Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 01:34:59 -0800 (PST)
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: BHA: PLATO ETC. (12)


Early on in the book, Bhaskar makes a cryptic remark complaining about
Marx's Hegelian residues, which he doesn't explain, and elaborates later
only in the jejune manner depicted below.  This got my suspicions going.  I
noticed a number of odd remarks about Marx through the course of the book.

On p. 236 is a peculiar reference to Marx's statement that mankind sets
itself only soluble tasks, which is used by Bhaskar is a peculiar and not
necessarily appropriate way.

Here's another enigma: "Marx never engages in the critique of empirical
realism necessary to sustain the intelligibility of his own scientific
practice or produces a plausible vision of flourishing under socialism."
(p. 217)

Now we come closer to the specimens of outright intellectual fraud:

"Marx is unable to shed the actualist, constellationally monist and endist
features of absolute idealism--because, although an untheorized scientific
realism is the true methodological fulcrum of his work, he never engages in
the necessary critique of empirical realism.  Marx displaces (alpha) Geist
on to labour, (beta) cognitive triumphalism into practical Prometheanism and
(gamma) endism into communism (all as aspects of a materialist inversion)."
(p. 202)

Bhaskar then goes on to explain how these three things become Stalinism.
Here and elsewhere Marx is turned into just another philosopher, who does
nothing more than translate certain abstract concepts of Hegel into other
abstract philosophical concepts.  If this isn't the worst piece of trivial,
dumb-ass shit in Marxian scholarship, I don't know what is.

Here's an elaboration of the same crap:

"In relation to (alpha) we can align, mainly as residues as I explained
elsewhere, Marx's actualism, manifest most starkly in the problem of
abstraction.  To (beta) we can match we can match Marx's constellational
unidimensionality on one (albeit arguably the explanatorily most important)
of the totality of master-slave-type relations  and his displacement of
Hegel's cognitive triumphalism into practical Prometheanism,  In respect of
(gamma) we can set Marx's post-dated endism and the consequential
functionalist, evolutionary and teleological strains of much Marxism after
Marx, as well as the failure of subsequent Marxists to complete his
unfinished business, i.e. to realize that geo-historical materialism is a
research programme which has only just begun (far from being post-ed)."  (p.
209)

With such tripe Bhaskar puffs up his own minuscule contribution to Marxist
theory.  This makes me want to puke.



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