Re: Another exchange with Leo Panitch

[Mervyn Hartwig <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou:

> I am not sure what you mean by theoretical fundamentals.

Actually, I meant whatever you yourself meant by 'the fundamental ideas
of Marxism'.

> There is obviously
> an ongoing need to refresh Marxist thinking around any number of questions.

Agreed.

> 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.

Agreed.

> 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.

I think both kinds of work are relevant, but you want to legislate that
only the second is valid; the reason being:

> 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.

So on all the 'fundamental' issues classical Marxism is forever
'correct' -- Marx resolved all the issues of idealism vs materialism,
the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, etc once and for all.
But Marx himself didn't think that and, great human being though he was,
wasn't god.

> 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.

This is not correct. Marx was fired up by Hegel's philosophy (without
which, as I've said, his own theories could not have been thought) and
after his early immersion in it, he revisited it for new inspiration
periodically throughout his life and in  particular 1857 when Hegel's
doctrine of the Notion in The Logic inspired the Grundrisse and in 1867
when the doctrine of Essence in The Logic inspired Capital Vol 1 and its
movement from phenomenal forms to essential relations.

Instead of viewing classical Marxism as incorrible and fixed, why not
see it as developing and dynamic? This is surely the dialectical
attitude, as well as the scientific one (same thing, ultimately) -
Darwinian biology didn't stand still with Darwin's death, nor
Einsteinian physics with Einstein's, etc. Since the world, especially
the social world, is in process (the dialectical view) any theory that
is frozen must necessarily end up in the dustbin of history.

> Well, autonomism is crap.

Two comments.

1. This is just knocking and mocking. How can you ever succeed in
building a broad-based movement to overthrow capitalism on that basis?
No social or theoretical movement is ever just crap. There's always some
positive things in it that are worth listening to and thinking about,
and also on the Marxist theory of ideology a real basis to it which is
worth analysing, i.e. you need to find out why it appeals to real
people.

2. Holloway himself has developed a specifically *dialectical* critique
of autonomism (*Historical Materialism vol 10 no 1, 2002, in a review of
Empire: 'Going in the wrong direction: or, Mephistopheles -- not St
Francis of Assisi', pp. 79-92) in which he criticizes it for offering a
purely positive theory instead of a 'negative' one, so to refer to him
in an unqualified way as an autonomist and to dismiss him as an
autonomist is hardly appropriate.

Thanks for your critique of 'Changing the World'. I'll comment further
when I've read the book.

Mervyn


In message , Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> writes
> 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

--
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, Journal of Critical Realism
13 Spenser Road
Herne Hill
London SE24 0NS
mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
020 7 737 2892