>>> Rob Schaap <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 12/16/99 11:05AM >>>
In answer to Lew's pragmatic plea,
>'So now we can be told the relevance of dialectical materialism ...'
John writes:
>The relevance is that it is all
>scientifically correct regardless of the revolutionary needs of the
>toiling masses.
As if that science does not present us with constantly changing relations,
and therefore ever a new complex of relations to reflect upon and within.
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Charles: This idea of science that Rob gives seems a dialectical conception of science.
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>It is because the theory is correct that it can be
>relevant to the revolutionary struggle
As if the enduring dynamic mutual constitution of theory and practice was
not also basic to Marx's thought.
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Charles: This seems a dialectical conception of Marx's thought , or an idea that
Marx's thought was dialectical.
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>Also, if you accept Marx's authorship and argument in his preface to
>'A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy' then
>consciousness is determined not by human society or by humans own
>ideas but is fundamentally the result of changes in the material
>world surrounding the conscious being; therefore a theory of that
>material world has to be incorporated into (and is relevant to)
>Marx's overall theory if its foundation are not to be revealed to have
>been build on thin air.
But if our consciousness is the RESULT of all material, it is logically the
result of the big bang itself , isn't it? Isn't that the sort of mechanist
claim Engels himself took trouble to repudiate? Consciousness is itself
part of history, John, and if you want human action in your philosophy, you
have at least to delimit the nature of determination - say, where the
physical (from big bang to internet) provides a scope within which human
action occurs, in which consciousness has the capacity dialectically to
interact with what you call the material world.
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Charles: So, a relevance to class struggle of dialectics is as a method for being
conscious of the material world in our revolutionary struggle to change it. To win
the class struggle, the working class must have profound consciousness of history and
natural history, including physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology and all the natural
sciences.
>The bourgeoisie which clings to it nice safe scientific view that the
>universe is static ...
Can't think of a scientist who holds this position, actually, John.
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Charles: In other words, by now, even the bourgeoisie and their scientists realize
that natural science must be natural history and that the natural world is
dialectical, even if they don't use that word. Yet , we have some "Marxists" who are
questioning the dialecticality of natural history and natural science. Thus, the
bourgeoisie are getting in the class struggle the advantages of a dialectical
conception of natural science, and some of the working class intellectuals are giving
up that advantage in the class struggle. Some intellectuals of the working class are
squandering the great lead that Marx and Engels gave them over the bourgeois
intellectuals.
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>and hence their cosy economic system could be
>equally static ...
I reckon economics is probably the only science which houses practitioners
who base their world view on stasis and equilibrium, don't you?
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Charles: For obvious reasons, no ? Political economy is the one area in which the
bourgeoisie cannot concede that everything changes, all things must come to an end
including capitalism, and the change comes by a quantum leap, a qualitative change, a
revolution. If they start teaching that economics is dialectical, they are on the
slippery slope to social revolution, communist revolution. In that sense, bourgeois
economics can never be science, for it would deduce its own dissolution.
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>Some (just like Canute) are aware of the scientific truth and either
>accept the inevitability of their economic decline or like Marx,
>Engles et al are won over by rational argument and proper science to
>the side of the agent for such a change, the proletariat.
Still can't see an 'agent' in your philosophy, John.
So I'll side with Chris on Gramsci (even if that leaves his dialectical
materialist view problematic from my reading of the bloke - doesn't
Gramsci's 'philosophy of praxis' rather deny structural determinism by
positing that it is practice that constitutes the social - that the
dialectic is all about the relationship between structure and *agency*?)
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Charles: The revolutionary transformation of the proletariat from reified, thinglike,
objectlike cog in the capitalist machine , a class -in-itself, into a class-for
itself, a self-determining, self-acting armed organization of the population is the
instant solution of this riddle. This is dialectical in that it is a quantum leap,
quantity transforming into quality, a turning into its opposite of mass consciousness,
after a quantitative buildup of the objective or objectlike process unconscioius class
struggle. It is a sort of awakening, like Rip Van Winkle, a momentous reversal as in
Sisyphus forcing the rock to the other side of the mountain and rolling it down the
other side rather than it rolling back down this side again, a subjectivity that even
Hegel never articulated. It takes a Communist Party to focus this collective
consciousness for the big push.
CB
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