The answer, Marx says, for Proudhon, is to establish an entirely new reason, which is neither the Absolute Reason, existing outside the mind of Man, nor the reason of actual men, living in the real world, in different historical periods, but the reason of the “person-society”, of humanity, which Proudhon also refers to as “social genius”, “general reason”, and finally “human reason”.
This human reason does not create truth, but only uncovers it. The process of revelation can only be incremented, and so the truths it reveals are always only partial and contradictory, and these contradictions are what drives humanity to try to resolve them by further revelation.
“Economic relations, which merely realize on earth these insufficient truths, these incomplete ideas, are consequently contradictory in themselves, and present two sides, one good, the other bad.” (p 109)
Marx quotes Proudhon, again, to illustrate this, and, in it, can be seen also the approach of Sismondi, and other moralists, in which ideas divide into two parts, one of “useful effects”, and the other of “subversive results”.
In it can be seen the method of the petty-bourgeois, moral socialist, employed down to today. Proudhon's method posed antithesis as antidote, but this then led to a new “subversive result”, requiring a new antidote, all of which is assumed to be leading to the resolution of all contradictions in Nirvana. In this can be seen the concept of lesser-evilism, adopted by the moral socialists, of choosing sides based on which is seen to be morally superior at any given point. It was also the basis of the “stages theory” of Mensheviks and Stalinists. For social-democrats, it requires workers to always subordinate their interests to those of capital, whose development is seen as the basis of society, and also of the workers' welfare. It is the ideology of “jam tomorrow”. It can be seen in the policies of Macron that lead to increased support for Le Pen.
“Hypotheses are made only in view of a certain aim. The aim that social genius, speaking through the mouth of M. Proudhon, set itself in the first place, was to eliminate the bad in every economic category, in order to have nothing left but the good. For it, the good, the supreme well-being, the real practical aim, is equality. And why did the social genius aim at equality rather than inequality, fraternity, Catholicism, or any other principle? Because “humanity has successively realized so many separate hypotheses only in view of a superior hypothesis,” which precisely is equality. In other words: because equality is M. Proudhon's ideal.” (p 110)
This is a perfect explanation, from Marx, of the point I have made, in the past, looking at the petty-bourgeois moralism of the Third Camp, as displayed by different components of it such as the SWP, on one side, and the AWL, on the other. Both employ this method of Proudhon, described by Marx, and, as Marx describes, both start from different hypotheses, different categorical imperatives, of the “good” they seek to achieve.
In both cases, socialism itself never enters the equation, other than as something relegated to some distant future stage. The SWP's “good” is “anti-imperialism”, whereas the AWL's “good” is liberal democracy, and its global agent “democratic imperialism”. Until recently, they did not draw the logical conclusion from that, which the Euston Manifesto Group reached during the Iraq War, and which Paul Mason reached, of advocating support for, and strengthening of NATO, as the instrument of that “democratic imperialism”, but the dialectic of their support for the role of NATO in the Ukraine-Russia War has now led them to that same inevitable conclusion, in which they now claim that the capitalist state and imperialism are defenders of workers' interests!
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