> At 10:57 PM 5/3/2010, SA wrote:
>> shag carpet bomb wrote:
>>
>>> now, i'm starting to think that what you are talking about are
>>> movements inspired by liberalism, in which case the issue is:
>>> context. what's inspiring is the ideals of liberalism as contrasted
>>> to whatever was around at the time. (e.g., feudalism for w. europe)
>>
>> No. I'm talking about - for example - Karl Marx's party, the German
>> SPD, once it became a politically potent party, after Marx's death. A
>> typical activist in this party in, say, 1912 (its breakthrough year)
>> would be a skilled male mfg worker active in his union, interested in
>> SPD affairs, who often attended socialist lectures and read socialist
>> newspapers and understood what he was reading and hearing.
>>
>> This person would probably call himself a "Marxist." But his idea of
>> Marxism was very different than yours. For example, the whole
>> question of whether "an individual must experience, and thus know,
>> for herself" probably would never have entered this person's head.
>> This is an important question for you and your Marxism; not for him,
>> though. And not for the vast majority of people who made up the
>> social base of "Marxist" political parties in the West. (Including
>> even the minority who took a special amateur interest in "Marxism,"
>> like our hypothetical 1912 worker.)
>
> 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 think there's a misunderstanding.
I wrote: "The *whole question* of whether 'an individual must experience, and thus know, for herself' probably would never have entered this person's head." I meant the whole subject - the subject of epistemology - would never have entered this "Marxist"'s head, one way or the other. Kautsky, for example, was only marginally aware that Marx had grounded his philosophy in any particular epistemology- and I'm not picking him at random, he was seen as the leading authority on Marxist politics, "the Pope of socialism," they called him.
In this period, The German Ideology was completely unknown. The Grundrisse wouldn't be published for decades. People more or less thought Marx = Capital + Critique of the Gotha Program, and most people missed or misunderstood the philosophical basis of Capital. "Marxism" was essentially seen as a philosophy about how forces and relations of production are in conflict; how capitalism is concentrating production, immiserating the proletariat, driving down the rate of profit, and preparing the path for socialism.
Marx's concerns about epistemology and the nature of man - i.e., concerns that *today's* post-1960 Marxists find highly pertinent - were almost totally neglected among those who formed the backbone of actually-existing Marxist mass politics. They thought Marxism was about historical stages and economics.
SA