My impression from reading Marx is that all of this was _very_ abstract, i.e., left at the level of principles with little or no detail. Because Marx eschewed utopianism, the details were left to be filled in by utopians such as Edward Bellamy (a non- or anti-Marxist, but still influential) and William Morris (a Marxist). When the CP took charge in 1917, they didn't have much in the way of a scheme for how to organize society and the economy. Lenin's STATE AND REVOLUTION (based largely on Marx & Engels) wasn't concrete enough to help. (Methinks their emphasis should have been on extending the soviets.)
>As I said in some posts in the Marx/Darwin thread, it seems to me that
Marx's "materialism" appropriates much from the idealism of Kant and Hegel.
This is particularly true of his aesthetic and ethical philosophy. For
instance, the idea of "fully free working" as art is an appropriation of
Kant's idea of art as "production through freedom."<
I would say that Marx rejected the original idealist/materialist dichotomy. Rather than history being a process of matter in motion (as crude materialism has it), it's conscious and acting people that make history (though obviously not exactly as they please) and are made by history. His work always hearkened back to the real, empirical, world -- of people acting and thinking and the societal structures they make and that make them as people -- whenever he could. I also read him as saying that in the end, it's practice, not theory that counts more. Actions speak louder than words.
But this does not mean that he _rejected_ aesthetic or ethical philosophy. Rather, those were clearly not his emphases. He spent the bulk of his life doing political economy, after all. I think that his materialist perspective (emphasis on people and society) pushed him to that emphasis.
>I think it can be shown that it is just this idealist aspect of Marx's
philosophy of history and ethics that makes a certain kind (namely the
conventional "materialist" kind criticized in the Theses on Feuerbach, a
kind that, as the third thesis points out, has no logical room for the idea
of the proletariat liberating itself through revolutionary practice) of
"blueprint" approach to the future inappropriate on his premises and that
provides the basis for his critique of "utopian" socialists.<
I'm not sure what you mean here, Ted. I think that Marx's eschewing of blueprints was a result of (1) the 19th century glut of utopian blueprints; (2) the top-down, elitist, approach of many if not all of the utopians that Marx encountered or read; (3) his optimistic faith that socialism was coming automatically (one that really can't be justified by Marx's own philosophy and historical vision, IMHO) and (4) the fact that Marx couldn't do _everything_ (and shouldn't have been expected to do everything).
I happen to believe that utopian visions are very useful, not as a blueprint for what actually should be done "come the revolution" but as a tentative plan to be discussed and argued over in the process of building a socialist movement. (Hal Draper argues that Marx & Engels favored utopian schemes as part of the process of worker self-education.) Given that people differ from bees in that they construct the world in their heads before they do so in practice (to paraphrase one of the more lyrical passages in CAPITAL), utopian schemes can be useful in this way. These days, we need something like them just to give us hope, to tell us that There Is Some Alternative (TISA) to capitalism. (Some still cling to an idealized picture of the old USSR to do this. IMHO, that's the same as utopianism.)
(third and final message of the day)
Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html