🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <62ero4$6k2$2@clarion.carno.net.au>, j.stokes@bogus-address.anu.edu.au (Jason Stokes) says:
>
>In article <344AE498.5872@pophost.canterbury.ac.nz>, revolution magazine
><plf13@pophost.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>
>>WHERE IS SOCIETY GOING?
>>developing a marxist critique
>

>
>Socialists have long used a false dichotomy between capitalism and socialism
>to argue for their own particular cause -- I am as anti-capitalism (as it
>operates in practice) as any socialist, yet I am _not_ a socialist, nor do I
>think Marx got it right in any significant part of his theory (nor have his
>"followers" got it right with their patched-up Marxisms and Socialisms.)

Your thinking seems confused, as if you regard 'socialism' as something 
connected very closely with what most people think of as Marxism. In fact,
Marx and his ideas were just one strand in the vast historic interwoven
currents of socialism. Of course one has to 'patch up' what Marx thought
to make it relevant to the world as it is today, because Marx has for so
long been dead and silent; but to imply that socialism is also something
that 'died' in its original form a long time ago and has to be 'revived'
in a patching-up operation just shows you have succumbed to the New Right
propaganda against socialism.
>
>>SCIENCE AND THE RISE OF IRRATIONALISM
>>The rise of irrationalism is another of the �morbid symptoms� of the
>>decay of society.  What forms does irrationalism take and why do so
>>many, including people on the left, embrace it?  Why is science
>>important to human liberation?
>
>Karl Popper argues in "The Poverty of Historicism" that Marxism is a deeply
>anti-intellectual doctrine -- as well as its "predictions" being nothing
>more than nonfalsifiable psuedoscience, it endorses a number of very flawed
>philosophical ideas without perceiving their flaws.

Karl Popper was good as a philosopher of scientific theories that have 
little to do with the behaviour of people and the currents of history. He's
not so good when trying to apply his strictures to sociology, psychology
and politics. (In fact he was such a bad psychologist he caused a dreadful
happening here in Christchurch.) Sure enough, Marx would be more 'in tune'
than Popper with people who aren't intellectuals. And Marx in some of his
enthusiasm made philosophical errors. But he had a huge area of investigation
to cover in his intellectual endeavours, and many pratical handicaps when 
trying to set down his ideas in writing. He is not consistent. There's an
earlier Marx and a later Marx, and you can take things out of what he says
one way or another rather like the Bible. He had strong disputes with 
other socialist or left wing thinkers; and had he gone on living and working
some decades he probably would have become critical of a lot of his own ideas
and modified them. He would have seen the dangers of the successes of socialism
being aborted because they took place in the wrong kinds of society for his
brand of socialism: namely in fairly primitive non-industrial peasant-
predominating societies, instead of in the post-industrial-revolution 
capitalistic societies. We neo-Marxists are still waiting and expecting
and working for the revolution that must happen sooner or later in those
kinds of societies that Marx would have expected were more ripe for it.
>
>
'No man is good enough to be another man's master.' (George Bernard Shaw)

Brian