Philosophy

As we were saying: the trap of “left-wing” relativism

This article from Solidarity ’s forerunner, Socialist Organiser (11 June 1991), criticises “political correctness”, focusing on art and culture, from the point of view of the Marxist left, (as opposed to right-wing prejudice). Jim Denham argues here in favour of free speech and objective standards in aesthetics, in a still-pertinent debate. A number of colleges and universities in the US have begun adopting PC codes, supposedly intended to curb behaviour and/or language that might give offence to racial minorities, women, gays and lesbians. Some of this is quite reasonable and no-one but a...

Should faith keep its fortresses?

While I am an atheist, I still respect people with faith (or superstition, as it is sometimes called). But should we respect faith itself? Is there a real difference between faith and superstition, or are they just different words that people use for the same thing, depending on whether they want to refer to it warmly (faith) or coldly (superstition)? Some people who are atheists themselves argue that faith should be respected as a valid way of knowing on questions which science cannot reach. Stephen Jay Gould, a widely-read and left-wing science writer, claims that faith is a strong way of...

Varieties of dialectics

By Martin Thomas In one of the crazy autobiographical fragments he wrote in his last years, the famous French Stalinist philosopher Louis Althusser claimed that his father, a bank manager, ran his branch on the following lines: “It was his custom not to say anything, or to make absolutely unintelligible remarks. His subordinates dared not admit they had understood nothing, but went off and usually managed very well on their own, though they still wondered if they might not be mistaken and this kept them on their toes”. “Karl Marx, the philosopher” is presented by many exegetists as...

What is Marxist dialectical thinking?

Vasilis Grollios contributes to the discussion opened by Dave Osler in Solidarity 219 The core of socialist-Marxist thinking is its methodology, dialectical materialism. But the term was not systematically analysed by Marx or Engels. One has to synthesise its meaning from thousands of pages of their collected works. Thinking in terms of dialectical materialism means trying to identify the essence of the thing under consideration, to understand what the thing is in itself. It means that we try to bring to light the real content of each social form, whatever this might be – state, representative...

Can you have Marxism without dialectics?

By Bruce Robinson Relatively little of Dave Osler’s column [ Solidarity 219] suggesting that Marxists should abandon dialectics deals with the substance of the issue — what dialectics is and why it is wrong. Instead we are treated to a collection of admittedly bad examples of how it has been used on the left “to promote arrant nonsense” and assertions that it is “mumbo jumbo” and “methodologically weak”. He instead states that Marxists should adopt formal logic and follow G. A. Cohen’s version of Analytical Marxism. I’ll try to give a brief introduction to why dialectics shouldn’t be dumped...

Dialectics, rival to analysis?

By Dave Osler A housewife knows that a certain amount of salt flavours soup agreeably, but that added salt makes the soup unpalatable. Consequently, an illiterate peasant woman guides herself in cooking soup by the Hegelian law of the transformation of quantity into quality. That — believe it or not — is a verbatim quote from Leon Trotsky. Leaving aside the casual sexism implicit in such an analogy, it does not strike me as a particularly impressive defence of one of major postulates of Marxist philosophy. When I first came across the notion of dialectics, I took it on board without much...

Are Marxists pro-liberty?

Normally I wouldn’t dream of grassing up the publishers of this newspaper to the Labour Party bureaucracy. But after nearly 20 years, even the dimmest witchhunter has probably by now twigged the subterfuge that saw evil clandestine Trot entrists the Socialist Organiser Alliance rebrand themselves as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. The name is that bit at odds from the usual unimaginative titles deployed by far-left outfits. What’s more, it has a subtly different political flavour. That much was apparent to me the first time I saw a somewhat shy and retiring young AWLer — yeah, I know...

Has socialism a future? Sean Matgamna debates Roger Scruton

Sean Matgamna debates Roger Scruton. Click here to download pdf . Sean Matgamna When, recently, I debated Professor Kenneth Minogue, one important point he made against me was this: if you pin down a socialist about a particular regime in a particular country you invariably get the reply: this was not real socialism. Minogue made the point that it is very hard to know what we are arguing about. Ours is an idea which is never realised and therefore can never be criticised. On a certain level that is a reasonable point to make. So I will try to define what I mean by socialism. Obviously...

Reviews from Workers' Liberty 14

Click here to download pdf. Workers' Liberty 14 Reviews section The real history of US labour (Dianne Finger and Barry Finger review a book by Kim Moody) It takes all sorts? (Liz Millward reviews a book on the Krays) As modest as Stalin (Jim Denham reviews Jon Halliday's biography of Enver Hoxha) Helter skelter and stage by stage (Martin Thomas reviews books by Ken Livingstone and Seumas Milne Marxism without bullshit? (Jon Pike reviews a handbook of "analytical Marxism" by Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene) "I have made enough voices" (Lilian Thomson writes on Greta Garbo)

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