populism vs. Marxism (was RE: Frank Sinatra)

James Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu
Sat May 16 07:51:17 PDT 1998


I had written: >> Right, history is written by the victors. You are pointing to a real problem, the disjuncture between theory and practice that has characterized roadly-defined Marxism. My practice involves trying to end this disjuncture (which means among other things that if the theory is wrong, it should be rejected). <<

The Maximal Max responds: >That's cool. My point is that theories of political action ought to reckon with history, with how the working class actually struggles, not only how we would like it to. If one sees a compelling pattern in how insurgency actually has happened in the past, that is grounds for revising one's projects for the future. As you can tell, I'm into heavy revision.<

yeah, I knew that.

One thing that's important to remember is the difference between levels of abstraction. A theory such as Marx's in CAPITAL is very abstract, with empirical referents from another, very different, era than ours. Among other things, the active struggle by the working class is largely abstracted from, with such assumptions as that the real wage is constant. Also, issues of gender, race & ethnicity, nation-states, and the natural environment are largely left out for theoretical clarity's sake. (cf. Lebowitz, BEYOND CAPITAL.) To get to the level of our history, our politics, etc. (a much lower level of abstraction), one has to bring all of those factors in. Major mistakes include rejecting the abstract theory on the basis of concrete experience (empirical data, etc.) or rejecting concrete experience on the basis of the abstract theory. Related to the second is the mistake of rejecting feminism, environmentalism, etc. on the _a priori_ grounds that Marx didn't talk about them in CAPITAL. This error seems to be the theoretical basis of those on lbo-talk who dogmatically oppose any environmentalism, ruling out any possibility of Red/Green synthesis. (BTW, my friend Paul Burkett has culled hundreds of "Green" quotes from Marx, even if they aren't at the center of the latter's main theory in CAPITAL.)

I had written: >> I have no brief for the CP, but most of the time, the IS folks were putting their theory into practice. The rank-and-file organizing that was so ...<<


>What theory? Near as I can tell, their approach is to be good, militant
trade unionists and to eschew parliamentary politics and existing Democratic or social-democratic politics. How that becomes socialism is beyond me. Maybe there is a theory underneath somether. God bless 'em. Nothing wrong with trade unionism, or being anti-bureaucratic.<

I already explained the theory and see no reason to do so again.

>As for colonization, if you think the working class is going to mobilize, that's a reasonable thing to do, though it requires a thoughtful decision on the part of the erstwhile colonizer as to what they want out of life.<

right. I also think that it's a mistake for someone (e.g., a wealthy college student) to pretend to be something he or she is not (a "proletarian").

Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list