[lit-ideas] What does "Marxist" mean, after all?
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 03:28:23 +0900
On 2/9/06, Judith Evans <judithevans001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Not that it's a big deal to me, still; I'm not a
> Marxist!! (If I were, I'd say so.)
>
My thinking is influenced by Marx? Does that make me a Marxist?
My thinking is influenced by Jesus? Does that make me a Christian?
In both cases the answer is no. But, again in both cases, to regard
the influence as a taint, a mark of Cain to be concealed, seems silly
and, at least in my case, intellectually counterproductive.
Victor Turner, the anthropologist who has most influenced my thinking
about how anthropology and thinking about the nature of human
societies ought to be done started out a Communist and converted to
Catholicism. His thinking was influenced by Marx, Durkheim and Freud,
from the first two of whom he took the importance of beginning with
the relations of production, exchange and consumption that constitute
social structures while from the first and third he adopted a
basically tragic view of the human condition, as inevitably shot
through with conflict and contradiction.
Marx was also a powerful influence on Claude Levi-Strauss and Pierre
Bourdieu, who, like Turner, have influenced my own intellectual work.
Marx to me is, like Freud, a seminal thinker whose work is a source of
inspiration to many and of ideas without which the modern world would
not be what it is today but whose work is no longer a canon to any but
a handfuls of diehards who are, as it were, Copernicans in a world
where Kepler, Newton and Einstein have substantially altered the
Copernican vision without invalidating its basic insight—Earth does,
indeed, revolve around the Sun.
In this day and age, calling someone a Marxist is like calling someone
a Christian, a term of praise or abuse whose referential meaning is a
muddle of possibilities, no clearly defined Cartesian "You see!"
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN
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