Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, September 2020
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no credentials to opine on
the history of Marxism, sociology, or even social network analysis.
- Anna Lee Huber, An Artless Demise
- Mind candy historical mystery, 7th in the series;
continuing to be enjoyable.
- Perry
Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism
- A brisk survey of Marxist thought from continental western Europe*,
1918--1968, which proceeds from the premises that (1) real Marxist insight is
directly translatable into, and derives from, joining the working class in
revolutionary action, and (2a) Lenin fulfilled these conditions and accordingly
made great advances in Marxist theory, as well as (2b) founding a genuinely
proletarian state. As Anderson brings out, all the western Marxist theorists
he surveys (except Gramsci) were children of the middle or even upper classes,
and were philosophers disconnected from concrete questions of politics (except
Gramsci) and economics. It is thus suggestive that a lot of what they did was
combining classical Marxism with other philosophies or ideologies
(psycho-analysis,
existentialism, structuralism),
in writings too obscure for most people with university educations,
let alone contemporary workers. (Such syncretism of apparently-incompatible
traditions, in increasingly arcane prose, is very common when communities of
literate intellectuals are left to their own, inward-looking devices
[cf.].) Anderson trembles on the
verge of a historical-materialist analysis of western Marxism as, in fact, an
ideology of (a fraction of) the educated professional classes, but doesn't
quite go there, perhaps because he thinks those works
were intellectually valuable — and in any case Anderson spent a
lot of his career importing this stuff into English-speaking, especially
British, intellectual life.
- A rather extraordinary concluding chapter points out that there was in
fact another Marxist tradition in western Europe which did
try to be revolutionary and keep its eye on politics and even economics, namely
Trotskyism. Anderson ends by saying, or at least strongly hinting, that there
needed to be some synthesis between the Trots and the philosophers.
- An even more extraordinary afterword, from a decade later, walks back
premise (1). The new argument is that historical materialism is supposed to be
a science of history, and practical action in the present can't change
the past, so correct Marxism can't be all about the unity of theory
and practice. (The afterword does not re-examine premise (2b), about how Lenin
founded a workers' state.) This shows commendable intellectual honesty and
willingness to revisit ideas on Anderson's part, but does raise a lot of "Where
else were you confidently wrong about?" questions.
- Still, if you are willing to accept, or mentally divide through for,
premises (1) and (2), this is a really good high-level survey of half a century
of left-wing thought, from a very learned and intelligent commentator. The
best alternative I can think of is volume III
of Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism, but this
is vastly shorter, if more schematic. (I would pay a lot to read Anderson and
Kolakowski seriously reviewing each other.)
- *: Anderson mentions British Marxist historians,
but doesn't discuss their work; no other Marxist historians get referred to.
As for Marxist economists, he
mentions Sweezy in the
USA and Sraffa in the
UK, but mostly to say that they marked end-points for the tradition of
distinctively Marxist economics, Sweezy by hybridizing it with Keynes, Sraffa
by, well, whatever the hell it was Sraffa was up to. (That last is a jest but
I'm actually curious about Anderson's thoughts on Sraffa.)
- Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend
- The legend is that Marx thought there was no such thing as a
trans-historical, universal human nature, that he dissolved into the "ensemble
of social relations" which are so malleable that the idea is meaningless.
Geras is very, very patient in picking apart all of the textual evidence
offered on behalf of this, and countering it with all of the places where Marx
plainly does rely on the idea of an un-changing human nature. Geras
is also very patient in distinguishing "There is no trans-historical human
nature" from "X, which is claimed to be part of trans-historical human nature,
is no such thing but a product of a particular ensemble of social relations",
and distinguishing between "Marx asserted that there was such a thing as
human nature" and "Marx was right about the content of human nature" and
"Marx was right to assert that there was such a thing as human nature".
- Linton C. Freeman, The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science
- This is a self-published history, by a participant, so it's not very
sophisticated historiographically. (There is little or no attempt to trace the
development of any individual's thoughts, or explain how the idea of network
analysis took off, or failed to, in particular contexts, for instance.) But
it's good on bringing together all the different strands and efforts that
contributed to the field of social network analysis, within sociology, as that
was understood circa 2000. Something which astonished me, though, was
to learn that Harrison White was in fact a Ph.D. physicist (and former Carnegie
Tech faculty).
- Erik Olin Wright, Understanding Class
- A collection of Wright's essays and reviews on the theme of what classes are, how they work, and why some essential core of Marxism is true, dammit, even if Uncle Karl's original formulations are indefensible.
- Flavor
- Valen the Outcaste [1, 2]
- The Spider King
- Comic book mind candy, fantasy flavors, no pun intended. (Technically Spider King is science fiction.)
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
The Progressive Forces;
Philosophy;
Commit a Social Science;
Networks;
Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime;
Scientifiction and Fantastica
Posted at September 30, 2020 23:59 | permanent link