Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1997 11:53:04 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: General Question


Scott Johnson, your summary of the relevance of Habermas is
exemplary, and I am in complete agreement with you.  I further
solidarize with you in opposition to MacKendrick's
diaper-droppings.

Your scenario of bombed-out DC as a riff on materialism reminds me
of MArxs's CAPITAL, chapter 1, on commodities.  Of course the
materiality of human bodies and relations includes their
intentionality.  This was Marx's point, too.  Yes, you are
correct: in my original postings on the Hegel list I made a rigid
distinction between the objective and the subjective.  I never got
around to answering your previous challenge on this point.  My
original intent was quite a simple one: that people's
self-conception may be at variance with their real social being.
Hence the standard is the objectivity of people's social being,
not their illusions about themselves, even though their illusory
self-consciousness is also part of their social being.  But of
course when it comes to humans, the subject and object are fused.
However, my point is clear, is it not?

Now as to relevance of Hegelian Marxism, briefly.  The tools
accumulated by Hegelian Marxism have to be adapted, extended, and
utilized in different settings than they were in the past.  The
pernicious petty bourgeois influence of lebensphilosophie,
hermeneutics, existentialism, French-fried discourse-onanism,
extends itself everywhere.  However much these precious
pretentious obscurantisms try to pass themselves off as
representatives of concrete human existence, they are in fact all
pale abstractions, all of them, and it is Hegelian Marxism that
can expose them.  Fortuitously, you remind me again of our
discussion of race.  Fortuitous, because I had begun to mention
this in my previous message and then backspaced it out of the
final text that I sent.  But as it happens, my ultimate ambition
is to inject the heritage of Hegelian Marxism -- Lukacs, the
Frankfurters, James, etc. -- into Black Studies, Africana
philosophy, and the problematic of the race-class nexus in order
to engage in mortal combat with the reactionary ideology that
pervades this arena from beginning to end.  As I always ask: why
Heidegger, why not Marx?

PS: I am not an academic.  I don't take guff from piss-ant grad
students in their 20s whose horizon of human existence does not
extend beyond assembling their footnotes for their dissertations.
Words to the wise.