Louis Proyect August 2016: n+1 & NLR
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On n+1https://louisproyect.org/2016/08/19/n1-syria-and-the-democratic-party/On NLRhttps://louisproyect.org/2016/08/15/who-is-gareth-stedman-jones-and-why-is-he-saying-such-stupid-things-about-marx/
jondwhite wrote:On NLRhttps://louisproyect.org/2016/08/15/who-is-gareth-stedman-jones-and-why-is-he-saying-such-stupid-things-about-marx/Thanks for that link, jdw.Neither Gareth Stedman Jones nor Louis Proyect seem to understand Marx.GSJ can go ignored, because I don't think anyone here will be giving him any space whatsoever. LP at comment 2 gives a link to a Weekly Worker article on "Humans, nature and dialectics", which is the usual Leninist guff.http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1057/humans-nature-and-dialectics/These people never mention proletarians creating their world, which is the central argument by Marx.
jondwhite wrote:I knew you would be interested in the article on NLR and Engels!Well, I'm open-minded enough to keep following up any links, books, pamphlets, articles, etc., that are provided by comrades like you, in an attempt to either find the key to destroy what I'm arguing, or to strengthen what I've come to understand by Marx's ideas.Of course, it's open to anyone to accuse me of being biased to 'my' views, but I know myself well enough to know that I'll happily reject my previously-held beliefs if I can justify that action, having done so a number of times in my life.All I can say is that I'm yet to come across any arguments that undermine my view of what Marx was arguing – that workers create their own world, and that this creation must be democratically organised – so I continue to search, and thus strengthen my initally tentative ideas, which I've developed tremendously since I first posted here.
LBird wrote:Neither Gareth Stedman Jones nor Louis Proyect seem to understand Marx.GSJ can go ignored, because I don't think anyone here will be giving him any space whatsoever..We may have to as he's got a new book on Marx out next month:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674971615Anyway, trying to get a review copy.
ALB wrote:LBird wrote:Neither Gareth Stedman Jones nor Louis Proyect seem to understand Marx.GSJ can go ignored, because I don't think anyone here will be giving him any space whatsoever..We may have to as he's got a new book on Marx out next month:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674971615Anyway, trying to get a review copy.
If you get hold of a review copy, and recommend that it's worth reading, I'll buy a copy.From what I know of the development of GSJ, I wouldn't have thought it worth reading (in the sense that I've got better things to do with my reading time), but if you think that he helps us to understand Marx and workers' democracy, I'll give it a whirl.If it's the usual academic elitism, for those who have a 'special consciousness', I probably won't bother.
Sounds as if he might be covering the same ground as this other recent biographer of Marx:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2013/no-1309-september-2013/book-review-karl-marx-nineteenth-century-lifeProbably a better approach than a hagiography.
ALB wrote:Sounds as if he might be covering the same ground as this other recent biographer of Marx:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2013/no-1309-september-2013/book-review-karl-marx-nineteenth-century-lifereviewer wrote:His summaries of Marx’s philosophical and political views are accurate enough…I had to smile at this, ALB.Is Sperber an Engelsist Materialist, too? No offence meant, but I rather think that 'accuracy' is always defined from a viewpoint.
Two more reviews of Stedman Joneshttp://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2016/2456'Stalinicos'http://isj.org.uk/marx-deflated/
The New Yorker has a long article on Marx that is an interesting read with some things said that could be an interesting debate.http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/karl-marx-yesterday-and-today
jondwhite wrote:Two more reviews of Stedman Joneshttp://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2016/2456'Stalinicos'http://isj.org.uk/marx-deflated/I thought the second one, by Alex Callincos, the SWP leader, was going to argue that Marx was a proto-Bolshevik but it doesn't. It even contains this refutation of the view that Marx thought that capitalism would collapse economically:
Quote:Stedman Jones argues Marx abandoned his critique of political economy because “he had not been able to sustain his original depiction of capital as an organism whose continuous and unstoppable spiral of growth from inconspicuous beginnings in antiquity to global supremacy would soon encounter world-wide collapse”.15 But nowhere in Marx’s writings of the critical period 1857-67 does he claim that capitalism is heading towards economic breakdown. His initial six-book plan of the Critique of Political Economy culminated in a volume on “World Market and Crises”—crises are not the same as collapse. Marx actually wrote: “Permanent crises do not exist”.16 His fullest discussion, in Capital, Volume III (dismissed in a sentence by Stedman Jones), portrays a spiral movement in which the tendency of the rate of profit to fall interacts with financial busts and economic slumps thanks to which capital is destroyed and exploitation increased sufficiently to allow the engine of accumulation to resume. Marx’s discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall concludes in the original manuscript with the sentence, cut by Engels: “Hence crises”. The “vicious circle” of boom and bust will continue as long as capitalism exists.17alanjjohnstone wrote:The New Yorker has a long article on Marx that is an interesting read with some things said that could be an interesting debate.http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/karl-marx-yesterday-and-todayarticle wrote:This was the essence of Marx’s Hegelianism. Hegel argued that history was the progress of humanity toward true freedom, by which he meant self-mastery and self-understanding, seeing the world without illusions—illusions that we ourselves have created. The Young Hegelians’ controversial example of this was the Christian God. (This is what Feuerbach wrote about.) We created God, and then pretended that God created us. We hypostatized our own concept and turned it into something “out there” whose commandments (which we made up) we struggle to understand and obey. We are supplicants to our own fiction.[my bold]We are supplicants to our own fiction, 'matter', according to the Religious Materialists. It is simply 'something out there', which we must simply 'obey'. 'Matter' is our 'illusion', our 'god'.We can change it.
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