Date: Wed, 04 Feb 1998 12:59:11 +0000
From: Fergal Finnegan <fergalf-AT-meta.dublin.iona.ie>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: M-I: Primitive Accumulation


At 10:39 04/02/98 +0000, you wrote:
>In message <199802040330.VAA287544-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>, Carrol Cox
><cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> writes
>>Marxism *cannot* explain everything. 
>>Probably it can't even explain *most* of "everything." Dogmatists assume
>>it can and proceed to stuff the whole universe into their little
>>dogmatics. 
>
>Yes indeed. What an excellent point. For as long as I can remember the
>left has been cursed with an irrational desire to give a Marxist
>explanation of everything - forgetting that Marxism is a theory of
>capitalist social relations.

>
>Such, for example are the various proletcult theories of 'proletarian
>art' or even the more contemporary Althusserian analyses of 'literary
>modes of production'. All of these suffer from the flaw of trying to
>reduce artistic life to rules of economic production, or of class
>struggle - which they are surely subject too but in no way does that
>exhaust its content, or even come close to it.

I think you are right. Too often Marxists who do not even have an interest
in literature or art produce some potboiler of a theory which explains
away all artistic production with petrified categories transposed from 
economics or sociology. However, it would be stupid to leave typical
bourgeois interpretations of culture uncontested. Speaking of which
I had an idle thought last night when I was watching Disclosure which
is a truly appalling film featuring the "talents" of a pert Demi Moore and 
saggy Michael Douglas and was written by Michael Crichton. It 
occured to me that Crichton is the poet of a society stricken by panic and
confusion in much the way LM describes it from my limited reading of
the magazine. Just a thought but  genetics, gender politics and anxiety 
sounds right up your street.

 Am I right in thinking
>the sciences, too, were cursed by a soviet orthodoxy around genetic
>inheritance in grain?

Yep, Lysenko's theories of genetic science became another orthodoxy
adhered to by CPs worldwide as yet another pseudo-scientific truth
despite the fact that empirical and scientific evidence contradicted 
this.

By the way..

Have any of you ever visited the park of Soviet achievement in Moscow?.
It was a monument to stupidity, kitsch  and hubris. It used to feature
pigs so overbred that they could hardly move, temples to atomic energy
and statues in gold leaf of happy kolkhoz peasants from each of the 
fifteen republics. It wasn't very communist but it was very "degenerated".

saoirse,

Fergal 
 


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