Showing papers on "Emancipation published in 1982"

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Abstract: The central unifying theme in the Manuscripts is the alienation of labour under capitalist conditions of private ownership and its transcendence and abolition under communism. The doctrine of total emancipation which, as I have argued, was crucial in enabling Marx to assimilate ‘class’ and the ‘division of labour’ in his work is much more clearly articulated here and eloquently expressed. Communism, Marx argues, is ‘the positive transcendence of all estrangement’; the abolition of private property, communism: is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution.27 The vision of communism Marx unfolds in the Manuscripts derives much of its force from his remarkable analysis of the alienation of labour and is clearly underpinned by a preconception of truly human, free productive activity. Man’s productive interchange with nature is in fact taken as the defining characteristic of the species: ‘the productive life is the life of the species’; and Marx is careful to point out that while an animal can also be said to engage in production it ‘only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young’.

El Salvador in Transition

Abstract: Baloyra argues that the deepening American involvement in what is basically a domestic conflict between Salvadorans has failed to eliminate the obstructionism and violence of the

Economic Adjustments to Emancipation in the United States and British West Indies

Abstract: Economic Adjustments to Emancipation in the United States and British West Indies The nineteenth century saw the end of slavery throughout the New World. The successful uprising in Saint Domingue, which led to the confirmation of the abolition of slavery in I804, represented the one case in which abolition occurred with a shift in the racial basis of political control. Several states in the northern United States had ended slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and a number of South and Central American nations had done

Socialism and the Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary

Abstract: This is a comparative study of the role of Jewish question in the politics of the German and Austrian socialist parties before 1914. The response of the leading Marxist labour movements to Jewish emancipation, the rise of political anti-Semitism, and the emergence of Zionism, are among the subjects analyzed by the author.

Work and Instrumental Action

Abstract: In recent discussions of historical materialism, the relationship of Marx's critique of political economy to a critical social theory directed toward political action has come into question. The thesis that there is a "crisis in the theory of revolution" indicates that the analysis of capital, the centerpiece of Marx's theoretical project, can no longer retain such a leading role in the determination of a critical social theory capable of offering a Praxis-oriented interpretation of the contemporary situation of late capitalism. The function of the critique of political economy in a theory of class struggle was always disputed in the history of Marxism, but it has never before been questioned to such a great extent. Although the fundamental methodological notion of the mutual translatability, if not the thematical convergence of the systematic analysis of capital and a Praxis-oriented theory of revolution forms the basis of the Marxian tradition, precisely this theoretical complementarity is currently in doubt. The categories of a crisis theory based on the analysis of capital are apparently no longer adequate to describe the altered crisis areas and conflict potentials of late capitalist society. This incongruity has come to dominate both the theoretical and the political sides of Marxist discussion. Marx's conception of work has taken on a central position among the theoretical doubts about the relevance of Marxism as a theory of human emancipation.' In its original form, the concept is a categorical connective between the critique of political economy and the materialist theory of revolution: the concept of work should not

Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection

Abstract: In his inaugural lecture1 Habermas presented a programme of a philosophy of emancipation, according to which our knowledge is guided by our interest in emancipation, our interest in intersubjective communication, as well as our interest in technical mastery over nature. Already, at that time, Habermas indicated that a proof of the thesis that our knowledge depends on our interests was not to be given in the form of a systematic argument but rather by way of a historical appraisal of the positivistic and historicist philosophy of science. Accordingly, Knowledge and Human Interests turned out to be a history of philosophy, albeit of a special kind. His excursion through the idealistic (Kant, Hegel) and the materialistic (Marx) theory of knowledge, through the prehistory of positivism (Comte, Mach), pragmatism (Peirce), historicism (Dilthey), psychoanalysis (Freud) and perspectivism (Nietzsche) served as the philosophical and historical framework within which the thesis of the cognitive interests was to be systematically established. This was in effect the systematisation of a theory the aims of which converge in the concept of ‘self-reflection’. Knowledge and Human Interests was an exercise in ‘self-reflection’ in the sense of a theory of knowledge which, while raising the question of human interests, at the same time resurrected the Kantian question concerning the conditions of the possibility of knowledge in general; it was also a ‘self-reflection’ in the sense of a critical theory which, while reflecting upon cognitive interests, was at the same time a reflection on the conditions of the possibility of emancipation from ideologies and power structures.

The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampf: Some Reflections on the Historiography of Imperial Germany

Abstract: For the past fifteen years the historiography of Imperial Germany has been dominated by the view that the years 1878-9 were a fatal turning point in that country's modern history. Some commentators stress the anti-Socialist legislation of 1878; others, the reversion to tariffs in 1879. Scarcely anyone questions the existence of what one historian has called an "axial shift in German domestic politics" in these years,' a shift that was both comprehensive and to the Right; or that the 1880s was a period of reaction in which Germany' s elites, supported by a "new conservative alignment" in the Reichstag, were able to deflect popular aspirations for "emancipation" for another generation.2 Some historians have gone so far as to perceive in the last decades of the nineteenth century a massive

In search of the new south: southern politics after reconstruction

Abstract: Only recently has the study of southern politics begun to emerge from the shadows cast by C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South and V. 0. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation. I These two brilliant and intimidating volumes appeared at mid-century-Origins in 1951 and Southern Politics in 1949-and for a generation have largely dominated the writing of post-Reconstruction southern political history. New works continued to be published, and a considerable number of them were quite good; but rarely did they stray much beyond the parameters established by Woodward and Key. The main features of the Woodward-Key synthesis are well-known. Although the two authors differed in emphasis and conflicted on specific points, they both advanced Beardian interpretations that emphasized economic conflict between the haves and have-nots of southern society. Both regarded race as something of an "artificial" issue that disrupted the "natural" alliance of have-nots across color lines. In Woodward's analysis, the Civil War and Emancipation broke planter domination of southern politics and transferred power to modernizing bourgeois elites composed of merchants, businessmen, and industrialists. The Populist movement was an assault by agrarian have-nots on the exploitive Redeemer policies at home and the shortsighted Redeemer Right Fork alliance with northeastern capitalism nationally. With the failure of the Populist revolt, town and business oriented middle class Progressives led the South back into national politics, albeit not before shackling the region with disfranchisement, the one-party system, and de jure segregation. Key's study focused on the debilitating results of these institutions. For more than half a century they stunted southern political development and undermined the formation of a biracial New Deal coalition of havenots. A Woodward-Key synthesis structured the teaching and writing of New South politics for three decades. Much of this analysis remains valid today, of course-indeed, Key's Southern Politics is still largely unchallenged-but in recent years vague outlines of a different synthesis have begun to emerge. Comparative history, especially comparative studies of slavery, has par

Race and Class in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean

Abstract: The abolition of slavery in New World societies is usually seen as a momentous event which resulted in a complete social transformation. Although the abolition of the legal status of slave required a rearrangement of social relations, the diverse social practices which constituted slavery did not all disappear overnight. In this chapter, I shall examine the continuities in structure which have shaped Caribbean societies through long periods of apparent change. My central argument will be that liberal ideologies developed in the post-emancipation period, ideologies which stressed individual achievement as the basis of social status, were systematically transformed by underlying assumption about race and that affected social practice in significant ways.

Socialist Societies Old and New: Progress Toward Women's Emancipation?

Abstract: It has long been the claim of socialist parties and governments that they, and they alone can bring about the full emancipation of women. They maintain that the abolition of inequality along the lines of sex can only be achieved as part of the broader socialist transformation of society through which divisions along lines of class will also be abolished. This assertion can be found throughout socialist programs and legislation. It is seen as an integral part of their claim to be socially revolutionary, and it is proclaimed as much in the new post-revolutionary states of the Third World as it is in the USSR and Eastern Europe. If true, even partially so, it represents a significant point of reference for discussing strategies of women's emancipation throughout the developed and less developed worlds.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The many faces of orthodoxy

Abstract: Among Jews, the Orthodox have often seemed to stand out because of their putative adherence to halakha, the strict pathways of Jewish law. Compared to their more liberal counterparts, they have seemed singlemindedly dedicated to an unchanging tradition. Yet anyone who has looked more closely at those who since the nineteenth century have claimed to be "Orthodox" has quickly discovered that what appears from the distance of unfamiliarity to be one face turns out upon closer examination to have a variety of aspects. To put it another way, those walking along the halakhic path have not always agreed on precisely where it could take them. Some remained convinced that the old ways could lead to a new age while others trusted the tradition to be able to take them to the essential core of parochial Jewish life. In what follows, I shall try to sketch these various trands or faces of Orthodoxy. My efforts are not, strictly speaking historical. Others are far more competent in that area. Rather, I want to suggest a way of sociologically considering some of the history of Orthodoxy. A sense of the centrality and abiding value of Judaism and the Jewish community was from the beginning part of the reaction to the enlightenment and emancipation by Jews who in contrast to the Reformers were labelled "Orthodox." In the face of the changes occurring in the western world surrounding them, tradition-oriented Jews tried to hold onto what they considered the meaningful, divinely-inspired order of life that was represented in the term, "Torah." Yet it was precisely this effort, to hold onto the past in an atomosphere that championed change, that resulted in fundamental transformations of Orthodox Judaism. The realities of the new world order were undeniable. Even the miost

Women, Work, and Crime: An International Test of the Emancipation Hypothesis

Abstract: This study analyzes Interpol statistics on female crime for the 1963–1970 period for a sample of Western nations with the purpose of testing two popular explanations of female criminality. Six measures of female economic participation in society were correlated with female proportional involvement in overall crime rates, theft, fraud, murder, and robbery/burglary. It was found that women's contribution to the overall arrest rate is neither directly proportional to their employment in the commercial work force, nor to the degree in which their jobs are comparable to those of males. The analysis of the crimes of theft and fraud provided support for the “opportunity” version of emancipation theory. Adler's “aggressive” variant of the emancipation hypothesis was only partly borne out by the data for murder and not supported for robbery and burglary.

The Propaganda of Anti-Slavery

Abstract: It has been argued that one of the crucial reasons for the success of the anti-slavery movement in Britain was the unprecedented support it came to acquire in the years 1798–1838.1 In a society where Government was unaccustomed to the arts of containing and deflecting public pressure, the public demand for abolition of the slave trade and later emancipation of the slaves was not merely more powerful than any comparable movement but, significantly, it was thought by contemporaries to be irresistible. It is easy to take a cynical view of this — to fall back on a deterministic position and argue that no British Government could have contemplated ending so economically important a system as slavery unless flaws had begun to appear in that previously profitable edifice. At the very time the British ended the slave trade in 1807 the slave system was not regarded as unprofitable by contemporaries. Indeed the work of Seymour Drescher has shown that abolition came at a time of economic buoyancy for the slave system.2 If this is true, and if it is also true that anti-slavery became the political issue which attracted more support from more varied social groups, the time is ripe for a closer examination of the anti-slavery campaign.

The limitations of federal health care for freed men, 1862-1868.

Abstract: DURING THE CIVIL WAR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT FREED the slaves, not in a fit of absent-mindedness exactly but at least with no plan for making freedom a reality. In the months and years after the decision in favor of emancipation, a tentative federal policy for easing the blacks' transition to freedom emerged. Recent studies have often concluded, though, that federal efforts did little to encourage true freedom and independence for the former slaves. ' In reaching that conclusion historians have devoted limited attention to the problem of medical care for the freedmen.2 Yet, access to professional medical treatment, which before emancipation had been controlled by the slaveowners, was one of the factors that helped shape the former slaves' experience of freedom. Close study reveals that federal health-care programs did little to break the pattern of dependence on whites. It also suggests that not just racism but mid-nineteenth-century social-welfare policy and the

The Checkered Career of “Jew” King: A Study in Anglo-Jewish Social History

Abstract: Contemporary Jewish historiography has tended to ignore the private side of the struggle for Jewish integration into European society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead, most work has concentrated on public efforts to achieve acceptance and respectability—programs to modernize Jewish education, reform Jewish worship, normalize Jewish occupations, and apply critical standards and methods to Jewish scholarship. In particular, historians have focused their attention on that small group of notables who managed the affairs of the organized Jewish community, that is, those wealthy Jews who everywhere directed the campaign for emancipation and the modernization of Jewish life and later the defense of Judaism in the face of a renewed antisemitism.Needless to say, this group hardly constituted a majority of the community in any locality and in many places probably not even a majority of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie. Yet many of these well-to-do Jews who took no active part in communal affairs were as eager as the communal notables to gain acceptance for themselves outside the Jewish community. Indeed, in most cases their ties to Judaism and the Jewish community were weaker; conversely, their desire for integration into non-Jewish spheres usually stronger.

Emancipation & Renewal: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: EMANCIPATION & RENEWAL: ENGLISH CATHOLICISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Cheryl E. Yielding Old Dcrninion University, 1982 Director: Dr. Norman H. Pollock English Catholics faced great difficulties and divisions in the nineteenth century. The chief problems were obtaining civil rights and the right to provide their children with a religious education, prejudice, the restoration of the hierarchy for more efficient government, and the split between Ultramontanes and Liberals. The influx of Irish added to these problems. This thesis is concerned only with the English Catholics and those Irish Catholics living in England. The "Irish Question" is not dealt with, as the Irish Catholics had different problems and needs than their English brethem. The major emphasis is the preju­ dice encountered by English Catholics and the restoration of the hierarchy. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Marxist Theory and Human Rights

Abstract: THE DENIAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOCIALIST STATES CAN BE seen as the natural outcome of Marxist praxis: Marxist teaching about the nature of the class struggle and the conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat from bourgeois values is not only theoretically alien to the concept of universal human rights, but its implementation by Marxist revolutionaries in the circumstances expected to prevail is likely to require the denial of such rights to ever-widening sections of the society if political power is to be secured and retained.

Production in General, the Labour Process and the Division of Labour

Abstract: It has been my argument that in transforming his theoretical starting point from exchange to production in the 1850s and 1860s, Marx found himself compelled to reflect afresh upon the conditions of existence of human production as such and its relation to the exigencies of what he referred to as ‘large-scale’ production, abstracted from their concrete realisation in social formations, characterised by forms of commodity production and class relations, and that the first fruits of this retheorisation are evident in the Introduction to the Grundrisse. It is also the contention here that this led Marx, in turn, to revise his earlier belief in the possibility of a complete emancipation from the division of labour in a future classless society and that in Capital and subsequent writings Marx’s remarks on the transformation of the division of labour in future society should primarily be understood as referring to one fundamental aspect of the differentiation of productive tasks: the division between intellectual and manual labour.

The History of European Jewry: Recent Trends in the Literature

Abstract: The historiography of European Jewry in the modern period has been dominated by the subject of emancipation 1-the prolonged struggle to achieve it, its revolutionary impact upon the social, ideological, and institutional foundations of the Jewish community, and the anti-Semitic assault upon it. Since the scholarly enterprise of studying the Jewish past was itself a product of the emancipationist impulse, from its beginnings in the nineteenth century modern Jewish historiography focused upon the perceived radical discontinuity between the premodern autonomous and partially segregated Jewish community, composed of tolerated aliens subject to discriminatory taxation and myriad economic restrictions, and the voluntary community of Jewish citizens, enjoying all the rights and responsibilities of their Gentile countrymen and participating with enthusiasm in the cultural and economic life of their countries. In shattering the optimism of the liberal emancipationist ideology, the experience of European Jewry in the twentieth century did not displace emancipation as the foremost issue of historical investigation. However, it raised to center stage the failure of emancipation, the "inevitability" of that failure, and the alleged insensitivity of European Jewish leaders to the instability of their situation and the inadequacy of their liberal ideology.2 Because of the centrality of the history of ideas within Jewish scholarship and the communal self-definition of Jews, Jewish historians have concentrated upon the legal and ideological components of emancipation and

Race and the Return of the Great Chain of Being, 1800–50

Abstract: A fundamental question about the history of racism in the first half of the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war against racism in European thought was being lost. The Negro was legally freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still mentally, morally and physically a slave.

Review Article : 'As individuals everything ... as a group nothing': The Flawed Emancipation of the Jews in Europe

Abstract: Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry 1906-1939, New York, Columbia University Press, 1979. xii + 338pp. $21.90. Harriet Pass Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 5740/1979. xiv+323pp. $14.95. John F. Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust 1939-1943, New York, Ktav, 1980. xvii + 327pp. $20.00. Bernard Wasserstein

Socialist emancipation: the women's movement in the german democratic republic

Abstract: Synopsis—The paper attempts to evaluate the role of the DFD (Women's Democratic League of Germany—the official and only women's organization in the G.D.R.) within the general context of the situation of women in the G.D.R. It therefore discusses the DFD's historical contribution to legislation and social measures in favour of women, the theoretical framework in which this occurred, and the somewhat paradoxical nature of the DFD's current role. Expanding these issues, the paper deals with the historical legacy of Marxist theory on the emancipation of women, and the isolation from Western feminist theory in which the G.D.R. in general, and the DFD in particular operate. Contradictions in the present situation of women in the G.D.R. are discussed as well as the tremendous gains in status and consciousness already made by women on the basis of the economic, social and legal provisions in their favour. Some causes for these contradictions are postulated. Examples of their expression through the media and in recent literature are given to exemplify both the extent of and the limits to the current discussion of feminist issues in the G.D.R.

The German Ideology

Abstract: Despite the emergence of historical materialism in The German Ideology, several themes broached in the earlier works remain central to this text and none more so than the close identification of class and the division of labour. While the notion of man’s ‘essence’ and alienation — and, correspondingly, the inspiration these had provided for the doctrine of total emancipation — had been crucial in enabling Marx to produce a close theoretical link between class and the division of labour, the transcendence of anthropologism led to no significant adjustment in this respect. The idea of complete liberation remained a strong motif, although this time underpinned not by a conception of human nature but by a theoretical structure which left no room for doubt that class and the division of labour both derived from private property and that the abolition of the latter necessarily implied the disappearance of the former. Thus there is a significant continuity in the (reductionist) structure of Marx’s discourse between the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology. The assimilation of class to the division of labour now independently performs the discursive function which had previously been accomplished by combining this form of reductionism with an essentialist anthropology.