Interpreting and/or changing the world, and the dream of a lost Eden

Abstract

Marx's famous thesis on interpreting and changing the world can lead toserious problems when the political desire to change the world determines or judgesthe interpretation of the world. In the hard sciences this is called Lysenkoism, but itis much more common in the fields of history and criticism, as may be seen in therecent projects of "bashing the bourgeois subject' and "rewritingthe Renaissance' to serve present political ends, and also in feminist and racialEdenism, which constructs an idealized life in the past that we lost, due to theactions of a demonized enemy, and which we should strive to regain. This outpouringof politics-driven histories and criticism over the past two decades raises the questionof whether they have actually produced the political effects that are claimed forthem. There is no evidence that they have helped the Marxist movement during thisperiod, which saw the collapse of Marxism as a theory and praxis; but they mayhave helped the liberation movements of women, people of colour and gays, whoduring this same period made significant gains, and also, unlike the Marxists, reallyhave political programmes of action. One reason for this difference is that changingpeople's attitudes has a much more important role in the other three movementsthan in Marxism, which is related to the anomalous status of class in theclass-race-gender-sexuality tetrad, since it claims to be more equal than the otherthree but turns out to be less equal.