File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9706, message 1


Date: Sun, 1 Jun 1997 08:35:40 PST
Subject: Re: M-TH: Toilet boil of bourgeois thought  (fwd)
From: farmelantj-AT-juno.com (James Farmelant)



On Sat, 31 May 1997 21:55:00 -0400 (EDT) Spoon Collective <spoons-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU> writes:
>
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Sat, 31 May 1997 18:04:55 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
>To: marxism-thaxis-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU,
>    marxism-thaxis-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
>Subject: M-TH: Toilet boil of bourgeois thought 
>
>Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Hayek, Popper, Carling -- what an utter 
>waste of
>human endeavor.  What an asshole list this has turned out to be.  Time 
>for
>me to unsub**ribe for real.
>
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
Ralph is peeved that this list has been spending so much time on
such bourgeois thinkers like Popper, Hayek, Arendt, and Weil as
well as Alan Carling who is a Marxist but is labeled as bourgeois by
Ralph.  Apparently Ralph believes that Marxist discussions should
proceed unsullied by contact with bourgeois thought.  I would submit
that has never been th case.  Marxism from the very beginning has
developed in confrontation with bourgeois thought and Marxists have
never shrunk from assimilating those aspects of bourgeois thought
that they believed would be useful.  Marx himself drew upon such
bourgeois
thinkers as Hegel, Feuerbach, Ricardo, and Smith.  Engels added 
Darwin and Haeckel amongst others.  And later Marxist thinkers have
continued in a similar vein drawing as Plekhanov did upon Feuerbach
and 18th century French materialism, or Gramsci did drawing upon
Croce and Gentile.  More recently Marxists have managed to draw upon
such bourgeois thinkers as Freud, Nietszche, Weber, Heidegger, Saussure,
Wittgenstein, Keynes, and many others.  

Nevertheless, one continues to here from time to time complaints
similar to Ralph's.  I have recently been reading Sebastiano
Timpanaro's *On Materialism* and he too makes a complaint similar to
Ralph's though he expresses his a bit more elegantly. Thus Timpanaro
in the essay "Engels, Materialism and 'Free Will'" complained that:
	During the  twentieth century, each time that a particular
	intellectual current has taken the upper hand in bourgeois
	culture- be it empirio-crticism, Bergsonianism, Croceanism,
	phenomenology, neo-positivism or structuralism- certain 
	Marxists have attempted to 'interpret' Marx's thought in such
	a way as to make it homogenous as possible with the
	predominant philosophy.  

It becomes evident upon reading Timpanaro that his complaints were
directed mainly against the then prevailing currents of Western Marxism-
the Frankfurt School and the Althusserians.  Both schools were in his 
opinion guilty interpreting Marxism in an idealist anti-materialist way
that denigrated the contributions of Engels to Marxism.  Timpanaro 
makes it clear that he was championing a variety of Marxism in which 
the materialist conception of history would be linked to a biological and
natural science materialism.  Such a Marxism would in his view be immune
to the intellectual currents of bourgeois culture.  But IMO he was a bit
naive
in this regard.  Just as the rise of the Frankfurt School was reflective
of the 
predominance in bourgeois culture of such currents as psychoanalysis
and phenomenology and the rise of Althusserianism was reflective of the 
predominance of structuralism in French intellectual culture so Timpanaro's
championing of an Engelsian materialism can be see as reflecting the 
revival of a natural science materialism in bourgeois academic culture.  
And indeed events since 1970 (or whereabouts when T. wrote that essay)
confirm this view.  In academic philosophy we have seen several varieties
of materialism become popular especially in the philosophy of mind-
witness
the work of the Churchlands, of Dennett etc.

The point of this is that like it or not a serious consideration of
Marxist thought
cannot avoid discussions of and confrontations with the work of leading
bourgeois thinkers nor is it going to be immune to the prevailing intellectual
currents of bourgeois culture.  To think otherwise is in my view both
naive and
I dare say 'undialectical'.

                      James F.


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