Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 15:57:36 +0000 From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> Subject: Re: Marxist sociology
I
>am well aware that every first year sociology student needs to learn by
>rote Marx's definition of class.
That's fair enough, except of course that Marx, famously, has no definition of class. The discussion of c;ass in Cap. vol. III breaks off after 40 lines.
Tahir: So even that bit of "marxist sociology" is wrong? I love it!
>
>If anything Marx was one of the first great interdisciplinarians.
Although this was before there were such disciplines, which is why, in part, he was able to be so broad.
Tahir: You see this is just where I find things get interesting. You take these disciplines as immutable facts. I find the prospect of re-establishing a non-atomised model of social and historical thought a highly desirable one and possible even within universities as we know them. The current vogue for interdisciplinarity does have some sort of rational basis, a dissatisfaction, I think, with the meaningless minutiae of research papers that almost no-one reads and which serve very little purpose other than professional specialisation. The Weberian in you should appreciate this point. This is not so much an indictment of individual academics as a simple point that there is a justified dissatisfaction here with a mode of knowledge production that does not produce a real critical perspective on the world.
>
OK: As to the first point. Marxism as a state ideology, the Soviet diamat,
or Mao Zedong thought, or Juche, is not revolutuionary but conservative,
basically a legitimating mantle for state power. There;s no point in
pretending that that's not "real" Marxism: it was Marxism for most of the
20th century.
Tahir: There's no point if what you want to do is to trash marxism. I think it is very important to tell the truth of some of this history though. Why not start with Lenin's cute little papal bull: Leftwing Communism an Infantile Disorder. The decisions to trash the left opposition worldwide and in the SU itself were not some sort of automatic consequence of Marx's thought, but real decisions taken by really important historical figures. Stalin was given a blank cheque from there on, you might say.
The revolutionary stuff was sidelined and confined to the margins. That also doesn't mean that the revolutionary stuff didn't matter, just that it was less socially significant.
Tahir: I think it is re-emerging, as the title of Barrot's 1970s piece had it: The Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement.
As to the second point, you tell me what it is to be revolutionary. The workers and peasants soviets are not going to march on Washington, raise the red flag over the capital.
Tahir: This has started happening already in symbolic and not-so-symbolic forms too. The images I saw of Genoa, for example, were of a sea of literally hundreds of thousands of people with red flags all over the place (not with the Soviet hammer and sickle though).
This isn't Petrograd 1917, and it's never going to be Petrograd 1917. A change is gonna come, maybe, but who knows when or how.
Tahir: This all seems self-evident to me.
>As for the last point I hope you are right. I still think that it should be
>called communism rather.
I gravely doubt whether this term can be rescued either; I think Stalinism has irremediably poisoned it. It's hard enough to hang on to "socialist."
Tahir: What's the point of hanging onto "socialist"? Why should we care about it when everyone from Tony Blair to Fidel Castro and all the rest consider themselves to be some sort of socialist? The term has no useful currency, and furthermore always was a statist concept anyway. On the other hand the term "communist" has never been surrendered for a moment - if you were more familiar with "leftwing communist" debates you would know that. Recently we have seen Negri and Hart, amongst others, insisting on that term - that one's not going to go away, trust me.
Well, since I'm a practicing lawyer and not a professor,
Tahir: Now THAT makes sense!
I surea s hell hope taht there's a lively intellectual life outside the academy.
jks
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