=================================== >RH: The truth that religion holds is this. It reifies the best human >qualities abstracts them from people and assigns them to a deity. It exists >and flurishes as Marx says because it gives hope and comfort in a world >without hope and comfort. Maybe. Religion also gives people comfort and answers to questions they might find discomforting or even terrifying. "There are no atheists in foxholes." Is Marxism withering away or only those >distortions of it put forward by the Leninist, Maoist, etc.? The distortions and the pure forms look like they are withering away. I don't know for certain, but there are less Marxists in academia, in unions, in the student&women's movements and less subscribers to Marxist periodicals then there ever have been. Of course I would love to be proved wrong. In most cases this has been no fault of Marxism. At my Alma Mater Simon Fraser U., in the 60's and 70's many Marxists were fired simply because of their political views. Many never found jobs in academia ever again. The Taft-Hartley act makes it illegal for Marxists to be involved with unions at a high level. >that the threat of the Soviet Union is gone it is more common to see >emascualated Marxist explaination in the press that it was before. Perhaps, I was only 16 when the SU went down the tubes. It seems to me that the bourgeois press has always embraced a kind of 'vulger' marxism, they're just on the side of the capitalists. And as >the current contradiction of this stage of capitalism work themselves out, I >predict it will make a comeback. Let's hope so, it would only be natural since Marxism is the best theory. The conquering of the USSR has made that awful white elephant known as Soviet Marxism obsolete. OTOH, the conquering of the USSR was a tremendous blow to the left world-wide and has been felt by just about everyone who doesn't wear a Rolex. I always like Lev Trotsky's formulation: unconditional military defense of the USSR but working for worker's revolution within it. Unfortunately, many leftists and liberals never read Trotsky or took his analysis to heart. There is no other rational explaination of >misery. > There are other explanantions, none of them are very good. >RH: Subjective idealism is an assumption not a technique. Marginalism is the >technique. It can be useful in many situtations. > Subjective idealism is a red herring. I meant individualism with a subjective v alue theory. Marginalism and NE are most convincing when used in biology e.g. R.Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker. Depending on how its presented, NE is just differential calculus. In the hands of it best practitioners, NE is a internally consistent deductive system such that marginal analysis follows from philosophical individualism. You can't have marginalism without the individualism. >RH: I don't know how anyone could construct a feasible plan without a good >knowledge of mathematics. > Yes, but a plan isn't a theory. The best mathematical minds the USSR produced worked for GOSPLAN. >RH: But individuals exist and they do sometimes act selfishly (in fact in >capitalism selfish activity is strongly encouraged. Yes, in capitalism selfish behavior is rewarded. It might be useful to make a distinction between selfish behavior and self-interested behavior. I think it is in the majority's individual self-interest to be for socialism since the majority will,individually, benefit from having it. Classic prisoner's dilemma. The social relations of >production would not make any sense if there is not something to relate. >I.e., how do individual relate in production. Again we are dealing with a >particular distortion of Marxism pushed for political reasons. What we want >is a dialectic of the individual and the group. Yes. Sartre's *Critique of Dialectical Reason* is the best work here but by no means is it easy going. Neither is prior to the >other and neither makes any sense without the other. I agree, but how do you square this with marginal analysis? The denial of the >individual is just the sort of philosophy that would allow the sacrifice of >the individual to the "necesities of history". I would imagine that most of >us would want to avoid that. Yes. Analysis that are too structural leave out human agency. Incidentally, that is another serious flaw of NE, its crude and false theory of human agency. best, Sam Pawlett note to Mike L. in lurker-land: Resub! Matthew Shipp was awesome!
