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Originally posted by Dracon II
First of all Che, thanks for the book recommendations.
First of all Che, thanks for the book recommendations.
I've got more.
I have a nasty habit of keeping a terribly eclectic taste in intellectual inputs.
I don't see anything wrong with that, as long as you can analyze your inputs critically. The afore mentioned Western Marxists are valuable, for instnace, not so much because of the answers they bring, as the questions they raise. Secondly, to attain a truley dialectical understanding of a thing, one needs to look at it from all sides. Thus, Robert Dahl's conception of the state is as important as Lenin or Marx's for trying to get a grip on how it really functions, and what it really is. Dialectics is holositic.
which means I often attain superficial knowledge of a many things, but lack the depth of understanding to truly understand the intricacies of those things I talk about.
You are young yet, and there's so much to learn. If you keep at it, you learn it. Everything facisinates me, and so I learn about everything. While I think it's good to concnetrate on a few areas to specialize, I also think a well rouded comrade studies as much as he or she can about the world. My first organization, an offshoot of the French Trotskyist group, Lutte Ouvriere, required its memebers to read a book a week, and not simply about Marxism. I had to read books on Chaos theory, anthroplogy, natural sciences, the arts, etc. I still think this is a good idea.
Are you laughing with me, or at me? 'Cause if you're laughing at me
With you, comrade, with you.
I think your problem isn't so much with Marxism as with what you think Marxism is.
I don't believe that there are any separate and discrete units in society, there is always interpenetration and determination... and the power of the ruling class does put them in a position to organise to create ruling institutions... historically speaking that's a no-brainer I guess.
Excellent!
My mistake was straying into formalism.
Yup.
Of course, to begin to understand how a thing works, you need to break it down and lok at its parts, just as you would dissect an animal to study it, you can't fully understand it without understand how they all work together as part of a unified whole, as well as seeing the animal in motion and in it's niche.
Although I would not say that dialectics is a black and white process;
Of course not. That would be undialectical.
political institutions are not merely determined by class, they also determine politics themselves. There is a process of interdetermination.
Absolutely! This is classic historical materialism.
This may be, as you say due to a if a "conjunction of forces leave the competing classes too weak to assert themselves"... but I'll leave it for further discussion (I'm sure you have a good explanation and I'd like to hear it. I'm learning quite a lot today).
No, you got it.
Nationalism was invented by the bourgeoisie, so giving expression to a national culture is exactly what a capitalist state would do.
Please explain. Do you mean that by the development of the bourgeoisie within the nation-state, formerly parochial markets were combined and integrated into national markets, thus raising the people's consciousness (interdependency) to the national level?
That's part of it. National traditions, national language, etc. were part and parcel of the rise of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class. Aristocrats are, by theior nature, rather parocial. Their economic interests are mainly in their land and the immediately surrounding area, regardless of how much interest in the world and how well educated they may be personally.
The bourgeoisie was from the begining, a class interested in what was going on "over there." A capitalist manufacture products not to be sold in his local market, but markets all over the country, as well as all over the world. They saw themselves as a nation, and it's no accident that nationalism appears as an ideology at the same time as the bourgeoisie begin their assent.
Economically, the bourgeoisie had an interest in making sure that everyone in their territory not merely spoke the same language, but spoke it the same way. A capitalist selling his products wanted to be understood in Normandy as well as Provance, and while regional dialects still exist, there has been a great flattening of language.
As well, the bourgeoisie benefits from all classes seeing themselves as a nation, and united in purpose and loyalty. This isn't merely to pull the woll over the lower classes eyes in order to get them to stay docile and dutifully march off to defend the motherland, although those aspects do exist. The bourgeoisie also sees itself as a universal class, that what is good for it is good for everyone, that since they are a nation, so are the lower classes with them. Before they came to power, they even saw that the lower classes had similar interests in everyone being part of one nation, instead of being seperate parts of the nobles society. Bourgeois revolutions were in part proletarian revolutions.
There are two authors you should look at to get a better understanding of nationalism, as this is pretty much the limit of my knowledge: Benedict Anderson and Ernst Gellner.
What are your thoughts on the Frankfurt School... or Frederic Jameson, Terry Eagleton and David Harvey?
I haven't read enough of the latter to make an opinion. The Frankfort School of thought is something of a misnomer, as Marcuse was quite different from Adorno and Horkheimer. I think both sets of authors raise interesting questions and have valuable insights on to how capitalism both affects the human psyche and how it maintains power. I'm less sypathetic to the latter two, though, because of their anti-science, anti-enlightenment views.
Marcuse, I think, should be best read along side Sartre, Camus, and other existentialists, since he's really dealing with the alienation of modern man from consumer capitalism in the age of imminent nuclear annihilation. In addition, though, I'd say to also read Marx's 1844 manuscripts, which also deals with the problems of alienation from capitalist society.
Adorno and Horkheimer's thought was largely a reaction to the Nazi Holocaust and the Second World War. The see in both the Nazis and the atomic bomb, the ultimate expressions of rationalism, rationalization, science, and inudstrial society, and they revolt against all of it. As the end result of the Englightenment, Nazisism and nuclear death taint the whole thing, and it needs to be tossed. Science is a tool of capitalist domination (and what else would it be in a capitalist society, comrades?), and so it's results are automatically suspect.
A&H do us a service by reminding us that science doesn't exist in a vacuumm, but that it is part of class society, and that it is bent towards maintaining and strengthening that society. That one should keep that in mind while learning science is important, but to throw out the baby with the bathwater is very typical of petty-bougeois leftists.
I'm not as familiar with aristotle as I'd like to be... so I'll take your word for it that I was being aristotelian.
Aristotle was the father of formal logic, so it was just another way of saying formalistic, as that word had escaped me when I was writing.
It was a whip in the hands of the Western Marxists (under whose wing you seem to be harboring) for their retreat from class struggle, dialectics, and materialism. We see the results of their thinking today in post modernism.
I'm certainly not under the wing of postmodernism.
PM is the outgrowth of WM. You can see the future trajectory in Adorno and Horkheimer. Ironically enough, George Novak, an American Trotskyist and philospher, predicted PM, but as a snide joke, when he commented that because language itself is a prduct of class society, we would end up logically not being able to trust the very words we use to try and describe the world, and would have to deny an external reality. And along came Derrrida and Foucault (though they really weren't so bad as those who followed them).
There's a really good couple of critical overviews of Western Marxism put out by Verso Press: Considerations on Western Marxism, by Perry Anderson & Western Marxism: A critical reader.[/i]
A couple more points on WM. There are two basic trends in WM, one is all dialectics, no materialism (which led to PM). This school is represented by Adorno, Horkheimer, etc. The opposite school is led by Althusser, which rejects the anti-materialism of the Frankfurt school, but goes too far the other way, and ends up rejecting dialectics.
There also a number of comrades who are unfairly lumped in with WM: Karl Korsch, Georg Lukasć and Antonio Gramsci. What seperates these comrades from the rest is first and formost, they were members of an acutal movement, rather than being college professors studying from afar. The former two were trying to deal with the failure of the 2nd International, the failure of the revolution to spread, and creeping Stalinism, while Gramsci was trying to understand why captialism was able to maintain itself, even after the First World War, and why people would chose Fascism. In other words, their writing and ideas sprang from actual struggles with the movement and were trying to undrestand how to make the revolution.
The rest of WM, on the other hand, seems fatalistically resigned to the continued existence of capitalism, and sees in Marxism merely a tool of criticism. They withdrew from class conflict, though Marcuse became something of a hero and inspiration to the New Left in the US during the 60s,
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