I'd like to talk about Marxism from an entirely philosophical point of view, although I suppose the methods of economics could enter into the discussion later. Now, I am not a Marxist, although I once was. Really, it was education that saved me, reading critical reflections on Marxism as a theory by both Marxists and non-Marxists. I soon realized that Marxism is not, by any means, "scientific" socialism. No socialist revolution as Marx envisioned it will ever occur. The excuses made up by Marcuse and Adorno are exactly that - both excuses and made up. They are ad hoc hypotheses, nothing more. If a Marxist still claims to be a Marxist for ethical reasons, then he is not a Marxist but a socialist, because Marxists view the revolution as a matter of strict causal necessity, socialists on the other hand are moralists. Now, since this is a hippy website, there surely must be quite a few socialists and I don't want to argue with them since I'm not interested in an ethical debate that would probably belong in the politics forum. But if there are some Marxists out there, who believe that the revolution is inevitible and all the other dogma, then here's a thread devoted entirely to Marxism with none of the bleedingheart stuff. You should be downright excited to participate.
well, I certainly do believe in the Hegelian dialectic, but I am not sure about Marx's interpretation of it. I do believe that capitalism and the growth of the middle class has produced an antithesis that it has to contend with. but I don’t think that it s a struggle between two classes, but a struggle between two philosophies. And for that reason, I don't agree with Marx's dismissal of an ideology as a false consciousness. However, I am not a Hegelian idealist either, and I agree with the pragmatists that everybody has personal philosophy that is just the way of acting out in the world. And as I see it, capitalism has made all our philosophies very individualistic and laissez-faire, and has produced as its antithesis, the philosophy of Statism, which saw its fiercest expression in the philosophy of Mussolini and Fascist Italy, and now lingers on in the non-Libertarian left. Thus I belive that the dialectic is not the struggle between the proletariat and the capitalists. But it is the struggle between individualism and statism. I think that the resolution of this dialectic will usher in the organic state.
We could argue over all of those things for the next year, but there's one I'd like to focus in on in particular. You say that you agree with the Hegelian dialectic but not Marx's interpretation of it. What exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean that you disagree with Marx's historical materialism, the entire meta-philosophical program of the Young Hegelians, or something else? Now, one book I've wanted to read but have never got around to it is Hegel's "Logic". I have a basic understanding of the dialectic, probably a little better than most people; but if you've read "Logic" then you should be talking about it and not me. In my opinion, there seems to be nothing "logical" about it; Hegel inherits the same mistakes Kant made, then philosophy was a desert until... Frege, maybe? Anyway, looking forward to your reply.
I do not disagree with, what you called the "meta-philosphical program" of the Young Hegelians. I think that Hegel had the right Idea, but he expressed it in overly mystical terms, and often muted his radical thrust, possibly to avoid persecution in 19th century Prussia. I think the Young Hegelian endaevor at the "transformal criticism" of Hegel was absolutely necessary given the nature of most Hegelian texts. What I disagree with is Marx's dismissal of ideology, as a "false consciousness" and Marx's claim that historical progress consists solely of inter-class struggles. I see "ideology" as personal belief systems, that is determined by much more than just material conditions. Now, most Marxists claim that religion and much of philosophy are "false" and alienating to the worker, and that it distracts them from their material conditions. But I tend to diasagree, and see religion and philosophy as a set of rules for operating in society, and indeed, as set of rules that binds together, the people who follow it. Thus, as I have said earlier, people from different classes can bind together in a syndicalist form of organisation, given that they share a common set of rules for operating in the society. Often, these rules are called "cultural values" and culture wars are struggles beetween two different "cultural values" I think culture wars, and not class wars are the animating mechanism behind much of human history, and this is fact is evident in Hegel's "Philosophy of History", although he puts it in "idealistic" terms. I just think that Hegelian Philosophy can be interpreted in "materialistic" terms without being a Marxist. and about "Logic": No, I haven't read it yet, but I will probably get to it. Hegel fascinates me to quite an extent, there is so much to his philosophy and so many ways to interpret it. Hegel was also a great improvement over Kant because he introduced "Phenomenological" thinking in philosophy and inspired evolutionary thought that Darwin used to explain the natural world.
By "mystical," do you mean metaphysical? If so, then I certainly agree. But of course, the Young Hegelians were still materialists (Stirner excluded), and materialism is still a metaphysics. Materialism is a lot easier to handle than idealism, and it was its materialism that made Marxism seem "scientific." And it does indeed appear to be scientific relative to the miserable excuses for sociology available at the time, like Comte for example. But at the same time, sociology is not a natural science and probably shouldn't be treated as such. So it just seems elementary that some non-material forces, such as ideology, certainly do influence human behaviour. Now, Marx amounts conflicts caused by ideology, which could be extended to include religious wars, fascism, etc. as sort of hiccups in time, not really all that significant. But to go about prescribing which issues should be important to which classes is not what natural scientists who describe their field of study do. Adorno, Marcuse, and them do deal with fascism and treat it as very significant, but that's just an ad hoc hypothesis and we can deal with that later. It certainly can. As I wrote above, Stirner the egoist anarchist was not a materialist, strictly speaking. Of course, Hegel's philosophy is extremely systematic and extremely influencial. Hegel was a brilliant critical thinker in that he finally brought closure to Kant's philosophy and expanded upon Kant's transcendental dialectic to build his own that was capable of solving virtually any problem (Hegel himself never uses the words "thesis," "antithesis," or "synthesis," but you can't turn two pages in Kant's Critique without seeing them. It's really interesting to chart the history of the Hegelian dialectic. Of course, it goes all the way back to Socrates, but I've found that it really doesn't take on some of the characteristics of Hegelianism until Hamann's doctrine of the union of opposites. Anyway, I'm babbling but my point is that Hegel is certainly interesting. I'm not so sure if he was an "improvement" on Kant though. It seems to me that Kant is far more read today than Hegel.
Yes, to a certain degree, I mean "metaphysical" when I use the word mystical. While I acknowledge that materialism or physicalism is yet another metaphysical system, I find idealism to be much more mystical because of the rather obvious reason that it is more "distant" from what scientific opinion holds to be the cause of human behaviour, i.e, "human drives". For this reason, I feel that what animates human beings, and hence animates history, is not some absolute spirit but our drives. The formation of ideas are guided by these drives more than they are guided by the conditions under which we labour, and one of our strongest drives is the drive to seek out an "ideological family", i.e, a group of individuals that share and act under the same ideology. Both psychology and sociology have come a long way since the days of Marx, and as you have said, later day Marxists have been forced to amend their beliefs, as Marx would have, had he witnessed modern history and modern advances in the human sciences. Capitalism, however, had unfolded to quite a degree in Marx's time, so he was able to do a good analysis of it as we see in most of his works. And overall, he did a good diagnostic of a laissez-faire society. However, his predictions as to the future of the capitalistic society (namely, its violent collapse) seem somewhat contrived. Although, as I have said that I wholeheartedly believe in the dialectic, I do not think that the collapse of the capitalistic society will be violent one. The Marxist exaggeration of the consequences of alienated labour as an unsolvable problem, leading to the destabilisation of society is the chief justification of a belief that our society will see a violent worker's revolution, but refinements in capitalism has largely placated the discontentment among the working masses. However, we see that it has mostly been done through the identification of the labour group with an "ideological family" that views belief in the capitalist systems as a part of its ideology. An instance of this would be United States in the 1980s, where Ronald Reagan attracted blue-collar and union votes, because the working classes chose to associate itself with the ideological family of the emerging new right. In other places, such as Japan, the working classes have been placated and assimilated into the capitalist system, through the development of the corporation itself into a second family for the workers, where workers are willing to sublimate their good for the good of the corporation. And there is quite a conformity of ideology among the workers in the same corporation, regardless of position within the corporate hierarchy. Although Marx views this "placation" of the lower classes in a negative light as a process by which the worker is "deceived", I see it positively as a move towards a more cohesive society, with the "organic state" as its final goal. It seems the same way to me and it is probably so because Kant is more of a "neutral" figure in philosophy than Hegel is, and it may also be because, the political theories of Hegel have been largely maligned.
