I wrote:
> >"orthodox Marxism" is an oxymoron. Ever since the beginning of the
> Marxian world-view, it's been a _debate_, not an orthodoxy.<
Justin writes:
>Oh, I agree that there has been a lot of debate. That's true in Catholic
>theology as well.
this is name-calling, which suggests that you suffer from an orthodoxy of
your own.
Every school of thought (or research program), including GA Cohen's
perspective, has a hard core of ideas that is not subject to debate, so
that every school of thought -- including the dominant schools of liberal
thinking -- have their theology-style (faith-based) debates.
However, I don't go all the way with Lakatos, who veers (or at least opens
to door for veering) toward Kuhn's vision of endlessly competing paradigms.
I see the valid propositions of NC economics and similar individualistic
perspectives, for example, as a special case of Marxian political economy.
>What I'm really talking about is an attitude, manifested by some on this
>list and too many in the history of debate, that responds to
>arguments with quotations, takes criticism of favored thinkers as heresy,
>uses terms like "renegade" and "apostate," and generally acts orthodox.
>Hell, I wasn't the one who invented the expression; it comes out the 12d
>Internatiobal, where all sides to any debate claimed to be orthodox. But
>it is rather sterile to talk about this in the abstract. I forget the
>specific concrete context uit came up in here.
This attitude became important among Marxists from the long period of
stagnation of Marxism that started in the Kautsky/Bernstein debates and
then deepened around 1914 or 1917. That attitude is hardly unique to the
left or Marxism. You should see how the IMF treats Joseph Stiglitz!
And it doesn't go away when Marxism goes away. My experience with John
Roemer, for example, is that his I-know-it-all attitude didn't change at
all when he moved from Marxism to abstract ethical analysis. And I detected
a sectarian attitude on the part of many of the Analytical Marxists toward
what they sneeringly dubbed "orthodox Marxism." Usually, it was simply
their own previous versions of crude Marxism that they were sneering at.
In any event, I think it's a big mistake to divorce _any_ attitude from the
socioeconomic environment that encourages and nurtures it. Or to talk about
attitudes without talking about people.
> >I like Lukacs' definition of "orthodox Marxism" in terms of dialectical
> and materialist method partly because it can't become ossified into a
> true orthodoxy.<
>Sez you.
nice analysis!
>In any case, I reject the substance-method division that underlies the
>distinction. You do too--you don't believe, and neither did Lukacs, that
>every single single Marx said could turn out to be seriously false, and
>yet orthodix Marxism as method would still be true.
Of course, since Marx applied his method, which can't produce totally-false
results.
>This was L's way of putting the idea that Marxism is method, and it's false.
what do you mean?
> >The idea of Marxism as a package of substantive propositions and
> commitments comes from Analytical Marxism (in order to choose which in
> the list to knock down), which simply ignores the dynamic of Marxian thought,
>Oh, I see, no one thought until 1978 or so that there were any important
>substantive commitments involved in Marxism?
No, that's not the point. The AM folks saw Marx as _nothing but_ a list of
substantive propositions. They totally reject Marx's dialectical method,
replacing it with orthodox social-science methods (which then leads to
misinterpretations of Marx). (As I've said, those methods aren't wrong as
much as incomplete, one-sided.)
> >Their allegiance to the primacy (if not the monopoly) of mainstream
> social-science techniques limits their ability to understand
> what's going on -- and the nature of the Marxian ideas they're
> criticizing. (Elster, for example, has little but misconceptions of the
> nature of the Marx he's attacking in his opus, MAKING HASH OF MARX. It's
> a matter of creating an ossified strawMarx to knock down.)<
>And the tendency of so-called dialectical Marxists to retreat into
>handwaving or doublespeak limits their ability to say anything definitely
>enough to be able to determine whether it is true.
You should read Duncan Foley's review of Elster (in the JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC
LITERATURE) -- or give me some specifics about whom it is you're talking
about. (BTW, among economists, the main kind of double-speak is
mathematics, which is great stuff sometimes but often hides common-sense
notions dressed up to look profound or simple nonsense.)
>I agree that Elster's book is not terribly good as Marx interpretation,
>althoigh it has a lot of good ideas. But it does have the virtue of trying
>to formulate clearly ideas that can be assessed and analysed.
That's hardly a new thing. Marxists have been doing this kind of thing for
ages. Consider Baran & Sweezy's work. Howard & King's history of Marxian
economics is also quite worthwhile.
BTW, the famous Frankfurt school didn't consist of "Analytical Marxists,"
applied dialectical reasoning, and didn't accept received wisdom as dogma.
Most of them veered toward purely cultural criticism (as they became
isolated from social movements), but people like Baran and Braverman (who
were highly influenced by the Frankfurt school) did not.
The Althusserian school also applied a version of dialectical reasoning,
while rejecting dogma and not falling into the AM camp.
>Caring about this is almost the central criterion of orthodox Marxism.
It's about time you started to try to "formulate clearly" what you mean by
this term "orthodox Marxism," so people can "assess and analyze" it.
> > If I remember correctly, [Hegel] started out being pretty radical, as
> a supporter of the 1789 French Revolution (and then retrenched). Even
> so, I would add that materialism is a necessary component of a
> radical dialectical vision. (A pure dialectic of ideas doesn't make sense.) <
>That is right about Hegel's development. But of course Hegel was not the
>sort of idealist you caricature here. A pure dialectic of ideas, where do
>you find that in Hegel?
I didn't and don't find it in Hegel. I was just saying that purely idealist
analysis makes no sense. Hegel makes sense up to a point.
Justin had said:
> >>to orthodox marxism, on which morality is ideology....
I asked:
> >To whom are you referring? Name three.
>OK, Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
I really don't know enough about Lenin, but Cornel West shows pretty
clearly that Marx and Engels didn't see morality as simply being ideology.
(note the word "simply." see below.)
> >This seems to be a reference to a very old and mostly-vanished
> ideology, in which the victory of the working class (forget other
> oppressed groups) was _inevitable_ so that issues of morality were
> irrelevant. <
>That is one way of making sense of what appear to be Marxist moral
>commitments to the workers, although it si intelklectuall nonsense. The
>inevitable, infamously, doesn't have to be good.
I don't see why this vision of inevitability is relevant in any way, except
as a StrawMarx to knock down.
> >It's clearly not Marx's view (see, for example, Cornel West's book,
> published by Monthly Review press),
>I know the book, and have written on Marx's moral theory myself. Rodney
>Peffer (another yucky analytical Marxist) has the best defense of MArx as
>havinga moral theory. However, Richard Miller, no inevitabilist, defended
>Marx the amoralist. Allen Wood has argued plausibly that Marx is a moral
>relativist of a sort that it is difficult to distinguish from amoralism.
>So has Milton Fisk. and if we consider Marx's official view of morality,
>he never wavers from the view stated plain as day in the German Ideology
>that morality is ideology.
I disagree, but I'm not into quotation-mongering as much as many Marxists
are (including these Analytical Marxists). Go read John Elliott's stuff for
quotations. Unlike many authors, he tries to put the quotes into the
context of Marx's work. Having a sense of dialectical reasoning, he also
understands Marx better than say Elster.
> >West also discusses the ethical thought of Engels, Kautsky, and Lukacs.
> None of those three -- two of whom are often labeled
> "orthodox" -- rejected ethical thinking.
>Engels and Kautsky followed Marx for their meta-ethics. Like Marx, they
>worked off substantive moral views that it is har to reconcile with moral
>realtivism or amoralism.
In other words, they weren't moral relativists or amoralists, just like
Marx wasn't. In the end, the Marxian ethic is one of disalienation.
>Lukacs is a complicated case, a real philosopher. It's interesting,
>though, that he never actuallyt wrote about ethics as such.
That's because "ethics as such" can't be separated from other matters (like
what's called "social science" these days). In fact, I think this is the
basis of most of the ethics-is-ideology interpretations of Marx (some of
which have been picked up by Marxists). Like Marx's assertion that
philosophy is ideology and should be rejected is really about ending the
_distinction_ (the division) between philosophy and socioeconomic
understanding, it's referring to the idea that ethics can't be separated
from materialist analysis and so can't be considered a truly separate
field. Marx didn't reject Kant categorically as much as he saw Kant's
ethics as excessively abstract and removed from the real world and
therefore largely irrelevant.
>However, you find a lot of more garden variety self-styled Marxists who
>rerun the usual tropes about how morality is ideology or idealism, etc.,
>mere utopianism, whenever the ethical issues are raised. At least I do.
who are these folks?
Justin said:
> >> you are just an analytical Marxist, in your case, one with a
> commitment to dialectical method.<<
> >insults! I am not now and have never been an Analytical Marxist (though
> I once co-wrote a paper the AMs praise but typically ignore).
>Cite please.
"The Microeconomics of Conflict and Hierarchy in Capitalist Production,"
co-author: Michael Reich (of the University of California at Berkeley),
Review of Radical Political Economics, 12(4), Winter 1981: pp. 27-45.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
