Moralism pure and simple, huh. No explanatory theses about the way bourgeois society works. No insights into which relationships are important in understanding the dynamics of social processes the activities of different social groups. No hypothesis about which variables are independent or dependent in understanding the way people think or the nature of government, education, the press, religion. No predictions about the direction and future of the economy or its shape. I wonder how I have been managing to misread all those things into the old scold for all these years.
Of course I agree with you that Marx's official anti-moralism isn't consistent with the attitude that he obviously manifests throughout his work, but let's not even bother to defend the rest of this ridiculous hyperbole. Someone whose conception of science is so far from mine as to exclude Marx from its ambit is talking about a different phenomenon than what I, as political scientist and philosopher of social and natural science, take to be the sort of thing science is. In case you feel like sneering at social science, I was originally a historian and philosopher of natural science and have graduate training in physics, aced QM, thermodynamics and stat mech, special and gen'l relativity, and basic classical mechanics. So I know what "real" "hard" science is supposed to look like. Marx qualifies.
--- Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> >
> >... I've heard people argue
> >that the prophetic impulse was important for Chuck;
> >his family was rabbinal and his mother never really
> >converted, so he woulda probably got the whole
> >megilla. He knew his Old Testament too and there is
> a
> >sort of prophetic feel to his writings.
>
> I think the most indefensible thing ever said about
> KM is that he was not a
> moralist. His thought -- whatever you term it
> (knowing his rejection of the
> term Marxism) -- is the morality that dare not speak
> its name. KM's entire
> persona and rhetorical style are 100% consistent
> with the prophetic model
> that abounds in the Old Testament -- ripe with
> denunciations of corruption
> and oppression, thunderous in asserting stern
> retribution is nigh. The
> notion that KM's work bears any serious relationship
> to science is a joke.
> It's moralism pure and simple; the patina of
> "science" was sprayed on simply
> to give Victorian bourgeoisie the willies and induce
> them not to dismiss KM
> as a common scold.
>
> Carl
>
>
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