William S. Lear wrote:
>I presume the preceding prodded you to write the following because you
>feel Marxists should open up a bit and acknowledge some of the
>insights postmodernism offers us?
[...]
>So, this points out that rigid dialectics is, well, rigid and
>something even a child sees beyond. We should see spectrums, rather
>than a Manichean thesis/antithesis. Do not limit yourself to rigid
>definitions, let them be a bit more mobile...
>
>I don't see that this is all that earthshatteringly interesting.
>Nicely written, but do we really need this drapery to tell us to be
>open-minded?
Well, one of the denizens of the Spoons Marxism space responded to this
quote by saying "I think the notion of the either/or is crucial to moral
thought AND
psychology." So what seems obvious to you doesn't seem obvious to everyone.
It's not just a matter of being open-minded (a notion that depends on its
opposite, closed-mindedness, of course). Marxist thought, like many others,
has tended all too often towards rigidity and abstraction. Rigidity in the
form of just that sort of either/or, yes/no, friend/enemy,
productive/unproductive sort - the "fake" Trotskyists denounced by the
Sparts (who are the authentic Trots, it goes without saying), or the
"bourgeois" feminists and greens denounced by orthodox Marxists (because
they can't imagine any other kind of feminist or green), etc. And
abstraction in the form of throwing about concepts like "capital" and
"labor" without doing any of the work necessary to flesh out these terms,
of naming and describing the real institutions and practices for which the
two words are shorthand. I think these twin tendencies lead to intellectual
sterility and political bankruptcy, and for those of us who'd like to see
Marxism revived as an intellectual and political force, we badly need flesh
& movement.
>But
>outside the halls of academe this stuff really is meaningless. The
>one thing the left does not need is more obscure prose describing
>society; clarity and simplicity should be sought, and the sooner the
>better.
Yes and no (talk about the interpenetration of opposites). The excerpt I
posted was maybe a bit obscurely written, but on the other hand, the
Grundrisse hardly qualifies as simple. But I don't think the tendencies
towards rigidity and abstraction are of purely academic interest; the
leftist-Marxist tendency to be more on the lookout for heretics than
potential friends has been politically suicidal.
Doug
