The individual in a collective science and politics.

I only recently understood once more one of the objections that I had just as I began to read Marx and marxists. A score of attacks were aimed at the marxist interest in history, structures and classes. Where, in all this, is there place in the individual? Is Marxism not determinist, relying on a material understanding of everything?

Well, no. What I am not going to say now is that some marxists have gotten it wrong and that they have oversimplified the science and turned it into a dogma. I am sure that there have been those, but to be honest, I have never read one. So what I am going to say is, instead, that liberal critics have misunderstood things.

First of all, there is probably a strain of the Soviet Union in here. Oppression of dissidents and personal freedoms, all that. The only thing I am going to say there is that the Soviet Union never attained socialism. Perhaps Trotsky would not have solved matters, however that may be, I believe in soviets proper, not the Soviet Union.

Second of all, if we are totalities of the social relations of our times: are we then individuals? Does our existance change anything? What are the (ethico-)political implications of that? It is absurd and incredibly stupid and ideological to deny that culture, class, ethnicity and gender does not affect us. We are to an incredibly large extent the products of our society. But society is not a static totality; that is a basic marxist insight. Individuals are the stepping stones of the collective, but a group can not simply be reduced to each individual in turn. There is something more. I would like to say that it is to a large extent praxis. In a human being there are certain ideologies, a language, an understanding of morality and many more things. These are prerequisites for being able to interact. As the hermeneutics understand it: we have certain given understandings of the world that filter it, and as we learn more, our understandings become more and more precise, some are even radically changed (note in this how it ties in with Thomas Kuhn and Louis Althusser's understanding of terms and revolutions in science).

To understand an individual, it is necessary for us to have a certain range of history, past relations and background such as where they came from, where they have gone to school, which social class they come from and so on. They, in turn, cannot be reduced to merely that. It is such a banal, ridiculous truth that I am ashamed to say it, but an individual is also something else than mere socio-economical totalities (that are often, consciously or unconsciously, in conflict with each other!).