Post-Marxist Humanist Pragmatic

My younger son Max’s major in college first was economics, which he now declares a pseudo science, that segued to history, moved on to Spanish, and then reverted back to history only because it was too late to change to continental philosophy, which he discovered in his junior year. Whenever he’s home from school for a visit we have these long, complex discussions about how my thinking and being fit into the scheme of all things explored from Aristotle to Jurgen Habermas. While I wish he would sometimes leave the continent and travel to the subaltern, I like being prodded to go back and read a lot of people I either failed to read or didn’t read very well, to validate or challenge his assessment of me, which currently is a post-Marxist humanist pragmatic (but subject to change at any moment).

Mark and I, along with some friends, were going to participate in a Marx study group of Capital with David Correia, our friend and American Studies professor at UNM, but that fell by the wayside when Mark got sick. So I reread Part I of Capital, and then I took up David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital. As Harvey emphasizes in his book, Marx was not at all a static thinker, as some would pigeonhole him as pertinent only to a time long eclipsed by global capitalism. Marx’s structural analysis of capitalism is conceptual, one that recognizes the transformative nature of its
process.

The “post” part of Marxism remains in step with his conceptual thinking as it expands beyond labor power and value in economic terms to the power structures that affect all facets of society: the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, gender studies, and the environmental movement. I entered Antioch College in 1969. The black scholarship students moved into a “black” dorm where whites weren’t allowed, turning the racial power structure upside down. The second wave of the women’s movement was soon to be in full swing, as writers like Susan Brownmiller and Shulamith Firestone moved beyond the call for equal pay for equal work to challenging the very nature of sexuality and patriarchy. Environmental politics was not some nice middle class recycling center but a head-on confrontation with corporate and global exploitation of resources and populations for profit and gain.

One of George Eliot’s biographers, Frederick R. Karl, refers to her as a secular humanist, which allowed her to abandon Christianity while retaining its “morality and ethics.” While she wasn’t very politically involved, per se, her life was a political statement for women’s emancipation and a challenge to societal norms. She lived with a married man, George Henry Lewes, for more than 20 years while she wrote her great novels (I’ve read Middlemarch at least three times over the years). I can’t come close to her erudition and sophistication, in a life of the drawing room company of Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, but I like to think my humanism resembles hers: a belief that we, subjectively, as individuals, can strive for both a reflective, and exemplary life, and objectively, as a society, can create the conditions for everyone to flourish. While the stark realities of our unjust and undemocratic world challenge our ability to hold on to personal will, or to refrain from seeing it in nihilistic terms, we can, as Antonio Gramsci put it, maintain a “pessimism of the intellect” and “optimism of the will.”

The final component of my label—pragmatist—was the philosophical theory with which I was the least conversant. I read some John Dewey and analyses of other pragmatists, neo pragmatists, or neo-classical pragmatists (jeez, it really gets esoteric), but came to the conclusion that I take a little something from a lot of them: an ethics that accepts the notion there are “good” values that can be reasoned out; “informed practice,” or recognition that the means are the end; and that there is no disconnect between body and mind, just as there is no disconnect between intellect and environment. As a community organizer around issues of environmental justice, and caretaker of a garden, orchard, and hay fields, over the years I found the only way to keep going was to stay connected and to value what I learned and who I came to love in the process of cultivating, irrigating, organizing, advocating, and resisting authority. When Ike DeVargas and I sometimes fall into a lament over what “could have, would have, should have been,” he reminds me that how we worked together was the most important part of what we did— the means, not the end. In the obituary that Jurgen Habermas wrote for the philosopher Richard Rorty, (labeled a neopragmatist), who, like Mark, died of pancreatic cancer, he said: “Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the ‘holy’, the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: ‘My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.’”