Ellen Meiksins Wood and ‘Political Marxism’
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For anyone looking for a way into Ellen's work I highly recommend listening to this radio program which highlights and explains the depth and breadth of her work. She really does deserve to be read more widely.http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/1314/mon-20116-remembering-ellen-meiksins-wood
Following is a discussion on the page titled: Ellen Meiksins Wood and ‘Political Marxism’.
Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments!It's been pointed out for a long time that 'Political Marxism' is a 'Marxism' that stresses 'consciousness' ( active class struggle and 'ideological' factors) and 'social production', as did Marx, rather than the simple, and simple-minded, 'materialism' ('being' alone, 'matter', 'bricks and mortar', rather than 'maths and physics') of Engels, Kautsky, 2nd International and Lenin.This also becomes evident by the immense outcry against 'Political Marxism' by the Trotskyists parties, like the SWP, who are 'Engelsian Materialists', and thus stress the power of the 'material' to determine (rather than human agency). This emphasis on the 'material' is a lie, of course, because 'theory' is required to 'practice', as Marx said, and so 'materialism' always requires a 'hidden elite' to provide the missing 'consciousness'.Thus those parties, like the SWP, Militant, WRP, RCP, etc., etc., who claim to be 'materialists' always substitute an elite for the conscious working class. They, of course, see themselves as that elite, and any 'Marxism', like Wood's, that openly states that 'matter' does not determine 'thought', is seen as a threat to their political power over the working class.The 'materialist' parties will not allow the proletariat to develop their own consciousness and agency to the point where the class takes democratic control of 'maths and physics'.'Materialism' separates 'consciousness' from 'matter', and claims that 'matter' determines 'consciousness', and so they claim that anyone, like elite-expert 'physicists' and 'mathematicians', have an access to 'reality' (material conditions) that the entire proletariat can't have, and so their elite-expert activites must be left to their elite-expert control.In effect, 'Political Marxism' means the democratic control by workers of all their production, including maths and physics, because the so-called 'Marxists' of 'materialism' oppose democracy.Any worker interested, simply ask a 'materialist' about democratic control, and they are compelled by their ideology to deny it. They never speak of either 'Political Marxism' or 'Political Materialism', because they think that they alone 'know' 'material conditions', and so workers cannot vote about 'material conditions'.Wood was an important theorist who attempted to bring back 'consciousness', and therefore democracy (as her other books make very clear just by their titles), into 'Marxism', and so she suffered the political and ideological attacks from the SWP materialists, who detest any mention of 'workers' democratic power'.I know, I've been in a 'materialist' party, and was taken in at first, until I realised that the SWP was never going to allow workers to vote upon maths, physics and truth.The 'materialists' claimed that they already knew 'The Truth', before workers had even constructed it.
Though, of course, the subtitle of one of Meiksins Wood's books was "Renewing Historical Materialism"Lbird does have a point, Meiksins does highlight the active party of human agents played in the creation of society, but as always it gets lost in his jumbled ontology and epistemologogy…
DJP wrote:Though, of course, the subtitle of one of Meiksins Wood's books was "Renewing Historical Materialism"Lbird does have a point, Meiksins does highlight the active party of human agents played in the creation of society, but as always it gets lost in his jumbled ontology and epistemologogy…That's the closest you've come for some time, DJP, to even acknowledging that I might 'have a point'.I indeed do 'have a point', and it is both Marx's and Wood's, too.And why you keep hanging onto stressing 'materialism', as if it's of special significance, when for the last 2 1/2 years I've constantly pointed to Marx's 'Idealism Materialism', beats me.The point is, of course, that 'materialism' alone is Engels' misunderstanding of Marx's 'materialism' (meaning 'human social production', as opposed to 'idealism' as 'divine production').Marx could have been clearer, of course, but put into socio-historical context, his 'materialism' clearly encompasses 'ideas and inorganic nature' in a relationship. This relationship is 'idealism-materialism', not a pre-fixed, ahistorical, asocial, 'matter', or 'the physical'.
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