empiricism and rational autonmy, as I described was a rallying cry for enlightenment liberalism. so, what you're saying is that this guy wasn't motivated by enlightenment liberalism.
i need another, concrete example. no time, so could you pull one out of the pamphlet.
i agree with carrol though. "my marxism" is the idea that people are primarily motivated to action by the ideas prevailing in their existing world. in works like the holy family, critique of the gotha programme, and the letters between marx and rouge, marx assumed that, for example, a idea that motivated people might be, say, freedom of the press - a totally bourgeois enlightenment liberal thing to care about. or, he talks about the war over the representative system and the estate system in germany. all very bourgeois enlightenment liberal.
it is the role of the critical theorist (critical philosophy) to advance those "struggles and wishes of the age" by choosing a side, the most "advanced" side and, as I said in a debate quite some time ago, help those struggles and wishes (actions and ideas) come to fruition: "for their vitory is their defeat," to paraphrase. this is why he wrote:
"Thus the particular form and nature of the political state contains all social struggles, needs and truths within itself. It is therefore anything but beneath its dignity to make even the most specialized political problem – such as the distinction between the representative system and the estates system – into an object of its criticism. For this problem only expresses at the political level the distinction between the rule of man and the rule of private property. hence the critic not only can but must concern himself with these political questions (which the crude socialists find entirely beneath their dignity). By demonstrating the superiority of the representative system over the Estates system, he will interest a great party in practice. By raising the representative system from its political form to a general one, and by demonstrating the true significance underlying, it he will force this party to transcend itself – for its victory is also its defeat."
so, naturally, holding my marx close to my heaving bosom and stroking lovingly, liberalism (or, generally, non-marxist ideas, sentiments, wishes) is the dominant modes in which people think and talk about the struggles and wishes of their age - at least in the u.s.
shag
>If you want an idea of what such people thought of when they thought of
>"Marxism," look at Kautsky's pamphlet The Class Struggle, which was
>written as a commentary/explanation of the SPD's 1892 Erfurt Program -
>this was the party program by whose adoption Karl Marx's protégés finally
>succeeded in their decades-long struggle to officially turn the party into
>(what they they of as) a Marxist party:
>http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/index.htm Almost all
>the "Marxist" intellectual questions that you see as important are absent
>from this pamphlet - a text from which millions and millions of people all
>over the world got their idea of "Marxism."
>
>So I'm saying that while your distinction between "Marxism" and
>"Enlightenment Liberalism" may have some validity in a philosophical
>sense, it does not actually describe a real historical distinction between
>"Marxism: the political practice" and "Enlightenment Liberalism: the
>political practice" (if there is such a thing).
>
>*Marxism*, as actually conceptualized by real, breathing Marxist mass
>movements that actually existed in history, was probably much closer to
>your idea of "Enlightenment Liberalism" than to your idea of "Marxism."
>
>History!
>
>SA
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