> I'm simply saying, first of all, that Marxism isn't a "theory of
> everything." It's not a theory designed to answer such questions as "why
> humans do the sometimes strange things they do" (Zizek) and "why Flaubert
> preferred literature to everything else, lived like an anchorite, etc."
> (Sartre).
It's not a theory of everything, it's more like a *critique* of everything (a.k.a. the social totality). Or, to paraphrase Adorno, it's the resistance to that totality, which sometimes takes a theoretical form, sometimes an aesthetic one, and sometimes a political one. That leaves plenty of room for contingency, no?
-- Dennis