Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2004 23:39:29 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: Communists and Religious Movements?
From: Thiago Oppermann <thiago_oppermann-AT-bigpond.com>


On 7/4/2004 12:04 AM, "David McInerney" <borderlands-AT-optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> Hi Robin
> 
> I don't think "philosophical materialism" refers to Feuerbach etc, but I see
> where you are coming from, i.e, a reading of Marx's 6th (?) thesis on
> Feuerbach, that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is
> to change it" - i.e, entailing that Marxism is a "post-philosophical"
> position.  

Heidegger once said that philosophy had ended with Marx, but I don't know
how someone could construe Marx as a post-philosopher. I rather agree with
Foucault's assessment that dialectical materialism was an effort by
philosophy to colonize the discourses of social war - the point isn't after
all, to change the world in any old haphazard way. No doubt we can see in
Marx another direction, one that sees the struggle itself as the creative
moment, even one that undermines theoretizations of how this struggle must
unfold, but that is a revision and possibly a good one. To read it
otherwise, you have to disregard all the rhetoric of scientific communism,
explain away how Engels could come up with such mechanical ideas about
organization, etc... Engels is probably more to blame for the way things
went, but it would be very odd if Marx, in view of his behaviour in the
International, had turned out to have been alien to the trajectory taken by
Marxists, which was very much towards scientificism and - does this even
bear stating - planning. All of which is about changing the world according
to certain principles, and putting philosophy in a commanding position.

Adorno, on the other hand, thought that Marx's 11th thesis was a sign of the
authoritarianism to come... I think this was in a letter to Marcuse, or at
least repeated there. He was very upset about subsuming theory to praxis, an
anxiety shared by Marcuse, and that is exactly what he saw happening before
him in the 60s. The anxiety, in a sense, is that the philosophy - or, let me
be vague, reflection - that is so central to Marxism would disappear. In
Teddy and Herbie, you have the authoritarian and liberal reactions, or
should we say - ways of avoiding the issue.

As for materialists not believing in the supernatural, that's weird sort of
pseudo-problem. It only exists under very specific assumptions about matter
and the other world. In the part of Papua New Guinea I focus on, one often
finds cosmologies that are entirely 'materialistic', in the sense that they
contain no 'other world' or 'ether' or 'astral plane', nor for that matter
'gods' or anything incorporeal. Ideas and emotions are often thought of as
properties of the skin and belly. Yet these people are very, very
'superstitious' - or rather, they have an entire technology for dealing with
spirits of the dead, who are conceived as items of this very world we walk
on. Puripuri, ie. sorcery, will as a rule involve excreta, and it will work
by affecting the body of the victim in a certain way. When, in 1919, the
Elema contacted their dead relatives, who were rumoured to be in a steamer
loaded with rifles and western goods, they did this by receiving the
communications through a flag-pole/radio device, the message being imparted
onto the pole by the vibration of the wind, which would either go into the
earth, up someone's leg, into their belly, where it would cause him to
speak, or it would be heard by placing the ear directly on the pole. At no
point is there any question of another domain, of metaphysics, etc...

Could you say that in this sort of cosmology there is 'materialism'? Well,
there is a pervasive corporeality. But even this word can't escape the fact
that we determine these categories by reference to otherworldliness and
irreality. 

This becomes extremely interesting when you have a situation where people
operating with such ideas engage with our universe and its things. In the
60s, at the height of the cargo-cult literature boom, Peter Lawrence, a
reactionary figure who was nevertheless very attuned to the people he
studied, noted that the problem with 'cargoist' interpretations of the
western technology was not that these imparted spiritualism to our material
world, but rather that the Melanesians were far too materialist and obsessed
by technology. They didn't have a realm of theory, and consequently, he
argued, they were in trouble separating their ritual technology from our
technology. Peter Worsley, who was Lawrence's antipode politically, drew
hope from this, coming very close - too close, if you read his conservative
reviewers - to construing cargo thinking as an incipient marxism...

 

Thiago 



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