Marx was a young Hegelian, who set out to challenge idealism with dialectical materialism. To be perfectly honest, there is no profit in discussing whether marx was proletarian or bourgeois, or whether the u.s.s.r was socialist. That's not "what we're talking about." That is, that's not of interest to anybody. The question is whether marx's reading of history and his philosophical emphasis on how materialism drives human ways of understand the world, were of importance.
If I were to provide a list of important thinkers who have been largely influenced by marx's thought, it would stretch very very far.
If I were to provide a list of marx's anti-communist critics, I doubt there would be a handful who are taken seriously.
Was his thought revised, over time, by thinkers on the left? Of course.
Lastly, to repeat, marx was not god. He wrote a lot; was brilliant and influential on generations of thinkers, not to mention activists. The attempts to discredit him are not new; they largely originate in public political writers, not in philosophers or serious political thinkers.
I say this because I seriously share many criticisms of Marxist thought, but I don't believe that those old arguments are relevant today.
When you can produce a meaningful refutation of Raymond williams's work on marx, then I'd be interested. I haven't really come across that.
Maybe we are really talking at cross purposes. You are emphasizing the larger political changes, most of which I am lumping into the category analysed by arendt as totalitarian. I am emphasizing the ways Marxist thought influenced generations of major thinkers, including almost all the important postcolonial thinkers and writers of the period of the struggle for independence.
I offered a list of names before. Just consider cesaire and fanon, and tell me why I should listen to the rightwing commentators of today whose goals continue along the lines of those who oppressed Africa from the start.
Best
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 7 May 2018 at 12:04
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Ken.
I'm an embodiment of the unequal distribution of wealth you speak of. I am fascinated by the practical manifestation of the workers creed and the philosophy behind it; the incongruence. To paraphrase it bluntly as WS put it In the 70s in the heyday of Marxist debates on campus:
1. is the university teacher a worker in the same way as a building site worker is?
2. Was Marx's activism realistic in that regard?
3. On his sick bed as the article showed Marx decided to shave his beard in order not to leave to posterity the prophetic look a gambit that did not succeed. Does this not indicate that those who see Marxism as the new religion are correct in that in spite of declarations to the contrary Marx and Freud deliberately constituted themselves as the High Priesthood of the new religion:science? We must remember they came to public consciousness in the scientific heyfays of the 19th century when new scientific disciplines came on stream.
I stand to be corrected but it seems USSR stands for socialist republic (and not communist republic)
In the case of Freud he was categorical on the question of method that the underguarding principle was the 'welthanchauung of science. My point is you dont go to the meticulous extent both went on the fortuitous gamble.
They set out to be the modern equivalent of Mohammed, Jesus and Moses with the third triumvir Einstein joining in the early years of the 20th century.(Jesus and Mohammed were not exactly rich at the commencement of their ministries too, hence their alleged benefactresses)
Freud lamented when the 15 th edition of The Interpretation of Dreams was published that it had not caught global attention as envisaged. They replaced self consciously the miracles of religion with the miracles of science the new zeitgeist. The whole universe was their playground and it is interesting how Marx was reported to be cooperating the archaeology of the universe to that of formation of social systems: a totalising mindset.
O.Agbetuyi
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
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From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: 07/05/2018 15:54 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
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Gloria, I did not know that Comrades Taylor & Francis charge an arm and a leg for a printout of my article. You can always get it through Inter Library Loan. I understand that the ROAPE collective awards grants to scholars based in Africa from portions of the revenues. Taylor & Francis also claims the copyright to the complete works of Marx but www.marxism.org claimed fair use for academic purposes by making the pdf versions available free of charge. The publishers can still sell the hard copies to libraries and expropriate surplus values.
Biko
On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 9:17 AM, Kenneth Harrow
<harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
Targets is a funny word. He embraced the communist party as embodying the working class movement. He lived in relative poverty, making a slight living from writing for newspapers. His writings were political and economic philosophy. He wrote the most famous political tract in history, The Communist Manifesto, which was intended for the broad public.
The real question is, can one be a philosopher and also an activist, and my impression is that marx was both.
The question I have for those espousing anti-communist or anti-marxist views is, what is your real target. For some, totalitarianism is the same as communism; for others, the idea that a working class should live under the thumb of an educated ruling class, called in the past the bourgeoisie, seems normal. For the former point, all I can say is that marx was not stalin, and to take it further, stalin and the Russian communist party and its successors, destroyed the value in the workers movement that put the communists in power. When people became disillusioned with the rigidities of the communist party, they turned to socialism and created socialist parties. Most intellectuals of the 1950s, outside of asia and africa, took that path. By the 1970s, it was hard to find communist intellectuals, unless they were engaged in revolutions or wars, like Vietnam or guinea-bissau.
For the latter point, I would say that you might read some pikkety to get an idea of an economic who challenges the unequal distribution of wealth that marks our times.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 7 May 2018 at 04:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
How many of the 99% of the working classes who were the target of Marx's activism had (and still has) access to Marx's writings? We're they really his targets?
Ayinka Agbetuyi
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: 05/05/2018 14:20 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
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This kind of attack on marx is typical of the red scare anti-communist movement from the 19th century on through the 20th. derrida distinguished between marx and Marxism, or what the various movements made of marx. To equate a figure like stalin with Marxist thought is abusive of history. Stalin is responsible for Stalinism. That he came on the heels of a Marxist revolution doesn't mean that the totalitarian regime he engineering, the purges, the statism, the "revolution in one state," in short the repressive regime, had anything to do with an ideology that conceived of the state "withering away" as the bourgeoisie was converted—not slaughtered—to a class with higher consciousness.
Every one of the reproaches of Marxism is built on this false connection of authoritarian abuse. It really strikes me as a playground level of thought, and it always amazed me that my students would parrot the conflation of Marxist thought and anticommunist propaganda.
There is really a core to this that needs to be reasserted. Marx built his political activism on the idea of mobilizing the working classes, and attempting to put the interests of the working class, the 99% we'd say in this country, above those of the 1% who ruled and imposed their ideology on the rest of society. A simple notion that is replicated again and again. a simple notion of a just society, deflected by pieces like this wall st. editorial.
I don't think we should begin to accept it by acknowledging that the killings and dictatorships of regimes like cambodia's or china's embody the ideals or even ideas articulated by marx. The answer is not that Marxism is responsible for fewer deaths than the conquistadores, but that marx's ideals would run counter to such regimes that represented an abuse of marx's thought.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 4 May 2018 at 15:41
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>, usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Half of the population of Libya was killed by the Italians and one third of Namibia by the Germans.
Has anyone been able to count the dead in the Americas?
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 4, 2018 3:16 PM
To: dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face
Download the Wall Street Journal app here: WSJ.
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