Abstract: Marx and Individualism

Here's the abstract to a paper submission to "Marx's Vitalism and Its Relation to Individualism"

Topic: Marx and Philosophy Society fifth annual conference Final call for papers

Conference Title: Is there a Marxian philosophy?

Location: London, Saturday 24th May 2008

Keynote speaker: Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser University)

Marx had a theory of individualism that is a surprise for many people to learn about. His belief was that the crowning achievement of the proletarian movement would not be the production of a socialist state that would organize society's product in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people possible, thus producing a picture of Marx as a radical or revolutionary utilitarian, but rather that the dynamics of development and struggle that characterized modern bourgeois society would result in a situation where, for the first time, real individuals would be created that were liberated from the restrictions of class existence. Membership in a class, Marx believed, led to the creation of what he called "average individuals"; individuals who didn't really have their own individuality at their disposal, but rather people who had to live out the life of an average member of a class, taking on the opinions, the world view, the newspapers, the popular beliefs associated with a particular class, rather than developing their own and independent ideas and understandings of the world around them. Precisely the point of the proletarian movement was to create a situation in which individuals were created who were not defined by their class position and by membership in a class. This paper will explore Marx's theory of individualism and its relationship to his peculiar brand of vitalism. [end of abstract]

Everyone wish me luck!

Comments

[ortho stice]

Promises to be an interesting paper. Good luck!

[john c. halasz]

The "free association of producers" has always stuck me as ambiguous as to whether it is an atomistic or a communitarian vision. Perhaps a better account of the "vision", across the revolutionary chiasmus, is that, for the first time, human beings would "produce" their social relations in and through community with others, rather than through the alienating experience of the bifurcation between "individual" and "community". "Individual" probably derives from the Medieval Latin "individuum", as that which can not be divided, and the dispute between the nominalists and the realists, as to the "ens realismus". Marx was probably less concerned with resolving the dispute over nominalism than with dissolving such an opposition, and resituating human beings in a common world, in which their self-divided differences from one another would be no greater than there difference from that world.

Well, Marx does call communism "a society in which the free and full develoment of every individual forms the ruling principle" in Capital I....

[EgoDominusTuus]

Marx respected plumbers, machinists, electricians (Marx took an interest in electricity early on), and other skilled tradesmen more than he did professors and belle-lettristz..................that's a starting point for understanding Marx