Date: Sun, 2 Nov 1997 21:24:15 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: Post-Marxism and Paleo-Marxism


I respect the comradely and rigorous way in which Jim Lawler laid out his
differences with me on the Marxist tradition, but I also disagree.

The issue is not whether or not Marx himself had a political stance, or
whether or not he intervened politically in all sorts of working class
struggles of his day. He clearly had a political stance, and he intervened
politically all of the time. The question is whether or not those politics
are identical with and reflective of his theoretical work and interventions.
That there is a relationship between the politics, on the one hand, and
theory, on the other hand, I would not deny; but I believe that it is a
mediated and complex relationship, in which the one can not be reduced to the
other. One must reject, I would insist 'correspondence' theories of the two
phenomena, all of which have their roots in an incredible hubris about what
'correct' theory can do. Even Hegel, who was never short on hubris when it
came to his philosophical reach and who clearly believed that it was possible
to grasp in theory a full understanding of an epoch's essence ('spirit'),
thought that this was only possible in retrospect -- note his image of
Minerva's owl spreading its wings at dusk.

The crux of the matter, as I see it, is that the Marxist tradition is a rich
and exceptionally diverse tradition, and that it should be approached as
such. Now, its various streams and currents develop different sets of themes
and concepts from Marx and subsequent Marxist thinkers (I do not think that
the Marxist tradition can be reduced to Marx) at the expense of other themes
and concepts: this is an inevitable development in any theoretical tradition
worth anything of value. And not all streams and currents are equal, of
course: it would be the foolish person who thought that Stalinism developed
Marxist themes with any degree of sophistication and intellectual rigor, and
most Trotskyism is only a step above that nadir. But by the same token, it is
myopic to claim that Stalinism and Trotskyism are not theoretically rooted in
the development of certain (unfortunate?) ideas and themes from Marx and
Lenin. Similarly, I think that Marxian intellectual currents as different as
the Frankfurt School and Althusserianism extrapolate from different themes
and concepts from the Marxist tradition, (and with a great deal more
intellectual power than Stalinism and Trotskyism), notwithstanding the great
cleavages between them.

The argument over what is genuine Marxism, therefore, invariably paints a
portrait of a singular, coherent and homogeneous vision of Marxism, denying
the richness and diversity of the tradition. If Marxism were a faith
community and the object was to construct a sect (the term sectarian has its
roots in religion), this portrait would be functional, if not accurate. But
since the Marxist tradition has always aspired to understanding the world in
order to guide efforts to change it, this reconstruction of Marxism is
counter-productive. Indeed, it should be noted that it was Leninism and
Stalinism which first insisted upon this notion of a genuine Marxism, and
that attempts to develop a counter 'genuine Marxism' faithful to democratic
principles miss the ways in which they have (unconsciously) adopted the
Leninist and Stalinist  paradigm of the one true way.

For many of us who have spent considerable time and effort within left
political organizations (I was a long time member and leader of the New
American Movement and Democratic Socialists of America), nothing proved quite
so dysfunctional, and so clearly led down the road to sectarianism and
stultified, ossified thinking, then the practice of a political organization
taking theoretical positions. A political organization should be based on
political unity, and political unity alone; it never needs to have a stance
on materialism, atheism, whether the Rosenbergs did or did not spy for the
USSR, whether African-Americans are a nation, a opppressed national minority,
a race or an ethnic group, and whether or not the Soviet Union was state
capitalist, a deformed workers' state, a form of Oriental despotism, a new
bureaucratic collectivism or (for the blind) proletarian paradise. The
conflation of theory and politics in the Marxist tradition lies, in no small
part, behind these diversionary and fruitless exercises. (There are, of
course, numerous other pressures which contribute to the development of this
sectarian outlook.)

All this having been said, I think that there are some core ideas and themes
in the Marxist tradition, and at the point which one has developed one set of
Marxian ideas and themes to the extent that those core ideas and themes are
rejected, intellectual honesty requires that one state that clearly. That is
why I identify myself as post-Marxist: I no longer hold to certain core ideas
in the Marxian tradition, even while I believe that there is much to be
learned from a century of its attempts to develop emancipatory theory.

Leo Casey