Date: Tue, 16 Aug 94 09:00 CDT
From: Andy Daitsman <ADAITS-AT-macc.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: Marxism and academia


Louis Proyect writes:
 
>My main beef is with what Perry Anderson calls "Western Marxism". This
>trend includes the Frankfurt school, Althusser, Sartre, Lukacs et al.
>This is a sanitized version of Marxism which is apparently quite
>acceptable in the academic world. This form of Marxism has very little to
>do with Marx's original goal: the abolition of capitalism.
>
>"Western Marxism" tends to view Marx as some kind of post-Hegelian
>philosopher and offers commentary on him strictly as a philosopher. I
>think is a complete distortion of Marx's role in history. Marx is the
>author of the Communist Manifesto. In the Columbia on-line library card
>catalog, when you look up the subject "Marxism": you are referred to
>Communism or Socialism.
>
>Marx was a communist. He is the founder of the communist movement. He was
>involved with party-building. To regard him simply as a philosopher is a
>travesty on everything he stood for.
>
 
Louis,
 
I humbly suggest that you are missing the point.  Like you say, Marx was a
communist.  Unfortunately for your position, however, he was also a "some kind
of a post-Hegelian philosopher."  In fact, his communism developed precisely
out of his philosophical investigations, his ability to "stand Hegel on
his head."
 
Marx spent the better part of his political career railing against the
"utopian" socialists, Blanc, Proudhon, Fourier, Cabet, Owen, etc., because
he correctly understood that the "utopians" lacked an adequate theoretical
understanding of social reality.  In the place of utopian musing, Marx
proposed his own "scientific" approach to theory; this "science" however was
little more than the Hegelian dialectic reunderstood as a material, rather
than intellectual, process.
 
Misfortune continues in this tale.  The Marxist dialectic predicted certain
historical outcomes, such as the ultimate proletarianization of the entire
workforce, a final crisis in capitalism, and a world revolution of the
proletariat over the bourgeoisie.  Of these three predictions, perhaps the
first has been fulfilled, but even that did not happen in anywhere near the
way in which Marx predicted it.  In fact, total proletarianization in the US is
a relatively recent phenomenon (if it has in fact occurred), and it corresponds
to the post-industrial age -- that is, after the factory as the main organizing
feature of the workplace had all but disappeared.
 
As far as revolutions, well, real existing socialism has already collapsed,
hasn't it?  If we're really "scientific", isn't it incumbent upon us to
reevaluate the theoretical failures that led to this political failure?  You
want academics to have an organic relationship to popular movements.  Find me a
true popular movement in this country that has an organic relationship to the
working class, and we can talk from there, OK?
 
In sum, Marx did a remarkable job of explaining nineteenth-century social
reality, *in nineteenth-century terminology.*  He did such a good job,
actually, that he revolutionised social theory, making possible the
development of new discourses that *better* explain reality than he could
with the tools at his disposal.  In the meantime, reality (that pesky thing)
changed.  In other words, too close a reliance on original or orthodox Marxism
means using an outmoded and outdated discourse to try to understand a society
that no longer exists.
 
Now if you would want to argue that people who follow Marx too closely nowadays
are recreating in the twentieth century what Marx identified as utopianism in
the nineteenth, well I guess you wouldn't find me disagreeing with that
characterization.  We need to reconstruct our social theory, because the one
we've been using up until now not only has produced Stalinism, but Stalinism
has been incapable of fulfilling the promise of the Marxian vision.
 
A priori rejection of "Western Marxism," it seems to me, is just a method of
handicapping yourself in the attempt to construct a new and more viable social
theory, one that could actually promote a humanist and liberating revolution.
 
See ya,
Andy
 
 
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Andy Daitsman                     +  "Without complete freedom of the press
Department of History             +   there can be neither liberty nor
University of Wisconsin, Madison  +   progress.  But with it one can barely
adaits-AT-macc.wisc.edu              +   maintain public order."
                                  + Domingo Sarmiento -- El Mercurio, 1841
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