Reply to Wardell

Abstract

Professor Wardell is unconvinced by my account of Marx's use of method of successive approximations. My argument, he says, is flawed by misrepresentation and misquotation. In particular, he objects to my emphasis upon scientific character of Marx's later work, a view, as he correctly notes, which has been developed by Louis Althusser and a number of other European scholars. (It is one thing to be accused of holding a scientistic view of Marx's work. is another to be caricatured as holding the view that Marx was a physical scientist looking at social behavior. I must demur from this latter characterization on two grounds: (1) Marx was not a physical scientist; (2) he was not a behaviorist.) In place of this reading of Marx, Wardell offers an interpretation which stresses pre-scientific philosophical roots of Marxian theory. In so doing, he makes a number of rather startling and, to my knowledge, unprecedented claims concerning Marx's work which include three following theses. (1). It is impossible to decipher what [Marx] really meant. This would seem to forestall all further discussion of Marx's work. If Wardell really believes this, on what grounds does he criticize my reading of Marx as being incorrect? should be noted that Wardell does not make this claim in reference to some particular aspect of Marx's work, but clearly intends his comment as a general assessment. What is important about Marx's writings, he says, is the response we make to them. But if we cannot establish through appeal to evidence and logical argument precisely what Marx wrote and what he meant, then in what sense can we be said to be responding to his work? If, as Wardell seems to imply, this precept is established as a fundamental epistemological principal and is not seen as some idiosyncratic problem peculiar to Marx's work, prospects for intellectual discourse and argumentation would seem to be dim, indeed. I doubt that Wardell himself would wish to accept all consequences that this principle implies. (2). Marx's position was that end of scientific theorizing is so that practitioners can explain their own behavior as well as that of others. This would seem to make Marx an important precursor of contemporary subjectivist trends in sociology, such as ethnomethodology. For myself, I seriously doubt that notion of constructing a theory of capitalist society so that he could better understand his own behavior ever crossed Marx's mind. But we do not need to engage in idle speculation. If he can, let Wardell produce (any) evidence from Marx's writings to corroborate this idiosyncratic view. (But then again, this may not be possible since according to thesis #1 we cannot know how to correctly interpret anything that Marx wrote, anyway.) (3). Marx did not believe the social world . .. to move in predictable ways. This would come as a great surprise, I am sure, to generations of Marxian scholars who have devoted themselves to studying historical development of capitalist mode of production. is a gross caricature of Marx's actual position.