Reinventing Marxism.

• Author: Wolfson, Murray

All right said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Howard Sherman has set himself the hopeless task of reinventing the Marxist cat even while making it vanish. Labor theory of value - too simple. Surplus value - not deducible from value theory. Classes defined by ownership of the means of production - Marx could not really have said that, it must have been the Russians. Dialectics - operationally meaningless. Materialism - science is about paradigms, or maybe post modernism, or maybe just looking at the data. Historical procession from lower to higher forms, from slavery to communism - another Russian idea.

The result is what Marx called "shallow syncretism." Sherman exhibits the same old Marxist compulsion to pass judgment at every turn, even while searching for legitimacy in the sources and methods of what Marx called "vulgar" and "bourgeois economics." For example, mathematics is acceptable to Sherman provided it is not used as "a kind of rhetorical device to pretend to be 'scientific' and to cover up the lack of content" [p. 265]. Sherman himself is only able to offer a pathetic bowdlerization of mathematical notation [pp. 53-54]. Sherman repeats the Hegelian holistic demand for "a complete theory of history . . . since (partial) explanation is always misleading" [p. 22], and at the same time asserts that empirically attained knowledge can only be partial and tentative. He praises Bentham's utilitarianism (Marx called him the "leather-tongued oracle of the British...