marxism on wgn-fm

[Justin Schwartz]

Chris, Academic Marxism is the only kind that is left. The mass social 
movement that called themselves Marxist are gone. The struggle is not gone, 
and insofar as the (academic) theory is true, which it is to a considerable 
degree, it correctly describes the struggle, but outside a few backwaters, 
the only serious social movement that still calls itself Marxist is the 
Brazilian PT, and its prospects are not so great, given what has happened to 
every other social movement that has taken the label.

Anyway, there's no percentage in trying to stick worker's movements in 
Britain or AMerica with the label. It won't adhere. That is why Wright 
thinks we shouldn't bother with fighting over the label, nobody cares 
anymore apart from some scholars.

The tradition is chock full of great insight, however, and is worth keeping 
and learning from because of it. In view of this, it doesn't matter, if it 
ever did, whether dialectics and value theory are "the core" of Marxism--in 
fact you picked exactly two of the three bits I would say are most 
dispensible, but that doesn't matter here--but only which parts of the 
theory and aspects of the tradition are still valid and useful. --jks


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>At 21:20 17/02/01 -0800, you wrote:
>>http://tribapps.tribune.com/rafiles/wgnam/shows/ex720/Audio/marxmr.ram
>>
>>http://www.nd.edu/~remarx/index2.html
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>OK what I got from this was
>
>1. the chairperson saying many people in US universities remain impressed
>by Marx
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>2.Erik Olin Wright arguing that it is better to talk about the Marxist
>Tradition as a terrain of debate rather than Marxism, and
>
>3.David Ruccio, Editor of Rethinking Marxism, arguing that a core concept
>of marxism is class exploitation.
>
>None of these would of course be sufficient for Lenin.
>
>I did not listen beyond the first 5 minutes and more may have been said,
>but the fear is that this is academic marxism, legal marxism.
>
>Without getting thrown onto the defensive with dogmatically re-stated
>terminology about the "dictatorship of the proletariat", is there not a way
>consistently of bringing forward the question of the enormous disparities
>in power between people of different classes, the self-perpetuating nature
>of these, and the effort required to change these, without hoping that this
>will inevitably involve bloodshed.
>
>For my part I think the residual features of marxism which are
>indispensible but necessarily at a high level of abstraction, are to
>recapture the relevance of
>
>1) a dialectical materialist approach
>
>2) the law of value
>
>Chris Burford
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