Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1997 10:45:15 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Academic Marxism


The question of academic Marxism has to be put into some kind of 
historical context. The reason it has the peculiar character that it does 
has a lot to do with McCarthyism. Nearly every party-oriented Marxist 
was booted off the campus in the 1950s. Many of these people were CPers, but a 
smaller number were Trotskyists. What they had in common was that 
they viewed Marxism to be the intellectual property of the working-
class rather than the intelligentsia.

If you look at the career of someone like Annette Rubinstein in NY, 
you can get an idea of the sort of people I'm talking about. She is 87 
years old and has been a teacher her entire life. She is the author of a 2 
volume Marxist study of English literature that is available from 
Monthly Review. This book can be understood and appreciated by 
high school graduates as well as literary theorists. It is a real 
accomplishment.

Annette was in the CP most of her life, but quit around the time of the 
Kruschshev revelations. Since then she has been part of the current 
roughly identified with the Monthly Review. During her days in the CP, 
she was on the staff of the Jefferson School in NY, where working 
people took classes on Marxism and other interesting topics. She was 
doing exactly what Lenin was doing at the turn of the century when he 
gave night classes on Capital to Russian workers. Today she is still 
going strong giving classes at the Brecht Forum in NY. Annette is also 
on the Editorial Board of Science and Society, a theoretical journal 
that used to be a semi-official CP publication. Even today it is edited 
by David Laibman, a very independent-minded CPer.

What happened is that when these types of people got the boot from Yale,
Columbia, etc., the replacements who came along from my generation crafted a
Marxism that was very much a product of the times and that hardly was at all
interested in communicating with working people.

To start with, you have to recall that many of these radicals had given 
up on the working-class entirely. They were deeply influenced by the 
Frankfurt school and took as one of their main areas of investigation 
the topic of why the working class was not revolutionary. They also 
looked to Gramsci for explanations. Later on, as postmodernism 
kicked in, they embraced aspects of this.

What this tended to do was making the working-class an area of 
research rather than audience for their message. This of course was 
nothing new. Fromm's study of the German working-class in 1929 
represented the same approach.

This tendency remains in effect for publications like Social Text and 
Rethinking Marxism and provides the intellectual framework for all of those
academics who write for or identify with them. There are others that I am
less familiar with, such as Socialist Review out on the west coast. I have
never found a compelling reason to make an exhaustive study of this subject by 
reading all of these obscure journals. If somebody paid me for it, I guess I
would. Hee-hee, does that make me homo-economicus?

A current within academic Marxism has attempted to put some 
distance between itself and the post-Marxist crowd. This is the so-
called analytic Marxism school. One of its adherents is Justin 
Schwartz who proudly carries its banner on marxism-international. 
Unfortunately nobody has ever turned up to carry the other corner of 
the banner and it sort of drags in the mud.

I have a feeling that nearly all of the AM people (AM = analytic marxism; PM = 
postmarxism) are enfatuated with the market socialism thing. John 
Roemer is a prominent AMer who is associated with a particularly 
cheesy notion of market socialism, one in which everybody gets an 
equal stock certificate entitling them to a share of "people's property". 
Back during the Korean War, when I was in elementary school, this 
notion of a people's stock-market was simply called the American free 
enterprise system, and socialism had nothing to do with it. That my 
dad owned 10 shares of General Motors made him a bourgeois. How 
silly can you get.

As far as the ideas of AM are concerned, it seems to boil down to 
rejection of the Hegelian dialectic and replacing it with the 
epistemology of Anglo-American logical positivism of People like A.J. 
Ayer, W. W. Quine and B.B. Sniffington. (B.B. deserves wider attention. He
taught logic at the New School where I was doing postgraduate work in 1967
and staying out of the army. He wrote the article "Who Put the Good in
Goodbye?" that turned the logical postivism world upside down when it
apperared in the Summer 1955 South Dakota Philosophical Review.)

The other important expression of academic Marxism is of course 
what I call the LTV industry. This is mostly the effort to uncover 
inconsistencies in Marx's economic and philosophical writings, 
especially the 2nd and 3rd volume of Capital and the Grundrisse. 
There is a tremendous opportunity for academics to don white coats 
and pretend that they are in a laboratory when they are doing this sort 
of thing. Their effort can be equated with the search to photograph a 
quark, at least in their own minds.

Now these folks don't even pretend that their research has any direct 
political application. What a vulgar notion. Why should they try to 
answer the question of the nature of the militias or the ecological 
impact of capitalist property relations in China when they haven't 
come up for an answer to the Oshikoshi theorem, or whatever the hell 
that thing is.

What they are doing is what Mandel warned against in his Socialist 
Register article that I reviewed a couple of days ago. They are turning 
Marx into an *economic* thinker rather than a *socio-economic* 
thinker. For people who are trying to advance their way in the 
economic faculties of America's great universities, I suppose this 
makes some sense.

There are examples of bona fide Marxist intellectuals on the academy. 
We several outstanding examples on marxism-international who are a credit to
their profession, god bless them. They are Gary McClennan, Carrol Cox and
Michael Hoover. What's interesting is that the voice they use is essentially
vernacular and jargon-free, as it should be. Also, they never try to throw
their weight around bragging about all the articles they write for
small-circulation journals. They are simply willing to be judged by the
posts they make to our modest, plebian list. I judge them first-rate myself.
It would be interesting to hear from Michael and Carrol how they have
managed to resist the tendency to join the hot-air brigades. (Gary used to
be in a party, so I sort of know where he is coming from. He had to overcome
another form of group-think jargon: Trotskyism.)

But the only way to correct these distortions overall is to build a 
socialist party that can orient the intelligentsia back to reality. The 
only way to reconcile theory and practice is not by setting up a "thaxis" 
list out of jefferson.village but by rooting the rootless professorial class 
in some kind of broader social movement. I have a feeling that many, 
if not most, yearn for this. Others of course prefer to remain isolated 
and pure in their "theorizing". We should leave them in peace.


Louis Proyect



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