Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 13:44:30 -0400
From: james m blaut <70671.2032-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: M-I: Marxism, genocide and morality


James F.:

I should like to see more discussion on the list of this important matter
of the relation between Marx/Marxism and Dewey and Mead (and also
Whitehead). I don't agree that the main distinction is micro-social (Mead)
vs. macro-social (Marx). Probably if there is a main distinction it is
Marx's revolutionary socialism vs. the evolution socialism of Dewey and
Mead, who in fact were somewhat sympathetic to Marxism (see for instance
Mead's *Movements of Thought in the 19th C*). (Whitehead was rather
progressive, but I don't recall what he said about Marx.)

In my (absolutely nonprofessional) view, the realist pragmatism of Dewey
and Mead was very close to a generalized materialism -- we could call it
empiricism with faith in the reality of the stuff being experienced -- and
I have often wondered whether it was a certain nervousness about defending
the nasty, subversive idea of materialism in US university culture of the
early part of this century (or for that matter today) that kept Dewey from
calling his view flat out materialism. Like Marx, Dewey, Mead, and
Whitehead believed in progressive evolution. Marx was not, in my view, a
Hegelian because you can't be a Hegelian without being a metaphysician: you
can accept the dialectical view of progress but not much more. (Recall
Marx's devastating comments on Hegel';s mwetaphysics in M's writings on the
philosophy or right/law.) I don't think Dewey, Whitehead, and Mead  had
much Hegel in them (after Dewey's conversion c.1900) apart from a sort of
evolutionism and monism. A lot of the comparison made between them and
Hegel seems to me to represent a failure to see that their really important
goal was to distance themselves from Kantianism. Am I wrong in all of this?
Probably.

Comment?

Jim Blaut  


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