>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
I largely accept your premise that there is no space for a large mass party that is explicitly marxist. Tight marxist parties under the influence of what was seen as the Leninist model, had a viability in conditions of fighting for national or democratic rights, or as bulwarks of trade unionist politics in bourgeois democratic societies. That appears largely over.
While I disagree with you of course about value and dialectical materialism, I think there is an irony that marxism will be successful without being openly acclaimed as successful. The human race will become its unconscious testamentary executor. Or only semi-consciously.
One advance is that it is so widespread now to analyse history or the present day in relation to the economic base that no one thinks they will be accused of being marxist if they do so.
I suspect that marxism will become relevant again only at the highest level of abstraction, in terms of how we understand that beneath the surface phenomena of an intense but highly fragmented commodity abundant, class-divided, world, there are social processes continuing about the accumulation of capital.
I certainly do not think academic marxists should be purged. But I think a caution is necessary when they are brought into discussion debates.
On the one hand it is welcome that the resistance to marxism is being undermined. On the other, the price that is paid is an implication that there are perhaps no issues of power, of brute force, behind the relentless uneven exploitation of people. Certainly it helps us if we are prepared to shift the debate onto the terrain of reasoning things out, but we need better ways to highlight the underlying power discrepancies, which need to be changed.
Chris Burford
London