Enemies…
The book Dialectical Economics by esteemed Marxist econo-myte Lyn Marcus, published in 1975 by some imprint of the Lyn Marcus Capitalist Concern Inc., opens with the following dedication note:
“To my enemies, who made this book necessary.”
Not an entirely cheerful dedication, but I suppose it befits a dense polemical journey into a realm of fantasy. So, putting myself in the midst of Lyn Marcus’s whereabouts, circa 1975, I have to wonder…
Who are his enemies at that point in time?
Um… At this point in time he was making overtures to the far-right and anti-semitic “Liberty League”, who’s publication would include an advertisement for Larouche material saying he was the only respectable Marxist. We are a couple years past “Operation Mop Up”, an string of events that I cannot overstate in significance to those concerned. But, on the other hand, this book appears to be a collegation of his teachings from the late 1960s to …. circa 1975.
Having recently read The Prophet’s Children, and posted the chapter on Landon Laroach, I wonder. Do angry residuals from his battle to gain control of SDS (at Columbia at least) make any appearance? I can look to the index for “Action Faction” and “Praxis Axis” and find, amid the unreadable gunk… well…
Praxis signifies nothing less than an entirety (universality) of human practice. Kant properly insists that practical reason cannot be located in the notion of the pleasure or desire associated with the actualization of a particular object or class of objects. He thus adduces that a priori content for practical reason as “pure practical reason,” since he locates substantiality in the “thing in itself” and the understanding. Where he dialectically demonstrates the existence of necessary principles governing particular objects he necessarily attributes to those principles the efficient nature of pure reason (Logos) in the same broad sense as does Hegel (ergo realism = idealism). The difference between Kant and Hegel on this point is that Hegel demands the immediate equivalence of the extended logo […]
Okay. I stop this paragraph, because I have a confession to make. I posted this for the sake of torturing you. Still, today’s membership of the Lyn Marcus Youth Movement can compare and contrast their current cadre school study guides with that of their fore-fathers — who, I will go ahead an term the Expendable Baby-boomers. The Expendable Baby-boomers can reminisce on … different times… when the Fifth International was in full steam and they were on the Vanguard of staving off financial crisis after financial crisis, right and left! Otherwise, I invite you to pretend you didn’t read that.
Kant articulates explicitly and repeatedly what amounts to the painstaking opposition of his notion of Praxis to the pragmatical empiricist sophistries of SIdney Hook’s bawdlerization of Korsch, or the even more trivialized dictionary nominalism of the “praxisite” or new working class cults of the late U.S. New Left. […] To use the term “praxis” as a fancy synonym for “practice” in the cracker barrel sense is an ignorant schoolboy’s prank.
And, indeed, the footnote points to further anger and derision at the faction of the SDS in which gained control, and Larouche was unable to pull into his realm of control. I suspect other “enemies” pop up in equally acidic manners in this unreadable book. Regrettably, there is no space for Nelson Rockefeller or Henry Kissinger.
Shouldn’t I be pondering David Broder’s studied Importance or something?