The Marxist Dialectic

as I ~have already said, this seems too banal and obvious. Hopefully not that’ everything is always changing’, since this is false. There is stability within change. We cannot describe change except by talking about ‘things which change’, and to say that a thing is changing is . to imply that within the process of […]

Personal Autonomy and Historical Materialism

PiRSONAL AUTONOMY a: HISTORICAL MATERIALISM Richard Archer The following is largely a criticism of some of the mistakes and certain tendencies antithetical to an historical materialist conception of the world found in Eoss Poole’s paper ‘Freedom and Alienation’. (Radical Philosophy, Winter 1975). Basically the criticism is this: because Poole never entirely leaves the framework employed […]

Notes: the inheritance of intelligence and ideology

Noles Report on work in progress THE INHERITANCE OF INTELLIGENCE AND IDEOLOGY I want to under-take a project of Marxist journalism wi th respect to the curr_ent political/scientific debate over IQ; understanding the present as history requires revealing the social basis for the views of all those involved, including the scientists on both sides, the […]

Wittgenstein and bourgeois philosophy

an astronomer predicts that a comet will appear over Britain in January 1974, the fact that he or she, as an expert, thinks that this is so, is a good reason that a layman can have for thinking that the comet will appear. As a layman, the reasons which the astronomer has for thinking this […]

Proletarian Self-Emancipation

Ma:rxlsm and pl’oletal’ian sel’emancipalion Norman Geras I claim no novelty for these ideas. Some of them are discussed in a recent article by Hal Draper. 1 They are treated at greater length, and in greater depth, in Michael Lowy’s book on Marx’s theory of revolution. 2 Going back to Marx himself, in 1864, in the […]

The Question of Hegemony

TIB QUBSTIOI or BB8BI1011 G. lowell Smith The question of hegemony can be posed as a political problem. How does it come about that a class or group struggling to free itself from oppression or exploitation remains subordinated politically to the group which oppresses or exploits it? And how does it break free from this […]

The Marxist Theory of Art

THE mARHIST THEORY OF ART ************************ ****************************************** Rager Taylar Therefore, concepts have histories and that this is so has rich implications for conceptual enquiries, for with the demise of essences concepts become no more and no less than historical phenomena, so that their history is not incidental to what they are. Thus, conceptual investigation must […]

The Marxist Theory of Truth

THE mARHI5T THEORY OF TRUTH Peter Binns One of the main problems facing marxist theory is that of its own status. On the one hand the theory of the formation of ideology seems to suggest that all beliefs are relative to the believer’s society; while on the other hand there is the assumption that marxism […]

Dialectical Reason

Richard Turner The concept ‘dialectical reason’, as used by ‘marxist’ theorists, contains buried within it a number of theoretical problems, problems which have significance for where why and how we may use dialectical reason. There are three issues, in particular, on which reflective clarity is both always needed and often lacking. Firstly, what precisely distinguishes […]

‘The Revolution Betrayed’

****************************************************************** ‘THE REUOLUTlon BETRAYED’ -[.J. Arthur ****************************************************************** In spite of Trotsky’s tremendous role in the victory of the Russian Revolution, his name will be forever associated primarily with the struggle against its decline, with his patient exposures of Stalin’s falsifications of the programme, and the history, of the revolution. as opposed In my view his […]

Symposium: What is Radical Philosophy?

WHAT IS RADI[AL PHILOSOPHV? BEGINNING FROM COMMITMENT Peter Binns [Reprinted with permission from Times Higher Educational Supplement. 5th May, ]972] The recent conference of radical philosophers in London attracted hundreds of dissident intellectuals. Yet it became apparent that there was no single clearly defined direction in which the philosophers wanted to move as a whole. […]

The Statist Conception of Politics

THE STADSI [On[EPTIOn OF POLITI[S Tanv Skillen philosophically sanctified. Moral and Political Philosophy are taught as separate fields: evidently the problems of the politician (the Statesman) are not the problems of the ordinary chap, save at such times when the ordinary chap goes to the po:ls or lobbies his M.P. (the Citizen) or marches to […]

The Theory of Ideology in Capital

IHE IHEORY OF ·IDEOlOIiV In [APIIAL John mepham •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• “There must be some way out of here” Said the joker to the thief “There’s too much confusion I can’t get no relief” (Dylan) Where do incorrect ideas come from? In What is to be Done? Lenin argues that “the spontaneous development of the working-class movement […]

Is There a Marxist Sociology?

lU[IEn IiOlDmAnn 15 THERE AmARHI5T 50[IOl06Y? Translated and IntradlHed bV Ion the socially relevant, like so many practitioners of the ‘sociology of literature’. When Lucien Goldmann’ s essay , Is There a Marxist Sociology?’ first appeared in Les Temps Modernes in 1957, it made an important contribution to the revival of a serious consideration of […]

Reports from Kent, London, Oxford

REPORTS HEm ~!……Discussion Weekend at Universi t..L..£.f2 ent , ,?2::.?Z__ .:!..~e first, insofar as its ‘problems’ arc emplr ~~l’: _ l,rohlems (knowledge of the external world, causality, other minJ~, personal identity, etc.), and secondly, insofar as it retain the same ideological orientation as classical empiricism. Epistemology is by its very nature prescriptive; it is for […]

Poor Bertie

Poor Bertie Jonathan Rée In the dark midwinter of 1916, Londoners had an unusual opportunity to see radical philosophical principles applied to the urgent issues of the day. The peace campaigner and feminist C.K. Ogden had hired the Caxton Hall for a series of eight weekly lectures on politics, to be given by Bertrand Russell. […]

Jacques Rancière: Democracy means equality

INTERVIEW Jacques RancièreDemocracy means equalityPassages: Jacques Rancière, for more than twenty years you have been following a somewhat unusual philosophical itinerary. It is obvious that what you are doing has nothing in common with traditional academic work. Most of your books reveal philosophical thought in unexpected contexts or in contexts that have been reformulated in […]