You and CArroll responnd to sharp criticism with accusations of Red-baiting,
and then have the chutzpah to reproach me for ad hominem attacks. Of course
Marx was nota n orthodix Marxist. He was, as he said when he encountered the
phenonomenon of orthodox Marxism, not a Marxist at all. He welcomed all
scientific criticism. The defining charctertistic of an orthodox marxist is
not her adherence to a particular substantive doctrine, but rather that she
doesn't; she treats Marx and her favorite Marxists as scriputural. She does
nor ask: is it true? Rather she asks, Is it consistent with the holy writ? If
I thought all or even most Marxism was like that, I would not bother with it
at all. But too many of them are. However, I find this discussion fruitless
and I end my participation in it now.
In a message dated 6/25/00 3:28:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< ustin, this sort of red-baiting Marxists does not solve the problem since
you still have *not* clarified what you mean by orthodoxy. Rational
communication requires logical arguments and empirical evidences not
unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks. If you think whatever I said about
Zetkin is *false* or makes me subscribe to *your* orthodoxy then you have
the responsibility of explaining the "rational grounds" which your
assumptions of orthodoxy rest upon. If you don't, I am afraid, you are
being dogmatic.
Furthermore, if you mean by orthodoxy holistic conception of history and
vulgar determinism of the kind Kautsky defended, ie., inevitability of the
theory of stages, it is obvious that Marx would *not* subscribe to your
definition of orthodoxy. You may not have Kautsky in your mind, but I am
afraid that like many of the bourgeois critics or defenders (Cohen) of
MArx, you implicitly take the mechanistic formulation of historical
materialism as the orthodoxy. Unfortunately, not only bourgeois critics
of Marx but also some Marxist followers of Marx were responsible for
misrepresenting Marx, turning Marx's dynamic theory of history into
economic determinism and political passivity--the kind of things that
bourgeois minded people *want" to see in Marx.
Nowhere Marx in his writings appears to be a fatalistic believer in the
functionalist causality between economics and politics, even in the
_Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_. When Marx says in
this text that legal and political structure of society "rise on the
economic basis of society", he does not mean that A determines B or B
mechanistically flows from A. Quite differently, what Marx means to say is
that the mode of production of material life, which is itself a
historically changing _social relationship_, conditions, if not determine,
the political and legal structures of society and their corresponding
forms of ideology. Marx does not give us a hint of determinism because
"conditioning" may be given lots of interpretations. As Cohen mistakenly
does, one may read the relationship between economics and politics in
instrumental terms as if Marx specified the direction or degree of
causality between the two. On the other hand, as Gramsci correctly did,
one may read the basis-superstructure model in counter- productive terms
to mean by conditioning "corresponding" or even "limiting", in place of
determination (Since Marx beleived in the final analysis that capitalism
_only to a degree_ liberated human beings, yet "limited" the development
of human potential as a whole).
Instead of red-baiting Marxists or calling them orthodox on the basis
of superstitious reading of Marx, one should instead come across with
what is meant by what is said about Marx. Ideology is a distortion of
reality personified in the body of the intellectual!
>>
