Old and new

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Old and new is in Marxism used two terms that by addressing the Hegelian dialectic is dominated thinking. It deals with the contradictory development of the old and the new, in particular how the new develops from the old and how in the new the old is lifted at a higher level. Often the revolution or the socialist order is seen as the new that develops from the old order and removes its contradictions.

Marx and Engels

Although the pair of terms old and new is sometimes used in connection with the inhibiting role of old scientific tradition on new knowledge, in connection with the confusion of new social creations with old, past forms or the assertion of the old in the new, etc. Used in connection with the general historical development, with the development of the social productive forces and especially the revolutionary transition from the old capitalist order to a socialist / communist society.

Already in the letters from the Franco-German yearbooks , Marx saw the “advantage of the new direction” in his thinking “that we do not anticipate the world dogmatically, but only want to find the new one from the criticism of the old world”.

In German ideology , history is then understood as a process in which the developing productive forces form a "coherent series of forms of intercourse, the interrelation of which consists in the fact that the earlier form of intercourse that has become fettered is replaced by a new, more developed one Productive forces and thus the advanced type of self-activity of the individual is set, the a son tour is again a fetter and then replaced by another. Since these conditions correspond to the simultaneous development of the productive forces at every stage, their history is at the same time the history of the developing productive forces and taken over by each new generation and thus the history of the development of the forces of the individuals themselves. "

This idea can also be found in the well-known foreword to the critique of political economy : “A social formation never perishes before all productive forces for which it is sufficiently developed, and new, higher relations of production never take their place before the material conditions of existence of the same hatched in the womb of old society itself. Therefore, humanity only ever sets itself tasks that it can solve, because if you look more closely, you will always find that the task itself only arises where the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of becoming. "

In Engels Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of classical German philosophy , history (like thinking, science) is understood as a process without a conclusion in which the new constantly develops from the old. So then “all successive historical states would only be ephemeral stages in the endless development of human society from lower to higher. Every stage is necessary, and therefore justified, for the time and the conditions to which it owes its origin; but it becomes obsolete and unjustified in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own bosom; it must give way to a higher level, which in turn comes back to the series of decay and decline. "

Marx and Engels deal more closely with the emergence of the new from the old in relation to the development of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx formulates with reference to the bourgeois revolutions: “The new, bourgeois society, based on completely different foundations, on a changed mode of production, also had to seize political power; she had to wrest it from the hands that represented the interests of the declining society, a political power whose entire organization had emerged from very different material social conditions. Hence the revolution. ”The“ machine industry, which developed with the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, arose before ... naturally on a material basis that was inadequate for it. To a certain degree of development he had to revolutionize this basis, which was first found ready and then further worked out in its old form, and create a new basis for himself corresponding to his own mode of production. ”In the following, the capitalist mode of production tends to destroy all“ ancient and transitional forms ”. , behind which the rule of capital was still partially hidden, [in order to] replace it with its direct, undisguised rule. ”For Marx, capitalist development was associated with the rise of the workers to a class that could revolutionize the mode of production . So grow out of "the old world with its social misery and its political madness a new society". In long struggles the working class would “work out that higher form of life, which contemporary society is irresistibly striving towards through its own economic development ... It has no ideals to realize; it only has to set free the elements of the new society which have already developed in the womb of the collapsing bourgeois society. "

Lenin

Lenin extends the use of the pair of terms by transferring them to the level of politics and class struggle. According to Gerard Bensussan, the terms are used by Lenin to “mark positions and places or to designate principles and actions. In other words, they serve Lenin to assess what the class struggles are about and in what forms they are carried out The concrete analysis of a concrete situation with Lenin is based, among other things, on balancing the old and new elements of the situation in order to determine an appropriate position and appropriate courses of action. Lenin also emphasizes the birth of the new in the old, which is why he concentrates less on the exploration of a new power and more on its growth against the old power. Thus “the current state of disorganization would be a state of transition ..., of the transition from the old to the new, a state of growth in this new ... And one understands that the search for the new is not immediately precise, once and for all can offer fixed, almost frozen and immobile forms ... "Ultimately, it is important to deal strategically with the old and new elements found in a concrete situation:" There are historical moments when it is most important for the success of the revolution is to accumulate as much rubble as possible, ie to blow up as many old facilities as possible; ... there are times when the most important thing is to carefully care for the seeds of the new that sprout from under the rubble ... ... You have to understand how to find that special chain link at every moment, which must be tackled with all your strength in order to hold the whole chain and to prepare the transition to the next chain link with a firm hand. "

Stalin

While the movement between old and new was still in the foreground with Marx and Engels as well as Lenin, under Stalin the final judgment of old and new was increasingly in the center. According to Gerard Bensussan, this had political consequences in addition to theoretical unproductivity: “From now on, the old and the new had to do the job, along with the other services for which these categories were used, to separate the wheat from the chaff. On the one hand (on that of the "old man") there is a colorful row: the general theory of relativity, abstract art, the theory of permanent revolution and the Trotskyist underestimation of the specific weight of the peasant class; on the other (that of the "new") there are about: the biology of Michurin, the socialist realism , the theory of the building of socialism in one country and the Lysenkoism ... The catalog of the confirmed, verified forms of the old and the new as well Incidentally, their disputes can be read in a Soviet work from 1952 ... "

Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci , who was also involved in the magazine L'Ordine Nuovo ( The New Order ), was interested in the Marxian foreword on the critique of political economy and the passage cited above in his prison notebooks . This is also made clear in his reflections on social crises: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new cannot come into the world ...” At another point he notes in this regard: “New things can arise because either a situation of prosperity ... is threatened or because the deprivation has become unbearable and one sees no strength in the old society that would be able to alleviate it and restore it to a normal state by legal means. ... the situation remains ineffective ... contradicting consequences can arise: the old society resists and secures a time of 'respite' ... "

In his writings on Fordism , Gramsci formulated the idea that the development of the new production techniques or the productive forces "brought about the need to work out a new type of person who conforms to the new type of work and the production process."

Brecht

Also Bert Brecht uses in his work, the two terms of the New and Old. In Brecht's Me-ti. In the Book of Twists , for example, he formulates: “Now what we have is certain, disorder, and what we are planning, order, but the new arises from the old and is its next level. We try less to push through something completely different, to which there is no access, than to take the next step, ie to draw the conclusion from what is available. The new arises when the old is overturned, continued and developed. "


The old says: I have always been the way I am.
The new says: If you are not good, then go.
Bert Brecht - Life of Galileo

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Engels, MEW 20, pp. 317/318 415/416 434 443 484/485 552.
  2. ↑ MEW 17, p. 340.
  3. ↑ MEW 33, p. 328.
  4. ↑ MEW 1, pp. 80, 241, 409; MEW 2, pp. 31, 109/110, 112, 132, 169; MEW 8, pp. 118, 225, 227; MEW 20, p. 129; MEW 21, pp. 266, 273, 301; MEW 23, pp. 403/404
  5. ^ Karl Marx: Letters from the German-French Yearbooks , MEW 1, p. 344.
  6. ^ Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Die deutsche Ideologie , MEW 3, p. 72.
  7. ↑ Karl Marx: On the Critique of Political Economy , Preface , MEW 13, p. 9.
  8. ↑ Friedrich Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of classical German philosophy , MEW 21, p. 267.
  9. ↑ Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: The Trial against the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats , MEW 6, p. 244.
  10. ^ Karl Marx: Das Kapital , MEW 23, p. 403.
  11. ^ Karl Marx: Das Kapital , MEW 23, p. 526.
  12. ^ Karl Marx: Official report of the London General Council, read out in public session of the International Congress in Hague , MEW 18, pp. 130f.
  13. ↑ Karl Marx: The Civil War in France , MEW 17, p. 343.
  14. ↑ a b Gerard Bensussan: Old / New . Critical Dictionary of Marxism , Vol. 1, 1983.
  15. ↑ LW 27, p. 199.
  16. ↑ LW 27, p. 265; see. LW 29, p. 415.
  17. ↑ Cf. MM Rosental: The Marxist dialectical method , Berlin / GDR 1953, pp. 132ff.
  18. ^ Antonio Gramsci: Prison Writings / Writings from Prison , Vol. 2, Berlin 1991, p. 354.
  19. ↑ Gramsci, Prison Books , Vol. 7, p. 1564.
  20. ↑ Gramsci, Prison Booklet, Vol. 9, Issue 22, §2, pp. 2068-69.
  21. ↑ Bert Brecht: Me-ti. Book of Turns , Frankfurt am Main 1965.