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

[andie nachgeborenen]

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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