wages, they wanted the things that allowed them to be human. They wanted to be able to enjoy what makes life worth living – music, art, films, theatre, and so on, not to mention other activities such as beekeeping or birdwatching, or anything else that took their fancy.
It is precisely these aspirations that Marx wrote about in his early works. His writings have often been treated as if the early works were the disposable ideas of his youth and separate from the monumental analysis of capitalism on which he spent so much of his life. There was a great deal of interest in these early works in the seventies but despite this, the normal discrediting of Marxism by the establishment has continued and has been predominant ever since.
It is clear from Marx’s early sociological works that he already understood the devastating effect that capitalism had (and still has) on the state of mind of the working class in particular, but also on other people in a different way. His sociological writing was mainly accomplished in the early forties and culminated in 1848, when he wrote (together with Engels) The Communist Manifesto. This pamphlet was commissioned by the Communist League and first published in London.
Marx never repudiated a single word of the early works which span a period from 1843 to (perhaps) 1848 when The Communist Manifesto was written. These early works contain his sociological writing, and during this time he was also caught up in practical political work. But when, in 1851, the entire Central Committee of the Cologne Communist League (which he had hoped to direct from London) was imprisoned, he changed direction and, according to Francis Wheen, p.166:
“The Communist League was dead, and many years were to pass before Marx joined any other organisation… he retreated into the British Museum reading room… and applied himself to the ambitious task of producing a comprehensive, systematic explanation of political economy – the monumental project which was to become Capital .” (Karl Marx, 2010)
Why did Marx embark upon Capital around 1850/1? He explained this in a letter written in 1864 to Karl Kings of the German Workers Association: “…to deal a theoretical blow to the bourgeoisie from which they will never recover.” He hoped to finish it “in a couple of months” but when he died in 1883 it was still unfinished, and much of it, in manuscript form, had to be edited and published by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. Apparently, he intended to follow it up with a study of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine.
Marx devoted over 30 years to researching and writing Capital , which was to deliver the theoretical body blow to the capitalist class. He did this in the context of his profound awareness of the harm done to the humanity of the workers and others by the capitalist system that he was studying.
Marx was something of a latter-day ‘Renaissance Man’. He wrote voluminously on history, philosophy, political economy and sociology, and even left a manuscript on mathematics that attempted to deal with the contemporary problems of limits and continuity in calculus. His attempt, though inadequate, does him credit. The amazing thing is that he was sufficiently acquainted with the mathematics of his day even to attempt such an enterprise. [However, he seems to have been unaware of the previous work done by Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857).]
The purpose of this booklet is to reveal Marx’s visionary aspect, the part of him that deplored and condemned capitalism’s dehumanising effect on the working class in particular but actually on the population as a whole, but who envisaged a bright future for humanity in a humanised and transformed world. His philosophy and economic analysis of capitalism has to be included as context for the reader, but it is not the main point. It is regrettable that the reader has to plough through philosophy and economics to get to the main point, but it would be difficult to appreciate his sociology without this. There is always the choice before the reader of starting with Part 3. However, we can feel Marx’s unhappiness about the dehumanisation in the very economic analysis, even when it is not explicit in those writings.