marxist sociology

Tahir Wood twood at uwc.ac.za
Tue Feb 26 00:32:33 PST 2002


Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 16:11:45 +0000 From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> Subject: Re: marxist sociology

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.

Tahir: Well I think that the supposed dichotomy between idealism and materialism is an overstated and boring one. I'm a big Hegel fan, so... But which part of my rant above did you find especially "idealist"?


>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.

Tahir: Yup. Nor did the nature of bureaucracy, elitism and wage slavery change all that much there either.



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