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Thanks for that, Rod, but I make precisely this point in my Essay Ten (link in an earlier post). Now, I do not accept the thesis that the truth of a theory can be tested in practice, but most dialecticians do; so I am merely using their own ideas against them "Is the failure of the world revolution over the last 150 years a suitable experiment of the correctness of weaving into practice the notion of dialectics?" Well, I'm not committed to this thesis, but dialecticians are, and if they are, practice has refuted their theory. Now, they are perfectly at liberty to abandon an auxiliary hypothesis to defend their core theory (as many scientists do with their own theories), but not only do they not argue this way, they refuse to accept that Dialectical Marxism is a long-term failure. However, I can explain *why*they do this (and I do so in the essay I linked to), but I won't test your patience by rehearsing that here. In a very short summary of my ideas, here, it is impossible to cover every base. "In fact, many great and wonderful things have been done by people who held obviously incorrect or unverifiable theories. In your case, how can we know that dialectics (or, say, Lenin's version of that notion) necessarily poisons revolutionary practice?" Well, my overall argument structure is in fact this: 1) Dialectics makes not one ounce of sense. Under even perfunctory scrutiny its theses fall apart alarmingly quickly. In which case, they cannot -- logically cannot -- be put into practice, anymore than the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear can. 2) This is not surprising since this theory was invented (upside down or the 'right way up') by a card carrying mystic and ruling-class hack. 3) In that case, given its class origins, it can only have deleterious effects on Marxism. 4) The available evidence confirms this. You ask is this 'necessarily' so? Since I do no accept that there are any necessary propositions true of the material world, then no, it's not necessary (in that sense). Dialectics could *accidentally* have a beneficial effect, but we'd be fools to rely on this vanishingly small probability. Indeed, given the disastrous effects it has already had, we'd be complete idiots to cling on to it any longer. So, I am not arguing that dialectic is defective because of the bad effects it has had, but that it is defective so no wonder it does not work. As I said, this is a very brief summary of those two essay at my site, where I work this out in considerable detail. Finally, I am only doing this in order to help make Marxism more successful, not less. Rosa! ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
