File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9710, message 38


Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 14:28:33 -0400
Subject: M-TH: Re: master-slave & pomos
From: farmelantj-AT-juno.com (James Farmelant)



On Thu, 2 Oct 1997 01:12:55 -0700 (PDT) Ralph Dumain
<rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> writes:
>
>At 10:09 PM 10/1/97 -0400, Justin Schwartz wrote:
> 
>>2) This sense of idealism has largely been lost in the subsequent 
>debate,
>>which turns around a different sort of idealism, namely the issue of
>>ontological and epistemic realism, whether the world exists 
>independently
>>of mind and whether we can know the independently existing world. The
>>shift in the debate is largely due to Lenin, who did engage the
>>epistemologicakl and ontological questions in dealing with a very 
>different
>>target than Hegel, the Empiriocriticism of Mach and Avernarius. 
>
>And let us not forget Engels, who was the one who made a big deal out 
>of
>ontological materialism vs. idealism.  Granted that the preoccupation 
>of
>Engels and Lenin turned more toward general ontology than Marx was
>immediately concerned with, but even acknowledging this, does this 
>mean that
>Engels and Lenin were misdirected or got Marx wrong?  I need to do 
>some
>homework before I can say much about the environment in which Engels 
>wrote
>ANTI-DUHRING, and Marx's relationship toward this aspect of Engels' 
>work,
>but who's to say that this turn towards ontology was not a necessary 
>and
>logical extension of Marx's work?  Engels and Lenin must have seen 
>that to
>defend historical materialism properly, one had to embrace and defend 
>a more
>general materialist ontology.  Perhaps there really is an inseparable
>connection between the two.
>

Isn't something like a realist ontology and a correspondence theory
of truth required for grounding the distinctions that Marx draws between
reality and appearance and between science and ideology?  Since these
distictions seem crucial to Marx's materialist conception of history and
to his critique of political economy then perhaps Engels and Lenin were
justified in defending a general materialist ontology.  Perhaps Justin
can
tell us how Bogdanov handled these issues. The logical empiricist- Otto
Neurath attempted to collapse the science/ideology distinction into the
positivists' science/metaphysics distinction, that is the
verifisble/unverifiable
distinction.  But this does not seem to do justice to Marx. 

>machinations
>that you describe, but one will ultimately get caught in 
>contradictions in
>so doing.

I suspect Ralph is correct here.  Again, the science/ideology distinction
seems crucial to historical materialism and it seems to me that a realist
ontology is still the best basis for grounding it.

		James F.


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