Ted Winslow wrote:
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> Carrol Cox wrote:[clip]
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> Marx, in contrast, makes rationally based agreement about ends, an agreement made possible by individuals having attained the requisite degree of "integral development", a necessary feature and outcome of a successful "revolutionary practice".
As a preliminary observation, I doubt that Marx, or anyone else past or future, is as cohenent and complete in his thought as Marx seems to be in your reading of him. I'm not arguing this - that would take an infinity of research and thinking, but tossing it out as what seems to me a highly probable fact.
But in any case, whether or not Marx was coherent, the _tradition_ of Marxian thinking from Kautsky, Lenin, & Luxenburg to the present has certainly not been either coherent or free from sharp disagreement on innumerable points. You yourself have argued (as I remember) that Marx was fatally wrong on some points (I believe in reference to the "education" of the proletariat). I have argued in a post of a year or three ago that the _core_ of Marx's thought, for me, was the Critique of Political Economy, and that other parts of his thinking, though profound and I think often correct, neverthelss were 'merely' (!) an important part of the general conversation of humanity. And I simply remained wholly unconvinced of the existence of any"true" (i.e. transhistorical) Rationality.
Among those crucial points (for me) in Marx's general thought is the sentence from 18th Brumaire, with its condemnation of Voluntraism and its allowance for the large element of Contingency in human history (not to mention in biological history -e.g. the asteroid that cleared the path for the development of mammals.
And (again in any case) we are facved with the continuing fact of sharp disagreement among the most sensitive and committed of Marxists, not to speak of among all opponents of capitalism, a category that is not limited to Marxists.
The post to which you are replying certainly lacks the nuances so prized on this list, but my core point is that it is precisely such crudities that can NOT be removed from _any_ individual's thought that must be worked out throguh debate, exploration, self-critique around a movement united by only those general points which (at a given time) all more or less accept. I certainly do not accept either the possiblity or tne need for a Theory of Revolution, a premise which was one of the more disabling feature of the Third and Fourth Internatioals. (Incidentally, it seems to me that the author of "they need us - where are we?" in effect tries to duplicate the most vicious qualties of the 'theory' of Democratic Centralism.
Carrol