From owner-marxism-international  Wed Apr 16 18:43:47 1997
Message-Id: <l03020901af7afc325f6f@[130.244.69.125]>
In-Reply-To: <33550ED6.126A@mail.telepac.pt>
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 23:46:02 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970@mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-I: Re: Marx an insufferable pedant?

Joao is nice and welcoming to the Buffalo crowd as they roam the
cyber-prairies, and why not? The more the merrier.

However, what he says about Marx is completely off the mark.

>They have the intellectual arrogance of extreme youth. Marx, when he was
>about their age, was a bit like them.

Not at all. Marx wrote a fantastic piece of original work on Greek
philosophy  getting right into the nitty-gritty of the classical views of
physics and existence and thought. He was deadly serious about ideas --
which no-one who can recognize an idea would claim for the Buffalo. Earnest
and proprietary they might be, but serious? Never.


>Except that Marx wrote better and,
>occasionally, denounced absolute genius on a simple turn of phrase.

He couldn't stomach pretension or pomposity, and he could tell a silk purse
>from a sow's ear (or a buffalo's scrotum).


>But he defenitely was an insufferable pedant.

No way. No insufferable pedant would ever have won the heart of wealthy,
scintillating, desirable Jenny von Westphalen -- the most beautiful girl in
town. She could have her pick, and she chose Charles and followed him to
hell. Nor could an insufferable pedant have forged a friendship with
down-to-earth, convivial Fred Engels that lasted for life and cost Fred a
couple of fortunes into the bargain. Marx wasn't even a pedant in his
writing. Even his doctoral dissertation is most unpedantic. He didn't have
time for pedantry. He may have been thorough and implacable, and was a
devil for the details, but he was never pedantic.


>What's more, he did begin with
>"abstract theory" and worked his way to the concrete. Not the other way
>around. That's an empiricist illusion.

He took the concrete world of the post-French-Revolution Rhineland and
abysmally reactionary Prussia, and the Europe in which they were set, and
chewed his way through the best available theories claiming to explain what
it was all about. He used philosophy as a tool for understanding the way
people thought about their situation in nature and society, and political
action for changing this situation for the better. The concrete is a
dialectical unity of theory and "reality". For humanity, reality and
reflection are very closely linked. Marx put the concrete first, and showed
the way thought and being, though separate, and unequal -- being having
priority -- combined to form the concrete. And in doing this he singled out
the bits of the historical process that are most open to human political
intervention. No pedant could have done this.


>Keep on with it, Buffalo kids.
>
>
>
>Jo=E3o Paulo Monteiro
>
>P.S. It goes without saying that you're welcome to hit me too.
>D=E9molissez moi.

It's nice to have someone like Joao around who's positive without being off
his head.

Cheers,

Hugh




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