Rosa Lichtenstein
1st April 2009, 16:05
The Dialectical Materialist Group has been open now for six months, and we have yet to see a substantive (or even vaguely complete) discussion of dialectics over there. In fact, nearly as much space has been devoted to slagging me off --, so much so, they should perhaps rename it the "Hate Rosa Club"
Why is this so?
May I suggest a couple of reasons:
1) If any of you have had the misfortune to read as many books and articles on DM (or even posts here that have tried to summarise this 'theory') as I have then you will no doubt have noticed how mind-numbingly repetitive they all are.
This involves most dialectical authors rehearsing one of more the following hardy perennials: balding heads, John and his manhood, boiling water, Mendeleyev's Table, wave/particle duality, 'contradictory' motion, "A is equal to A", a character from Molière who has spoken "prose all his life without knowing it", "Yea, Yea" and "Nay Nay", seeds negating plants, living/dying cells, Mamelukes, who have a somewhat ambiguous fighting record against the French, the North and South Poles of a magnet, and so on, year in, year out -- despite it having been pointed out many times that none of these specially-selected examples works to begin with.
In that case, other than just repeating the sacred mantra yet again for the gazillionth time, there is very little for the sad denizens of the DM-Group to discuss.
2) DM has largely remained frozen in a time-warp lasting for about a hundred years, with very little or no innovation in the intervening years (one or two CPSU theorists and Mao, perhaps, being the exception here, when they invented 'antagonistic' and 'non-antagonistic', 'principal' and 'secondary contradictions', etc., notions unknown to Hegel, Marx, Engels, Plekhanov and Lenin). Apart from this, anyone who has had the temerity to try to innovate is soon accused of 'Revisionism', the scientific development of this 'theory' grinding to a halt, the abstract now set in concrete.
No other scientific theory that I know of has been ossified in this way. Religious and metaphysical theories, on the other hand, display this characteristic quite clearly.
In that case, these sad individuals are not brave enough to try to innovate, so they have nothing to discuss.
Hence all that is left for them to do is gesture at re-reading the classics (and they have been rather pathetic at this up to now, too!), and this is not surprising, either.
This is because if your theory is frozen in non-dialectical ice for decades on end, then it resembles religious dogma more and more with each passing year. In that case, just like the Bible, all you can do is study the sacred texts, and then stifle the desire to ask intelligent questions, or any at all.
Read, repeat and memorise the Dialectical Mantra...
This is Moses and the Prophets for such mystics.
Indeed, for mystics and dogmatists, innovation is the enemy.
For genuine science, in contrast, it is the life-blood.
Why is this so?
May I suggest a couple of reasons:
1) If any of you have had the misfortune to read as many books and articles on DM (or even posts here that have tried to summarise this 'theory') as I have then you will no doubt have noticed how mind-numbingly repetitive they all are.
This involves most dialectical authors rehearsing one of more the following hardy perennials: balding heads, John and his manhood, boiling water, Mendeleyev's Table, wave/particle duality, 'contradictory' motion, "A is equal to A", a character from Molière who has spoken "prose all his life without knowing it", "Yea, Yea" and "Nay Nay", seeds negating plants, living/dying cells, Mamelukes, who have a somewhat ambiguous fighting record against the French, the North and South Poles of a magnet, and so on, year in, year out -- despite it having been pointed out many times that none of these specially-selected examples works to begin with.
In that case, other than just repeating the sacred mantra yet again for the gazillionth time, there is very little for the sad denizens of the DM-Group to discuss.
2) DM has largely remained frozen in a time-warp lasting for about a hundred years, with very little or no innovation in the intervening years (one or two CPSU theorists and Mao, perhaps, being the exception here, when they invented 'antagonistic' and 'non-antagonistic', 'principal' and 'secondary contradictions', etc., notions unknown to Hegel, Marx, Engels, Plekhanov and Lenin). Apart from this, anyone who has had the temerity to try to innovate is soon accused of 'Revisionism', the scientific development of this 'theory' grinding to a halt, the abstract now set in concrete.
No other scientific theory that I know of has been ossified in this way. Religious and metaphysical theories, on the other hand, display this characteristic quite clearly.
In that case, these sad individuals are not brave enough to try to innovate, so they have nothing to discuss.
Hence all that is left for them to do is gesture at re-reading the classics (and they have been rather pathetic at this up to now, too!), and this is not surprising, either.
This is because if your theory is frozen in non-dialectical ice for decades on end, then it resembles religious dogma more and more with each passing year. In that case, just like the Bible, all you can do is study the sacred texts, and then stifle the desire to ask intelligent questions, or any at all.
Read, repeat and memorise the Dialectical Mantra...
This is Moses and the Prophets for such mystics.
Indeed, for mystics and dogmatists, innovation is the enemy.
For genuine science, in contrast, it is the life-blood.