Now on my web site: Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy by Maurice Cornforth III Marxism 2 THE LAWS OF THOUGHT http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/cornforth3/MLP3-2.html
This is so much more sensible than the usual presentations of diamat, including Cornforth's own. Granted the need for popularization and accommodation to different audiences, but a double standard for logic and clarity is harmful. I think party orthodox is responsible for its perpetuation among people who should know better. For example, Erwin Marquit's contribution to DIALECTICAL CONTRADICTIONS and other essays should disincline him to have anything to do with Somerville's horrible intro to Marxist philosophy and should make him wary of Paulus Gerdes' peculiar Marxist take on mathematics. I don't know much about Cornforth's personal history, but I wonder whether perhaps he got smarter after Stalin's death, or maybe it was just the intersection of provincial academic British philosophy and the more radical but also provincial world of the Communist Party, the combination of which opened up an avenue of intellectual development that would have been normally closed to both worlds.
I think I need to get hold of Cornforth's last book, which may contain further surprises: Communism & Philosophy: Contemporary Dogmas and Revisions of Marxism (1980).
I say this because even though he stuck with the Communist Party, he seemed to have learned some hard lessons about dogmatism:
Partisanship and Objectivity in Theoretical Work by Maurice Cornforth http://www.cpa.org.au/amrarch/37corn.html _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
