From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Apr 23 2007 - 14:06:48 EDT
Hi Jerry, The usual suspects in Analytical Marxism - dissecting the corpse as it were - are G. A. Cohen (philosopher), John Roemer (economist), Jon Elster (philosopher), Adam Przeworski (politicial scientist), Erik Olin Wright (sociologist), Philippe van Parijs (social theorist), and Robert-Jan van der Veen (politicologist). I was a bit harsh in my judgement of what they do, because some of their insights are very valuable indeed. You always have to remember these people are socialists, whatever their Marxist faults. Cohen came from a Jewish milieu and frequented the circles of the Canadian communists as far as I remember. He wrote the pioneering book about Karl Marx's theory of history. The basic storyline of this book is oldfashioned Stalinist historicism, in other words productive force determinism and economic determinism. Marx himself of course never subscribed to this, or to a "theory of history" or a "philosophy of history" for that matter. That was Hegel's thing, and Marx rejected it, precisely because it was speculative. The materialist conception of history was to be just a "guiding thread" (Leitfaden) for empirical historical research, and to be modified by the results of that research. The most progressive thing that Cohen did was to ask, "what does Marx mean, in plain English?". When Cohen stops talking about "historical materialism", and starts talking about ethics, he suddenly becomes very, very interesting. His best insights concern the notions of freedom and egalitarianism. Cohen makes great play about the fact that the materialist conception of history does not logically entail a labour theory of value. Of course he is correct about that! As Johan Witt-Hansen pointed out, the analysis of capitalism using the theory of value was supposed to be a demonstration of the validity of the materialist conception of history. If it could be logically inferred from it, it would not be a demonstration at all. Jurriaan
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