-------- Original Message -------- Subject: "Quaderni di Operai Contro" (Vitale): Marxism as science of workers' liberation From: "Andrea Vitale" <a.vitale@tin.it> To: <ope-admin@ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu> Dear Riccardo, it is probably superfluous to say that the fact that Marx has sometimes used a very caustic style against his opponents, including derision, it is not sufficient to justify one in doing the same. By the way, I don't think I have said so in the last email. Moreover, a mistake would remain such even when it is done in good company. What I wanted to emphasize was not merely an issue of style of discussion. In the Quaderni of Operai Contro we have singled out tendencies in Marxism (Algebraic Marxism among the others) which we believe have limits and contradictions. We have explicitly denounced what (we believe) are the errors and the (implicit or explicit) theoretical consequences of the ideas supported by concrete individuals. In doing this, we referred to what these people have written and thus made very circumstantiated and documented criticisms against them. The reason we have made all that, is that we believe the first step the workers have to make to re-appropriate Marxism as mean of their liberation is to free Marxism of all those tendencies that are completely separated from the workers themselves. Probably this is not that far from something that you have underlined in more that one occasion, namely that the "analytic" and the "political" part of Marx, science and revolution, are inseparable. Of course, although my theoretical positions can be quite different from yours, if we agree on the point above about Marxism, I think it would be very interesting and useful to discuss the motivations that lead us to write Quaderni of Operai Contro. What I called there "Algebraic Marxism" is the erroneous and contradictory attempt to compute values on the basis of linear equation of "production". But, more importantly, this algebraic tendency is nothing else that an attempt to reduce Marxism to a mere bourgeois economic theory. I guess that I have at some extent demonstrated this thesis in the Quaderni of Operai Contro. If one does not agree with that, I am ready to discuss it into detail. It is necessary to make Marxism the science of workers' liberation. Marxism separated from workers, separated from the actual process through which they become a class, treated as a "simple" science, capable only to interpret the world, it is nothing.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Jul 02 2002 - 00:00:05 EDT