In a message dated 00-01-29 16:19:56 EST, Justin writes:
<< But Marx believes
> that there is a progressive series of modes of production froim slavery
> through feudalism to capitalism to communism, driven by an internal dynamic.
> See, inter alia, the 1859 Preface. Rorty rejects that sort of model.
This of course is a matter of immense debate *among* Marxists. One
position (Brenner, Thompson, Wood among others] is that (a) the
totality of Marx's work does *not* exhibit any belief in such an
"internal dynamic" in history and (b) those passages in Marx where
he does express (or seem to express) such a belief are wrong. The
claim to an "internal dynamic" in history as a whole (rather than
just in capitalism) reduces history to a technological determinism
which is inconsistent with the overwhelming bulk of Marx's
work. A few months ago this was debated out at terrifying length on
Pen-L, and I'm not going to repeat any of the arguments here.
OK, so if you don't want to start something, you shouldn't statrt something. In fact I was just noting that pace Angela, Rorty rejects a view often attributed to Marx in the old left circles R grew up near.
But if you want to get particualt about it, I didn't say that that view of Marx committed him to technological determinsim or a rigid sequence of stages or hsirorical inevitability. You don't have to buy into Plekahnov or G.A. Cohen. The view can just be that there is a rough a sequence of stages in which the later ones count as progress over the earlier ones and one gets fron one to another by some sort of dynamic internal to the stages.
That's weak eniugh that I believe it be true myself. I have discussed this in my paper Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, and Justice, Legal Studies 1997. But Rorty and the other pomos would rejewct even that very weak historical progressivism.
Brenner doesn't actually offer interpretations of Marx at all, just accounts of the rise of capitalism. By Wood I presume you mean Ellen M. Wood, not Allan Wood, the analytical Marxist, who does in fact think that Marx is a pretty rigid historical determinist. By Thompson I guess you mean E.P. Thompson, who has strong views about (against) stagism, historical inevitability, etc., and ideas about what _Marxists_ should think, but nothing much to say about the interpretation of the work of Karl Marx. The best interpretive case against a technological determinsit, stagist, inevitabilist reading of Marx himself is probably Richard Miller's in Analyzing Marx. (Miller was an analytical Marxist, he since given up on socialsim because he thinks markets are here to stay.)
If you want to know what I think, I think the matter is important because the issue of how determinist, etc, Marx was is important to the overall defensibility of his thought. I think he's inconsistent. He has a very strong, absolutely crystal clear, completely unavoidable commitment to a historical teleology driven by the productive forcesl it's not just in the 1859 Preface. I think this view is inconsistent with the facts about the rose of capitalism on which Marx himself relies, but he doesn't seem to notice this.
He also has a quite different sort of historical teleology driven by class struggle that is a lot less rigid and a lot less expressly articulated. It is hard to square with the first sort. He uses either kind somewhat inconsistently in his actual historical analyses, where he is prone to talk in terms of demogarphy, geography, ideology, etc., without tying these too tightly to either kind of "materialist" explanation. For a good reconstruction of Marx's historical analyses in capital, see David Little's The Scientific Marx.