Michael Albert, the co-editor of Z magazine, asked me to forward this to Pen-l and I have decided to do so. Michael is a close friend of mine although I do not agree with his criticism that Marxism reflects the interests of the co-ordinator class. We have argued this point for many, many years and neither one has convinced the other. Peter Bohmer ---------- Antonio: Peter Bohmer was kind enough to forward your pen-l message to me and I thought perhaps I ought to offer a brief reply. In the first part you relate how for you pomo made it possible to see the importance of organizing not only among workers around traditional class issues, but also, for example, with women suffering battering. You close with the following paragraph... > Jim Devine, I think, thinks that all of this opening to other > constituencies is already a fait accomplm, and he points to Michael > Albert's Z as a vehicle for it. But he points out that Michael Albert is a > modernist (he's right. Michael is quite proud of being a modernist: he had > a degree in physics before turning to economics). The thing I would point > out is that, being a modernist, in order to open up to a variety of sites > of struggle, Michael found it necessary to reject Marxism. I don't. A > pretty BIG difference, or it should be to someone like Jim. > Well, yes, I certainly do agree with Jim. And I think it is a non-contentious point since folks were arguing the need to pay attention to not only economic and class issues and concepts, but kinship and gender, politics and authority, culture and race, etc., well before and quite independent of anything that could remotely be called pomo. Antonio, will perhaps remember that when he and I were students at U.Mass economics, oh so many years ago, it was quite commonplace that a sector of folks there felt class was not only important but first and foremost, while another sector thought, no, it is important, but so are other phenomena. Now the part about me. Yes, I went a bit further. But my coming to the conclusion that class was not ALONE central or first order or whatever you want to call it, had literally nothing to do with my deciding marxism was flawed. This is easily demonstrable, since I made the identical critique of feminism, anarchism, and nationalism -- that they too were monist in precisely the sense marxism was, that is apriori and with no sustainable historical or logical justification privileging one source of oppression and seeing things as too dependent on that source alone, while minimizing or ignoring the defining impact of others. And while I critiqued all four orientations on grounds of monism, I also added that the solution wasn't to abandon each or any of these four focuses, but to creatively combine their insights by broadening the concepts of each to take into account how the forces emanating from each type of oppression/structure affect the definition of the others -- something which class-oriented folks in the guise of marxist feminists, socialist feminists, anarcho communists, had already begun doing with some success. The grounds on which I came to the conclusion that while marxism had much of relevance and value, it was nonetheless fatally flawed, were quite different. And it was because of failings which the other orientations did not share. These were, mainly, that marxism instead of being an attempt to understand society from the perspective of eliminating any form of economic oppression/hierarchy (that is class division and rule), was actually a framework reflecting the class interests and agenda of what I call coordinators (and what others have called professional/managers, technocrats, etc.). To get back on track as a marxist you couldn't just recognize the need to pay attention to how forces emanating from cultural institutions, kinship institutions, and political institutions affect the very definition of workplace and allocation relations, though that was a very important step to take, and has only in part been taken even now. (That was a step--correcting the monist weakness, that also needed to be taken by feminists, nationalists, anarchists, of course.) With marxism, you also had to go into the very economic logic of your concepts and find the places where it was out of touch with reality on the one hand (in the analytic part), and desirable values on the other (in the prescriptive part) due to its coordinator agenda...and this led me to changes my bag of economic concepts so dramatically and took me so far from certain basic marxist economic tenets that it made no sense to me to continue calling the result marxist. I have to admit, all that said, the sentence that screams out at me in your comments, Antonio, is the one about my being quite proud of being a modernist, with the explanation that I was in physics before being in math. (a) I could not define modernist if my life depended on it and I honestly believe that other than in the phrase post modernist, used critically, I have never used the label for myself or anyone else. I have to admit that I wouldn't know how to. (b) If paying attention to physics or any other "hard science" makes one a "modernist" (then yes, I am) and if "post modernists" think one should transcend being a modernist to get on about something superior, wouldn't that mean post modernists are saying that no one who wants to be "with it" should clutter their minds or distort their perceptions by learning anything like a hard science, or the methods of hard sciences, for that matter? Quite remarkable.
