Compressed because busy, maybe I’ll fill in the details later as well as insert links to the posts and notes I refer to below.
I was reading an essay today on the bus about heterosexuality considered as a legal entity. It reminded me of a few things I’ve read about women’s oppression and about slavery - Hartmann’s point about marxism being what she calls sex-blind, work by Boydston and Fortunati and Dalla Costa and others on housework, Tomich on historical theory vs theoretical history (I forget which is which) and how slavery has been constructed as external to capitalism, and Walter Johnson on this same point.
It struck me that perhaps one way to describe an issue here, and part of some people’s well-intentioned rejection of marxism (well intentioned but still wrong, in a baby-and-bathwater kind of way) is that the scope and application of Marx’s work isn’t clear. Obviously it pertains to capitalism, but what precisely does that mean? It means that when X is capitalism Marx’s work pertains to it (I will call this ’scope’), but it doesn’t say what phenomena fall under X. Some things are easy to see. But what about vice squads in the early 20th century US? The other issue is whether Marx’s work is descriptive or invoking causal explanations in a hard sense (I’ll call this ‘application’), as in “Y is a product of X.” Like I said or alluded to in my last post, this was part of my break with a very vulgar marxist group I was close to when I was younger and my own vulgar marxism - the reduction of sexual assault, homophobia, and domestic violence to being solely a product of capitalism and such that the end of capitalism would end those phenomena. I addressed something like this in a thing I wrote on Resnick and Wolff writing on overdetermination and how class is not primary. I do believe class is primary, but I also believe primacy is relative and subjective (this is a restriction of scope) and not largely a matter of causality at least in the hard sense (a restriction of application).
I think this also may be somewhat related to some of NP has written about self-reflexive critical theory, not sure about that (to the degree that self-reflexive means ‘correctly aware of its own scope and application’).
Hey there - I’m so ill at the moment it’s not even funny… So I won’t comment substantively, other than to say: yes, exactly. This is precisely what I think is required: a much more specific sense of what this sort of theory can do - which necessarily means a clearer sense of what it can’t. And as I keep chanting, mantra-like, to my students: the boundedness and the limitations of a thing, are precisely what it useful - these aren’t weakenesses, they are locations - locations from which it becomes possible to move in important directions - but that don’t have any claim on all the possible movements we want to make…
This is probably utterly incoherent - sorry - just… I’m really not coherent right now, and have to teach anyway, so that’s sort of making things worse. I’ve written (much too occasionally - but I just haven’t had time) about interpentetrations between the sorts of thing I think Marx does well, and issues relating to gender dynamics. I don’t think this necessarily has to be thought in terms even of what is “primary” - other than in the contextualised way that we have to make grounded political decisions about what sorts of actions we’re going to make - i.e., “primacy” needn’t be thought in ontological terms…
But I’m making no sense… Sorry… Maybe when I’ve glued myself back together and don’t feel like my brain is floating several feet outside its skull…
Take care…
Comment by N. Pepperell — August 25, 2008 @ 8:38 pm
The search for The Grand Thoeory of Correctness-About-All-Things” is not useful.Marx (helped)build upon a living, dynamic system of thought to be applied to historical and present (in his time)situations. The future, he allowed, might require revision, as it obviously has. I am appalled at the lack of respect he gets from the Left-Left and at how lonely i feel the instant I declare myself a “Marxist”( as if that were ALL that I am!)
Comment by troutsky — August 29, 2008 @ 1:24 pm
hi NP, Trout,
Thanks, both of you. I like how Troutsky put it - being a marxist does not mean one is only a marxist. It would be interesting to try and chart the times and places when people within the marxist tradition have tried to make marxism a theory of everything. I remember reading once, maybe somewhere in Gramsci (I’ve not really read him, just poked around a bit) some comment about how the whole ‘the revolution is inevitable’ thing is basically just a way for people to try to hang in there. That seems to me the sort of overstepping the bounds of the proper scope of marxism (not that I know what that is, but I think when I see it I do know what is NOT the proper scope) from within the marxist tradition that people outside the tradition can use to justify wholesale rejections of marxism. As opposed to rejecting bad arguments which not all marxists hold. NP, I had in mind exactly this when I mentioned the primacy of class - primacy “in the contextualised way that we have to make grounded political decisions about what sorts of actions we’re going to make”.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — August 29, 2008 @ 3:14 pm