>
> You clearly said that Marx would not allow views
> which disagreed with his
> own, using every polemical weapon to suppress them.
> You now qualify your
> claims.
I still think that's a pretty fair characterization. I wouldn't say "allow," he had no other means than argument and invective to "suppress" opposing views.
Good for you though along the way you
> insulted me for no good
> reason as a true believer, as if I am in less
> possession of reason than
> you.
I still don't see why you insist in the face of the evidence that Marx was some sort of charming intellectual Fred Astaire -- except in his nimbleness.
And of course your praise of Marx as the
> Newton or as I prefer the
> Galileo of the social sciences rings hollow to
> someone who knows you
> reject most of the arguments in Capital.
This can only be problematic to someone who thinks that be right about the detailed answers really counts for everything. I also reject most of the arguments of Aristotle's Ethics, Kant's First Critique, Hegel's PhG, and I making the point?
>
> Marx certainly did not have the temperament to
> become a bourgeois
> politician which one liner Remick counts against
> him.
And that has what to do with anything I said?
His bad marriage
> advice seems to have led some here to ignore that
> his daugthers were
> extraordinarily gifted and educated women.
Likewise?
You
> complain that his replies
> to the unrestrained critic of trade unionism were
> not sufficiently urbane.
> Pathetic. Given what was at stake and what was
> simmering in 1847.
Again, you concede my point, he wasn't a nice polemicist. Urbane was your word of praise, not mine. I never said that Marx's harshness was unjustified (unlike Carl R or Carl S), although I did say he was intellectually unfair to many of his opponents by not putting their views in the best light before attacking them.
>
> But most obnoxious of all you still have not
> studied JS Mill's views
Did I say anything about Mill's _views_? I was comparing him as a personality and an interlocutor to Marx. He has a lot of lousy views. Don't get my started on my objections to the content of Mill's ideas. But as personality he was a nice guy, you admit that he was fair to his critics, and he was basically a sweetie. Often wrong-headed or worse, but personally a sweetie. Marx was the other way around, more right than not, but no sweetie personally.
on
> the British Raj (have you heard of Bhikhu Parekh?)
> or
> counter-revolutionary response to Chartism (which he
> credited himself for
> setting back twenty years!) or his destruction of
> any coherence in
> Ricardo's theory of value. It's hard to say anything
> bad about JS Mill?
> Please. To be sure, Marx adopted/adapted his theory
> of falling
> profitability and counter-tendencies and could not
> get himself to admit so
> much. Unfair.
Please keep the unimportant issue of the personalities of these individuals, which you have blown up into a major issue for some reason I do not grasp, from the important issue of their ideas the the impact of their ideas.
>
> I am no true believer in Marx--
Good, so we may not agree on which of his views are erroneous or outmoded, we agree that m,any important ones are. All the more puzzling that it is so important to you that Marx be either urbane or excusably and justifiably nasty. I don't really care if he was inexcusably nasty sometimes; it makes me think no differently of his ideas, any more than Newton's fanaticism, megalomania, and sadism (bad sort) makes me think worse of relativistic mechanics. Why do you care so much?
perhaps capitalism
> has outgrown value in
> important ways as Negri insists, Marx was
> dangerously dismissive of rights
> (Steven Lukes is important here) and left too many
> holes in his political
> theory (yet see Richard Hunt and Hal Draper), his
> theory of the Asiatic
> Mode of Production is error ridden (not that you
> would care), he paid too
> little attention to the reproduction of labor power
> and patriarchy, he
> should have sought more agreement--as Korsch argued
> later--with the
> anarchists (but Kropotkin and Malatesa and others
> were not his
> contemporaries, Proudhon and Bakunin were and the
> former was an implacable
> opponent of the organization of the working class
> and the latter was a
> very dangerous character; in his unscisplined
> tirades I, unlike the
> person who goes by B, hear the the first
> articulations of the syndicalism
> which would become through Sorel fascism and anti
> Semitism, but that's an
> argument to be had), Marx never really developed his
> theory of credit
> money. And ask Doug whether ft us enough to
> understand that theater
> capitalism presents to the world--the stock market.
> Of course not.
>
> Marx had a theory of the world market but it's now
> anachronistic. The
> complexity of present enterprise and the
> construction of new means of
> production and the carrying out of R and D were all
> beyond his
> imagination. The new forms of state intervention he
> could not have forseen.
>
> Criticize Marx for his mistakes, his blindness, his
> incompleteness but the
> character assassinations are puerile.
The "character assassinations" (now that the dust is settling) are things that you mostly concede but regard as justified, except perhaps for his intellectual unfairness. Maybe you are right about the justification, I don't think it matters much. I was just observing what everyone, including you, seems to acknowledge about Marx as a disputant. I also added some irrelevant but unflattering things about his personal life, but these are also true as well as irrelevant to the value of his work. They may affect our appraisal of his character, but how much does his character really matter?
____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss an email again! Yahoo! Toolbar alerts you the instant new Mail arrives. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/