Bookmark: Marxian methods
Haven't been on LJ much lately. If you want more Fodder, I've been writing recently for the Solidarity Webzine and our campus grad student organizing committee against budget cuts, fee hikes, declining access, and austerity in public education. Check it out!
Next quarter I'm teaching my own class for the first time. It's called "Philosophies of Praxis." I'm getting excited about the material. I'm also angry at myself for waiting too long to get going with really high-level preparation. Have submerged myself in that the last few days, up to the neck, and I think ... it will be okay, in some fashion. Probably they'll even have a reader during week 1. Still, I wish I had been at this stage three months ago, so that I could have shared my syllabus with friends, comrades, and co-thinkers, gotten feedback, tweaked things, etc. I guess I can still make some changes if I want and put additional readings on the course website.
Also, I'm nervous. 120 students (and three TAs)! That's a lot of eyes looking at me. A lot of chances for my stuttering, which has been relatively low-level lately, to ramp up and shut me down.
So, negative feelings acknowledged. I'm also excited! And I think I may use this space to explore ideas that come up around the course which may or may not make it into lectures. This entry is really an initial bookmark for that kind of thinking.
Non-dogmatic Marxists often talk about Marxism as a method, meaning to contrast this notion of method with the idea of Marxism as a fixed set of ideological propositions. But what is the method of Marxism; how would we name this method without referencing the founder? Is the method itself more general than the founder and the work that explicitly claims him as forefather, with all of the troublesome stuff around patrimony and legitimacy suggested there? If we can't name the method without referencing the founder, then it's not really a method; it would be more like a religion. If people who think they violently oppose the founder find something they can't do without coming out of thinking by / in / around him, then it's a method. Or, more than one method.
There are at least two or three mainstream possibilities. Historical materialism is perhaps the broadest, most inclusive, and least specific. Is there a specific purchase of the notion of historical materialism within Marxist thought? Does it leave some things out? I should investigate this more. Let's leave to the side a Stalinist bastard cousin of this term, dialectical materialism. I'm inclined to find little that's intellectually redeemable about this term, save as a descriptor for an intellectual method that sought to refound Marxism on the basis of bad, positivist sociology. Not even bothering to teach this stuff in my course, though in a grad seminar I would want to. Am I underestimating its continued importance? My sense is that even most people in most of the popular frontist and third worldist left at this point don't privilege this "method;" its attractiveness was based mainly on the state power it no longer holds. But I may be wrong. If Marxism were ever relevant in a mass sense again, I suspect some version of this would crop up again, even without strict Stalinist patrimony. It's easy to import satisfaction with authority into a revolutionary process. It's comforting. It makes us think we don't have to work so hard all the time. It's familiar.
The method of the late Marx: critique of political economy. It is interesting that interest in this method has revived somewhat in sectors of the humanities. People in my department shortly after the economic crisis of 2008 were proclaiming something along the lines of political economy to be the next big thing. But here we should observe this slippage. Liberals (with a few notable exceptions such as Fukuyama and Robert Reich) have stopped doing political economy. The unity of the political and the economic, acknowledged by Smith and Ricardo, has been suppressed almost completely in neoclassical economics and even most of mainstream, quantitative political science. Thus in the revival of political economy on the Left, in the humanities, we have critical political economy or radical political economy. Not "critique of," because there's nothing much to critique. (Though I suppose I could rewrite one of my dissertation chapters as a critique of Reich, and that would actually be a worthwhile exercise.) There's something at stake in this slippage. We do not necessarily have the arsenal of tools at hand to "do political economy" that the liberals would have. It is easier to critique than to construct a system of understanding contemporary political economy which is also aligned with a politics of its destruction. I think the temptation of crisis theory, which appears within this milieu as based on the utmost statistical rigor, in fact may suggest a certain intellectual laziness.
Next we come to the Frankfurt School and its progeny: critical theory. One could also, I suppose, add cultural studies as a method here, and it would be interesting to note where the methods of critical theory and cultural studies are united and where they are opposed. It seems to me that the term "critical theory" can never really escape its Marxian heritage, even when employed by theorists who do not explicitly reference the founder. "Cultural studies," on the other hand, was always a bit more of an intellectual bastard, and very early in its career it seems to have given up the quest and even the desire for "legitimation" as part of the Marxian brood.
My hypothesis is that philosophy of praxis is a fourth method that could be fleshed out, suggested by the early Marx (especially the Theses on Feuerbach, but also the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and even The German Ideology) and, especially, Gramsci. One could argue that it is a radicalization of the materialist standpoint, but one that takes social relations, not economics or "matter" in the inert, physical sense (or even "bodies" in the feminist sense) as what "matters" for materialism. Praxis takes on a methodological and epistemological primacy for theoretical activity, both prescriptively and descriptively, and, since praxis always is the real expression of a theory, indeed a more real expression of the "truth" of that theory than any given theorization of the theory, we could say that the hermeneutics of this situation are inescapable. Not immediately directive or unidirectional; for dialectical materialism, "theory was the chairman and praxis the worker" - we can see immediately how depressingly traditional and unreconstructedly bourgeois was this method. No, for philosophy of praxis the relationship is always circular, but praxis still has a certain primacy of tempo if nothing else.
Furthermore, philosophy of praxis in this sense is a method that has mattered for lots of theory-praxis relationships which would not claim any "legitimate" Marxian heritage if, indeed, they would claim any at all. In this sense it is truly a method, and I think it may be as important as historical materialism, critical political economy, or critical theory as a name for what Marxism gives to revolutionaries of the future. Of course here exactly I'm stamping the claim of heritage that I've said non-Marxian philosophies of praxis neither need nor want; and this is a real contradiction. Still taken by the phrase, "Marxism and feminism: an unhappy marriage."
Have I forgotten any other important methods which arguably attend directly to the Marxian corpus?
Next quarter I'm teaching my own class for the first time. It's called "Philosophies of Praxis." I'm getting excited about the material. I'm also angry at myself for waiting too long to get going with really high-level preparation. Have submerged myself in that the last few days, up to the neck, and I think ... it will be okay, in some fashion. Probably they'll even have a reader during week 1. Still, I wish I had been at this stage three months ago, so that I could have shared my syllabus with friends, comrades, and co-thinkers, gotten feedback, tweaked things, etc. I guess I can still make some changes if I want and put additional readings on the course website.
Also, I'm nervous. 120 students (and three TAs)! That's a lot of eyes looking at me. A lot of chances for my stuttering, which has been relatively low-level lately, to ramp up and shut me down.
So, negative feelings acknowledged. I'm also excited! And I think I may use this space to explore ideas that come up around the course which may or may not make it into lectures. This entry is really an initial bookmark for that kind of thinking.
Non-dogmatic Marxists often talk about Marxism as a method, meaning to contrast this notion of method with the idea of Marxism as a fixed set of ideological propositions. But what is the method of Marxism; how would we name this method without referencing the founder? Is the method itself more general than the founder and the work that explicitly claims him as forefather, with all of the troublesome stuff around patrimony and legitimacy suggested there? If we can't name the method without referencing the founder, then it's not really a method; it would be more like a religion. If people who think they violently oppose the founder find something they can't do without coming out of thinking by / in / around him, then it's a method. Or, more than one method.
There are at least two or three mainstream possibilities. Historical materialism is perhaps the broadest, most inclusive, and least specific. Is there a specific purchase of the notion of historical materialism within Marxist thought? Does it leave some things out? I should investigate this more. Let's leave to the side a Stalinist bastard cousin of this term, dialectical materialism. I'm inclined to find little that's intellectually redeemable about this term, save as a descriptor for an intellectual method that sought to refound Marxism on the basis of bad, positivist sociology. Not even bothering to teach this stuff in my course, though in a grad seminar I would want to. Am I underestimating its continued importance? My sense is that even most people in most of the popular frontist and third worldist left at this point don't privilege this "method;" its attractiveness was based mainly on the state power it no longer holds. But I may be wrong. If Marxism were ever relevant in a mass sense again, I suspect some version of this would crop up again, even without strict Stalinist patrimony. It's easy to import satisfaction with authority into a revolutionary process. It's comforting. It makes us think we don't have to work so hard all the time. It's familiar.
The method of the late Marx: critique of political economy. It is interesting that interest in this method has revived somewhat in sectors of the humanities. People in my department shortly after the economic crisis of 2008 were proclaiming something along the lines of political economy to be the next big thing. But here we should observe this slippage. Liberals (with a few notable exceptions such as Fukuyama and Robert Reich) have stopped doing political economy. The unity of the political and the economic, acknowledged by Smith and Ricardo, has been suppressed almost completely in neoclassical economics and even most of mainstream, quantitative political science. Thus in the revival of political economy on the Left, in the humanities, we have critical political economy or radical political economy. Not "critique of," because there's nothing much to critique. (Though I suppose I could rewrite one of my dissertation chapters as a critique of Reich, and that would actually be a worthwhile exercise.) There's something at stake in this slippage. We do not necessarily have the arsenal of tools at hand to "do political economy" that the liberals would have. It is easier to critique than to construct a system of understanding contemporary political economy which is also aligned with a politics of its destruction. I think the temptation of crisis theory, which appears within this milieu as based on the utmost statistical rigor, in fact may suggest a certain intellectual laziness.
Next we come to the Frankfurt School and its progeny: critical theory. One could also, I suppose, add cultural studies as a method here, and it would be interesting to note where the methods of critical theory and cultural studies are united and where they are opposed. It seems to me that the term "critical theory" can never really escape its Marxian heritage, even when employed by theorists who do not explicitly reference the founder. "Cultural studies," on the other hand, was always a bit more of an intellectual bastard, and very early in its career it seems to have given up the quest and even the desire for "legitimation" as part of the Marxian brood.
My hypothesis is that philosophy of praxis is a fourth method that could be fleshed out, suggested by the early Marx (especially the Theses on Feuerbach, but also the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and even The German Ideology) and, especially, Gramsci. One could argue that it is a radicalization of the materialist standpoint, but one that takes social relations, not economics or "matter" in the inert, physical sense (or even "bodies" in the feminist sense) as what "matters" for materialism. Praxis takes on a methodological and epistemological primacy for theoretical activity, both prescriptively and descriptively, and, since praxis always is the real expression of a theory, indeed a more real expression of the "truth" of that theory than any given theorization of the theory, we could say that the hermeneutics of this situation are inescapable. Not immediately directive or unidirectional; for dialectical materialism, "theory was the chairman and praxis the worker" - we can see immediately how depressingly traditional and unreconstructedly bourgeois was this method. No, for philosophy of praxis the relationship is always circular, but praxis still has a certain primacy of tempo if nothing else.
Furthermore, philosophy of praxis in this sense is a method that has mattered for lots of theory-praxis relationships which would not claim any "legitimate" Marxian heritage if, indeed, they would claim any at all. In this sense it is truly a method, and I think it may be as important as historical materialism, critical political economy, or critical theory as a name for what Marxism gives to revolutionaries of the future. Of course here exactly I'm stamping the claim of heritage that I've said non-Marxian philosophies of praxis neither need nor want; and this is a real contradiction. Still taken by the phrase, "Marxism and feminism: an unhappy marriage."
Have I forgotten any other important methods which arguably attend directly to the Marxian corpus?