[Marxism-Thaxis] Popper

[CeJ]

> CB: Cause he [Popper] was doing anti-communist/anti-Soviet  hack
> work .
>
>
JF:

>>My comments on Popper, Hayek etc. can be found
here:

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w46/msg00026.htm
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2005w00/msg00027.htm

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-October/017416.html   <<

That piece from 1999 is especially good. A complete essay in itself.

Popper was brought to England from N.Z. (to which he had fled) to help
fight the Nazis, but by volume 2 of his 'war effort' on political
philosophy,  you can see he is helping to gear everyone up for the
coming Cold War. In a nutshell, Plato (and Aristotle), Hegel and Marx
are charged with giving us 'totalitarianism'. A little later
Feyerabend went to England to study under Wittgenstein, but due to W's
death, ended up a student under Popper.

CJ

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Althusser on Marx, Lenin, Hegel (among other things)

[CeJ]

It is also interesting to put Lukacs and Korsch up against Althusser
on all this. I have attempted to break up the the Korsch excerpt into
more readable paragraphs. My excerpts, as always, are meant to be
indicative, not definitive. If I've got the chronologies and who read
what correct, we might suppose that Althusser had read Lukacs and
Korsch (Althusser even refers specifically to Lukacs), while Lukacs
and Korsch do their work without knowing about Lenin's observations on
Hegel from 1914-15.

My appreciation of Adorno in all this is almost blank, even though I
can remember trying to read Adorno because when I moved into my
current office (in 1994) someone had left a collection of essays by
him on the bookshelf. Will have a look at that.

At any rate, let me clarify that I'm not attempting to argue for some
masterful Hegelian re-reading of Marx. Rather, I'm just saying that
M-E were not coy about their later use of Hegel, and later Marxists
deal with it to quite an extent. Hence its relevance to understanding
Marxism as part of postmodernism. It has long seemed obvious to me,
but I guess it gets eclipsed by the revulsion that postmodernism and
post-structrualism draw forth. Much of that has to do with the
irrationalist label. Which is somewhat like saying Lewis Carrol, the
Surrealists and Fascism show how irrational the Modernists were. Or
that Sade makes the Rationalists irrational. Etc.

 Even funnier is that one about how postmodernism died in 2000 because
French intellectuals have been embracing Anglo-analytic philosophy.
They have seen the light. Sure, and analytic Marxism is alive and
well, too (read with the heaviest irony you can emote).

CJ

1. Lukacs

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/youngheg/ch37.htm

>>Objective idealism requires an authority to guarantee its
authenticity. As we have seen, the Hegelian 'spirit' is that authority
and it fortifies those idealist tendencies which would hypostatize the
universal as opposed to the particular and hence constantly force the
dialectic back into metaphysics. This double aspect of objectivity is
not simply the consequence of its so-called 'immanent' method. We have
attempted to show how it springs from the socio-historical situation
and was exacerbated further by Hegel's own position within it. Of
course, once objective idealism came into existence, its
methodological implications necessarily had an impact on tendencies
that sprang directly from life itself. But here as everywhere society
is the primary reality. And what we set out to show was how that
specific social reality and the socially-conditioned understanding of
that reality were recognizably reflected in the most complex
categories of philosophy, however abstract and remote from them they
appeared to be.

Engels has referred to this contradiction in Hegel as the
contradiction between his method and his system. In his last years he
attempted to induce younger Marxists to renew their acquaintance with
Hegel, but he always warned them not to spend too much time on the
arbitrary elements in the Hegelian system, and urged them instead to
concentrate on the genuine dialectical movements it contained. The
first approach would be simple enough and any schoolmaster could
accomplish it, the second was vital for any Marxist. Marx too always
had the same distinction in mind, even when he was most deeply
immersed in bitter feuds with the representatives of Hegelianism. In
The Holy Family, that great polemic in which he settles accounts with
the Left-Hegelians, he ruthlessly exposes the 'mystery of speculative
constructs', the false reasoning by means of which Hegel advances from
the universal to the particular and the fallacies involved in Hegel's
hypostatization of the universal vis-a-vis the particular. He
mercilessly unmasks all the flaws in his arguments and the distortions
of reality which spring from idealism of this sort. But at the same
time Marx draws a sharp distinction between Hegel and the Hegelians
who have acquired only his defects. He defines the difference between
their dialectics and Hegel's in the following manner:

'Besides, Hegel very often gives a real presentation, a presentation
of the matter itself, within his speculative presentation. This real
development within speculative development misleads the reader into
taking the speculative development as real and the real as
speculative.'

This additional distortion of Hegel was not just the work of his
immediate disciples but was aggravated by later neo-Hegelians. If the
real Hegelian dialectic is to be salvaged from the rubble and brought
to life for the contemporary student then its internal contradictions
have to be explained in terms of the problems which reveal their
origins and social character most clearly: the problems of
economics.<<




2. http://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1923/marxism-philosophy.htm

For the coincidence of consciousness and reality characterises every
dialectic, inclu

[Marxism-Thaxis] Althusser on Marx, Lenin, Hegel (among other things)

[CeJ]

Two suggested readings, with excerpts (sorry for the errant ?s popping
up in the text, apparently an ansi unicode issue when I clipped and
pasted and saved to a .txt file).

1. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1961/young-marx.htm

>>When Marx tells us (and he continually repeats it) not to take an
ideology's consciousness of itself for its essence, he also means that
before it is unconscious of the real problems it is a response (or
non-response) to, an ideology is already unconscious of its
'theoretical presuppositions', that is, the active but unavowed
problematic which fixes for it the meaning and movement of its
problems and thereby of their solutions. So a problematic cannot
generally be read like an open book, it must be dragged up from the
depths of the ideology in which it is buried but active, and usually
despite the ideology itself, its own statements and proclamations.
Anyone who is prepared to go this far will, I imagine, feel obliged to
stop confusing the materialist proclamations of certain 'materialists'
(above all Feuerbach) with materialism itself. There is much to
suggest that this would clarify some problems and dissipate some
other, false, problems. Marxism would thereby gain an ever more exact
consciousness of its own problematic, that is, of itself, and even in
its historical works ? which, after all, is its due, and, if I may say
so, its duty.<<




2. 
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1969/lenin-before-hegel.htm

>>We move from paradox to paradox. I have just said that what
interests Lenin in Hegel is the criticism of Kant, but from the point
of view of scientific objectivity and not from the point of view of
its truth, which, to be brief, is represented in Hegel by the Absolute
Idea. And yet, Lenin is passionately interested in the Chapter on the
Absolute Idea, which he sees as almost materialist:

It is noteworthy that the whole chapter on the 'Absolute Idea'
scarcely says a word about God (hardly ever has a 'divine' 'notion'
slipped out accidentally) and apart from that this NB it contains
almost nothing that is specifically idealism, but has for its main
subject the dialectical method. The sum-total, the last word and
essence of Hegel's logic is the dialectical method ? this is extremely
noteworthy. And one thing more: in this most idealistic of Hegel's
works there is the least idealism and the most materialism.
'Contradictory', but a fact! (op. cit., p. 234).

How are we to explain this paradox?

Ultimately in a fairly simple way. But before doing so, I must go back a little.

Last year, in a paper I read at Jean Hyppolite's seminar, I showed
what Marx owed to Hegel in theory. After critically examining the
dialectic of what may be called the conceptual experiment carried out
by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts, where Feuerbach's theory of the
alienation of the Human Essence underwent a Hegelian injection,
precisely the injection of the process of historical alienation ? I
was able to show that this combination was untenable and explosive,
and in fact it was abandoned by Marx on the one hand (the Manuscripts
were not published and their theses were progressively abandoned
later), while on the other it produced an explosion.

The untenable thesis upheld by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts was that
History is the History of the process of alienation of a Subject, the
Generic Essence of Man alienated in 'alienated labour'.

But it was precisely this thesis that exploded. The result of this
explosion was the evaporation of the notions of subject, human
essence, and alienation, which disappear, completely atomized, and the
liberation of the concept of a process (proces or processus) without a
subject, which is the basis of all the analyses in Capital.

Marx himself provides evidence of this in a note to the French edition
of Capital (this is interesting, for Marx must have added this note
three or four years after the appearance of the German edition, i.e.
after an interval which had allowed him to grasp the importance of
this category and to express it to himself). This is what Marx wrote:

The word 'proces' (process) which expresses a development considered
in the totality of its real conditions has long been part of
scientific language throughout Europe. In France it was first
introduced slightly shamefacedly in its Latin form ? processus. Then,
stripped of this pedantic disguise, it slipped into books on
chemistry, physics, physiology, etc., and into a few works of
metaphysics. In the end it will obtain a certificate of complete
naturalization. Let us note in passing that in ordinary speech the
Germans, like the French use the word Prozess (proces, process) in the
legal sense [i.e. trial] (Le Capital, Editions Sociales, t.I, p.
181n.).

Now, for anyone who 'knows' how to read Hegel's Logic as a
materialist, a process without a subject is precisely what can be
found in the Chapter on the Absolute Idea. Jean Hyppolite d

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx on the ideal ; Zizek on Lenin on Hegel

[CeJ]

^^^
CB: Human thought does represent objective reality.

By the way, Marx had this reflectionist theory too. Not just Lenin.

^^^

That is why I quoted Marx's statement of it. That doesn't absolve Marx
the philosopher of having to address causality or the nature of mind
or social structure in such a theory. With Engels we get an
interactionist formulation of it, revealing that M-E wished to avoid
the trap of determinism in which superstructure is a mere
epiphenomenon of the base.

Next up, Althusser.

CJ

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iyenkov on Hegel

[CeJ]

RD:

>>You certainly cannot understand Marx without understanding the Young
Hegelian milieu. The Second International Marxists never understood it
and Engels' pamphlet on Feuerbach did not provide sufficient
information and perspective.>>

Agreed, but one 'popular' view that we often are asked to inherit sees
a simple line of development of nascent possibilities finding Hegel's
philosophy, and then falling under the influence of Feuerbach and
Bruno Bauer (the latter being Marx's mentor). Marx's doctoral thesis,
although it appears sophomoric compared to most of the texts we
consider as source material , displays Marx as part idealist
philosopher, but grounded in concerns that seem to predict some of his
future directions (e.g., an eye for details and specifics rather than
generalizations) . But more importantly than that, later Marx goes
'back to Hegel', and even says he does, and many see this as the key
to understanding the genesis of the creation or discovery of
historical materialism and the later form of materialism, which
Engels's called dialectical materialism. This comes to light in the
Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845 but published by Engels in 1888.


>>As for Lenin's MAEC, these issues have been argued endlessly.  MAEC
serves a limited function; it combats an overall positivist philosophy
based on a misuse of the natural sciences, ubiquitous in Lenin's time,
but it doesn't address more sophisticated issues about the relation of
subject and object (in relation to social formations).  However, that
doesn't mean Lenin was wrong about his arguments for philosophical
materialism in the most general sense. Natural science materialism,
like natural science itself, gives us the floor of a world view, but
not the ceiling.>>

But a post-mo would say, one can aver one is a materialist and yet
when doing philosophy display something else. Anglo-analytic types
jump on the very same tendencies for meaning in texts to drift beyond
stated intentions.


>>One thing that would be useful, given how much this stuff has been
rehashed, would be a more complete picture of the ideas circulating
towards the end of the 19th century and among whom.  The rebellion
against psychologism, the lineage of Frege and Husserl, the positivism
and vulgar evooutionism, social physics and social darwinism,
revolutions in mathematics and logic, the influence of Nietzsche, the
distillation of an intellectual entity known as Marxism, the birth of
modern sociology and social theory (Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, etc.),
traditions passed through Dilthey, neo-Kantianism, etc. etc. There was
a lot going on, but there is also a fragmentation of knowledge to
consider, a fragmentation that has yet to be overcome.  Even "Marxism"
remains fragmentation; I doubt there is a single person around with an
intimate familiarity with all the schools of thought that marxism has
generated or fused with.<<

What interests me is the way Marxism survives the turn to
post-structuralism and the wider postmodernism, even though the
results are dismaying to many Marxists.

Finally, about the fragmentation of knowledge issue. The modernists
pointed this out (that poetic 'heap of broken images' in Yeats). So
simplistically speaking, I could say much of what made modernism a
condition was the belief that through sophistication and refined
methods, they could pull it all together. And in 1945, some got the
realization that the post-modern already existed and the modernists
hadn't succeeded. (Lyotard specifically picks out the year 1945, but
he also points out that for modernism to exist, there already had to
be a 'post-modern').

I pass over the issue with the thought that as knowledge has expanded
and fragmented into micro-disciplines, many of which can't even
communicate with closely related specialties, I also get the feeling
that most of this expansion and branching of knowledge--outside of a
small percentage of the happy accidents of science and
technology--isn't really very useful for everyday life. In my own
profession (foreign language teaching, applied linguistics), I wish to
shift back to phenomenological and existential concerns because deep
down I feel there is very little to be done in terms of collective
action counter the capitalist-commercial, elite institutional, and
scientistic domination of the field I'm forced to work in.  End of
confession.
CJ

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iyenkov on Hegel

[CeJ]

Closing up a real problem with reference in my discourse:

>>These two could be called 'Hegelian' Marxists, or Marxists who stress
the importance of  Hegel in Marx and Marxism, not just in young Marx,
but in Marx-Engels' subsequent 'return' to Hegel.>>

'These two' should refer to 'Lukacs and Korsch'.

CJ

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iyenkov on Hegel

[Jim Farmelant]

 
On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:08:52 +0900 CeJ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:


> ^^^
> CB: Cause he [Popper] was doing anti-communist/anti-Soviet  hack 
> work .
> 
> ^^^
> 
> The interesting post-modern aspect of Popper for me is that he 
> opened
> up 'anglo-analytic' philosophy of science to post-modernism (Kuhn, 
> but
> especially Lakatos and Feyerabend).
> He is also the guy whom Wittgenstein allegedly threatened with a
> fireplace poker after one of their few discussions. Popper's work 
> on
> scientific methods and induction is formidable and some of the most
> important after Hume, Mills and Peirce.
> 
> And yet I would suspect most of his obituaries revel in the 
> nonsense
> about how he helped defeat communism because he showed Marxism to be 
> a
> pseudo-science (while Hayek 'proved' central planning didn't work).
> --

My comments on Popper, Hayek etc. can be found
here:

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w46/msg00026.htm
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2005w00/msg00027.htm
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-October/017416.html


> 
> CJ
> 
> 

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iyenkov on Hegel

[CeJ]

>>Popper's work on
scientific methods and induction is formidable and some of the most
important after Hume, Mills and Peirce.>>

I meant 'J.S. Mill' here, but I was reading a wikipedia article on
Hayley Mills at the time.

CJ

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iyenkov on Hegel

[CeJ]

Iyenkov on Hegel

>>> CeJ

Engels and later Lenin (and Lenin had real revolutionary practices to
get a grip on) end up with their materialist drawers tied into
idealist knots dealing with Marx's conception of 'materialism'
vis-a-vis the physical sciences.


CB: If you are more specific we can argue this. It's been argued on
Marxism-Thaxis before.

I was getting around to this, by way of Althusser. Since, again, the
reason we are discussing all this is it stems from a discussion on
post-modernism, not a discussion on Lenin's 'materialism' or his
tangles with idealism (or Engels' for that matter). One thing worth
pointing out here is you could say that Lenin anticipates Lukacs and
Korsch (and Althusser, etc.) in his re-engagement of Hegel in order to
solidify his Marxism.




 Lukacs and Korsch address the issue
without having read Lenin by the time they did their work.


CB: That's a bit of a shortcoming.

^^^

Independent arrivals at similar positions can be a strength. Marx and
Engels celebrated them.

Taking a completely different example, consider the work of Peano,
Frege and Peirce in quantified formal logic.

These two could be called 'Hegelian' Marxists, or Marxists who stress
the importance of  Hegel in Marx and Marxism, not just in young Marx,
but in Marx-Engels' subsequent 'return' to Hegel.

I should have been more specific about what 'the issue' is, by which I
meant understanding the importance of Hegel's philosophy in historical
materialism and diamat. That is, L. and K. arrive at the importance of
Hegel without having known how important Hegel was to Lenin's attempts
to get a grips on diamat by re-engaging Capital through a better
understanding of Hegel.

About Engels, wasn't it long thought that his appreciations of both
Feuerbach and Hegel were significantly different (if not more
enthusiastic, at least less critically nuanced)than Marx?


^^^
CB: Most people don't find it hard to say. A lot of people say he [Marx] sort
of invented social science.

^^^
In the US, when they teach foundations courses for fields of social
science, they cite Marx as the fountainhead? Over Weber, Durkheim,
Levi-Strauss, and Saussure? In political economy/economics, Marx is a
footnote on labor theory of value.



CB: Schopenhauer is not a materialist.

^

I didn't even mean to imply that he was. S. was the academic
philosopher who resented Hegel's popularity, even after H. was dead. A
few posts ago, I said S. was one of the influential figures who
started the dismissive criticism of Hegel that his was a philosophy of
speculative nonsense.

As for this issue of 'materialism', I don't think it is an essence of
being a philosopher or a critical theorist or a thinker. Rather it
refers to an ontological position one might take on a number of
philosophical issues. As a post-mod would say, don't pay so much
attention to what someone avers they are (I'm a materialist) but
rather look closely at what they say, write and do when doing
philosophy or critical theory (since philosophy has become a bad
word), at the explicitly intended meanings but at the implicit ones,
and the ones that are left open to the reader.


^^^
CB: Cause he [Popper] was doing anti-communist/anti-Soviet  hack work .

^^^

The interesting post-modern aspect of Popper for me is that he opened
up 'anglo-analytic' philosophy of science to post-modernism (Kuhn, but
especially Lakatos and Feyerabend).
He is also the guy whom Wittgenstein allegedly threatened with a
fireplace poker after one of their few discussions. Popper's work on
scientific methods and induction is formidable and some of the most
important after Hume, Mills and Peirce.

And yet I would suspect most of his obituaries revel in the nonsense
about how he helped defeat communism because he showed Marxism to be a
pseudo-science (while Hayek 'proved' central planning didn't work).
--

CJ

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Marx on the ideal ; Zizek on Lenin on Hegel

[Charles Brown]

-
>From: CeJ <
>
>"The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the
>human mind, and translated into forms of thought." --Karl Marx, Das
>Kapital, Vol. 1.
>
>It is interesting to read Lenin on Hegel, followed by Lukacs, Korsch
>and then Althusser. Whereas Lenin said something like the way to
>understand Capital is to have read Hegel, Althusser says that the
only
>way to understand Hegel's dialectic is to have read Capital. Lenin
>would appear to anticipate some of the post-modern concerns with how
>to treat psychological and social phenomena  beyond crude physicalism
>without resorting to subjective idealism.
>
>Zizek seems to grasp the very crux of the matter when he writes:
>
>http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm


>
>
>This hard materialist core of Empiriocriticism persists in the
>Philosophical Notebooks from 1915, in spite of Lenin's rediscovery of
>Hegel ? why? In his Notebooks, Lenin is struggling with the same
>problem as Adorno in his "negative dialectics": how to combine
Hegel's
>legacy of the critique of every immediacy, of the subjective
mediation
>of all given objectivity, with the minimum of materialism that Adorno
>calls the "predominance of the objective" (this is the reason why
>Lenin still clings to the "theory of reflection" according to which
>the human thought mirrors objective reality).7


^^^
CB: Human thought does represent objective reality. 

By the way, Marx had this reflectionist theory too. Not just Lenin.

^^^

^
>
>However, both Adorno and Lenin take here the wrong path: the way to
>assert materialism is not by way of clinging to the minimum of
>objective reality OUTSIDE the thought's subjective mediation, but by
>insisting on the absolute INHERENCE of the external obstacle which
>prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself. The moment
>we concede on this point and externalize the obstacle, we regress to
>the pseudo-problematic of the thought asymptotically approaching the
>ever-elusive "objective reality," never being able to grasp it in it
>infinite complexity.8
>
>The problem with Lenin's "theory of reflection" resides in its
>implicit idealism: its very compulsive insistence on the independent
>existence of the material reality outside consciousness is to be read
>as a symptomatic displacement, destined to conceal the key fact that
>the consciousness itself is implicitly posited as EXTERNAL to the
>reality it "reflects." The very metaphor of the infinite approaching
>to the way things really are, to the objective truth, betrays this
>idealism: what this metaphor leaves out of consideration is the fact
>that the partiality (distortion) of the "subjective reflection"
occurs
>precisely because the subject is INCLUDED in the process it reflects
?
>only a consciousness observing the universe from without would see
the
>whole of reality "the way it really is."9
>
>--
>
>CJ
>
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iyenkov on Hegel

[Ralph Dumain]

Forgive the many typos in my previous post.

I forgot to mention a book that defends a version of Lenin's reflection theory:

Ruben, David-Hillel. Marxism and Materialism: A Study in Marxist Theory of 
Knowledge, new and rev. ed. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press; Atlantic 
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979.

A problem with this sort of literature, and with much of philosophy, is that a 
lot of energy is expended to review prior material and prove one or two 
important points, but when it's all done, one has travelled very little 
distance.  This is of some interest from a philosophy of science standpoint and 
the hassling out of old controversies about Lenin, materialism, etc.  But when 
one is done, one has not gotten very far, and actually, very little of this has 
anything to do what marxism was for, which is about understanding society (as 
part of changing it, of course).

I reviewed this book a couple of months ago, but the material is not at hand 
now.

However, I did put a couple of interesting excerpts on my web site:

David-Hillel Ruben on Materialism & Praxis
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/ruben-dh-1.html

I often feel embarrassed about returning to these hackneyed issues time and 
time again.  This stuff has been left behind, but since people haven't learned 
. . . . 

One more remark about the essays from the book SCIENCE AND MORALITY (a 
colleague will soon scan the whole book): as much of an imposture as Soviet 
Marxism-Leninism was, there were people who labored under it who produced some 
good work, which either gets lost in the shuffle or buried completely.  Some of 
these folks from the '60s to early '80s had something to say, even of relevance 
to the sexy concerns of intellectual consumers in the west. Ilyenkov, 
Lektorsky, and a few others were interested in incorporating subjectivity and 
praxis into the scientific world picture.  So much obligatory garbage is 
contained in the Soviet literature it takes effort to extract the usable 
material.  Most of the marxist-Leninist rhetoric was refuse; what's worse was 
when Soviet boot-lickers in the western bourgeois democracies (note 
publications of Gruner publishing co.) imitated this style of argumentation. I 
have spent a fair amount of time extracting the usable from the offal.

-Original Message-
>From: Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Mar 18, 2008 3:04 PM
>To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
>Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iyenkov on Hegel
>
>You certainly cannot understand Marx without understanding the Young Hegelian 
>milieu. The Second International Marxists never understood it and Engels' 
>pamphlet on Feuerbach did not provide sufficient information and perspective.
>
>As for Lenin's MAEC, these issues have been argued endlessly.  MAEC serves a 
>limited function; it combats an overall positivist philosophy based on a 
>misuse of the natural sciences, ubiquitous in Lenin's time, but it doesn't 
>address more sophisticated issues about the relation of subject and object (in 
>relation to social formations).  However, that doesn't mean Lenin was wrong 
>about his arguments for philosophical materialism in the most general sense. 
>Natural science materialism, like natural science itself, gives us the floor 
>of a world view, but not the ceiling.
>
>Unfortunately, Lenin, like Engels before him and Marx slightly before him, was 
>institutionalized in a manner that created a solidified doctrine that Marx 
>never intended, and that was open-ended even for Engels.  Lenin was an 
>innovator and opposed ossification but also contributed to it.
>
>There is nothing new in anything that has been said so far in this discussion. 
> I find CeJ's take on this matter rather eccentric, and it's if he thinks he's 
>revealing something that none of us encountered before.
>
>One thing that would be useful, given how much this stuff has been rehashed, 
>would be a more complete picture of the ideas circulating towards the end of 
>the 19th century and among whom.  The rebellion against psychologism, the 
>lineage of Frege and Husserl, the positivism and vulgar evooutionism, social 
>physics and social darwinism, revolutions in mathematics and logic, the 
>influence of Nietzsche, the distillation of an intellectual entity known as 
>Marxism, the birth of modern sociology and social theory (Weber, Durkheim, 
>Simmel, etc.), traditions passed through Dilthey, neo-Kantianism, etc. etc. 
>There was a lot going on, but there is also a fragmentation of knowledge to 
>consider, a fragmentation that has yet to be overcome.  Even "Marxism" remains 
>fragmentation; I doubt there is a single person around with an intimate 
>familiarity with all the schools of thought that marxism has generated or 
>fused with.
>
>Now if only I could find a copy of THE POSITIVIST DISPUTE IN GERMAN SOCIOLOGY.
>
>-Original Message-
>>From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>Sent: Mar 18, 2008 8:50 AM
>>To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.ed

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iyenkov on Hegel

[Ralph Dumain]

You certainly cannot understand Marx without understanding the Young Hegelian 
milieu. The Second International Marxists never understood it and Engels' 
pamphlet on Feuerbach did not provide sufficient information and perspective.

As for Lenin's MAEC, these issues have been argued endlessly.  MAEC serves a 
limited function; it combats an overall positivist philosophy based on a misuse 
of the natural sciences, ubiquitous in Lenin's time, but it doesn't address 
more sophisticated issues about the relation of subject and object (in relation 
to social formations).  However, that doesn't mean Lenin was wrong about his 
arguments for philosophical materialism in the most general sense. Natural 
science materialism, like natural science itself, gives us the floor of a world 
view, but not the ceiling.

Unfortunately, Lenin, like Engels before him and Marx slightly before him, was 
institutionalized in a manner that created a solidified doctrine that Marx 
never intended, and that was open-ended even for Engels.  Lenin was an 
innovator and opposed ossification but also contributed to it.

There is nothing new in anything that has been said so far in this discussion.  
I find CeJ's take on this matter rather eccentric, and it's if he thinks he's 
revealing something that none of us encountered before.

One thing that would be useful, given how much this stuff has been rehashed, 
would be a more complete picture of the ideas circulating towards the end of 
the 19th century and among whom.  The rebellion against psychologism, the 
lineage of Frege and Husserl, the positivism and vulgar evooutionism, social 
physics and social darwinism, revolutions in mathematics and logic, the 
influence of Nietzsche, the distillation of an intellectual entity known as 
Marxism, the birth of modern sociology and social theory (Weber, Durkheim, 
Simmel, etc.), traditions passed through Dilthey, neo-Kantianism, etc. etc. 
There was a lot going on, but there is also a fragmentation of knowledge to 
consider, a fragmentation that has yet to be overcome.  Even "Marxism" remains 
fragmentation; I doubt there is a single person around with an intimate 
familiarity with all the schools of thought that marxism has generated or fused 
with.

Now if only I could find a copy of THE POSITIVIST DISPUTE IN GERMAN SOCIOLOGY.

-Original Message-
>From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Mar 18, 2008 8:50 AM
>To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
>Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iyenkov on Hegel
>
>
>
 CeJ 
>
>Engels and later Lenin (and Lenin had real revolutionary practices to
>get a grip on) end up with their materialist drawers tied into
>idealist knots dealing with Marx's conception of 'materialism'
>vis-a-vis the physical sciences. 
>
>
>CB: If you are more specific we can argue this. It's been argued on
>Marxism-Thaxis before.
>
>
>
> Lukacs and Korsch address the issue
>without having read Lenin by the time they did their work.
>
>
>CB: That's a bit of a shortcoming.
>
>^^^
>
>
> Althusser,
>at least in the translations I have had to work with, is not a
>pleasant read, but he is a thorough-going thinker in a philosophical
>sense.
>
>Part of Marx's 'obscurity' on the issue for people who come at
>philosophy and social thought with a naive positivism and an almost
>blank-slate pragmatism is Marx's own fault and the fault of
>circumstances. He wasn't paid to be an academic -- a philosophical
>scientist in the way Hegel or Schopenhauer were. Much of the time Marx
>writes like a literary gentleman displaying his wide literary learning
>to widely learned literary gentlemen of his era. He eschewed
>'philosophy' as the concern of the metaphysicians, even though his
>thought contains ontological and epistemological positions (for
>example, that 'reflection' view of mind and the material world).
>
>It would be hard to say he created a whole new approach to the social
>sciences and economics, UNLESS you can understand and appreciate the
>continental traditions (some of them not strictly philosophical,
>though they take 'philosophy of science' type positions on their
>'science') that use him as one of their main starting points.
>
>^^^
>CB: Most people don't find it hard to say. A lot of people say he sort
>of invented social science. 
>
>^^^
>
>Part of the difficulty would be his materialism is not intuitive and
>in a series of steps over time developed out of Hegel, the guy who had
>been condemned as metaphysical nonsense  ( dismissed by Feuerbach,
>condemned by Schopenhauer).
>
>
>CB: Schopenhauer is not a materialist.
>
>^
>
>Marx's unintuitive materialism doesn't equate to someone like Hobbes
>(though Dilthey is an interesting point of contact, for example see
>Dilthey on Hegel's idealism). Nor does it anticipate or give rise to
>functionalism, physicalism and behaviourism (outside the Soviet Union)
>so much as it helps give rise to and integrates with the 'ideational'
>and 'textual' concerns of the co

[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: [FRA:] Frankfurt School study update: new Adorno discussion group

[Ralph Dumain]

-Forwarded Message-
>From: Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Mar 13, 2008 1:24 AM
>To: Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [FRA:] Frankfurt School study update: new Adorno discussion group
>
>Resulting from an ad hoc discussion of Theodor Adorno on a Hegel 
>discussion list, a new yahoo group was established on 9 March for 
>close readings and detailed discussions of Adorno's work:
>
>

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Adorno-Hegel

>
>I had alerted the collection of interested individuals to the prior 
>existence of the Frankfurt School discussion group at 
>[EMAIL PROTECTED], but others made the decision 
>to start a separate list for Adorno.
>
>The first order of business is to engage in a group reading of 
>Adorno's Negative Dialectics. The discussions will be conducted in 
>English, based on the English translations, but of course those who 
>read German will be of great assistance given the necessary 
>imperfections of translation.
>
>There is one English translation published in print form:
>
>Negative Dialectics [1966], translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: 
>Seabury Press, 1973.
>
>This translation has received a number of complaints.
>
>There is an online translation by Dennis Redmond (2001), which is 
>available as one PDF file via the Files section of this new Adorno 
>list, or in HTML format from the Marxist Internet Archive:
>

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1966/negative-dialectics/index.htm


>All interested parties are welcome to the new group.  Once again:
>
>

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Adorno-Hegel
>

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Negative Dialectics

[Charles Brown]

How do you get on the Negative Dialectics list ?

>>> Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 03/17/2008 4:54 PM
>>>
In a hurry:

(1) Coincidentally, I'm now reading NEGATIVE DIALECTICS, just forwarded
a post on materialism.

(2) CeJ is wrong on materialism, as usual.

(3) Zizek's essay in pretty good, not exactly a great revelation to me.
 I did not quite get his point on "interpretation" vs "formalization". 
Then there's his weird interpretation of Christianity, Otherwise, he
makes sense.  Except that there is no punchline, no real idea as to how
to apply his interpretation of Lenin to today's circumstances.

Don't have time to address other details.  Reference to Badious
confirms Badiou's bankruptcy.

-Original Message-
>From: CeJ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Mar 17, 2008 10:09 AM
>To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu 
>Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx on the ideal ; Zizek on Lenin on Hegel
>
>"The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the
>human mind, and translated into forms of thought." --Karl Marx, Das
>Kapital, Vol. 1.
>
>It is interesting to read Lenin on Hegel, followed by Lukacs, Korsch
>and then Althusser. Whereas Lenin said something like the way to
>understand Capital is to have read Hegel, Althusser says that the
only
>way to understand Hegel's dialectic is to have read Capital. Lenin
>would appear to anticipate some of the post-modern concerns with how
>to treat psychological and social phenomena  beyond crude physicalism
>without resorting to subjective idealism.
>
>Zizek seems to grasp the very crux of the matter when he writes:
>
>http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm

>
>
>This hard materialist core of Empiriocriticism persists in the
>Philosophical Notebooks from 1915, in spite of Lenin's rediscovery of
>Hegel ? why? In his Notebooks, Lenin is struggling with the same
>problem as Adorno in his "negative dialectics": how to combine
Hegel's
>legacy of the critique of every immediacy, of the subjective
mediation
>of all given objectivity, with the minimum of materialism that Adorno
>calls the "predominance of the objective" (this is the reason why
>Lenin still clings to the "theory of reflection" according to which
>the human thought mirrors objective reality).7
>
>However, both Adorno and Lenin take here the wrong path: the way to
>assert materialism is not by way of clinging to the minimum of
>objective reality OUTSIDE the thought's subjective mediation, but by
>insisting on the absolute INHERENCE of the external obstacle which
>prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself. The moment
>we concede on this point and externalize the obstacle, we regress to
>the pseudo-problematic of the thought asymptotically approaching the
>ever-elusive "objective reality," never being able to grasp it in it
>infinite complexity.8
>
>The problem with Lenin's "theory of reflection" resides in its
>implicit idealism: its very compulsive insistence on the independent
>existence of the material reality outside consciousness is to be read
>as a symptomatic displacement, destined to conceal the key fact that
>the consciousness itself is implicitly posited as EXTERNAL to the
>reality it "reflects." The very metaphor of the infinite approaching
>to the way things really are, to the objective truth, betrays this
>idealism: what this metaphor leaves out of consideration is the fact
>that the partiality (distortion) of the "subjective reflection"
occurs
>precisely because the subject is INCLUDED in the process it reflects
?
>only a consciousness observing the universe from without would see
the
>whole of reality "the way it really is."9
>
>--
>
>CJ
>
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iyenkov on Hegel

[Charles Brown]

>>> CeJ 

Engels and later Lenin (and Lenin had real revolutionary practices to
get a grip on) end up with their materialist drawers tied into
idealist knots dealing with Marx's conception of 'materialism'
vis-a-vis the physical sciences. 


CB: If you are more specific we can argue this. It's been argued on
Marxism-Thaxis before.



 Lukacs and Korsch address the issue
without having read Lenin by the time they did their work.


CB: That's a bit of a shortcoming.

^^^


 Althusser,
at least in the translations I have had to work with, is not a
pleasant read, but he is a thorough-going thinker in a philosophical
sense.

Part of Marx's 'obscurity' on the issue for people who come at
philosophy and social thought with a naive positivism and an almost
blank-slate pragmatism is Marx's own fault and the fault of
circumstances. He wasn't paid to be an academic -- a philosophical
scientist in the way Hegel or Schopenhauer were. Much of the time Marx
writes like a literary gentleman displaying his wide literary learning
to widely learned literary gentlemen of his era. He eschewed
'philosophy' as the concern of the metaphysicians, even though his
thought contains ontological and epistemological positions (for
example, that 'reflection' view of mind and the material world).

It would be hard to say he created a whole new approach to the social
sciences and economics, UNLESS you can understand and appreciate the
continental traditions (some of them not strictly philosophical,
though they take 'philosophy of science' type positions on their
'science') that use him as one of their main starting points.

^^^
CB: Most people don't find it hard to say. A lot of people say he sort
of invented social science. 

^^^

Part of the difficulty would be his materialism is not intuitive and
in a series of steps over time developed out of Hegel, the guy who had
been condemned as metaphysical nonsense  ( dismissed by Feuerbach,
condemned by Schopenhauer).


CB: Schopenhauer is not a materialist.

^

Marx's unintuitive materialism doesn't equate to someone like Hobbes
(though Dilthey is an interesting point of contact, for example see
Dilthey on Hegel's idealism). Nor does it anticipate or give rise to
functionalism, physicalism and behaviourism (outside the Soviet Union)
so much as it helps give rise to and integrates with the 'ideational'
and 'textual' concerns of the continental traditions in formal,
psychological and social sciences. Why do you think Popper put Hegel
and Marx together in his attack on 'pseudo-sciences' that lead to
'totalitarianism'? 
^^^
CB: Cause he was doing anti-communist/anti-Soviet  hack work .

^^^


But Marx was a mere footnote in many approaches to
political economy and sociology long before Popper ever got around to
him.



CJ

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