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In reply to OPE-L 2935.
Rakesh: "Somewhere in your paper you criticized Lucio Colletti's
abandoning of
Marxism ...."
I was PRAISING Colletti, for christ sakes! My paper is about the need to
decide among interpretations on the basis of genuinely empirical
criteria, and that is what Colletti did in the end. He was honest:
examining his interpretation of Marx against the empirical evidence,
Colletti concluded that his interpretation was incorrect. His ideas
weren't Marx's ideas, so he broke from Marx. That was the principled
thing to do.
Others have been content to ascribe their own ideas to Marx, irrespective
of empirical evidence to the contrary.
"1. What do you mean by positivism?"
A world-view that measures ideas against what exists, instead of
vice-versa.
Colletti: "if Marx is a scientist, he has to measure his ideas and those
of others against the facts .... The criterion of his critique, in
short, cannot be the *ideal* .... It must be a criterion drawn from and
rooted in reality."
Marx: "the *practice* of philosophy is itself *theoretical*. It is the
*critique* that measures the individual existence by the essence, the
particular reality by the Idea."
Andrew Kliman
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