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Created: March 23, 2002
Latest Update: March 23, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Relevance and Rational Argument

Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, March 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on Paul Stevenson's post to PSN on March 23, 2002, in which he called the discussion group to task for failing to situate its discussion in any sense of overall relevance to issues of present-day Marxism.

On Saturday, March 23, 2002, Paul Stevenson posted on PSN:

I must say that I find it "ironic" ("contradictory"?) that those who have taken a consistent stand against American imperialism, American imperialistic actions in Afghanistan, and have questioned the underlying motivations of the Bush administration and its Democratic Party supporters have been labelled, on the one hand, as being dogmatically "Marxist", ignorant of Marx's dialectics, and ensconced in 19th century thinking. Yet what comes up. A lengthy reference to Marx's position on British imperialism in India (certainly 19th century, and certainly an "undialectical" citation of the "Marxist bible), an ignoring of Marx's analysis of British imperialism in Ireland, and an ignoring of Marx's discussion of imperialism and underdevelopment which a real anticipation of dependency theory. There's a lot of "selective inattention" and "selective attention" going on here. By the way, "dogmatist" that I am, Marx wasn't always right about everything.

Cheers,
Paul Stevenson

On Saturday March 23, Carl Dassbach posted to PSN:

Stop repeating (and reinventing) old debates and start reading them. This entire issue of the relevance of Marx has been traversed several times in the last 150 years and yet not one person has mentioned any of the earlier contributions nor, in my opinion, made any relevant contribution to this debate beyond what has already been said years ago. One of the best statements on this issue is "young" Lukacs' article "What is orthodox Marxism" in the volume HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS.

I would further contend that this somewhat tiresome debate on PSN is merely a reflection of much of academic and intellectual life in the United States. In their endless need to create the "new" so that the can publish more crappy articles, academics simply (and without their knowledge because they don't read anything published more than 10 years ago) simply resurrect ideas and debates from years ago, act as though these are new ideas, repeat what has already been said and add nothing.

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This is a good illustration of the actual difficulties we encounter in public discourse. In U.S. courtrooms we approach this barrier to good faith listening with objections. In this case, Paul Stevenson is saying: "Objection, relevance." Carl Dassbach is objecting: "Precedent; what has already been said on this topic?" And both are right, in that we do need to determine for each argument we enter into the overall relevance of the argument to the validity claim at bar and fit that into precedent argument.

Unfortunately, discourse isn't that simple. In the courtroom the Judge can grant the objection and force the argument back to the facts and law at issue. But in public discourse no one has that power. In public discourse the ability to keep "our eye on the ball" is a team effort. We must count on a good faith commitment to face the facts and argument.

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