Materialist Dialectics

Well it certainly sounds like you have. Read the blue box in the right column labeled "Introduction" at your site.

Dialectical Materialism (DM) has been the official philosophy of active revolutionary socialists for over a hundred and thirty years.

During that time, Dialectical Marxism has 'enjoyed' spectacular lack of success.

Given the fact that dialecticians assure us that truth is tested in practice, and that "materialist dialectics" is the main-spring of all they do, this can only mean that this 'theory' has been tested and shown to fail.

However, not only is it virtually impossible for most Dialectical Marxists to accept this negative picture of their own 'success', it is more difficult still for them to blame it even so much as partly on the misbegotten theory they have inherited from Hegel.

In fact, it doesn't even make the reserve list.

This must mean that in a world where dialecticians claim that everything is interconnected, the only two things in the entire universe that are not inter-linked are the long-term failure of Dialectical Marxism and its core theory: 'Materialist Dialectics'!

This is impossible to believe.

Unfortunately, their denial means that Dialectical Marxists never learn from their mistakes --, they just blame this long-term failure on anything and everything else.

Naturally, this just leads to yet more failures, and the cycle continues year on year.

(1) It is important to emphasise from the outset that I am not blaming the long-term failure of Marxism solely on the acceptance of the Hermetic ideas dialecticians inherited from Hegel.

It is worth repeating this since I still encounter comments on Internet discussion boards, and still receive e-mails from those who claim to have read the above words, who still think I am blaming all our woes on dialectics. I am not.

However, no matter how many times I repeat this caveat, the message will not sink in (and this is after several years of continually making this very point!).

It seems that this is one part of the universe over which the Heraclitean Flux has no power!

Here is just the latest example.

What is being claimed, however, is that adherence to this 'theory' is one of the subjective reasons why Dialectical Marxism has become a bye-word for failure.

There are other, objective reasons why the class enemy still runs this planet, but since revolutions require revolutionaries with ideas in their heads, this 'theory' must take some of the blame.

So, it is alleged here that dialectics has been an important contributory factor.

It certainly helps explain why revolutionary groups are in general vanishingly small, neurotically sectarian, studiously unreasonable, consistently conservative, theoretically deferential to 'tradition', and almost invariably lean toward some form of substitutionism.

Naturally, this has had a direct bearing on our lack of impact on the working-class over the last seventy years or so -- and probably for much longer -- and thus on the continuing success of Capitalism.

The following 'Unity of Opposites' is difficult to explain otherwise:

The larger the proletariat, the smaller the impact that Dialectical Marxism has on it.

Sadly, this will continue while comrades cling on to this regressive doctrine.

OTC, all you've demonstrated is that a Wittgensteinian reading of Marx is unMarxian.