I am unfamiliar with the work of Lakatos, but from the brief precis in the following post it would seem that his conception of advance in science is analogous to the concept of punctuated equilibrium in biology. I suggested in posts to lbo some time ago that left organizers should recognize a similar rhythm in major social change. Periods of change, moreover, _always_ catch us by surprise (as the 1917 revolution caught everyone, including Lenin and the Bolsheviks, by surprise). Nevertheless, our current activity should be grounded in the assumption that such a surprise is coming, else we _will_ never even be remotely ready for it when it does come.
Moreover, all the endless whining about the political, cultural, social backwardness of u.s. workers which is so prevalent on lbo (and the deep political pessimism which such whining reflects) is all based on the assumption that there must be a steady linear advance from present to future -- i.e., that our understanding of the future can only be based on extrapolation from the present. But of course the attitude of workers today is of no _practical_ relevance whatever to what their attitude will be in the future. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Marxism] Feyerabend and Lakatos Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 18:58:49 -0400 From: andrew c pollack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I was hoping Lakatos' name would come up. It's always seemed to me that Lakatos was worth studying as someone who provided a coherent schema for how science progresses. First, because he explains how successively more sophisticated research programs enable the accumulation of more facts and more accurate interpretation of already known ones. Second, that can happen because those programs are themselves built on successively better theories whose increased sophistication allows them to integrate more facts in a more sophisticated way. Third, because the whole process does not happen in a slow, gradual way but through alternating periods of slow progress, then stagnation of the dominant program, followed by its replacement by a new one (which must encompass the best of the old). In this sense Lakatos' method, regardless of his later politics, is a progressive (in a scientific sense) to Feyerabend's anarchistic irrationalism or Kuhn's idealism. And he obviously learned something from his time as a Marxist (much as the method of many mid-20th century bourgeois sociologists shows their early Marxist training, however brief). [CLIP] ------- And on Pen-L Ralph Johansen wrote: > > [LARGE CLIP] to me one of the most enduring messages that Nader in > his campaign is trying to get across. We lurch unsteadily into barbarism. > > And Yoshie has it about right: if 1% of the vote is small in terms of a > presidential poll estimate, it's not small in terms of a nucleus behind > progressive change. [CLIP] > > I most especially appreciate Yoshie's proposition: how many would end up > in Nader's support if the three platforms, Democrat, Republican and > Nader-Camejo, were set side by side without the candidates' names, and > people were then asked which set of principles and practices they supported. The people who share our principles are out there, and reaching them around programs in which they can actively participate (as opposed to the passivity of voting out of desperation for someone whose principles they oppose) is the task of leftists today. That task is furthered both by the MWM and the Nader campaign; it is frustrated by the despairing surrender of so many leftists to the ABB. Carrol
