> Ted Winslow wrote:
>
>> If this is a realistic psychology, a full explanation of the Taliban would
>> require examination of the social relations including the economic and
>> family relations within which its members developed and live. This is what
>> I understand Marx to have meant by a "materialist" analysis.
>
> I think many self-professed materialists would regard this as too
> personal, individualistic, smelling too much of subjectivity,
> preferring that "materialist" analyses be carried out at a high level
> of abstraction, the realm of "imperialism" and "finance capital."
>
Yes they would Doug. I like "smelling". Pecunia non olet.
As for Marx:
"The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes [A peasant uprising in the Cevennes mountains in 1702-1705. - Ed.] but his modern Vendee. [A peasant-backed uprising against the French Revolution in the French province of Vendee, in 1793. - Ed.]"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852-18b/ch07.htm
"Individualism" is a word like "realism". I think Marx was an "individualist" in the sense that he didn't treat, other than metaphorically, collectivities such as "classes" and "states" as locations of agency and the realization of value. In his ontology, for instance, it makes no sense to speak of sacrificing individuals to the interest of the "state".
His individualism is not "atomic", however. Individuals are embedded in internal relations. It is in this sense that "class" is critical.
Individualism is often misidentified with atomism i.e. with the treatment of relations as external rather than internal. An example is the conventional understanding of so-called "methodological individualism".
Keynes, who ultimately rejected "atomism" as a foundation for social theory, remained an "individualist" in what I take to be the reasonable sense. He makes this point in rejecting the atomism of the analytic philosophy (G.E. Moore's) underpinning his "early beliefs".
"Though one must ever remember Paley's dictum that 'although we speak of communities as of sentient beings and ascribe to them happiness and misery, desires, interests and passions, nothing really exists or feels but individuals', yet we [early Bloomsbury] carried the individualism of our individuals too far." "My Early Beliefs", Collected Writings, vol. X, p. 449
Ted