Re: Another exchange with Leo Panitch

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mervyn:
> I fully share your concern about challenges to Marxism in the name of
> Marxism from within the academy. However, I'm confident that the research
> paradigm founded by Marx can more than hold its own on the basis
> of  results. Moreover, you can't reasonably expect academics to accept
> some kind of intellectual division of labour policed by yourself and other
> self-appointed defenders of 'the fundamental ideas of Marxism' whereby
> academics do the empirical research (provide the 'information') and either
> (it is not clear from your post) the theoretical fundamentals remain
> unchanged and undeveloped, or are developed by non-academics.

I am not sure what you mean by theoretical fundamentals. There is obviously
an ongoing need to refresh Marxist thinking around any number of questions.
For example, I believe that the question of indigenous society has been
radically undertheorized in Marxism and is susceptible to social Darwinist
deviations that crept in at the birth of our movement. That being said, the
answer to this particular question is not theorizing about the Nature of
Man and Freedom, but a deeper engagement with anthropological research of
the kind that Marshall Sahlins. In general, the less that Marxism has to do
with *idealist* philosophy, the better. With Holloway and a whole range of
Western Marxists, you get attempt after attempt to "correct" Marxism with
healthy dollops of Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, or whoever.

> For one thing, theory and practice go hand in hand. There are things the
> Zapatistas are saying that you'll find in Bhaskar, a theoretician of real
> stature, as well as Holloway. For another, Marx himself was the first to
> protest that he was not a Marxist and to acknowledge that his theories
> needed developing (he himself was developing them to his dying day) and
> would one day be sublated in a higher theory. The creative struggle goes
> on at every level,  from the most abstract meta-theory to the shop floor,
> and cannot be corralled by you or anybody. Hegel was an academic
> meta-theoretician without whose thought Marx himself (not to mention
> Proyect) was impossible.

You really don't have the quote correct. Jim Farmelant is always chiming in
on this, but it has something to do with Marx's response to what some
French utopians (I believe) were writing in his name. His response: if that
is Marxism, I am not a Marxist. As far as Marx acknowledging that his
theories needed developing, I am not quite sure what you mean. Marx had an
inexhaustible desire (and need) to make sure that his method met the
challenge of new phenomena. So at the end of his life, he made an apparent
"turn" against what others, especially Plekhanov, regarded as Marxist
verities when he endorsed much of the populist program in Czarist Russia
with his own particular interpretation. This turn was examined by Teodor
Shanin in "Late Marx and the Russian Road". Whatever efforts were being
expended by Marx in order to adjust his thinking to the Russian reality
(including studying the language in order to read scholarly literature and
statistical material in the language), he did not think that it was
necessary to revisit the early phase of his career when he rejected German
idealism. There was no need to reopen questions already resolved in "The
German Ideology", etc. As I will make clear in my critique of Holloway
which is well underway, his work is very much an attempt to not only
prioritize the early philosophical phase of Marx's career (a mark of his
neo-Frankfurt tendency), but to burden it with idealist notions that Marx
had definitively broken with.

> To repeat: I don't swear by everything Holloway says (I haven't even read
> his latest book yet, just the interviews and articles re it). But I do
> think some of his ideas are important and I would like to think that they
> would be considered carefully on this list instead of being prejudged to
> be a load of old crap because they hail from a petit bourgeois
> intellectual or an 'autonomist' or whatever.

Well, autonomism is crap.



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org