Ive just signed on to this list, and so just catching the Rorty thread. There was a review essay in the London Review by Jonathan Ree, on Rorty's ignorance of marxism. The link is here, if youre interested:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20n20/ree2020.htm
While I think Ree still cedes too much ground to Rorty, it is still a fine critique. Rorty finds marxism just too damn grand-theoretical and rationalist, whereas what we really need is non-theory like (his) pragmatism, an emphasis on telling "sad and sentimental stories that help us care about other people," and something like a collective, political will to welfare-statism. Ree's retort is that, if anything, classical marxism (lenin, mao, etc) was all too close to this prioritizing of politics (or political will), at the expense of theory. Here is Ree on this:
If there is a moral to the story of 20th-century Communism it
is not that social movements ought to rely more on sentimental
hope and less on rational knowledge, but that sheer political
willpower can lead to results at odds with its aims: after all no
one could suppose that drab poverty, nervous suspicion and
mass murder were quite what the Bolsheviks originally had in
mind. They would have done well to acquire a better
theoretical understanding of their situation rather than trusting
that sheer militant optimism would be enough to see them
through. They should have thought rather more deeply about
the ideas of democracy, planning and state power, not
bothered about them less. They listened to too many edifying
stories, not too few.
Marx had a much better [idea] when he suggested that money - especially self-creating money, or capital - corresponds to God, with Adam Smith as patriarch and classical political economy as the Bible.
Rather like Rorty, he had a zeal for saving his fellow leftists from absolutist delusions: that is why he exhorted them to treat the
mystery of capital rather as atheists treat the mystery of God, and
warned them not to be taken in by political economy when it
sanctifies capitalist social relations and treats them as 'fixed by natural laws and unchangeable'. Marx sounds to me like the first and
perhaps most consistent leftist ironist.
Best,
Daniel
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------- Daniel Vukovich English; Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801
"Riding roughshod everywhere, U.S. imperialism has made itself the enemy of the people of the world and has increasingly isolated itself. Those who refuse to be enslaved will never be cowed by the bombs in the hands of the imperialists. People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs!"
---- Mao Tse-Tongue, 1964
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