Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 19:43:16 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: Communists and Religious Movements?
From: Thiago Oppermann <thiago_oppermann-AT-bigpond.com>


On 11/4/2004 1:02 PM, "FoofighterPilot" <cwright-AT-megapathdsl.net> wrote:

> Now, does this preclude the presence of such notions in Marx's ideas?
> Hardly.  But I think it is an ongoing mistake to imagine Marx/Engels instead
> of Marx and Engels.

Yes, definitely so, but I think that it is an important exegetical tidbit
that Marx didnıt get stuck into Engelsı scientificism. I donıt but the
justification that this was unnecessary because he had a dialectical view of
science, or rejected Mills. Iıd want to know what the substance of this is,
in terms of how the project of a scientific communism could be found to be
absent in Marx. What worries me in Marxıs trajectory is that he had ample
time to engage with the more blatant distortions ­ if thatıs what they are ­
such as Engelsı horrible, horrible treatment of ethnological data, the
increasingly mechanical application of the teleology by, well, everybody,
and so on...
 

> Do you equate dialectical materialism with Marx?  I do not, for example, per
> se disagree with Foucault's assessment, but I don't think it applies much to
> Marx or to certain other heterodox elements, as much as to the orthodox
> tradition.  But maybe this relates to below..

Well, I donıt equate dialectical materialism with Marxıs thinking, but it is
a very substantial part of his thinking. I have a hard time seeing how
someone would disagree with that. Perhaps you can say that dialectical
materialism in Marx is open to many different interpretations, and that a
particularly hierarchizing, indeed positivist version ended up triumphing.
Perhaps this happened despite Marxıs wishes, but again, he has to foot the
bill for something here. Similarly, I donıt think Nietzsche was a Nazi, but
you have to hold him to account for making that distortion such a plausible
one...

But I should say that my reading of Society Must be Defended is that that
last lecture is targeted precisely at Marx. I read Foucault as saying that
here you have a discourse on economics that emerges at a time when
productive life and the relations of power therein have begun to be
articulated into unruly and ungovernable discourses, with all sorts of
apparently incomprehensible results, and voila, here is Marx with his
nouvelle tableaux with which to organize the teeming mess. For my Foucault,
Marx is the moment of regimentation of the proletarian aspect of these
uncontrolled discourses, more or less in the way Spencer represents the
bourgeois moment. 

Ahh... just mentioning Spencer makes me homesick. The Brazilian motto,
spangled across the flag, is "Order and Progress"...

> This is interesting.  I might put it differently that, given the pervasive
> pessimism of the Frankfurt School, their hopelessness, the idea that the
> life of the mind should be expressed as merely one moment of total social
> practice puts at risk the meaningfulness of their activity.  In its own way,
> it is a rational misreading of the 11th thesis.

In its own way it is not a misreading at all. Adorno had some very
authoritarian attitudes as to what was proper theoretical guidance for
action. In particular, he was not about to be hurried into a decision before
thinking it through, which given his intellectual habits was not going to
happen sooner rather than later. The 11th thesis, from that perspective, is
nothing other than the demand to change the world before it is interpreted,
before what Adorno understood to be the required work of thought be
completed. It is a denunciation of authoritarianism couched in authoritarian
terms and with an authoritarian rhetorical force, but for that very reason
it is also one that is extremely compelling. It is difficult to argue
against it precisely because that would be a detour into the work of
thinking. Checkmate.


> I rather enjoyed the last three paragraphs.
> 
> Cheers,
> Chris

I wrote a thesis on the subject, which fleshes out a lot of the historical
stuff. I'd be happy to forward it to you or to anybody else who is
interested - but it runs at around one meg, and could be incomprehensible to
someone without a knowledge of PNG ethnography...

Thiago



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