Rawls / dialectic of Marx's historical materialism

Charles Brown CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Wed Feb 2 14:16:45 PST 2000



>>> <JKSCHW at aol.com> 01/31/00 04:02PM >>>
Rawl's views are flawed, but all political philosophy is subject to objections, except (as Charles Brown points out) Marx's, because Marx is dialectical.

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CB: Marx's political philo is not exempt from objections because it is dialectical. It is that what Justin thinks are inconsistencies in Marx materialist conception of history, the role of forces and relations of production in class history, are not inconsistencies in that they give rise to objections, but are rather dialectical contradictions.

Specifically, the human role in production has dimensions which are contradictorily thing-like and human-like. This is the contradiction of that dialectic. It causes Marx to make statements, which seem inconsistent to those who don't consider that his method is dialectical on this issue.

An example of what I would call an objection that I have to Marx's theory is in a critique I did of Marx's ideas in _The German Ideology_ with respect to the role of the mode of reproduction in history.

CB



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