File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-04-21.135, message 17


Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 13:10:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: March/April Radical Philosophy


I picked up the latest copy of "Radical Philosophy", numbered 82 and dated
March/April 1997. It is worth a look-see for two items: an article titled
"Analytical Marxism--An Ex-Paradigm? The Odyssey of G.A. Cohen" by Marcus
Roberts, and reviews of a batch of books by Terry Eagleton. And, oh yeah,
one other bonus: very little jargon or neologisms in the whole issue, as
far as I can tell.

Roberts is the author of the pretty good "Analytical Marxism: A Critique"
that I read in February and that gave me a handle on AM. I learned from
the new Roberts article that Cohen stated in 1990 that we "can no longer
sustain Marx's extravagant, pre-Green, materialist optimism." Cohen
believed that "the planet earth rebels" against the final elimination of
material scarcity. Not that I am interested in following every twist and
turn in Cohen's dreary career, but I was surprised to learn that he had
pulled back from the technological optimism that marked his early career.

(This was the same sort of crap I heard from the market socialist David
Belkin at a panel at the recent Socialist Scholars Conference, except that
he put the dilemma in somewhat different terms, stating that green
socialism's hopes for limited growth is in conflict with the appetites of
the working-class for consumer goods. He said that the only solution was
market socialism, which did not stand in the way of uncontrolled growth.)

One of the books that Eagleton reviews is Callari, Cullenburg and
Biewener's "Marxism in the Postmodern Age". Callari and Cullenburg are
affiliated with the journal Rethinking Marxism. Callari was assigned by
the journal to soften up Doug Henwood at the Rethinking Marxism conference
up at Amherst last December. Everything was going nicely until Callari
chased after some rebellious young Marxist Indian graduate students trying
to smack them over the head with a hard-cover edition of Althusser's
collected writings. Doug said that's a no-no.

Eagleton dispenses of the Callari, Cullenburg and Biewener collection with
this pungent characterization: "Most of the pieces in this volume strike a
... cautiously revisionist note, espousing, in characteristic
American-Left style, a suitably pluralist, deconstructed, non-essential,
anti-teleological, anti-foundationalist Marxism, which may be dubbed,
according to taste, revisionist-Marxist, post-Marxist or a sheepish
postmodernism in materialist clothing. Quite where deconstructed Marxism
ends and non-Marxism begins is a question which advocates of the former,
for all their modish anti-essentialism, had better address themselves to
if the term 'Marxism' is to retain some meaning."

Louis Proyect





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