The Opiate of the Party

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Some comrades might like to read my latest post. However, others may prefer -- like those who confronted Galileo -- not to look down this telescope; their simple faith I well understand -- it is both their burden and their punishment.

Hot of the processor at:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016.htm

This is a summary of the ideas that have been posted already at my site, or will be posted over the next few months. It is aimed at those who prefer brevity.

This essay itself has been sliced up into manageable sections here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016.htm

So, I say why I brand dialectics 'the opiate of the party' here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-9.htm

And analyse the nature and provenance of ruling-class theory here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-12.htm

The long-term failure of Marxist practice (where this need not have been so) is considered here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-2-3-10.htm

(about 3/4's of the way down the page).

Lenin's unwitting destruction of materialism here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-13.htm

And much else besides.

Remember, these are only summaries of my ideas; the full details will be published later this year.

Also worthy of note: I have immortalised our very own Miles (partly for his skim-reading of my essays, and partly for his head-in-the-sand approach to new knowledge -- he therefore wins the Gold Medal in this event; well done Miles! A clear winner). Read this here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-9.htm

And with these words:

"Either way, the un-revisability of DM confirms its dogmatic status. Indeed, only Fundamentalist theologians jealously guard the changelessness of their 'revealed' truths with comparable zeal.

Water of a dialectical duck's back all this; such comrades gave up radical thinking (at least in Philosophy) years ago.

This accounts for the response so far to these Essays among the faithful. Many just skim read them, at best. Pages and pages of Hegel are downed before breakfast. A few thousand words of tightly-argued prose, and they suddenly get picky. An equal number of non-sequiturs (and acres of appallingly bad 'logic) in Hegel is fine. In fact it is more than fine, it is 'genuine philosophy' (even if no one can comprehend it).

Rosa makes a few small errors, and all hell breaks loose.

In fact, one comrade on an American, revolutionary discussion-board, who will remain anonymous, was happy to dismiss everything posted at my site (as "turgid" -- what does that make Hegel's Logic then!?) even though he clearly did not read it, on the basis of the assumed fact that I was a petty-bourgeois intellectual. When informed of my working-class credentials (and that I am a trade union representative), he still brushed this aside on the newly assumed basis that I must be a bureaucrat.

[In fact, I hold down a full-time job, and represent my colleagues at work without pay.]

Hegel, of course, was a coal miner....

As I noted in the introduction, this response is predictable. So, this comrade was happy to malign me (and invent whatever he needed) rather than confront the awful truth about the ruling-class ideas he has so uncritically swallowed. The fact that a working-class comrade like myself could rubbish this alien-class theory so thoroughly was anathema to him. I am now on his own private Index of Forbidden Books; his tender eyes can no longer look down this particular metaphorical telescope.

[Anyone who doubts any of this should try to get a randomly selected dialectician to specify under what conditions they would abandon a DM-thesis; unless they are incredibly lucky (and, disingenuous responses aside), none will be forthcoming. This shows that DM-theses are neither empirically-based nor scientific.]

There are in fact two sorts of dialectician.: (1) Low Church dialecticians cleave to the original, unvarnished faith laid down in Engels, Plekhanov, parts of Lenin, and Trotsky's writings. These simple souls are highly proficient at quoting endless passages from the holy books, just like the faithful who bow to the East or who fill the gospel halls around the world.

They may be naive, but they are at least consistently so.

(2) High Church dialecticians, on the other hand, are often openly contemptuous of the 'sophomoric ideas' found in these classic works, but they are equally dismissive of simple Low Church souls for their adherence to every word in the DM-classics. [Anyone who knows about High Church Anglicanism will know of what I speak.] High Church dialecticians are mercifully above such crudities; they prefer the mother load -- direct from Hegel, Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks and assorted latter day Hermeticists like Raya Dunayevskaya, Tony Smith, Chris Arthur and Bertell Ollman -- cut perhaps with a few kilos of hardcore jargon drawn straight from that intellectual morass otherwise known as French Philosophy.

High Church dialecticians are thus generally, but not exclusively, academic. Tortured prose is their forte, and a pointless existence is their punishment.

At least Low Church dialecticians try to pretend that their ideas are relevant to the class struggle.

High Church dialectics is just good for the CV.

[Clearly it is not an "abomination" for that section of the bourgeoisie who administer Universities.]

Both wings, however, are adequately stocked with lost souls, happy in their own way to copy the a priori thought-forms of two-and-a-half millennia of boss-class theory, seldom pausing to note the implications of such easily won knowledge: if knowledge of the world is a priori, reality must be Ideal.

Even this simple truth will sail over their heads, so deep have ruling ideas sunk into their class-compromised brains."

Remember comrades, keep checking back at my site. I am only about a third of the way through this thorough demolition of dialectical materialism -- 250,000 words already posted.

[A long way to go to catch Marx up, if anyone is wondering about brevity....]

And a final thanks to dialecticians everywhere -- without you we would not know dialectics is a total failure.

Way not to go, guys!

http://www.anti-dialectics.org

[redstar2000]

Yea, Rosa! :D

I think our resident "dialecticians" are mostly "low Church" here...as evidenced by the quality of their "arguments".

"High Church dialecticians" would probably consider it demeaning to post on a board like this one...where they'd be unable to display their erudition in the original French or German.

Let's face it: this is not a good place for them to exhibit their philosophical peacock feathers.

The spotlight is too dim. :lol:

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Red, I think you are right.

A few High Church dialecticians have contacted me by e-mail to inform me that I am trying to slay the already dead at my site, since no Marxist of any intelligence (so they say) would swallow the simple myths and fables peddled by Engels (in Dialectics of Nature, or Anti-Duhring), or Plekhanov, Lenin (in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism), and Trotsky (in In Defense of Marxism).

However, to show that there are plenty of Low Chuche-goers still around, I pointed them here, and to Ted Grant and Alan Woods's site:

http://www.marxists.org/

and several other medieval backwaters.

However, I am in the process of re-writing Essay Two, and have just added these comments:

""Flexibility, applied objectively, i.e., reflecting the all-sidedness of the material process and its unity, is dialectics, is the correct reflection of the eternal development of the world." [Lenin (1961), p.110.]

Lest we are tempted to search back through the archives to find the countless container-loads of missing evidence Lenin had "carefully" marshalled in support of these dramatic claims, a consideration of the next passage will at least relieve us of that onerous task. Here at last Lenin is disarmingly honest about where he obtained these sweeping generalisations:

"Hegel brilliantly divined the dialectics of things (phenomena, the world, nature) in the dialectics of concepts…. This aphorism should be expressed more popularly, without the word dialectics: approximately as follows: In the alternation, reciprocal dependence of all notions, in the identity of their opposites, in the transitions of one notion into another, in the eternal change, movement of notions, Hegel brilliantly divined precisely this relation of things to nature…. [W]hat constitutes dialectics?…. [M]utual dependence of notions all without exception…. Every notion occurs in a certain relation, in a certain connection with all the others." [Lenin (1961), pp.196-97.]

Lenin is quite open about his sources in these private notebooks; dialectics derives not from a "patient empirical examination of the facts", but from studying Hegel! As far as evidence goes, that is it; that's all there is! The search for evidence begins and ends with dialecticians leafing through Hegel's Logic. That is the extent of the evidence Lenin offered in support of his assertions about "all notions" without exception, and about "all phenomena and processes in nature", and nature's "eternal development", etc., etc. And as the rest this Essay and the other Essays posted here show, this approach to the 'science of dialectics' is shared by every other DM-theorist.

To be sure, Lenin did add the following comment:

"The correctness of this aspect of the content of dialectics must be tested by the history of science." [Lenin (1961), p.357.]

Many dialecticians make similar claims. However, as we have noted several times already, the other things DM-theorists say flatly contradict this seemingly modest admission. The theses Lenin and others advance go way beyond the available evidence (and beyond any conceivable evidence); they transcend the listing of mere examples.

Indeed, since Lenin also claimed that human knowledge will only ever be partial and incomplete, neither he nor the most pedantically "patient" of dialectical sleuths will ever be in a position to justify the sweeping a priori claims we find him (and others) regularly making -- like those about the "eternal development of the world", for example.

How could anything from the entire history of science confirm something like that?

Moreover, Lenin himself admitted as much in the very next few sentences:

"This aspect of dialectics…usually receives inadequate attention: the identity of opposites is taken as the sum total of examples…and not as a law of cognition (and as a law of the objective world)." [Lenin (1961), p.357.]

Hence, the need to provide mere evidence is in fact a distraction, one that the dedicated dialectician should rightly eschew. In this particular case, the thesis that UO's [Unities of Opposites] exist everywhere in nature, and which govern change throughout reality, expresses a "law of cognition" and a "law of the objective world", and it is these laws that legitimate the imposition of dialectical verities onto nature. This is something Lenin also described in the following terms in the next few passages of the same Notebooks:

"The identity of opposites…is the recognition…of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature…. The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their 'self-movement', in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the 'struggle' of opposites…. [This] alone furnishes the key to the self-movement of everything existing…." [Lenin (1961), pp.357-58.]

Now, the uncommitted reader might be forgiven for thinking that the claim (recorded earlier) that DM does not provide the "master-key" to everything -- to which denial all aspiring dialecticians at least pay lip-service -- has here been rescinded by Lenin. In this passage, Lenin describes the struggle of opposites as "the key to the self-movement of everything existing". This must surely include the many countless things that were way beyond the science of his day (and indeed of ours), and which transcend any conceivable human experience. If they concern "everything existing", they would surely encompass, say, the behaviour of elementary particles in the outermost regions of space and time, far beyond anything humanity will ever experience, and much else besides.

Compare this with what John Rees had earlier claimed:

"The dialectic is not a ['magic master key for all questions'] [or a] calculator into which it is possible to punch the problem and allow it to compute the solution. This would be an idealist method. A materialist dialectic must grow from a patient, empirical examination of the facts and not be imposed on them…." [The Algebra of Revolution, or Rees (1998), p.271, slightly edited; quoting Trotsky (1973), p.233.]

But now we have Lenin informing us that a belief in the universal existence of UO's is indeed just such a "key" to understanding everything in existence, flatly contradicting what Rees (and Trotsky) had said.

[UO = Unity of Opposites.]

Now, if Lenin is right, it is perfectly clear why the need to provide evidence is in fact a distraction; the a priori approach to knowledge that DM-theorists have copied from traditional philosophers means that evidence is not only unnecessary, it is to be avoided wherever possible.

Clearly, the acceptance of an evidence-based science is a sop to crude materialism. DM-laws are based on "objective" laws, on "laws of cognition" (and not on material evidence), on 'dialectical logic', on "axioms" (as Trotsky depicts things, recorded below), and on assorted "insistences" and "demands".
In this way, therefore, we see that Hegel's system, even when inverted, takes control: DM is "objective" since the world is Ideal, and dialecticians have the master key to unlock it.

It now seems clear that we have indeed located the Dialectical Master-key, one that unlocks all of reality and which explains why so few dialecticians ever bother to provide evidence in support of their universal theses.

This will need to be qualified somewhat as these Essays progress.

However, in relation to the need to produce evidence to support their theories I distinguish between two sorts of dialectician: High Church and Low Church. It seems that in the former, the desire to grub around in the physical world seeking out material evidence in support of their a priori theories is somewhat attenuated. Wall to wall jargon, spruced up with lengthy commentary on the jargon of other High Church Theologians, admixed with a regular supply of Neologisms, and written in very material ink is about as close to material evidence as these Dialectical Monks seem to get. Systematic Theology replaced by Systematic Dialectics. They have probably forgotten how to spell "radical".

In contrast, Low Church Urchins at least make some sort of an effort to scrape together what little support they can from nature, although after the hardy perennials (seeds negating themselves, heads turning bald, pans of water boiling, rubber bands snapping, soup tasting too salty, and Mamelukes finding the French army a little daunting) have been given their ten thousandth airing, the favourable evidence peters out alarmingly quickly. [Of course, the negative evidence, given in Essay Seven at my site, is either ignored or ignored some more.]

Now, anyone who has carried out hard scientific research will know how much evidence is needed (and how precise it has to be) even to settle minor issues (let alone make breakthroughs into new areas). The thin evidential gruel offered up by Low Church Urchins in support of their theses is rather pathetic in comparison, a few paragraphs here and there, a few pages, perhaps the odd book or two. Even at its best the contrast with genuine science is stark indeed.

[More on Woods and Grant later.]

Can you imagine the derision a genuine scientist would receive if he or she attempted to, say, resurrect Caloric theory based on a book of perhaps two hundred pages of semi-anecdotal 'evidence' (some of it twisted, most of it irrelevant, all of it specially selected, and in a way that resembles the way Creationists assemble 'proof' that the Bible is infallible, etc.), [i]with no data at all, no experimental evidence, no original research?

Even Low Church Urchins assemble evidence and when it comes to, say, economic theory, but here they appear to have a dialectically-induced blind spot. And this seems to extend to scientists who are Low Church-goers, too. [The same sort of tunnel vision afflicts scientists who are also supporters of 'Intelligent Design'.]

Small wonder then that High Church Dialecticians (who, in contrast, seem to know something about the scientific method) look upon their Low Church Brethren with pity, and some alarm. Indeed, one or two find it hard to believe such Dialectical Dinosaurs still exist, or that they matter if they do. Indeed, more that one has contacted me (since this material first appeared on the Internet) to inform me that with these Essays, I am attempting to slay the already dead. For High Church go-ers, to be Low Church is to cease to exist, apparently.

However, the fact that RIRE can sell thousands of copies more than the most popular book ever written by anyone from the High Church Faction, and they know nothing about it (so divorced it seems they have now become from grubby material reality) says more that I can about their irrelevance from the class struggle. As far at the class war concerned, High Church comrades have ceased to exist.

I will leave it to readers to decide which faction is the most to be pitied.

[RIRE = Reason in Revolt. I.e., Woods and Grant (1995).]

Even worse, the fact that so many Low Church Urchins think so highly of RIRE, while knowing so little about the requirements of proof in hard science, and even less about logic, suggests that human stupidity does not end at the doors of the local (genuine) church.

UK Prime Minister Disraeli bemoaned a realm made of two Nations not 150 years ago; one living in total ignorance of the other. The same may well be said of our High and Low Church comrades.

May the non-existent 'Deity' have no mercy on their souls.

For High Church Theologians, the master key is Hegel's Logic, which is perhaps the only key in existence which is vastly more complex than any lock ever made. In fact, it locks things up permenantly. It probably squirts superglue.

For Low Church Urchins, the key is dispersed over the DM-classics.

Low Key Dialectics is thus rather scriptural in approach, highly repetitive, but easy to learn. High Key Dialectics in comparison is largely incomprehensible, suspiciously esoteric, and highly ritualised (adepts must show proof they are competent with the jargon -- anything less is sneer reviewed).

The analogy with Anglicanism is uncannily accurate, one feels."

Just turning the non-dialectical knife, comrade -- despite what Lenin said, it won't turn itself.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

By the way, I should be able to post the new version of Essay Two this weekend at some point.

I am re-writng all the Essays so far posted (before I upload any new ones), since my ideas are developing apace.

Must strike while our Low Church friends are hot under the collar!


-------oOo--------



Dialectical Materialism won't change itself from the inside.

It is not going to change because of its own internal contradictions.

It is thus the best disproof we have of itself....



So, see what all the fuss is about, and check out the biggest revison to Marxist Philosophy for 150, years at:

http://www.anti-dialectics.org

[Monty Cantsin]

Originally posted by Rosa [email protected] 4 2006, 01:12 AM


A few High Church dialecticians have contacted me by e-mail to inform me that I am trying to slay the already dead at my site, since no Marxist of any intelligence (so they say) would swallow the simple myths and fables peddled by Engels (in Dialectics of Nature, or Anti-Duhring), or Plekhanov, Lenin (in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism), and Trotsky (in In Defense of Marxism).

However, to show that there are plenty of Low Chuche-goers still around, I pointed them here, and to Ted Grant and Alan Woods's site:

i'd have to agree with them...who really cares what Ted Grant and Alan Woods go on about? there just tautological robots.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Maybe so, Monty, but since these comrades are the backbone of the active revolutionary movement, their theory needs to be given an indecent burial.

And what the **** is a "tautological robot"?



http://www.anti-dialectics.org