[lbo-talk] The winner of the In Our Time Greatest Philosopher Vote

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Thu Jul 14 10:51:07 PDT 2005


I agree with Charles, and for the reason that he gives, which is one reason I no longer consider myself a Marxist. It's not that the theory isn't as true as it ever was, but the movements that it generated have largely collapsed or worse. Whatever one think's of Lenin's achievements, moreover, they are certainly no model for social change in advanced (post)industrial capitalist democracies. (We know this not through lack of trying!) It is, however, true that other of Marx's pupils, also flawed, transformed the world in other ways: social democracy was a branch of Marxism in one way or another through the 1930s, and its achievements still remain valid and worth defending.

Marx would not thank us for callung him a "philosopher," an activity he considered quite expressly to be a branch of mere ideology and which he abandoned before he was 30 without having contributed to it anything more than a few articles and a handful of suggestive notes. There is no Marxist "Discourse On Method," "Treatise of Human Nature," "Critique of Pure Reason," or even "Phenomenology of Spirit." The Paris Manuscripts are suggestive and deep, but they are not finished work on that scale. Marx was a social scientist and revolutionary, not a philosopher.

jks

--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:


>
>
> [Mark Seddon of the Labour national executive
> committee had an interesting
> take on Marx's win in today's Guardian (below).
>
> -clip-
>
> " Marx, now freed from his flawed pupils, is as
> liberating as he
> was when he published the Communist Manifesto 150
> years ago. ..."
>
> -clip-
>
> CB: Marx's test for himself as a philosopher is
> whether he changed the
> world. The main world-change Marx has made is
> through his pupils,
> especially Lenin and Leninists. Marx "freed" from
> his pupils is a failure by
> Marx's own philosophical standard.
>
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>
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