[Marxism] `Let us rediscover Marx' -- Two talks on Michael Lebowitz's `Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class' | Links

[glparramatta]

By *Michael A. Lebowitz*

Michael Lebowitz will be a featured guest at the /World at a Crossroads/ 
conference, to be held in Sydney, Australia, on April 10-12, 2009, 
organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective, Resistance and /Green 
Left Weekly/. Visit http://www.worldATACrossroads.org 
<http://www.worldatacrossroads.org/> for full agenda and to book your 
tickets.

February 16, 2009 -- It is well known that when Karl Marx heard what 
people calling themselves Marxists were saying, he commented, ``all I 
know is that I am not a Marxist’’. It is not as well known, however, 
that Marx had little respect for disciples in general. A theory 
disintegrates, he said, when disciples try to ``explain away’’ problems 
in the theory -- when they engage in ``crass empiricism’’, use ``phrases 
in a scholastic way’’, and employ ``cunning argument’’ to support the 
theory. A theory disintegrates, he said, when the point of departure of 
the disciples is ``no longer reality’’ but the theory that the master 
produced.

Although Marx had in mind what had happened to the theories of Hegel and 
Ricardo at the hands of their disciples, the problem he detected applies 
to his own theory. /Marx has had too many disciples /-- too many people 
who simply repeat the theory, too many people who argue endlessly that 
it is correct in the form that Marx left it. These are people whose 
mantra is the ``two whatevers’’ -- whatever is in /Capital /is right, 
whatever is/ not /in /Capital /is wrong. With a dialectical perspective, 
however, we recognise that what is outside /Capital /is essential to 
understand what is inside it.

Full article at http://links.org.au/node/921

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