(there are a lot of ellipses that are not indicated)
I wrote:
> > 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.<
Justin writes:
>Sure, though the sneers were often justified, whether or not they were
>sneering at their past ideas.
There are lots of wrong ideas floating about (some of which were pushed by
the Analytical Marxists) but I don't think sneering is the appropriate
response. It's a symptom of a closed mind, or a closed community, and/or
psychological insecurity -- any of which is bad for a scientific attitude
and the growth of the left (since sneering turns everyone off except the
sneerers). I think astrology is nonsense (that's because I'm a Pisces, of
course), but I don't sneer at those who believe in it. It's fun for them
and gives them vague suggestions that allow them to make decisions about
their lives.
I also think it's usually a mistake to totally reject one's old views (to
sneer at them). Sometimes it involves simply a swing to extremes. For
example, some Althusserians totally rejected structural determinism and
became Analytical Marxists, embracing the exact opposite, methodological
individualism. (Erik Wright has been talked about in these terms, but I
don't know if that's true or not. Probably not. I do like his earlier,
Althusserian, stuff better.) But both structural determinism and
methodological individualism are one-sided, i.e., forms of reductionism --
and both of them capture one aspect of what's going on. Others are
hard-core triumphalist "revolution now" types who swing all the way to
utter reformism and defeatism. This latter phenomenon is quite common in
eras of defeat of traditional left movements (like the current one).
I had written.
> >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.<
Justin now presents an argument:
>OK, I'll spell it out. Lots of dialectical doubletalk gets us nowhere.
Lots of analytical philosophy, mathematics, sociological double-talk,
economic graphs, etc., etc., get us nowhere. (Once a journal sent me a
book to review by Roemer about egalitarianism. It was so jargon-ridden that
the benefits of reading it quickly shrank in importance, especially since
it was a bunch of normative speculation.) Academics -- and wannabes and
sectarians -- often have a Mandarin Mentality, using jargon, math, obscure
symbols, etc. to set themselves off from the unwashed masses who don't
Understand. It's a common disease, one that's hardly unique to
non-"Analytical Marxism."
The mode of presentation is a completely different issue from dialectical
method, which (though it can be as mind-numbing as THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF
SPIRIT) can be explained in very simple terms. To cite the book again that
I cite whenever a hat drops anywhere, see Levins & Lewontin's DIALECTICAL
BIOLOGIST. They don't make the ontology vs. epistemology vs. mode of
presentation distinction that I would make (cf. Ollman's ALIENATION), but
they are very clear. Anyway, Justin, didn't you study philosophy at one
point? you should know that dialectics is much more than jargon.
(I've heard rumors that even though US philosophy these days is dominated
by analytical philosophy, graduate students form underground study groups
to study the types of philosophy -- e.g., Hegel -- that aren't seen as
correct by the establishment... Of course, at a Catholic place like LMU,
there's more of an emphasis on classical philosophy. People don't have to
publish samizdats.)
>People who insist in doing it despite that, who respond to criticisms of
>anything that looks substantive that any of them might say with more
>dialectical doubletalk, and who bridle at having the the emptiness of this
>sort of move pointed out, are stuck with a "true orthodoxy" every bit as
>flatheaded as that of creationists or flat-earthers.
This set of assertions is itself empty. You cite no authors and quote no
live individuals. It is nothing but sneering. In fact, it gives me the
impression that you know nothing about the subject matter, even though
that's not true. (It's true you list some people below, but I think
content-free assertions should be avoided, especially since you don't think
content-free method exists.)
Justin said:
> >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 [word] Marx said could turn out to be seriously
> false, and yet orthodix Marxism as method would still be true.<
I replied:
> > Of course, since Marx applied his method, which can't produce
> totally-false results.
Justin now says:
>There must be something missing here. Why can't it produce totally false
>results?
In theory, the dialectical method _could_ produce totally false results.
But Marx showed that _in practice_, it doesn't lead to totally-false
results, though sometimes he was wrong. He developed all sorts of theories
that could never have been developed by AM using deductive logic (among
other things because in practice he rejected the dichotomy between
deductive and inductive logic). In fact, he created all sorts of grist for
the social-science mills. Except for orthodox economics, every social
science has been highly influenced by Marx. Even the hard-core
conservatives accept many of his propositions. For someone writing more
than 100 years ago, he was right a remarkable percent of the time.
(Heilbroner's MARXISM: FOR AND AGAINST has a list.)
If I remember correctly, Lukacs brought up the possibility that all of
Marx's "substantive propositions" were wrong, but that was more of a
rhetorical flourish than anything else. His point was that method was more
important than specific propositions. For example, during the era of
classical Marxism (Luxembourg, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Hilferding,
Kautsky, etc.) there was a lot of historical-materialist research into why
capitalism in Western Europe wasn't turning out as Marx had suggested,
developing theories of imperialism and uneven development. Unfortunately,
the material conditions -- i.e., the disaster of World War I, the Russian
Revolution, and their aftermath -- didn't allow these applications of
Marx's method to come to fruition. But these efforts weren't doomed from
the start, as scholarly efforts since then have shown.
BTW, it's a little strange that you seem to ignore the socioeconomic
environment in which people do their theoretical and empirical work. I keep
on bring it up and you keep dropping it. When Lenin blasted Kautsky as a
renegade, for example, there were important issues at stake. It's not a
matter of having a bad attitude at a cocktail party, where no serious
issues are at stake.
>... I also do not believe that they were produced by application of a
>"method." I do not think there is any such thing. What people call
>"method" is something that can be found backwareds,a fter the fact, in
>pieces of thinking atht people do.
This doesn't seem to be true of Marx. He was pretty explicit about his
method, e.g., in the Introduction to the GRUNDRISSE. Of course, he started
out with a version of Hegel's method (given his training). That method
changed over time as he applied it and learned from the empirical world.
Some things that never changed were his holism, his emphasis on dynamics,
his materialism, and his emphasis on contradictions.
>But you do not get substantive results by bringing a "method" that is
>independent of any content to some material and then "applying" it. if you
>want to see the absurd results that happen when people try this, look at
>my own social science discipline, political science, where people actually
>true to do this too much of the time.
The method was never independent of content. Hegel's idealist conception of
history was chock-full of content (cf. THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY). And
"content" -- Marx's contact with the real world of 19th century Europe --
encouraged him to turn to materialism, which necessitated adding more
empirical knowledge (yet more content).
That the method and the object of study aren't separate is a dialectical
point, BTW. That doesn't mean that method doesn't exist, however. For that
matter, the fact that the method of study and the object of study can't be
separated doesn't mean that the object of study doesn't exist.
I think it's impossible to _talk about_ method without the object of study,
but that doesn't say the method doesn't exist.
Justin writes:
>I am trying to explain that is method-substance dustinction cannot be
>maintained. What people call "method" is just the way substance is organized.
No, I'd say it's a way of getting new insights. Marx's method, for example,
told him to look for interconnections, the ways in which the totality of
capitalism fits together, rather than simply starting with a bunch of atoms
and adding them up.
I find that this method is desperately needed by economics. For example, in
macroeconomics, theory is hobbled because the theorists simply add up
individual decisions or markets (or feel uncomfortable about using
aggregates and macro conceptions). Most outside of the University of
Chicago have rejected the idea of treating macroeconomic decisions "as if"
they were made by a single individual (the representative agent model) but
they just barely understand that the whole is different from the sum of the
parts. (It's true that the aggregate production function still lingers in
glorious fallacy.) They don't seem to understand at all how the macro-level
feeds back to affect micro-decisions (as when persistent unemployment
encourages those with jobs not only to work hard for their bosses in fear
of the cost of job loss but also to fight to exclude the unemployed from
jobs). They are also hung up by quaint notions of equilibrium, seeing no
phenomenon as truly real if it can't be described as an equilibrium
state. They need dialectics badly (see my 1981 dissertation, which simply
applies a dialectical vision rather than talking about it).
To say that there's no such thing as method except as a way to organize the
substance is to say that people don't reflect about what they're doing
before they do it, or while they do it. It also suggests that "anything
goes," so that a totally deductive approach is as valid as a totally
inductive one which is as valid as one which rejects the
deductive/inductive dichotomy. It also says there's no way to say that the
method that astrologers apply is somehow less valid than that of mechanical
engineers.
I had written:
> > 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).<
Justin writes:
>Well, this is sort of ancient history, since AM is over. But I do think
>this characterization is fair, not least because I do not think there is
>any such thing as "Marx's dialetical method."
Have you read the GRUNDRISSE?
>I do think there is such thing as dialectics, which I understand to be a
>matter of organizing accounts of social dynamics to reveal internal
>instabilities and tendencies to change to overcome these conflicts; there
>is also a more narrowly Hegelian dialectic that, Tony Smith shows in the
>Logic of Marx's Capital, was important in Marx's presentation in Capital.
>I don't think that is a "method" in the sense that it is something that
>can be prised free of a particular subject matter and applied to anything,
>even any old thing in human sciences.
As I've argued before, the dialectics of human society are qualitatively
different from those of non-human nature. But Marx showed that dialectics
reveal a heck of a lot about the "human sciences" (though people like Cohen
try to destroy Marx's vision by taking the dialectic out). Of course,
there's no "method" that can be prised free from the particular subject
matter, since subject and object are united. Again, that's a dialectical
point.
>Not all the AMS were hostile to Hegelizing -- I wasn't (and am not), and
>although I was not a Major Figure, I was an AM if I was any sort of
>Marxist. I also disagree that the AMs were totally stuck on "orthodox
>social science methods," in part because I don't think there are such methods.
Oh yes there are. You just don't hang out with economists or sociologists
for a living. They don't just _do_ research. They start with a bunch of
preconceptions about what kinds of research are okay and what kinds are
verboten. There are certain questions you don't ask. The hallmark of the Am
school was that they took the orthodox social science shibboleths and
taboos and accepted them. Look at Roemer. He should have known that general
equilibrium theory would lead him astray.
>Roemer used rational choice modeling, rather creatively I think, applying
>to questions about class and exploitation; he was never very interested in
>Marx interpretation. ....
As Dymski and I show, his theory of exploitation is not really about the
real world at all. It may be "creative" but it is simply a generalization
of Henry George's idea of land-rent-as-exploitation to talk about all
scarcity rents as exploitation. (Unlike Roemer, George had a good reason
why exploitation doesn't simply go away with time.) Of course that very
simple idea is hidden in a welter of obscure math which allows him to avoid
issues of causation and time, dwelling instead on the academically-correct
ideas of general equilibrium theory.
Justin said:
> >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.<
>
> > give me some specifics about whom it is you're talking about. <
>Don't tell me this isn't a phenomenon you haven't encountered constantly,
>people who think the negation of the negation is an excuse for self
>contradiction. Bertell Ollman does this in his more recent work--Tony
>Smith doesn't; he's very careful. You don't really want a list, it would
>be too long.
The only real case I've seen was Trotsky's IN DEFENSE OF MARXISM. Ollman
doesn't do this in general.
> > (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.
>Yes, and this excuses dialectical doublespeak?
No, but you were implying that dialectics was the only source of
double-speak. My point is that double-speak comes from all sorts of
sources, including from the AM school.
>I have no patience for the dismissal of textual support for an
>interpretation as "quote mongering." Obviously it is possible to misread a
>quotation, but then one says thatm rather than dismissing people who
>support their interpretations as "quote mongering."
I reject quote mongering as an activity for _me_. It's not my comparative
advantage, as it were. Others can do it if they want. Some do it very well
and I rely on their work.
>As to Marx on ethics, I think think there is a disjunction between Marx's
>substantive views, which are loaded with moral content, and his express,
>repeated, unequivocal meta-ethical views, which waver between class
>relativism and amoralism--he was never really interested enough to think
>through which one he meant.
Right. He wasn't interested in ethics. Not everybody has to be. After all,
ethics doesn't rule the world or drive history. (That, of course, is the
problem.)
>Moreover, given historical materialism, at least moral relativism and
>perhaps amoralism is very powerfully supported.
I don't think one can easily derive an ethics from a theory of history (if
it can be done at all). Even if one agrees with the inevitabilist Marxism
of the 2nd international, that doesn't mean you have to side with the
"inevitable" winners (the proletariat). Schumpeter seemed to think that
socialism was inevitable (in his later work) but he was against it.
>It takes a great deal of rather subtle analysis to argue plausibly that an
>objective morality, which marx clearly held in practice, is consistent
>with a materialist conception of value. (I have a paper on this.)
I'm not sure that Marx believed in an "objective morality" (whatever that
is), but I'll take your word for it. BTW, his theory of value is not
ethical in the sense of saying that workers "deserve" to be paid the full
value of their product.
I wrote:
> > Marx's assertion that philosophy is ideology and should be rejected is
> really about ending the _distinction_ (the division) between philosophy
> and socioeconomic understanding, <
Justin writes:
>I think that this fails to appreciate how Feuerbachian Marx really
>remained. Dan Brudney has convinced me that Marx really did want to kill
>philosophy, he thought that philosophical questions had no answers--not
>merely that they had social scientific answers rather than philosophical
>ones, but that they were answered by practical experience.
Well, since I've never talked to Brudney, he hasn't convinced me. What is
his logical argument? his textual support? what kind of preconceptions did
he bring to this project? Why should I be convinced by some guy I've never
heard of? Is quoting Brudney more worthwhile than quoting Marx? why?
Justin, please don't simply give me _assertions_ about what you or your
friends believe. For example, the assertion that there's no method in
social sciences simply poses more questions than it answers. Such as, what
in heck do you mean by "method"? Assertions -- especially when they involve
dismissal of a long tradition that presents an alternative to the official
perspective -- don't help at all. They remind me of sectarianism.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
