File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-18.151, message 33


Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 15:53:59 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: M-SCI: A Fear of the Future


Doug writes:
'The left these days is big on thoughtless No!s: No! to NAFTA, No! to structural
adjustment. We're terrible on saying just what we're for. Yeah science is
often used to kill and exploit, but scientific thought and practice are one
of humanity's greatest achievements. Most of the people who look at it
critically from the left aren't up to the task. I don't know where to go
>from here, but it's time to get started.'

Most people of the left, and not just those of us on this list, have a
problem with both articulating the goal of socialist revolution and
agreeing upon it.  They also have a tendency to avoid the mundane questions
of how to get from here to there.

If all science is seen as bourgeois mystification and instrumental control
of the personal and the social, then I think we make the mistake of not
distinguishing between science and *scientism* (the latter being a radical
positivist claim, most dangerously made in the name of studying humanity,
that scientists are objective, that values do not play a role in their
efforts, that all human qualities can be unproblematically represented in
magnitudes, and that all is cause and effect).  In my view, if there's one
thing that Lukacs, Adorno and Horkheimer, Habermas, Foucault and Lyotard
would not bother arguing too much about, it is that sort of claim - if
science is about mastery and prediction for the purposes of control, then
human society is not an appropriate object/tool.

Even Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg would be okay with this.  It is a
question of degree, and in my view, Foucault, and especially Lyotard, went
much too far.  This all appealed to the premodernists (of whom Nanda had
much to say recently) the romanticists and - as Doug implies - the people
who found contemporary real politik too disappointing, or historical
dialectics too difficult.

I think Marx scientifically critiqued the logic of capital, identified
inescapable contradictions, and was led to anticipate inevitable socialism.
 If that's what he was about - and I'm off today so I've no time to debate
this any more - then he is beyond genuine attack on the first two and the
jury's still out on the third.  Marx was a (if not *the*) human of his
time, and assumed, I suspect, the historical inevitability of what is the
rational (I'd say the *only* rational) response to an organising principle
by which the vast proletariat's immiseration at the hands of the few is
guaranteed.  

I see no evidence yet that rationality prevails - merely that it is
continually voiced.  It's a definitive constituent of the human, but it
does not appear that is a decisive constituent.

To my mind, this is not a defeatist argument.  Socialism can be made to
happen - just like Fascism can.  The suggestion that it is not inevitable
just makes us aware that the responsibility is ours.  If, like me, you see
more chance of immiseration leading to bigotry and fascism right now - then
that responsibility is not just eternal, it is *absolutely urgent*.

Everything else is moving faster than it ever did (the forces of
production, the media of communication, the re-evaluation of institutions,
the immiseration of the proletariat, the objective union of the sexes, the
subjective disunion of same (and others) etc etc).  So we must move faster.

If our lives are already full of data - as mine is - we have to be selective.  

I've learned much from this list (I can't believe how much) - but it's
taking time I need for the reproduction of my life as it is, and a serious
commitment to human life as I think possible and desirable.  I learn about
Trotsky, I learn about Stalin - even a little about Marxism as per Marx -
and a lot about today's Marxist movement.  But there are bigger bangs out
there for my paltry bucks.  I have books, articles, clever bourgies and
fellow travellers - with whom I get to discuss things face to face.  That's
all I have time for at the moment.

All the best,
Rob.





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