Date: Fri, 02 Jan 1998 16:02:30 +0000 From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk> Subject: Re: M-I: Albert & Co Why do we indulge ourselves with yet more meta-debates about the meaning, relevance, validity etc of Marxism? It is just self-indulgence, a chance to opinionate. No-one is persuaded of anything and nothing is achieved. I regret my own anti-Albert rant. It was not a good way to start the year. The only purpose of this list is surely by means of collective intellectual effort to shine a light into the murkier bits of capitalism, to develop understanding of its directions and potentials and help people see it for what it is and act accordingly. This thread is the kind of thing we should avoid at all costs. It is mere angel-dancing. A more useful meta debate, if we are going to have one, would be to decide the standards of debate which should be upheld, and subsequently to insist on them. Minimum standards ought surely to be the generally-agreed and understood standards of scholarship, objectivity, logical and factual proofs and refutations -- the popperian standards of falsifiability -- which apply in the Academy. In the past two months we have been debating issues of climate change, population and development. This debate was largely a waste of time because there is no common attempt to uphold these academic minima. The 'debate' if it can be dignified with the term, therefore took the usual form of flaming, of the endless assertion of controversial opinions with no attempt to justify them in a scholarly way, of the essentiually pointless regurgitation of arguments, theories and research- results culled from elsewhere, ie from the work of bourgeois scholars, research scientists and political figures which in almost all cases is more cautious, scholarly, thought-out and therefore serious than our own efforts. This debate once again proved thegeneral irelevance of Marxism in our hands. No outsider could possibly have learnt anything from our own lucubrations which she could not better have learnt from the primary sources we borrowed from: we do not even qualify as a public- interest group, let alone the authoritative voice of a powerfgul social class! The level of debate about this whole range of issues: cliamte change, enviornment, development etc -- is far higher amongst the GReens we seem to cordially despise -- and so is the level of political partisanship and activism. What is true of our debates on anthropogenic climate change is true across the board, it seems to me: if the question is one of the epistemology of natural science, or cultural critique, or the analysis of post-modern theories of personality, art, the constituion of the subject etc: in each case, what appears on this list is generally speaking either worthless pseudo-Marxism or if it has any worth, it is because the poster has some direct professional involvement in the subject, as for example a practising scientist, sociologist etc. The sciolistic antics of James Heartfield, for instance, who quite brazenly and cynically ignores the most basic canons of scholarship and in the most mendacious way pursues the private, opportunistic agendas of the 'dissolved' RCP, are only possible because of the general climate of scholarly permissiveness, personal PR, feuding and spite, intellectual shallowness and idle pretensions, which charatcterise this List (which however and sad to say is probably the most serious Marxist list on the Net). For all the well-known disadvantages of peer-review systems, which can produce abhorrent intellectual fashions and a leming-like pursuit of chimerical and fascistic paradigms, insisting on the minimum standards it evokes would greatly enhance our own discussions. It would be a wonderful thing if we took a collective New Year resolution to set ourselves and the list as a whole the same unimpeachable professional standards we presumably set ourselves elsewhere in life, and to take as seriously the intellectual work we carry out here, as the work we do elsewhere. Contributing to this list should not be a self-indulgent holiday from the rigours of the division of labour, but ought to be the place where we apply those standrs with THE HIGHEST DEGREE of rigour, because here we do it not for the bosses but for ourselves. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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