Re: Engels's use of the term "Marxist" - reply to Justin

[andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen@xxxxxxxxx>]

J, this is too long for me; just a  few quickies:

--- Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Justin,
>
> > Thanks, I'd missed that. But one really has to
> look
> > for it, right?
>
> Yes, although when I studied Engels's writings
> (published and unpublished)
> in the early 1980s, I found several loci.

I would not be surprised if Engels occasionally
adopted the usage that Kautsky popularized in late
mid-late 1880s; you won't find it in his work before
then, I'ld bet. And, as I said, it's not a common
trope.

It is just
> that I do not have the
> literature handy here anymore, and I am too
> preoccupied to go to the
> International Institute of Social History round the
> corner

A lovely place. I once got a research grant from my
grad school in England to do some work on Marx there.
You should tell the story of how the stiff got there.

> Later
> > Kautsky made "Marxist" Into a term of honor.
>
> Yes, I would go along with that, except that
> Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin and
> others did not simply seek to make Marxism a term of
> honour, but to expound
> it as a complete theoretical system.

Well, of course, but I was just talking abiut the use
of the term.



> Marx's work was
> radically unfinished, it set an intellectual
> challenge but did not complete
> it, but the systematisers and popularisers in
> practice glossed over this in
> their urge to present a system of thought which had
> an answer for
> everything.

Yes, but the handful of remaining true believers in
the diamat can be ignored; there are far more people
who are not stuck on that view, but who are still
stuck on the term. ACtually I don't care about the
term one way or the other, but I think it's important
not to care about it, rather than to cleave to it, as
Soula does, as an emotional symbol of alienation and
revolt.

But if you use the
> term socialism, then you can admit many people who
> are in practice the same
> in their views as Marxists but reject the
> specifically Marxist
> accoutrements.

Yes, me too. In fact, like me. I'm one of those
people.

>
> I disagree because there are still plenty active
> Marxist parties in the
> world who cannot be included in those categories.

But there is no Communist movement. The so-called
Marxist parties have no common revolutionary project.
They do not have mass working class support.
Self--styled Marxism is livelier in some places than
other -- in the US it is totally dead, even in
academia -- sorry, guys 'n gals, I wish it were not so
-- in other places Marxists can win important
university posts and even parliamentary seats. But in
the main, the sane Marxist parties are just far-left
reform and protest parties, as in Japan or Israel. No
one would think that this is the specter that is
haunting Europe.

I certainly don't dispute that it's worth working with
the organized Marxist parties where they exista nd are
doing good things,a s they often are, but I also think
it is worth working with the Democrats where they do
good things. In America, the groups often overlap: the
CPUSA has been staunch supporters of the Democratic
Parties, on and off but mostly on, since the 1930s.


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