[lbo-talk] Kliman on Marx

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at berkeley.edu
Mon Nov 26 11:57:42 PST 2007



>On Nov 26, 2007, at 1:41 PM, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
> > Doug thinks
> > there are no real world consequences. I don't
> > agree, but that reflects a pragmatist conception
> > of truth which I don't accept anyway.
>
>Yeah, and Jerry Levy used to call me a vulgar empiricist.
>
>In any case, I certainly don't subscribe to a "pragmatist conception
>of truth." Were that the case, I'd probably have applied for work at
>Goldman Sachs long ago and dabbled in Democratic politics on the
>side.

Well I agree that Marx's conception of truth is pragmatist in some sense but not say William James' which is how your posts have been reading to me. You want consequences from analytical distinctions immediately. But I must say that I find compelling much of your pragmatism, so I was trying to mark out a problem, the problem of truth, Dewey and Marx and Foucault and Tarski; others may want to take up this problem. I suspect that we have differences here but by no means was I suggesting that your understanding is vulgar. Challenging but to me probably unpersuasive. But to get to that point we have a lot of spade work to do, and I can't do it know.


>It seems to me, though, that the value crowd used to want to
>prove that a rising OCC or something meant that capitalism had an
>inevitable date with the Reaper.

I think you mean the working class, not the Reaper.


>Since that prophesy hasn't panned
>out, the pursuit has lost some of its urgency, to a point that's
>reminiscent of the session of the Wallace Stevens Society I dropped
>in on long ago that debated just what kind of jar it was he found in
>Tennessee.

Oh, no I don't think it has lot of any of its urgency. Quite the contrary.


>As I recall, Marx himself thought the point was to change the world,
>which suggests he subscribed to a pragmatic conception of truth in
>some sense. Temporal single system, atemporal multiple system,
>whatever. Is it any more relevant to the class struggle, or even
>understanding today's Financial Times, than studying the villanelle
>throughout history?

You want the immediate relevance of theory that the substance of value is abstract socially necessary labor time. Patience please...

Rakesh



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