Marxism-Thaxis] Alan Carling's reply
Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Wed Feb 20 02:55:29 MST 2002
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--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alan Carling <a.h.carling at Bradford.ac.uk>
To: Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2002 18:30:04 +0000
Subject: Re: Selectionism: Me, Popper, and Hayek
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Dear Jim,
I was very pleased to receive your perceptive message, especially as it
was
apparently sent on Christmas morning (Maybe you were trying sensibly to
escape from the festivities!). The questions you pose are very pertinent
ones, to which I don't have any very satisfactory answers.
As you will have gathered, I reached the position that the only
plausible
version of historical materialism is a selectionist one through an
engagement with Jerry Cohen's work, and Analytical Marxism more
generally.
It was only subsequent to that realisation/discovery that I saw a
parallel
with the work of the 'bourgeois' social selectionists you mention. I
think
Dennett is wonderful on the general power of the selectionist paradigm,
Dawkins is always interesting, and Blackmore is slightly derivative. The
'meme' idea I do not find especially persuasive however, and by far the
most impressive of the bourgeois selectionists in my view is
W.G.Runciman.
I'm in the middle of writing a critique of his Treatise on Social
Theory,
and I'd be happy to send you a copy when it's finished if you are
interested.
Although I've obviously known about Popper and Hayek in general terms
for
a
long time, I've only recently appreciated their direct relevance, and I
don't know enough about them to answer your question. It may be that my
gardening is not all that different from Popper's piecemeal social
engineering, and I will no doubt have to give this issue serious
attention
in any book that appears.
The final set of questions you pose seem to me the central ones for any
21st Century egalitarian. My worry is essentially this: if Competitive
Primacy is true (as I now think may be the case), do there exist
egalitarian alternatives to capitalism which are capable of competitive
survival against it? If the answer to this question is 'No', then
(successful) Marxist theory has (ironically, or tragically) ruled out
Marxian politics, and the Marxist/socialist/enlightenment egalitarian
project is dead in the water. So I have a considerable personal and
intellectual investment in the answer being 'Yes', and I regard the
various
market socialist proposals as promising candidates in this respect. But
even if one or other of these proposed solutions could survive in the
globally-competitive environment created by contemporary capitalism, can
it
be brought into existence by intentional political action?
My impression is that the exponents of market socialism do not generally
engage with this crucial question of transition (which brings Popper
back
into the frame). The problem is that revolutionary socialists had (a few
still have!) a dogmatically-held and ultimately indefensible (though
personally sustaining) set of answers to this question, centred around
the
proletariat, the party apparatus, and their favourite version of
Leninism
(or Trotskyism). Analytical Marxists and others have rightly abandoned
the
dogmatism and Leninism, but they haven't elaborated any alternative
theory
of political agency. Neither have I, but this is the problem on which my
sights are now set firmly. I would hope to say something useful about it
in
the book. The fundamental point is that the theory of political agency
(whatever it is) must be woven from the same cloth as the theory of
social
evolution, since to act politically is to intervene in the reproduction
of
social structures.
Perhaps I could close by asking some questions of you. You are obviously
very knowledgeable about the debates. Do you work in an academic
context?
If so (or even if not), where are you located? And how did your own
interest in all this arise?
Happy New Year
Alan
PS. Do you know about the journal Imprints, in which these issues are
debated from time to time? (www.imprints.org.uk)
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