On Tue, 4 May 2010 20:27:13 +0100 "James Heartfield"
<Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> writes:
> SA writes, as if this view was absurd: '"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.'
>
> Which to me sounds like a reasonable shorthand for what Marx spent
> most of his time writing about (apart from the word 'philosophy',
> which study, he compared to wanking).
>
> But apparently, no, Marx was not really writing about relations of
> production or the rate of profit, or immiseration, but really just
> preparing the ground for the fascinating study of .... epistemology
> and the nature of man!
Well, that indeed is the way that a lot of Marxist philosophy has been written. On the other hand, we may recall that one recent Marxist philosopher, the late Jerry Cohen, developed an interpretation of Marx, "Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense," which quite consciously hearkened back to the kind of Marxism that Kautsky & Plekhanov had popularized over a century ago. That is he treated Marx as having been mainly concerned with the relations of production, forces of production, the superstructure etc.
Later on though, he seems to have concluded that this was a mistake and he devoted the rest of his life to defending socialism using the methods of analytical political philosophy, so this meant discussing socialism in relation to the ideas of philosophers like Nozick, Rawls, Dworkin, Sen, etc. and providing critiques of their ideas.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
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Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant ____________________________________________________________ Penny Stock Jumping 2000% Sign up to the #1 voted penny stock newsletter for free today! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/4be0c86843a3d5870cm03vuc