On Fri, 15 Jan 1999 17:25:26 -0600 Carrol Cox <cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu>
writes:
>
>
>Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> . He found the teleological aspects of
>> Marxism entirely consistent with his earlier Christian views; the
>only
>> difference was that the redemption would be on earth rather than in
>heaven.
>
>One of the reasons I always react so negatively to demands for a
>picture of
>what socialism will be like or for evidence that it will work is my
>strong
>distaste for these sorts of marxism. The problem is that even if the
>most
>sanguine projections of socialist joy work out, it will be something
>only our
>great great grandchildren will enjoy. The role the projection of a
>classless
>future performs is not as a goal of struggle but as a perspective on
>and way of
>understanding the present. (Ollman is good on this.)
>
>The goal of struggle (the motives) must be found in the present, not
>in the
>future.
>
>Carrol
>
>
>
Andrew Collier in his _Socialist Reasoning_ (London: Pluto Press, 1990)
makes a point very similar to Carrol's with his call for a "politics
without
teleology." Like Carrol he emphasizes Marx's rejection of utopias and
'ideals' and he goes on to describe scientific socialism as a politics
without teleology. Collier builds his argument by qoting from Marx's
letter in which he discussed Darwin's _The Origin of Species_.
In that letter Marx noted that Darwin's theory of evolution through
natural selection dealt a death blow to the invocation of teleology
in the natural sciences and this was something that he saw as
having implications for his own materialist conception of history.
Collier goes on to quote from Bukharin's book _Historical
Materialism_ where he examines the difference between teleological
explanations and causal explanations and argues that social
acience must seek to replace the former with the latter, just
as Darwin had done in biology. Collier endorses Bukharin's
position which he sees as akin to Althusser's notion of history
as a process without a Subject. Collier also distinguishes between
functional explanations (which he endorses - following G.A. Cohen)
and teleological explanations which are to be rejected.
Collier makes the case that the Marxist conception of the inevitable breakdown of capitalist society is non-teleological because it is a prediction based on a projection of the outcome of tendencies inherent in the existing social structure which play out in a self-destructive manner. Collier compares this prediction to medical predictions that a given patient will inevitably die from a terminal illness. That sort of prediction is not teleological either.
Collier goes on to discussing the implications of the rejection of teleology for socialist politics. Socialist movements arise from the existence of needs and problems in the working class in the here and now. Socialist governments take power to solve problems in the present not to fulfill goals in the distant future. The case for revolution cannot be made in terms of the realisation of a utopia in the far off future. Rather the case for revolution is that it will solve problems for the proletariat in the here-and-now.
Jim Farmelant
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