By heaven, let's put that warning sign over Marx's ideas. But as Victor Serge said about Bolshevism, it may have, certainly did, bear the seeds of Stalinism, but it bore other seeds too.
The ideas that Heidegger never repudiated, however, had only one sort of seed, the bad kind. A few weeks ago I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau and walked into a gas chamber that was built to murder me, and looked at the ovens a few feet away where they planned to turned by body to ash and smoke and unlike a fair number of my relatives who walked into that gas chamber, I walked out through the door into the light and air instead of leaving via the chimney. It's quite an experience. T recommend it to all. No one on this list would have been exempt.
I don't impute the wickedness of Heidegger's politics to his philosophy. But the greatness of his philosophy doesn't get him off the hook for the wickedness of his politics.
Neither Marx's ideas nor his politics were wicked, quite the contrary. Neither did he actively embrace and never repudiate the sort of crimes that were later performed in his name. That doesn't mean that the Old Man's ideas and politics didn't have dangerous potentials. We cannot deny, at this point, that they lent themselves to justifying the unspeakable. Or anyway they could be kidnapped for this purpose.
Nonetheless there is no symmetry here.
--- On Tue, 7/8/08, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Heidegger
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, July 8, 2008, 1:21 PM
> True, but this does not change that Heidegger's thought
> has played a role in no deaths, whereas Marx's has
> played a role in very many. If one believes in the
> existence of inherent practical evils in various
> philosophers' ideas (which I don't), Marx's
> work should have a large neon warning sign over it.
>
> --- On Tue, 7/8/08, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Except that Heidegger was an actual Nazi, and Marx was
> long
> > dead
> > before Stalinism existed.
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>
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