>Oh, I've lost count. Let's see there's Engels, Lenin, Trosky, Lukacs,
>John Reed, Erich Fromm,
>Shatchman, CLR James, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che, Dunayeskaya, Kevin
>Anderson, DeLeon, Kautsky,
>Luxemburg, Debs, Gorky, Pannekoek, Luxemburg, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Gramsci
>and probably many others
>I've lost count of. So, that's at least 24 Marxist writers I've
>read. I've also read all of Karl
>Marx's major works who, although he wasn't a Marxist, obviously had a
>major impact on Marxism. I
>treat the works of Marx, Engels, etc. as one of many sources of
>inspiration and analysis rather then
>some kind of materialist 'revelation' the way Marxists do.
so, these writers, many of whom consider themselves working within marxist theory, rejected some of marx's claims and were often speaking to the debates that galvanized the marxists of their day, criticizing much of what went on around them, were engaged in unthinking, uncritical materialist revelation?
i think your caricature here is unfounded. i agree that yoshie, carrol, and charles often advance a top-down democratic centralism that lends itself to the notion that they favor a leninist vanguard approach to politics. and, sure, carrol advances a kind of standpoint theory that works something like revelation does for certain kinds of protestants where one's devotion to the teachings of christ must be proved by putting oneself to the trials and tribulations of christian/political practice.
but i think that they certainly do not conform to the caricature of puppets pulled by strings and that none of them consider criticism of the marxist tradition they tend to favor. e.g., yoshie clearly questions some aspects of marxism and marxist feminism because of her reading of post modernist and post structuralist thought, queer theory, radical feminism, anti racist feminism, black feminism, and third world feminism among other things. carrol and charles too. i don't always agree with them, but it is clear that they have, even in the course of the four years i've duked it out with them on this list, taken arguments against the positions they've advanced and incorporated them into their thinking, revising their thinking along the way.
kelley