Articles tagged “Black; David”

A report from the successfully concluded Founding Conference of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, Chicago, July 3-4, 2010

Black offers a dialectical critique of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s materialist interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy, which has influenced a number of current and recent Marxist philosophers, among them Adorno, Postone, and Arthur. Another problem is how some on the left have been uncritical of Islamism, while others like Dawkins have put forth a “new atheism.”  A more dialectical view of religion is presented, rooted in Marx, Hegel, and the last writings of Dunayevskaya on the dialectics of organization and philosophy.  — Editors

Alfred Sohn-Rethel and George Thomson sought to locate the source of philosophical abstraction in the monetary exchange of Greek Antiquity. According to Gillian Rose’s critique of Frankfurt School Marxism, Sohn-Rethel (and Theodore Adorno) erred in discussing commodity fetishism outside its specifically capitalist form. They thus obfuscated Marx’s critique of capital, in which “necessary illusion arises out of productive activity.” — Editors

[Philosophy] is the scientific expression of a certain fundamental human attitude… toward being and beings in general, and through which a historical-social situation often can express itself more clearly and deeply than in the reified, practical spheres of life.
— Herbert Marcuse[1]

If there is one dominant philosophy in the modern world that embraces both left and right (not to mention post-modernism) that philosophy is pragmatism. As a philosophy pragmatism is really quite simple. If you want to eat a bowl of soup, and the choice is between using a fork or a spoon, you will choose the spoon because it will do the job best.

It is not enough to follow the negative rejections of vanguardism made by Pannekoek, CLR James and Castoriadis, which are defined by what they critique in such a way as to never figure out how to present organizational responsibility for philosophy as the critical mediation.