From: MSalter1-AT-aol.com Date: Wed, 5 Nov 1997 14:06:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: Post-Marxism and Paleo-Marxism I would agree with much of Leo's comments, but am curious at the idea that class in-itself graduating to class-for-itself is central to Hegelianism. This might be true for Hegelian-Marxism of the early Lukacs variety, but there is little textual support for this in Hegel. Yes there is a projection of the need for a move from unreflective customary / traditionalistic consciousness of social life to the internal ideal of a more reflexive, self-critical and accountable form of social organisation. (a similar element is found in Habermas's work on modernity and posttraditional societies) But no specific social class is seen as possessing or even being the bearer of this enhanced mode of consciousness. It is the lack of class reductionism and the reference to all overarching conception of culture or geist which (despite other difficulties) makes the movement from (some more positivistic/deterministic elements of) Marxism to (some leftist/communitarian version of) Hegel movement attractive to many, including Adorno/Marcuse etc. In a message dated 05/11/97 04:58:59 GMT, Leo writes << From my point of view, the problem is at least as much how the Marxist tradition conceptualizes class and the working class, as the central and primary role it gives to both. The fact that virtually all of my political work now takes place within the labor movement and on issues of education is an indication that I do not dismiss or even treat lightly the important role of the working class movement in social change. What I can not accept, however, is the idea that there are immanent laws of social development which in the era of captialism lead -- not necessarily in a direct or simple way, but still, "in the final instance", do lead -- to the emergence of a working class-for-itself, a class conscious proletariat, which then constructs socialism. I would argue that notions of immanent historical laws are the traces of Hegelian idealism, 'turned on its feet', in Marxism, and I give much more weight to historical contingency. History is explicable, but not by reference to universal laws of historical development. ..... I also would argue that the Marxist framework for understanding social class and working class development has severe limitations for understanding the actual processes going on around us, and for fashioning our interventions. This is a long topic by itself, but let it suffice to say that Hegelian notions of classes-in-themselves and for-themselves, separations of social being and consciousness, do not, IMO, take us very far. The most interesting labor history today, again IMO, takes the form of applying discourse analysis of various sorts to the study of different working classes at different points in history. Further, my attraction to Gramsci was rooted in, among other things, the ways in which I could use his conceptual framework to think through actual political interventions in given conjunctures; I don't think that Marxism is very good at this task, and I don't believe that this is just because Marx never got around to the issue in Capital before he died. Leo Casey >>
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