I wrote: >>... But since Marx was very much one who engaged in "ruthless criticism of all existing" and major followers such as Luxemburg embraced "doubt all," dogmatism isn't a necessary component of Marxism.<<
Justin Schwartz writes:>Never said it was. Religion isn't necessarily dogmatic.< Alan implied that religious-style dogmatism was part of Marxism (or at least that was his interpretation of what you said); I was responding to him, not you. >>If we follow such folks as Georg Lukacs to see Marxism as defined by its method of understanding the world (a style of questioning rather than a list of pre-determined answers or "substantive propositions"), then dogmatism can be avoided.<< Justin: >Well, Jim and I have had this one out before. As a pragmatist, I don't think that substance and method cab [can?] be seperated so neatly, < Of course substance (answers) and method (questions) can't be separated in practice (since there's a dialectic between the two). But it's good to separate them analytically in order to clarify thinking. The central part of L's method is materialist dialectics, which I interpret following Levins & Lewontin (though Hegel had something to contribute). A crucial aspect of dialectics is the rejection of reductionism -- and similar one-sided methods -- in order to focus on the totality. >and Lukacs, who coined the concept of Marxism as method, didn't believe it. [you can read his mind?] He said that you could reject every substantive proposition that MArx put forth and still be a Marxist, but if someone were to propose rejecting the law of value, the desirability of the abolition of markets, the central role of the working class, and the priority of economics, I don't think that Lukacs would regard him as a MArxist for a minute, no matter how dialectical his thinking.< I don't know what L said specifically, but (as I've said too many times) the LoV makes sense as part of the method (at a different level of abstraction than dialectics). I doubt that L cared about price theory. I bet that he'd be willing to reject such substantive propositions as that prices gravitate to values or that they gravitate to prices of production. (I know I do.) The issue of the abolition of markets is sorta irrelevant, since Marx's legacy is a theory of capitalism, not a theory of what to do afterwards. (Those who rely on Marx alone on this issue have been flying blind.) I looked for my copy of Marx's HOW TO SET UP A PERFECT PLANNED ECONOMY WITH NO MARKETS IN THREE EASY LESSONS but couldn't find it. It turned out to be Edward Bellamy's LOOKING BACKWARD, from a completely different tradition (but one that seems to have influence the Bolsheviks). (The CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAMME doesn't have _any_ details about abolishing markets.) BTW, "we should abolish markets" isn't a substantive proposition of Marxism (like "proletarian revolution is inevitable") as much as a programmatic proposition. In any event, Marx was clearly much more interested in abolishing capitalism than markets. (After all, the Nazis abolished markets, but not capitalistm.) The centrality of the working class is indeed central, but that's not exactly a "substantive proposition." It's more of (1) a moral commitment, along with (2) the idea that once the capitalist class system has taken hold of all of society (i.e., the entire world), the class system will be simplified to a simple class-against-class mode and (3) the idea that once that happens, only the working class can abolish classes altogether. This is not a substantive proposition of the sort that says "the rate of profit always tends to fall." Not only isn't it a "substantive proposition" (such as that endogenously-created crises regularly shake capitalism) but the "priority of economics" isn't exactly Marxist: Marx rejected the common divisions between "economics," "sociology," "political science," "philosophy," etc. Marx embraced the priority of human activity over thought in the historical process, with production labor being central. This emphasis on human activity comes from the materialist side of Marx's method. Jim D.
