stuartw2112
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DJP: Well, each to their own. Graeber is not the writer Marx was, but he has written the most important and interesting book from the left since Capital, in my view.TWC: If you read the posts I have written to you, you would know I have already left the party, have already made clear some of my reasons for doing so, and I am under no moral obligation to pen detailed criticisms of anything at your bidding. I've leave it there, thanks all for the chat.
When I say knows it inside out, I mean, he knows it inside out. I don't mean he repeats it verbatim for the satisfaction of dogmatists and sectarians. Twc: I find the 'standard theory' – if you want to give such a sketchy and metaphorical piece of storytelling such a ludicrously grand title – to be roughly OK, as a roughly right picture of the world. But you're asking me to believe in it. Sorry, but I don't do that kind of religion.
"Sorry Stuart, but that is utter nonsense."Oh dear, I thought it might be! Utter nonsense? Nothing in it at all? "For genuine respect for human values, reread Engels’s wonderful “Origin of the Family”, which is genuine anthropology. Don’t fall for the consciously anti-marxian vulgarities that parade under the name of anthropology—see the Chris Knight reference I gave earlier. [Anthroplogy became deliberately anti-marxian in exactly the same way that economics did.]"I have read Engels, I studied under Chris Knight for years, I have read Graeber, who knows his Marx inside out, and discusses Morgan wonderfully in his book Debt, and I have read a fair chunk of Thompson, including his wonderful biography of Morris. I have also read Marx and Engels. I have to say, I've not found "utter nonsense" in any of these writers, or in very many at all. There's something to learn in them all."E. P. Thompson, great and all as he was, and superb as his biography of William Morris remains, was tainted by Leninism."You say that EP Thompson was "tainted by Leninism", and then in the very next sentence say that I should "Take heart from the fact that the socialist party is the only bearer of socialism" – pure Leninism! Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that in thine own eye?! You have a very aggressive and defensive style, twc, which will inevitably make people ask what it is you are defending. You give your own answer: you're "defending our standard theory". I can assure you, it's not worth defending. It's a bit like my favourite piece of wisdom about an organisation's leadership: "If the leadership is indispensible, then the organisation is dispensible." Same with your theory. If it needs defending, it's dead.
Relevant to our long and varied discussion here…On EP Thompson from historian John Rule (Or: what we can learn from Thompson (and David Graeber)): "Socialist humanism would, Thompson hoped, provide the liberating approach around which a new left movement could emerge. In simple terms it would restore to the Marxist tradition (after 1956 Thompson tended to describe himself as a historian working in the Marxist tradition), the dimension which had been partly lost by Marx himself as he moved on from the writings of his youth to the economic certainties of Capital. It had certainly been lost from the Soviet version of communism. Later Thompson recalled his sense of a ‘real silence’ in Marx, lying in the ‘area that anthropologists would call value systems’. The ‘degeneration of the theoretical vocabulary of mainstream Marxism’ had led to a desensitization of human qualities such as imagination and passion. Marx may have replaced the classical economists' economic man with ‘revolutionary economic man’, but the injury lay in defining man as essentially economic in the first place." H/T Lynn
Who knows? What makes a flower beautiful?I didn't make this up, as I'm sure you know. It's physicists and mathematicians who like a theory to be "beautiful".
At least, what I just said for the natural sciences. For the social sciences, the attempt to do likewise ends up in absurdity. So for that, go for the best story telling – the ones that seem true and pay respect to the richness and diversity of life.
"For starters the question remains when faced with competing 'stories' how do we go about choosing one of them."If Kuhn is right, you don't. You just wait till the last old fucker desperately clinging on to the old ideas is dead, and the new generation can take up the better ones.
Thanks LB, I enjoyed it too. Don't think by the end we were really disagreeing about all that much, which is nice! All the best
Sorry, but I think LB is doing such a lousy job at keeping up his end of the argument that I'm going to take it over. The reason, Stuart, that you think you can get everything you need from the FT, and can make some kind of critical sense of it, is because you have had such a thorough grounding in Marxism and socialism, thanks to the SPGB and your own efforts. Even if you are not always conscious of it, this provides a narrative framework, an ideology, a theory, through which you can observe the otherwise disconnected facts presented in the Economist, and make sense of them. This is what Marxism, and all science, provides – a story that makes sense of the facts. As time goes on, you're not even aware that it is a story – it's just "how things are", and it takes an effort of will and thinking and imagination to even begin to see things differently.To which I would say, yes LB, precisely, but sometimes we do need to see things differently if we are to learn anything new.
And yes, I am an individual – a scientifically well established fact. Assuming I don't have an identical twin, I am genetically unique. I am a free agent. Anthropologically, I am also an individual, even if one that takes on a variety of roles: brother, partner, worker, friend, enemy, etc. "You are all individuals!""I'm not!"
