You're answering someone else. I was not defending Marxism beyond first
principles. I was very careful not to propose a means to the end or to
support history's horrors. The end, I think, is clear, however, and I can't
see why striving for some sort of economic equality would necessarily lead
to Stalin.
What I was proposing is a compassionate understanding of the anguish that
causes people to be leftists. I do wonder if academic leftists in the UK
are as monolithic a group as you seem to think. Perhaps they are--I have no
idea.
The key sentence in my earlier post was "That [the Marxist solution] didn't
work for a whole complex of reasons doesn't make the impulse to change what
one finds intolerable--what one ought to find intolerable--worthy of
scorn." In my neophyte's fervor I thought that I was being angry, not
patronizing, but you can read as you wish. Remember that all I had to go on
was your words.
Incidentally, going back to those words, do you really think that Marx
himself is responsible for all those miseries?
At 11:26 AM 7/5/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>Dear All,
>I'm tempted to leave it at that after Alan B's touching affirmation and Mark
>W's conversion to irony, but I've just spent 2 hours travelling on a bus
>through one of England's most economically-exploited & underdeveloped areas
>(in which I live & work), planning my response, so here goes...
>
>Mark - You approach your subject with all the patronising fervour of a
>newly-graduated economics teacher addressing a refractory first-year. I
>don't need this, really. I have no difficulty appreciating that exploitation
>exists (in the UK we tend to favour Bangladeshis rather than Mexicans) and
>having first read Marx at age 13 I know full well that his starting-point
>was a horror of the conditions that made such exploitation economically
>necessary to capitalism as he saw it. However, you know & I know that
>Marxism doesn't stop there. It purports to offer a total package of
>revolutionary change which would affect the slightest detail of the way in
>which it's possible to live (see Peter Riley's posts _passim_) This is where
>the discussion-strand on 'the totality of relations' came in, the big
>questions in my view being (1) who has the right to decide what such a
>totality consists in, and (2) what happens when something comes along that
>falls outside this ? We already have plentiful evidence in the dismal annals
>of 20th century practical Marxism to indicate the answers, and alongside
>this a continuing culture of academic leftism that insists that all this was
>merely the product of bureaucratic mistakes and evil individuals, the
>underlying theory being pure and sound. Rubbish ! When I was a Marxist
>(yes, and it lasted for about 20 years !) it was generally agreed that the
>highest form of theory was Praxis, i.e. what people actually _do_. Quod
>erat demonstrandum.
>
>Henry (le Facteur de la Verite) - I'm with you on antiismism, but I'd be
>inclined to go easy on the sneers at the middle-classes: I suspect that most
>denizens of this List would qualify.
>
>Oh, and Dave B - you are Dave Spart of "Private Eye" and I claim my £200.
>
>Cheers Phil
>
>
>
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