[Marxism] The criticism of religion

[Haines Brown]

> Haines Brown wrote:
> >  
> > Given all this, I can only wonder if this list does indeed
> > represent a particular ideological line within the Marxist
> > framework. I doubt that there's an explicit official line here,
> > but would like to know if there's an implicit line based on an
> > outlook shared by those who founded the list or who most
> > consistently participate in it.
> 
> There is no "line" as such, but from my experience on the list going
> back to its formation in 1998, there have been only a handful of
> people who view work within the DP as a tactic. Yourself, Charles
> Brown, Marvin Gandall--that's about it. And we are talking about
> over a thousand subscribers. Julio Huato used to post here about
> supporting the DP, but he unsubbed--I think to a degree out of
> frustration. I don't think it is a bad idea to have these debates
> from time to time, but I tend to keep them on a short leash--and all
> other deeply contested debates for that matter. Nothing annoys
> subscribers more than threads that go on forever, with arguments on
> both sides being repeated ad nauseum. I like to keep things brisk
> and invigorating here.

Understood, and I respect that. However it does raise an interesting
issue, although folks may not be inclined to pursue it.

I like to think of myself as an orthodox Marxist, but these days that
position is not very popular. There are plenty of people who identify
themselves as Marxist, but they clearly use the term in a loose or
different sense. I won't here attempt to characterize it, perhaps
because there is no new orthodoxy or intellectual movement that lends
itself to characterization. It is entirely possible that the majority
of folks on this list fall into this new Marxist category, and hence
the suggestion for a critical engagement of the Democratic Party falls
on deaf ears.

It might be useful if I were to identify characteristics that seem to
distinguish my own view from what I often see among the new Marxists
(if there is such a thing).

One thing that immediately strikes me is that traditional or orthodox
Marxism embraced science, and more specifically natural science. While
some of that may have been the result of the influence of positivism
at the time, I believe that original Marxism had a sense that findings
of science and the methods of science were of of profound, even basic,
importance to their intellectual enterprise. One can't come away from
reading Marx's analysis of capitalism without a clear sense that it
was consistently scientific in method and aim.

I suspect that part of the reason for the "neo-Marxist" disenchantment
with science is the result of a mediocre basic education, which still
presents science in its late 19th century positivist guise (such as
nomological-dedutivism being the scientific method). For good
reason they reject positivism, and since they understand science as it
used to be, any respect for science goes out the window. And to
suggest that folks do some scientific reading is not very welcome, for
they have already been exposed to a bit of stultifying science in
school, and won't want to endure more of it.

However, I find it hard to believe that this fully accounts for the
alienation from science of many, perhaps even most, neo-Marxists. So
it would be interesting to know how people subscribed to this list
feel about the findings and methods of science, particularly in
relation to a revolutionary project.

Another area where I find it difficult to communicate with
neo-Marxists is over social class. The problem here is that in terms
of bourgeois ideology, class is defined in empiricist terms. That is,
class is a group of people who share an important quality or set of
qualities. Once that position is taken, there immediately arises the
problem of what features should be considered definitive for the
working class. Is it industrial labor, wage labor, relative poverty,
anyone not an owner of capital? This uncertainty makes discussion very
difficult, but I believe it is an artifact of the empiricism that
prevails in our popular culture (but not in our scientific culture)
rather than any ambiguity in the original Marxist notion of class,
which is defined in terms of a causal relation, not in terms of
empirical qualities.

While I'm generating this list off the top of my head and don't want
to drag it out, I find particularly frustrating the subject of
dialectical materialism and more specifically the idea of
contradiction. This simple and elegant notion, which is not at all
problematic in terms of contemporary science, is a real stumbling
block for a lot of people. They seem to wish either to marginalize it
or to reduce dialectics to what is called "indeterminant
interactionism" (a term originally applied to Bernard Ollman). I
believe, but certainly could be wrong, that to marginalize
contradictions drives one into the arms of empiricism, and to look at
things in terms of abstract causal structures such as contradiction,
but independent of time, place and circumstance, moves one toward a
structural functionalism.

I'm just musing at everyone's else's expense, but surely how we relate
to orthodox Marxism (other than simply associating it with political
blunders and other misfortunes) is of fundamental importance, and in
turn critical self-examination seems a precondition for laying the
foundations for a constructive discourse that offers intellectual
support for the unified movement we all would like to see. If we all
talk past each other and cannot engage in the kind of discourse that
is mutually constructive, how can we provide intellectual leadership
for a possible movement that is able to transform the system rather
than just react to it?

You said you like to "keep things brisk and invigorating" here, and I
seem to have betrayed that trust. I agree that a debate that is
getting nowhere quickly becomes tedious. On the other hand, the issues
that are debated often seem to be of great importance. I wonder
if it would be possible to set up a little series of projects that put
forward a _very_ basic issue in Marxism, and ask all comers willing
to do it to write a little essay of not over a specified length,
within a certain time frame such as one week, that makes all starting
assumptions very explicit, and that no discussion of these essays take
place until after the cut-off point. Then the carefully laid out set
of positions can be critically compared. After all, we are all
intellectuals of some sort here, and the point should not be to
"profile" as they say here (or engage in a Kuhnian struggle to have
our ideas prevail because it offers social rewards), but to encourage
debate in such a way that can lead to our development.

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM