> I don't know where you live, but by now there must be a group or
> groups of activists in almost all cities (and even in some smaller
> towns) who have been getting together and discussing what is to be
> done in opposition to the coming war on Iraq and other questions.
> The question that you raise above is best discussed in that context,
> because what you want to _and_ can manage to do probably differs
> greatly depending on the number and demographic composition of
> existing local activists and activist groups.
I'm in the Philly area, which of course has no shortage of groups of many types. I must confess that I was much more active in the 60s and 70s than lately, mainly because trying to keep my head above water financially has preoccupied me. But I think I can now see my way clear to increasing my level of activity again. At any rate, I am hoping that it is also possible to have some sort of useful discussion in forums such as this list (otherwise what are they for?), although it is no doubt harder to do than in local, specific activist groups.
> Marxism, if it is a science at all, is a kind of social science, thus
> not quite comparable to natural sciences like biology and geology.
> By the standards of social science like economics, history, literary
> criticism, sociology, and political science, a small body of commonly
> accepted knowledge created within the Marxist tradition (which is
> itself quite heterogeneous) is not shabby, which is not to say that
> it is accepted at all by those who are not Marxists (though it has
> had an influence on even those who do not identify themselves as such
> and moreover reject Marxism's political objectives).
Of course I wasn't assuming that social sciences are exactly like physical/biological sciences in all respects. But the problem is that the scientific process of collaborative inquiry within a community of scientists just doesn't seem to be much in evidence among Marxists. The heterogeneity of the Marxist tradition which you point to seems to me to disqualify it from being called a "science" in any useful sense.
To mention only one problem, even key terms like "working class" vs. "bourgeois" and other classes and "value" don't have precise definitions that everyone can agree on. Just who belongs to the working class and who doesn't? And is "value" a useful concept at this point? Most practicing Marxists these days seem never to have understood what Marx meant by it, and don't make any discernible use of it, but without it there isn't much of his basic theory left.
It's as though physicists were constantly quarreling over what they meant by "force," "mass," etc., and whether these terms had any use in viable theories, or had to be discarded, like "phogiston." Marxian concepts seem to be used much more as political slogans and shibboleths to define who's in or out of which in-group. Perhaps that's inevitable -- "the point is not to interpret the world in various ways, but to change it," as the Master wrote, and political concerns may unavoidably have to take precedence. But in that case, the pretense that the various political positions of Marxist groups and tendencies have some sort of empirical, rational foundation has to be given up, and some other way of achieving solidarity has to be found.
I admit that these are problems that have been resisting solutions for a long time -- the complaint that if left radicals formed a firing squad, it would be a circle is hoary by now. But I think this conceptual confusion has at least something to do with the problems that have been raised in this thread.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ______________________________ Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing. -- Oscar Wilde