Quote:
Originally Posted by tooblue
Are Marxism and Relativism incongruent with one another?
Relativism: the belief that concepts such as right and wrong, goodness and badness, or truth and falsehood are not absolute but change from culture to culture and situation to situation.
Marxism: the doctrine that the state throughout history has been a device for the exploitation of the masses by a dominant class, that class struggle has been the main agency of historical change, and that the capitalist system, containing from the first the seeds of its own decay, will inevitably, after the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, be superseded by a socialist order and a classless society.
Bonus question: does shopping at Walmart make anyone else depressed?
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They are incongruent with one another. Marx was not a relativist. He was a historical materialist with a grand narrative (the truth and inevitability of communism). For Marxists, consciousness is not even relative--it is connected, and in some variations, caused, by the means and relations of production. Such fundamental Marxist notions as alienation and demystification are incompatible with relativism. The class consciousness Marx is interested in is obscuring what he calls species being, and is not relativistic either.
These are some of the reasons Marxists and Neo-Marxists of every stripe and type critique postmodernists.
I'm well-read in several branches of Marxism--the 1844 Manuscripts and their application to British Cultural Studies, the French Situationists, the Frankfurt School sociologists, Gramsci's adaptation of Marx, Althusser and the structural Marxists, Antonio Negri's Italian Marxism, Lenninism...
I should mention that I am not a Marxist. But understanding it is invaluable in my discipline.