LouPaulsen wrote:
>
> [clip]
>
> When Catherine challenges Yoshie to demonstrate that Marxist theory is
> "utterly sufficient to contemporary IP", I think she is rhetorically
> challenging Yoshie to do something that Yoshie is not called upon to do. I
> don't think that anybody thinks Marxist theory is "utterly sufficient" to
> ANYTHING if it means that you don't need to own any books except Capital,
> for example.
Catherine can't really mean this, and I expect her to change it. But if she does mean it, then she confuses theory and revealed religion. The religious debate in the 16th and 17th centuries revolved around the question of what is "sufficient" for salvation. (Catherine's "utterly" makes any discussion, even religious discussion, impossible, so I will assume it was a mere typo.) And that discussion, in turn, was always implicitly anchored in (quoted clumsily from memory) "Whosoever believeth in me shall not die."
That is, theological debate turns on the asumption that what one believes is all important. And Catherine takes this essentially religious position in demanding of Yoshie that she show that Marxism is Sufficient for salvation (salvation here being understood as having the right spiritual attitude towards IP.) Now my original post, which began this thread, was specifically an attempt to argue the inadequacy of "Maoism" in contrast to "Mao Thought" (and I was responding to a poster influenced by (though apparently not a member of) the RCP, which labels itself, I believe, as "Maoist." I wrote as follows:
"One definition of dogmatism (and I think this is what Mao meant whenever he used the term) is the attempt to translate theory directly into practice. Such an attempt changes theory ("scientific theory" if you will) into religion: a set of unchanging doctrines to be "applied." Mao held that M-L was a theory or set of theories good for the entire epoch of imperialism/monopoly capitalism. He thought it unlikely that, during that epoch, the fundamental theory would develop further. (He also noted parenthetically that in a thousand years both Marx & Lenin would look pretty silly.) One can argue that in a dozen different ways for several thousand pages, but that debate is not relevant to my immediate concerns. For the sake of discussion I am simply taken Mao's understanding of M-L theory as a given." (Tue, 18 Feb 2003 12:16:16 -0600)
So as initially launched, this was a quarrel among Marxists as to the scope and limits of fundamental marxist theory. Justin in his post this morning points out that the distinction applies to _all_ scientific theory (however science is defined). Gravity (either Newtonian or Einsteinian), incidentally, does not explain the the relationship between a water insect and the pond it skates on, nor is gravity relevant to the life of bacteria. Both phenomena are "beneath the notice" of gravity. Gould has discussed this a number of times. Catherine, presumably, would see this as a defect in the theories of Einstein and Newton. They are not "utterly sufficient" to explain the life of a water bug.
>From just browsing through Yoshie's posts so far I am not sure whether
or not she allowed Catherine's theological conception of theory force
her into defending Marxism as a theology.
> Therefore I think Catherine is saying "Your Marxist theory is inadequate to
> the task, because it has to be substantially improved with additions to
> theory" whereas Yoshie is saying "My Marxist theory is entirely adequate to
> the task, because it serves as the foundation on which a substantial
> structure of additional propositions can be placed." This is what I mean by
> talking past each other.
Yes. And I would add that one would not want Catherine to become a marxist until she had altered this expectation of what theory can or should do, for that leads precisely to the kind of marxism that I was opposing in my opening post:
"Of course, in China itself, 'Mao Thought' did, in the '60s, in part morph into 'Maoism,' in the form of the 'Theory of the Three Worlds' and of 'The International United Front Against Social Imperialism' (I may have forgotten the exact terminology here.) That emerged from the China-Soviet split -- and it sent the u.s. 'new communist movement' into a tailspin from the get-go. That theory was a really metaphysical attempt to smash the wine of post-Vietnam War period into the bottles of the 1930s (with the SU playing the role Germany had played earlier). Some communist group in the u.s. (PWOC???) even put out a paper entitled, 'Eventually, Why Not Now?' the point of which was that eventually there would be united front of China with the U.S. ruling class against the new fascists from moscow, so why don't we form that united front right now."
When theory is expected to be "utterly sufficient," the result is religion.
I don't think of myself as "defending" or expounding "Marxist Theory" on this list. I try to talk about the world, and the proper (negative) response to such comments is simply to point out that they don't explain the world (in which case it doesn't make any difference whether they are "marxist" or not). The proper (positive) response is simply to continue the commentary. If I'm right, it doesn't confirm marxism. If I'm wrong, it doesn't disconfirm marxism.
If I quote Marx or Lenin it is not to offer evidence that my position is correct because Marx said so, it merely manifests the Homeric principle that if something has been said well it is foolish to make up a new way of saying it. I've never come across a better way, for example, to make _my_ 'take' on anarchism clear than to quote (or paraphrase from memory) Lenin's observation that anarchism was the penalty the working class pays for its sins of opportunism. My claim isn't that it's true because Lenin said it. I'm merely crediting him with saying well something that I have discovered to be true in my own experience with anarchists in the '60s before I had ever read a word of Lenin. That's why the quote stuck in my memory so -- it said so clearly what I had been thinking already but hadn't formulated so well.
Catherine's first intervention into this theme was laconic:
*****
> Some profound changes indeed, but do we need to change theory to make
> sense of them? [Yoshie]
Yes. Otherwise you keep slotting what you see into the closest hole in your standard theory, regardless of whether it is still appropriate or productive. Catherine****
This rings a bell with my struggles 45 years ago in writing my doctoral dissertation (on modern criticism of Pope). I had to keep inventing holes into which I could slot this or that critic. This seems to be Catherine's approach to Marxism: does it give me an adequate set of pigeon holes to slot the world into. That is important for much (by no means all) historical scholarship. It is not a useful way to think of theory for political purposes. Thus it was Catherine, not Yoshie, who wanted _Capital_ to explain IP, that is, thought Faraday's theories were "utterly insufficient" to explain what heat to use in frying eggs.
Carrol