--- Leigh Meyers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It's the elitists, opportunists amd pedants that > require one to be able > to "recite Grundisse", whoever that person was, as a > bar to entry in > their little 'intellectual's club'.
I don't know wheter "Marxism is cult", but I certainly think the entire notion of Marx_ism_ is dubious. Capital is a didactic work aimed at a popular audience. Theorists like Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt have done extensive work attempting to reconstruct Marxian value theory. Perhaps you are just an exceptionally sharp reader who is able to determine exactly what Marx means on the first reading. But the fact that throughout the entire century-long existence of the classical workers movement, Marx was interpreted as a sort of socialist Ricardian, suggests to me that a significant number of people have greater difficulties reading Marx than you do. > I mean was Grundisse writing Marxism's bible > concordance, or what? No, that would be the "Results of the Immediate Production Process." :-P > It's simple, anyone can do it. But you have to put > your 'way of life' on > the line. Before I put my precious life on the line, I want a very clear idea of what it is I'm dealing with. If I had the luck of having my own little sect, I would shelve any praxis for an extended period, bombard new recruits with the first three chapters of Volume 1 as a basic course, and the _results of the immediate production process_. Intermediate study would be the rest of Volume 1, excerpts from the Grundrisse, excerpts from the Theories of Surplus Value, and excerpts from Volume 3. Advanced study would be Horkheimer's Traditional and Critical Theory, Adorno's Introduction to Sociology, and Lukacs Reification and Proletarian Consciousness. Then, maybe, maybe, I would think about what practical activity would be of any use whatsoever. Alas, I have not been blessed with the happy circumstance of being a sect leader, so people will happily continue with whatever useless form of ritualized protest, without my modest input. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com
