Date: Sun, 31 Aug 1997 09:09:12 -0700 (PDT)
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU,
Subject: Re: BHA: new dialectics and CR


There are a couple of glaring gaps in your tour de force, Hans.  Recognizing
the difficulties over the past 120 years in properly interpreting CAPITAL,
you suggest that Marx himself may not be the last word in the development of
social science and scientific philosophy.  It seems the shortcomings in Marx
could be attributed to (1) mode of presentation, (2) shortcomings in
understanding political economy itself, (3) distortions in his analysis of
political economy due to methodological constraints, i.e. too closely
following Hegel.  You lean heavily on possibility (3), so it seems, with
suggestions of (1) and (2) as well.  It is also the case that you accept the
notion than the mature Marx differs qualitatively from the young Marx.  You
haven't spelled out these differences, but, given your citation of
Althusser, it seems that the transition from philosophy to science has
something to do with this sea-change.

Ok, so where are the gaps?  To begin with, let me pose a series of questions:

(1)  As I asked before, other than the fact that the object of study changed
for Marx, what are the indications that the young Marx's analyses of
whatever were affected by a form of metaphysical thinking he transcended
later on?

(2)  If the mature Marx too closely followed Hegel, does this mean that the
mature Marx was metaphysical in the bad sense, that somehow he forced the
material of political economy into the Procrustean bed of Hegelianism?  Did
Marx merely use aspects of Hegelianism he found useful, or was he truly used
and co-opted by Hegelianism to distort the direction of his work?

(3)  You suggested that Marx took political economy as a fully developed
science and reordered its categories.  Here is where I must introduce the
relation between Marx and Engels.  From Western Marxism, we are accustomed
to thinking of Marx as the great genius and Engels as the second-rate
interpreter.  These considerations take place specifically within the realm
of philosophy and methodology.  Yet Marx himself greatly esteemed Engels
above all others.  Did Marx so admire Engels because of his philosophical
subtlety?  It would seem that Marx so esteemed Engels because Marx relied so
heavily on the latter's grasp of political economy and economic phenomena.
If there is something Marx failed to develop concerning political economy
proper, what is Engels' share in this failure?

(4)  There is a huge literature on the interpretation of CAPITAL, some of
which you have cited, that ranges from extreme Hegelian to extreme
anti-Hegelian interpretations.  It would be unfair to demand a review of the
entire literature in one post in this forum.  However, I think I did ask if
Bhaskar himself had written substantively on this topic, or on political
economy in general.  I didn't get much of an affirmative response.  Now
maybe this is your ultimate ambition, maybe this is your work in progress, I
don't know, but the real test of the superiority of critical realism in this
instance would be to show it enables superior insights into Marx's CAPITAL
than all the other interpretations, or that it shows up Marx's ambiguities
or shortcomings more insightfully than all the other interpretations.  Has
anybody done this?  If so, I wish someone would bring that to the attention
of this list.

Remember, what I've seen here is treatment of very general questions
regarding the ontology and methodology of social science.  But for me the
real test of critical realism is not its ability to argue for the scientific
status of social science or to argue against methodological individualism,
which are still very general issues, but to specifically apply critical
realism to something in the (social) sciences to show the insights it
enables into those realms.  Hence the issue would not be merely to clear up
the ambiguities and lapses in Marx's texts that make reconstruction of his
methodology and philosophy of science so difficult, but to show what is
going on and his lapses in the analysis of political economy itself.

(5) Just for the sake of information, not as a provocation for further
polemics, I am curious as to which texts of Althusser you claim for his
insight into Marx. In light of question (4), is it READING CAPITAL, or it it
something else?

In sum, it is not clear where precisely Marx's shortcomings are, except,
obviously, in his mode of presentation and his failure to write the
methodological treatise he promised.  It is difficult to tell from your last
two posts how Marx failed to develop political economy or precisely the mode
and consequences of his excessive reliance on Hegel or why his usage of
Hegel for his own purposes is suspect.  Furthermore, the role of Engels
needs to be factored in.

I imagine it would be unfair of me to demand so much in this forum as a
complete explanation, which could easily fill up a large treatise.  But
would it be possible to answer at least in the form of one-liners to the
questions above?

Now, just one or two more specific points.

At 05:16 AM 8/31/97 -0400, HDespain-AT-aol.com wrote:
>  Second, Marx was never, and i mean never explicit
>about his mode of presentation, let alone his method, just determining what
>Marx in fact was up to methodological  has taking over 120 years to begin to
>piece together.  

Yes, point acknowledged.

>But determining what exactly were Marx's philosophical
>commitments toward the production of knowledge and the process of science may
>never be know, Marx himself my not have been all together clear about this
>himself.

As I suggested above, this may not be the crucial issue.  Better to show
where he goofed up in GRUNDRISSE or CAPITAL.  Is his commitment regarding
science and knowledge production that mysterious?  On this note let me
mention another book: MARX, METHOD, AND THE DIVISION OF LABOR by Rob
Beamish, where this question is addressed.



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