Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 10:31:57 -0400 (EDT) From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: Marxism and academia Since the Bitnet is basically E-Mail for professors, I'm not surprised that the discussion on Marxism has had so decidedly an academic character. But nobody should be fooled into thinking that this discussion has much to do with the project that Marx initiated and that many of us persist in following despite all sorts of setbacks. Marx was basically a revolutionary. All of his mature writings are about the dynamics of capitalist society and call for its overthrow. In addition to his writings, Marx was a practical politician who tried to help organize the working-class in Europe into revolutionary parties. If he was alive today, he wouldn't be a tenured professor. All the postings on this list that invoke the names of Althusser, Habermas, Gramsci et al are in the spirit of what Perry Anderson called Western Marxism. This is a university-based discipline which disunites theory and practice. Western Marxists tend to have no impact on the working-classes of their countries; their audience is the intellectual millieu of small- circulation journals and academic conferences. Instead of scrutinising the economic laws of motion of capitalism as a mode of production in order to provide an analysis of the political machinery of the bourgeois state and how to overthrow it, the subject matter of Western Marxism is philosophy. >From Lukacs to Althusser, Korsch to Colletti, there's a preponderance of philosophers in this school. In the time of the 2nd International, Luxemburg and Kautsky alike were contemptuous of 'professorial socialists' teaching in the universities, without party commitments. When the Frankfurt school was created, Marxist theory started its migration into academia. At the end of WWII, this migration was complete. Lukacs, Lefebvre, Goldmann, Korsch, Marcuse, Della Volpe, Adorno, Colletti and Althusser were full-time professors of philosophy. 27 years ago I was a graduate student of philosophy at the New School reading Nietzsche, Kant, Husserl and Hegel. As the Vietnam war intensified, I became convinced that philosophy had nothing to do with the problems of the real world, imperialist war especially. I joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in 1967 and was purged in 1978 for having petty-bourgeois tendencies. You see, I was a computer programmer and didn't produce surplus value at the point of production. I did my best to join the proletariat. I worked in a steel mill in Kansas City for a brief time and discovered that the political projections of the SWP leadership about 'radicalizing workers' was just an ultraleft fantasy. Shortly after leaving the SWP, I helped to start an organization called Tecnica which sent volunteer programmers, engineers and other skilled technical people to work with the Sandinistas, the ANC, SWAPO and the Zimbabwean and Mozambiquean governments. Throughout my close to thirty year involvement with Marxist politics, I have never lost sight of what Marxism is about: the abolition of capitalism. Of course, there are still some profound questions which beset Marxism. Among them are: --How has capitalism been able to manage crises since the great depression; to what extent has this been the result of displacing exploitation into the third world? --Why have the non-Stalinist parties based on the Leninist model turned into sects and cults, especially those of the Trotskyist variety? --Is the planned economy a superior way of achieving progress, or is some market variant necessary? >From time to time, these questions are dealt with in the Marxism list, but for the most part it seems like a bunch of professors quoting from their doctoral dissertations. Of course, I understand that one's dissertation means a whole lot to the author, but on broader society it just has no effect whatsoever. In his "Considerations on Western Marxism", Perry Anderson called for a reunion between Marxist theory and practice. This task is as urgent as ever. Many battle-scarred veterans of "Marxism-Leninism", including ex- CPers, ex-Trotskyists and ex-Maoists have begun to regroup in a formation called Committess of Correspondence. This organization seems to be in the spirit of the original Marxist project. It is anticapitalist and nonsectarian and has learned a lot from newer revolutionary movements that have broken from the "Marxist-Leninist" mold, including the Central American movements and the ANC. Although I once vowed to myself not to join any group that has less than 10,000 members, I might be tempted to make an exception in this case. At any rate, this seems to me to be the only profitable way to be engaged with Marxism: working with others in an organization to emancipate the working-class and save the planet. ------------------
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