Marx's historical determinism spoils the whole marxist thing for me; economics, social interaction and life isn't that simple or preordained. determinism is not intellectually honest, only rigorous since it's harder to lie to oneself than to tell the truth. unless you're ari fleischer.
just as i don't like freud's psychological determinism: as in, gender is destiny (which it may be only in the most limited sense regarding who bears the children -- which is not what freud meant), and the fatuous claim that everyone always goes through freudian developmental stages (which i believe do not exist -- especially since i don't have any memory of wanting to kill my father and screw my mother, no matter how hard i look. i might have been a polymorphous pervert once upon a time, but oedipal never ;-) ).
as i don't find reasonable calvin's determinism; or the puritan's "sinners in the hands of an angry god." etc.
too cut and dried. too 19th century (except for calvin, of course). too crippling intellectually. emotionally and spiritually. the claims of western "thinkers" to universality in their concepts is hollow, vain, ignorant and fatuous.
doug presented the attraction. i do the subtraction. ;-)
R
----- Original Message ----- From: Tahir Wood To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Sent: Friday, June 28, 2002 12:40 AM Subject: Determinism
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 20:27:56 -0700 From: "R" <rhisiart at earthlink.net> Subject: Re: Lightweights and Losers (Was: Sidney, Hilton, Cornel, etc.) I said I'm not innocent of snobbery. Hey, isn't one of the attractions of Marxism that it's an intellectually rigorous, nonsentimental form of egalitarianism? Doug
if you like determinism.... R
Hey R, don't be so laconic. Give us something more to work with here. Tahir
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