marxist sociology

[Justin Schwartz]

I wasn't so much asking whether there are people who consider themselves 
marxists and who manage to make careers within academia that are more or 
less satisfying to them. (This applies to me too). The disciplinary 
boundaries themselves seem to me to be problematic and to have nothing to do 
with marxism - as I suggested I think they even detract from marxism's view 
of the totality. In the social sciences the compteting paradigms based on 
the primacy of either validity or value (mainly positivism and hermeneutics, 
broadly speaking), which have their roots in neo-kantianism of the Marburg 
and Heidelbg schools, have shaped the discipli!
>nary frameworks in which marxist academics are forced to operate. To claim 
>that the situation is opposite - i.e. that marxism somehow divides itself 
>into these disciplinary fields and procedures, and that bourgeois social 
>science takes its cue from this - is ridiculous. Marx's sustained critique 
>of bourgeois social science, in the form of political economy especially, 
>comes closer to the spirit of what I am suggesting here.
>

You're funny, Tahir; you speak in the name of Marxist totality, and then 
unenunciate an extremely technical scholarly thesis about the intellectual 
origins of the academic disciplines--a thesis that is purely idealist, in 
Marxist terms. In fact the structure of the disciplines probbaly has a 
humbler origin in academic empire building and inertia. I agree, of course, 
that a major attarction of Marx and Marxsim is its ability to cut across the 
disciplinary boundaries, which are artificial and arbitrary. That is one 
thing (not the only one) pragmatists and Marxists can agree on. I certainly 
doa gree with you taht there's no percentage in saying, well that's not 
economics, that's sociology.


>So will there be universities as we know them after capitalism?
>
>

Let's hope not! But, n.b., the university structure didn't change much in 
the ex-Bloc.

jks

_________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: 
http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx