[Julio Huato posted this discussion}:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptb6WSAt2zE
This was interesting. The washingston concensus is still in place and will not be moved. They are in a complete denial mode. Leo Panitch does a good job in a one to three match but to utterly no effect. Neoclassical economics and the neoconservative political line stand like twin shining pillars holding up freedom, market system, capitalism, blah, blah---the best of all possible worlds.
Panitch's adversaries are complete ideological hacks. They are not going change their minds in the slightest. One thing that surprised a little is that most of them sounded like they had not really read Marx. I have to confess I haven't read enough myself, even if I have a whole shelf plus some companions and studies. In any event Panitch does list off all the fields with marxist scholarship beyond just economic theory and critique. Following that list, was met in a uniform silence. His opponents had just said they thought marxism was dead.
It was a little frightening to watch the US and EU hacks just repeat the same policy talking points. It means that nothing will be done---absolutely nothing, no matter how bad it gets.
In addition to Panitch's list, I'd like to add philosophy of history (historiagraphy) along with, history of philosophy (different than the former) and social history. The marxist influence (perhsps just potential) in these fields seems very important to me, because they form part of the intellectual propaganda wars that are going on.
Most people don't realize that the intellectual wing of the necons have been very busy re-writing history through their own various ideological lenes. Their scholastic mistake is an interesting one. They have appropriated what I think is called historial idealism. The irony is that most of the US academic world in history are opposed to historical idealism since it smacks of Hegel---which it does. US academics are firmly committed to their Anglo-American empiricism which also tends to oppose the positivist schools. Where neo-marxist(?) or newer marxist historians come in is interesting (to me) because they confront their subject with a good mixed tool box. They can carve up a period, a sequence of events, a set of people, first through pretty rigorous empirical methods, then not stop at this so-called objectivity, but keep going into the social, economic, and cultural institutional systems at work.
This method is marxist in two senses. First by theory from Marx. But I think, much more important something like this approach was used by Marx himself. He started off in the German idealist school, move to the French positivist school, then finally landed in the English empirical school. I think this is the reason that Marx seems so relevant today and most especially in the much more broad view of society. It is what makes him so adaptable to the social sciences which trace back to the postivists, economics which should be more closely tied to empiricism, and then finally to developing a newer form of historical studies.
I am bringing all this up, because it is the sort of thing, I am trying to sort out in my ssuartS oeL project. Instead of trying to write a probably insufficient idealist or classical critique, I decided to use as much social and political history as I could find and assemble something like a marxists social and intellectual biography.
For example, when I was reading up on Spinoza and the LS's work on Spinoza I thought he was working on some personal identity crisis of his own---that is his theoretical and social position in Weimar. What I couldn't figure out was what an essay on Hobbes was doing in a work on Spinoza. Strauss was assembling an historical study on various critiques of religion---so Hobbes counts there. But I think now part of that work and the two subsequent works, one on Maimonides and the a longer work on Hobbes, where also following a revealing philsophical problem.
The problem can be reduced to a question, what is human nature? Is it a fixed and static concept as in Aristotle. Or is it maluable, mobile, variable sort of structure that takes different forms in different times and places? Strauss assumed the static form. He had too, for philosophical consistancies reasons. So this helped make sense of his study of Hobbes---who took a very dim view of human nature. Notice also that the religions of the book, also take a very dim view of human nature, since the children of God need a real asshole father to keep them in line.
For my purposes the most interesting thing about Hobbes was his linkage between human nature and human society. The elements of human nature drive by necessity the structure of human society. But it is something of a combination of Hegel and Marx, that in fact history and social history show the opposite view, that the socio-economic system mostly likely make manifest various potential elements of human nature---if there even is such an entity.
How did I get all that from Panitch v. neocons? Just look around. These pricks tout a political and economic ideology that makes distinct asumptions about human nature an society that are deeply wrong as matters of empirical fact and philosophy of value. They are so wedded to their worldview, they will persist in their denial of concrete and possibly emergent realities.