[Marxism] Philosophy of The Kitchen

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was impressed by Nestor's very correct retort to Jurriaan regarding
materialist philosophy as connected to everything and anything we do or
don't do, and crumbling as a house of cards his attempt to dichotomize
philosophy from the banal (a very postmodern thing to do, but one marxism,
firmly modern and materialist, would never do). There is nothing banal.
Everything is part of the class struggle. Not in a determinist way, of
course, but it is never outside of it.

Here a choice quote from Trotsky who, all said and done, was a rather
brilliant marxist:

"Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels
with a chain - at least in a poor country like Russia - and his vanity
begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to
produce this effect."

Maybe it took the internet to have this effect on Jurriaan...

Jurriaan sez:

> My argument is not that the wheel should be reinvented. It is rather that
> most people do not know when it was invented, how it was invented, how many
> spokes there are on the wheel, what it was made of, what its circumference
> is, how many times it has turned, and more generally, where it has been.

And so, D&HM is a banal platitude because it explains all those things?

> As regards making Marx accessible to the "ornery" worker, this is pretty
> much a myth, probably more a kind of class-racism. Most "ornery" thinking
> workers in my experience are quite capable of reading and understanding
> Marx, and many of them understand him a darn sight better than academics.

How is this so? Now, I am an organic intellectual, from the working class.
But for the life of me I have never gone beyond a cursory reading of Das
Kapital, even with the help of Althusser and even when I was in college.

The reason? Time. Yes, time. Reading takes time. You either work or read.
And workers don't have time to read in most of their jobs. One of the very
key material reasons for the dominace of intellectuals in the marxist left
is precisely because they have time to sit down and read. Hell, they are
PAID to sit down and read.

Workers (yes, real workers) like David W, are usually not in a subjective
position, and most of the time not even in the objective position, of
engaging in intellectual pursuits. The sacrifice a worker needs to make in
order to read Das Kapital, is usually too much when faced with concrete
examples of exploitation.

The basis for marxist popularization efforts have been always, at least in
theory, not to spoonfeed  workers what we deem them "uncapable" of
understanding, but rather to provide concise and concrete ideas, and
bibliographical points of references for self-study. This explains, for
example, why didactical books such as D&HM are full of quotes and
bibliography. Rather than telling workers, "here, read these 20 or so books"
which they will not do, you tell them, "here, this are what we consider the
main points of these 20 books, feel free to read them too".

It is not "anti-worker racism". It is what is dereisvely called by
intellectuals "workerism". As a matter of fact, I argue that your ultra-left
"our theory is just right for workers" actually leads to a de facto
leadership of the intellectual sector.

Workers are of course in the abstract
capable of reading Marx, after all marx was an Homo sapiens just like them.
They are also able an capable of studying special and general relativity.

Hell, they can even take on Derrida! GASP!

But the fact that they are capable, doesn't mean that they CAN do it.

Nestor already explained the difference between capability and ability.

Interestingly, this same debate was what lead to the formation of
Marxism-Leninism, from the trotskyite to the anti-revisionist brands.
Leninin developing a political method for marxism, correctly identified the
need to synthetize the ideas of Marx and Engels into easy to access forms.

I am not saying that Leninism, in this sense, is correct. In view of
historical experience it would be wrong to say so. But it certainly pointed
out a huge elephant that eluded and continues to elude the view of
intellectuals of your stripe: theory without action is idle talk.

In concrete terms, marxist and marxian intellectuals have to

Yet, most of their theoretical work occurs with little connection to the
things

Marx described religion as the soul of a souless world. Our task is not to
be an alternative soul, but to free the world's real soul. And I doubt that
this task can be achieved by not abridging Das Kapital simply because it
would be "anti-worker racism" to do so.

Such liberal guilt leads to liquidationism, not to victory.


> They can use the Internet just as well as anybody else, maybe even better.

No one said that workers are uncapable of reading.

In the industrial world, most workers can muster maybe two hours online a
day. And that is including email, news, entertainment etc. The time left for
workers to engage in purely theoretical education is concretely limited by
their objective need to sustain themselves and their families. Not to
mention reading. Academicians at all levels now nothing of this, because
their work is precisely intellectual.

And of course, your fetish with the internet as a mode of production is
incredibly naive. Get out into the real world. Your computer's keyboard was
built in a factory, the electricity that powers it is brought to you by
real, breathing, human beings who have no time to sit down an read Das
Kapital, but might give you a minute or too to its abriged version.

> It's funny how people extrapolate the class consciousness of the 19th
> century or the 1930s to the conditions of the 21st century."

In what manner? Based upon what do you argue this?

At least none of the discussions I have seen argue that stupidity.

As a matter of fact, the only person who has quoted extensively 19th century
philosophy is yourself!

sks




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