Ted Winslow wrote:
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> As I've pointed out before, Marx's late writings on the Russian peasant commune don't do what this claims.
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> They are based on the same ontological and anthropological assumptions as those underpinning his early writings and Capital. These constitute history as a set of "different stages in the development of mind."
Though I've learned much over the years from Ted's commentary on Marx, this claim has never struck me as being even an interesting basis for discussion. If Marx did ever believe this (either the existence of stages _or_ of an entiy called _mind_ which could be the subject of development), Marxc was flatly wrong. More, I would be sceptical that _any_ thinker ever maintained scuh continuity and or consistency over a lifetime. Someplace in the Anti-Duhring Engels, reacting to some claim about the mind and human knowledge, remarks that though the latter _may_ be in principle capable of complete knolwedge of reality, that power exists in particular brains that are by no meansd so capable. (I've bungled this quotation; Engels said it much better and in much more precise terminology.) And I would presume he included among those limited brains that of Mararx and of himself. And Mao somewhere suggests that in a thousand years even Marx & Lenin will look a bit silly. He did not mean that the individuals would; we don't see Aristotle as being personally silly, nor will the future regard Marx in that way; by "Marx" he meant the _content_ of Marx's thought, and in respect to that Mao was correct. I am willing to admit/claim that Marx had one of the most capacious intellects in history, but ultimastely it was limited.
Even the core of his work, the critique of politicval economy (i.e., of abstract capitalism) is incomplltete, especially as so far translated into English. Vol. III of Capital was the first to be written and it never was revised; hence there is no _textual_ reason t o believe that Marx still himself accepted any given argument in that volume. In particular, I understand that a new German edition of Volume III, including much not included in Engels's editng, shows that it was not only or even mostly ill-health that prevented the completion of capital but Marx's realization that he did not yet understand fully the nature of capitalist finance, and that late in life he was making a fresh study of the U.S. stock market for that purpose. (This has been discussed in short articles in both Historical Materialism and Science & Society, but I have not read carefully or fully either article.)
Robert Albritton, in _Economics Transformed: Discovering the Brilliance of Marx_, suggests that in a post-capitalist society historical materialism will not be useful or necessary: it is not, that is, a philosophy for all time (i.e., an ontology) but a perspective necessary for the (historical) understandinding of capitalism. Humans will continue, even if things turn out well and capitalism doesn't destroy us, to have things to argue abut. And of course, we might well fial, and the final stages of capitalism will not be the period of transition to socialism but rather of sinking into a more profound barbaism. There is nothing in the structure of the universe or of human history that guarantees success.
In the meantime, though "The Left" does not name any coherent process in the U.S. there are several tens of thousands of leftists or those who would be leftist were there a visible left in action. The present absence of a visible left does not mean the "death of the left" or even "the defeat of the left," (meaningless phrasea) but merely that we are in one of those normal periods of the last two centuries when capital is dominant and we are having a hard time finding each other and the issue or issues which will galvanize another period of left activity.
Carrol