Sidney Hook, before he became a die hard cold warrior tried to combine Marxism and pragmatism, an attempt the CP didn't approve. IMHO, it is possible to combine a sense of contingency, open-texturedness, and indeterminacy with a radical Marxist project. To borrow Stuart Hall's phrase- that's what "marxism without a guarantee" (or was it Milliband who first used the phrase?) is all about. That's a problem that I have with Laclau and Mouffe's post-structural reconceptualization of "Hegemony." Unlike L/M, I don't think poststructural re-reading of "hegemony" has to (although they didn't articulate their position in terms of logical necessity, but that's the impression one gets) lead to a position of left-liberal radical democracy. I would argue that it can easily be reconciled with a revolutionary socialist politics. That is a major crux of my post-marxism. In the end of the day, it does not matter whether I call it neo-Marxism, poststructuralized Marxism, post-Marxism, or simply
Marxism. I use the label "post-marxism," because it gives a sense of theoretical coherence to my understanding of contingency, Lacanian subjectivity, and radical agency. I defend the October revolution, have a great deal of respects for Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky (my friends tease me that I am the only postmodern Leninist they know of), defend Cuba, support revolutionary movements all over the world, support Maoists against state terror in my part of the world (India, Nepal, Bangladesh), criticize the reification of bourgeois democracy and so on, but I do that without making revolution or "Marxism-Leninist" a theory of all-encompassing certainty. These are all different, sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping, sometimes complementary, moments of emancipation which one can be committed to without being a MARXIST in a "certain", meta-theoretical" sense.
BTW, the thing that I don't like about Anti-Duhring (and Dialectic of Nature) is the way Engels applied the dialectical method to nature. What was supposed to be a terrain of social analysis (in ontological, epistemological, and historical senses- all these three moments are present in Marx's method), Engels, positioning himself against the positivist trend within the Second International, tried to make it a method of the understanding of nature. There are indications that Marx approved that, but at least there is no similar effort in Marx's own texts (which may not be a sufficient ground for creating a Marx-Engels divide as some Marxist-humanists have done). But Lukacs, Gramsci, Sartre, all within the Marxist tradition, criticized that specific Engelsian position.
Manjur
Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote: By way of Engels, the philosophical ideas lend intellectual credibility to a movement to get beyond capitalism. If pragmatists or Buddhists or Nietzscheans organize revolution for socialism, great. I haven't seen evidence of any of these other schools of thought doing much in this regard compared to Marxists.
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