I wrote:
> ways of working together and institutions are very important stuff, > but it's also good to have the ever-changing world view has some > tendency to converge to some sort of unity.
I don't see how Yoshie's comment below responds to what I said above in any wa. Nonetheless, she wrote:
The Marxist tradition once had a world view, a world view (more specifically a philosophy of history) of inevitable dialectical progress, from pre-capitalism, to capitalism, to socialism, the world view that the Marxist tradition borrowed in part from Christianity and in part from liberalism. It no longer does, though it remains useful as it supplies a theoretical framework and analytical tools.
NB: this wasn't Marx's view as much as it was the Marxism of the 2nd and 3rd internationals. There's also been a tradition within the broad Marxist trend of voluntarism and/or spontaneity.
A school of thought can be built around a theoretical framework and analytical tools, but a social movement cannot be.
why is that? Is it because cross-class movements are required? In Marx's original view, of course, a mass social movement _could_ be built around a theoretical framework and analytical tools because there were no inherent conflicts within the working class and the superficial ones would be washed away by the acid of capitalism. If a cross-class social movement is needed, then the polarization tendencies of capitalism would tend to split the movement, encouraging the use of different theoretical frameworks.
A social movement, especially one with an ambition to present an alternative to capitalist modernity, needs a world view, a world view that inspires people to have faith in the work they must do in the face of adversity.
doesn't Marxism have the potential to do that, especially if it sheds a lot of the old crap (Stalinism, Trotskyism, social democracy, third-worldism, etc.)? -- Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht
