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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (60363)	12/7/2002 1:03:04 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

As for Harris' ability to exegete Marx, it's terrible. OK. I challenged you on this, and your response indicates to me that you want to "move on," rather than discuss Harris's article further. Hmm, I read your statement that you thought neither one of us knew what we were talking about when it came to Marx as your desire to skip the topic. So I was simply reiterating my view. Three quick points then. 1. Whether Marx was convinced that history had an ineluctable destiny or not is a contentious issue in the literature. Lenin thought that Marx did not think so, thus the deliberate agency of a political party within a noncapitalist society was permissible within the theory. One can read Marx as agreeing with this. One can also read Marx as putting his money on some sort of inevitable movement of history. Since Harris picked the latter view rather than the former, he owed us, however quickly, a sentence or two as to why. 2. That, in turn depends on which larger view of Marx one takes. Over the last thirty or forty years different ones have appeared as the dominant ones: an economic one, the humanitarian pre 1848 one, a sociological one, a political one. Harris picked one. Let us know he knows there were other options. 3. The path to revolution takes more than the immiseration thesis for Marx. There is also a social organizational issue. Marx takes off from his famous comment about why peasants don't revolt (he was wrong on this one) and argues that's because they are like potatoes in a potato sack. Organizationally, they don't communicate with one another sufficiently to create a consciousness of kind and to know who the enemy is. He then argues that's precisely what industrialization does. It brings peasants in from the countryside where they live in ghettos and work alongside one another in factories. They come to see themselves as similar to one another and similarly located in the social structure. And, just as important, to see the lives of the wealthy. Harris and I aren't your students, John. Well, perhaps I put that poorly. But my point is that if you and Harris anyone else wishes to argue that the left is anti-American, here are some left figures. Go to it. If, however, Harris is arguing, as you seem to feel he is, and you are, that we are talking about the Marxist left, then (a) that's different (I see only one reference to the Marxist left in his essay) and something I'm not interested in, that's not my club, someone else can argue about that; and (b) Harris' essay loses its punch; he's still caught up in Cold War rhetoric, looking for an enemy and wondering why they've all gone home. Ah, the post modernism discussion. Well, I remember it differently as one in which I answered your questions and you finally just changed the subject.