"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Apr 2, 2010

...on the way out the door.

The rub: I don't know if I embrace, fully, the implied homogeneity of class, the uniformity of class values, or the mysticism of dialectical materialism, especially following Engels' interpretation of the far less certain, and far more fluid Marx. Marx presages an awareness of the impact of material effort on material-chemical thought, and how culture and power develop in these ecologies. Engels prophesies a perfect future of crystalline harmony, and calls it science.

Historical materialism I can accept, but not the assumptions of the Dialectic. I think I've come to understand antagonism, contradiction and opposition, but I reject the religious assumption that all events and objects contain, somewhere, somehow, within themselves, and within aggregate sets of themselves, antitheses which must express as manichean divisions resulting in future syntheses, expressing thereafter self-contained antitheses, and so on and so on.

See comrade Rosa for a much better dismantling of Hegel's Mysticism than I can ever offer.

Marx provides an articulate (and often dryly humorous) set of analytical tools, which often require the user to extract them from the accretions of Engel's interpretations, redactions and resetting - as well as those of Lenin, Trotsky and subsequent schools of pro- and anti-Marxist thought.

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