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. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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