Re: Re: Hardt: "Spinoza was a communist thinker long before Marx"

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

> One favors thinking outside received categories *when* they are
> either false or inadequate.  But why ditch categories that make for
> effective explanations, as categories used by Marx are?  That
doesn't
> make sense to me.  (If you think of some categories used by Marx as
> either false & inadequate, which should be replaced by Foucault's,
> you might _explain what they are & why_.)
=========
There you go with zero-sum thinking again. It's an issue of
incompleteness and supplementing categories.

> Moreover, in the case of Foucault, he first of all misunderstood how
> Marx used such categories as commodity, thus his criticism of Marx
> was unfortunately based upon his (willful?) misunderstanding of Marx
> (Cf. Doug's remark upon the anxiety of influence).  On this point,
> see for instance Abdul Janmohamed, "Refiguring Values, Power,
> Knowledge: or Foucault's Disavowal of Marx," _Whither Marxism?:
> Global Crises in International Perspective (edited and with an
> introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, NY: Routledge,
> 1995).
========
I'd love some evidence for the above claim. I will try to track down
the AJ essay. It would seem the issue is whether he disagreed with the
way M defined commodities would serve in various strategies of
explanation or whether Marxists who disagree with F on his contesting
of those strategies engage in question begging defenses of Marx'
approach.





> There is no need for going outside Marxism to make use of
> reflexivity.  Nominalism is a dead end, for instance leading to an
> understanding of mental illnesses that leaves out biology altogether
> & degenerates into a labeling theory of deviance.
=========
Well of course it's not about necessity; it's about the cognitive
freedom to think differently. Your dismissal of nominalism and the
challenges it poses in naming and predicating natural and social kinds
is frightening. You also seem to be setting up a straw man/woman
argument.


> Remember that adversarial stance is toward not each and everything
> that Foucault ever wrote -- it is taken toward his theoretical
> premises & conclusions that are not compatible with Marxism as
theory
> & political project -- incompatibility that post-Marxist
> post-modernists themselves trumpet.
=========
Well that begs the question on intertheoretic choice and
underdetermination, no?

>
> If you want us to take a look at works by Marsden & Lowe, you might
> explain why we should in more concrete terms.
>
> Yoshie
>
> P.S.  Your posts, except for forwards, are increasingly
content-less,
> and it's not clear to me what you are arguing _for_ at all, except
> that you disagree with me.  Especially your latest:
>Hence the social scientist's quest for the archimedian point/olympian
>epistemology and know-it-all vanguardism are to be repeated? Lot's of
>metaphor to decontruct in 'ol Vlady's rhetoric....
>
>Ian

Here, you are just repeating post-it buzzwords.  So much for
"thinking 'outside' received categories," moving beyond adversarial
stance, arguing against "a methodological zero-sum game," etc.
Thanks for your post-modern dogma.  The end of discussion.


===========
Is this an attempt at an insult? Why do you think in term of
everything I post as an argument? Typical Leninism. You're right, it's
closure time.

Ian