File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 14


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.



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