[Marxism] The criticism of religion

[Jeff Rubard]

    From: Haines Brown <brownh at hartford-hwp.com>
    Subject: Re: [Marxism] The criticism of religion
    [...]

    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 seems to me that the term "leftist" is actually a bit more
free-floating today, in that a lot of liberal Democrats decided the
term "liberal" was wimpy and tainted with bad associations, choosing
the more virile "leftist" to describe their (middling) support of the
Democratic Party and criticism of Bush. I don't think that "Marxist"
has a special cachet: the era of Joan Robinson and company, where a
"Marxist" thinker could be entrenched well within an establishment,
is long over. Among people who do have some interest in claiming the
concept, there is a diversity and lack of orthodoxy: but that's not
really a new phenomenon, is it?

    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.

Well, why not ask the opposite question: has natural science embraced
Marxism? In many cases, especially today, the answer is "no", even
quite spectacularly; I defy you to read the blog "Gene Expression",
www.gnxp.com, and not find a committed class enemy with
legitimate-enough scientific credentials. Obviously any kind of
Marxism is going to require accepting the broad sweep of modernity,
and the rise of modern science is an ineliminable part of that: but I
don't think your account really exhibits how polemical and critical
an "acceptance" of mainstream scientific results maintaining core
principles of Marxism requires. That Marxists should accept "good
science" and reject "bad science" is a statement of the
problem, not the solution; and artificially restricting "science"
to mean "fundamental" fields like particle physics, which nobody uses
to grind axes, is not even a statement of the problem.

    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.

A "mediocre basic education" is going to be a common feature of anyone
worth organizing politically; that "cultural capital" is a trick
played on the poor was a good insight of postmodernism, and it holds
in the scientific department as well. As for what should be done about
it, I think there is a lot of evidence for the exemplary conduct of
past Marxists (including the "actually-existing") with respect to
encouraging "popular science", a widespread appreciation of the basic
findings of modern science and the methods by which they were
achieved: but although I've been finding your attempt to link up
Marxism with contemporary philosophy of science interesting, I think
it's a bit much to expect prospective radicals to be *au fait* with
the work of James Ladyman.

Jeff Rubard