On 2012-11-20, at 10:04 AM, Jim Devine wrote: > Marv: >> What is "Marxism"? :) > > like the US Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart said about porn, you > know it when you see it.
Bad example. The court was split on the decision, and could not come up with a rationale as four concurring judges and two dissenting ones offered entirely different opinions of whether Malle's movie was obscene, none of proved acceptable to the others. Later Court decisions affirmed the definition of porn should not be left to judicial whim and established more rigorous criteria to assess which material should be subject to state regulation. Anyway, as you know, what constitutes Marxism and who is a Marxist are issues which been kicked around for generations and, if anything, the disagreements have widened. There are Marxists who consider the labour theory of value, the falling rate of profit, and/or other doctrinal matters to be essential components of Marx's system, and there are Marxists like yourself - at least in respect of the FROP - who think otherwise. That's at the frequently arcane level of theory. The divisions over what constitutes a "Marxist" program, party, and strategy have been even more fierce and consequential. Perhaps the only point of convergence is fidelity to the historical materialist method, broadly speaking, applied to the past and present. There have been serious disputes over the application of the method but not, it would appear, over the legitimacy of the method itself. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
