>>> <JKSCHW at aol.com> 01/29/00 10:50PM >>>
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.
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CB: Perhaps these "inconsistencies" in Marx are because he is serious that he is a dialectician ,and so proceeds in terms of contradictions.
CB