Jim Devine wrote: > > > If cul-de-sacs are all we have, we're in big trouble. I'm not into > postmodernism, so I don't see theoretical thoroughfares as necessarily > futile or hubristic. At least one can try to find a thoroughfare out > of this jungle, rather than simply giving up.
I don't think that theoretical frustration necessarily involves pracical frustration. In a general way all Marxists, beginning with Marx & perhaps even some of his predecessors, have agreed that capitalism is a weird social system, a mass of contradictions. Hence it is very possible that capitalism poses theoretical questions that either can't be resolved at all or can be resolved only by post-capitalist theoreticians of the future looking back on it. What Marx and Marxists _have_ gotten established (at least to their own satisfaction) is (a) the historical nature of capitalism as opposed to being a "natural" or inevitable expression of human "nature" and (b) its utter destructiveness and therefore the necessity (for human survival) of destroying it and building a cooperative society. I think something like this is what various Marxists have had in mind when they characterized Marxism as a _method_, a guide to practice, rather than merely (or at all) a belief system. Carrol
