One important idea of Bhaskar's was about what he called the intransitive and transitive dimensions of reality. This was akin to Althusser's idea of the real object and the thought object, but Bhaskar's version is better in my view because it is more accurate. Althusser's version still gives too much weight to social construction rather than to nature.
For Marxists, the importance of Bhaskar's distinction above is that it foregrounds the importance of ontology. In my view Marxism had got into a near-terminal crisis because the Trotskyist groups were focussing almost exclusively on trying to realise their beyond-question theory (i.e. working at the level of epistemology as an identity-theory) whereas what they needed to be doing was trying to cognize changes in the nature of world capitalism (i.e. working at the level of ontology). The groups were thus committing an example of what Bhaskar calls the "epistemic fallacy". Phil Sharpe and I (in Britain) took some of Bhaskar's ideas into the Trotskyist milieu starting from about 1992 and got an uncomprehending response but it now appears that some of the Bhaskar did get taken up. Bhaskar rejects the appellation "materialist" because he sees the materialism of Lenin (M+EC) and Engels as being positivist in a reductive way, and as being distantly related to what he regards as the false ontology of Hume's regularity determinism (i.e. it is not sufficiently stratified). Later dialectical materialism (post-1930) is referred to by Bhaskar as "objectivist processual empiricism" (see Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, Verso 1993, or Plato Etc., Verso 1994). Those two books are very demanding (but rewarding!), but Bhaskar's more recent books are much more accessible. Bhaskar has gone through a transcendental (and even mystical) phase but I am told that his latest work which he is starting to propagate is much more grounded in empirical research. For some years now Bhaskar has been working in Sweden at the same university where Goran Therborn, the noted social thinker and researcher, is based. Phil Walden _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
