Well, the fall semester is upon us and it is time for me once more to offer my services as a zoom visitor to anyone teaching a course at a community college, undergraduate college, graduate University, or adult education program who would like me to visit a class. Because I teach on Mondays, that day is out but any other day is fine and remember, my fee is quite reasonable, namely zero.
I hope that your offer of free class visits continues next January-April 2023 semester when I am teaching Theories of Justice (4th year undergrad) and might be able to get a technician to help with the teleconferencing at UPEI (I may have to go to specially equipped classroom, not the usual unequipped room they give to small philosophy classes here). Other retired philosophers should also imitate your example and help the next generation of teachers enliven their classes, if time and technology permits.
ReplyDeleteBut back to Marx and writing about Marx or what has been missed in Marx by all those worried about real understanding (your previous post on essay topics). There are two main approaches to choose between: a) pure Marx treated as some kind of self-sufficient genius; b) mongrel Marxism (neo-Marxism) which means Marx plus another philosopher (such as Marx supplemented by Freud as Marcuse directs). The problem with the pure Marx approach is that Marx is stuck in his time and culture, and absolutely ignorant about so much that happened since his time.
So scholars have to keep trying re-combinations of Marx such as Marx supplemented by Nietzsche, or Marx with Marcuse, or Habermas, etc. I am starting to think that we should expand Marx by not just strengthening his thought with Marcuse, but all of the Sixties liberation gurus together: Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd), Adorno (The Jargon of Authenticity), Marcuse (One-dimensional Man), Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex), and Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali and so on.
In particular, Marx needs to be put into larger context of Paul Goodman's narrative about incomplete or interrupted revolutions or compromised revolutions (Growing Up Absurd, pages 195-207). The identification of the criteria for distinguishing good social changes from the wrong forms of society is complicated because there are no self-validating or eternal categories and fixed jargon for all future social critics, there is only a language game of keeping up with reality as it evolves. Each generation must voice and re-work the basic categories of its particular critique of the currently oppressive ideology. Marx was a "sickly scholar" according to Jerrold Siegel (Marx's fate, p 382-7) and must have realized that his jargon of economic determinism was embedded in time and could not be perfected to apply forever in the future. Marx became an "ironist" (in Rorty's sense) about his jargon, his followers read his jargon like metaphysicians and led us into error.
I can't imagine a class in social thought that would not benefit from the professor's contribution.--It seems to me that Tony Couture's division of approaches to Marx into 'pure' and 'mongrel' (where 'mongrel' = Marx + X (Nietzsche or Marcuse or Habermas (!)) misses a major part of the interpretation and criticism of Marx of the past century, namely treating Marx's oeuvre as not wholly internally consistent, and further drawing out and elaborating one aspect of it. The original instance of this is dividing Marx into early Marx and later Marx, with much of the tradition of Western Marxism favoring the former. A more recent move is to prefer The Grundrisse to Capital. It seems to me that in English the most important instances of this style of approach in past decades are Paul Burkett's and John Foster Bellamy's emphasis on an ecological dimension in Marx; Alasdair MacIntyre's emphasis on an incomplete Aristotelean dimension (see inter alia his essay 'Theses on Feuerbach: The Road not Taken" in the MacIntyre Reader); and Moishe Postone's account of Marx on abstract labor in Time, Labor, and Social Domination. (Postone's account has been further developed in the outstandingly original and profound book by Martin Hägglund, This Life. For a brief summary of Hägglund's arguments and his use of Marx, see (of course! Why bother reading anything else?) my little review: https://www.academia.edu/39360767/Critical_Notice_Martin_H%C3%A4gglund_This_Life_Secular_Faith_and_Spiritual_Freedom_2019_)
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