Long version: Last time I looked, we weren't heaping praise on Hegel, nor has anyone denied Hegel's racism. But denying the importance of both the substance and method of Hegel to Marx's of work because Hegel wasn't a humanist, was an "idealist," and was ignorant, in every sense of the word, concerning Africa is substituting moral repugnance and outrage for historical analysis, something which is anti-Marxist to the core.
Marx never denied the importance of Hegel for the development of his work. Marx, to my knowledge, also never described his work as "humanism." And despite the acrobatics of some, Marxism has little enough to do with what passes as humanism. Short version: We were discussing Marx's use of Hegelian jargon, whether or not he even used it (I still can't find anything that comes close to Hegel's expositions). If somebody out there is vilifying Russell, Mead, Dewey, that's a horse on a different colored list. -----Original Message----- From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Jul 14, 2004 12:14 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Hegel & Marx When Marxists heap adulation on a reactionary, racist, anti-humanist metaphysician and Prussian propagandist, then perhaps we have a slight problem. Sure, some of Hegel's ideas are built into Marx's thinking and later Marxism. So are Aristotle's, Leibniz's, etc. Sure, Marx matured in an atmosphere of Hegelianism and could not have avoided being influenced byt it (even if the influence was filtered through radical Hegelians). But if we leap backward over Marx to Hegel and start to proclaim that Hegelian ontology has any value and validity today, we really come close to betraying the spirit of Marx. Some Marxists have claimed to find that just about every non-Marxist philosopher was advancing "materialism." It isn't true of Hegel. Hegel and Kant represent the two important streams of idealist thinking that have come down to us. We can give those guys credit for their place in the history of ideas, but we have to recognize that historical and dialectical materialism denies the validity of most of their doctrines. *Except* in the context of the history of ideas, they have no relevance. What really pisses me off is reading Marxists proclaiming the importance of old idealist philosophers -- and new idealist philosophers -- and totally neglecting the naturalist, realist, philosophers. We have to overcome the tendency to heap invective on thinkers whose ideas are close enough to Marxism to pose a real threat of presenting an alternative to Marxism and of seducing people away from Marxism. That was the case with Lenin vis-a-vis Mach -- no radical, but yet a philosopher of science, unlike Hegel. Think of the way we vilify or ignore Dewey. Russell. Whitehead. Mead. The positivists. Etc. These folks represent the main line of thinking in philosophies that are friendly to science and are to one degree or another materialist (although the word of course scared them). Nor are these philosophers somehow anti-humanist and anti-subjective. There is, IMHO, more humanism in John Dewey than there is in the entire Hot Dog school. Dewey, after all, pioneered the most humanistic form of education that we have. And, for goodness sake, Mead practically invented social psychology. Enough said. I don't plan to respond to other postings on this thread unless it becomes unavoidable (personal). En lucha Jim Blaut -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
