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. --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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