Re: The 'formalising' of dialectics.

Yeah, while we're at it, isn't a lot of this "dialectics" so much
mumbo-jumbo or bunkum
espoused by theologians, most of whom don't know what they're talking
about except to say that things
can get reaallly complicated or that there is this mechanical process
of conflict between opposites, but if things
don't really turn out the way we thought or we can't explain something
then it's "dialectical", see, like so much mysticism like the Holy
Trinity or Transubstantiation or some other obscure doctrine we common
folk need priests to safeguard and explain to us.

What is this doctrine anyway and where do you see it recognized in any
sphere outside the realm of a certain milieu of the Marxist Left.
Surely, if one is to say that formal logic has its limits to
the point of ossification one is to speak an aphorism, as would the
observation that all phenomena
need to be looked at their full context, in all their aspects,
particularly tem****arily.

A Workers League guy once told me years ago that dialectics is summed
by the critique of formal logic's "A=A"  OK, but A does equal A-at any
particular point in time.  When I see this doctrine generally accepted
in the scientific community or a significant section thereof, then
maybe I'll take it seriously.   It was refre****ng after listening to
all this tedium from Wohlforth and the like to peruse Maurice
Cornforth's (of the British CP) 1940s philosophy pamphlet which is
sociologically oriented with the first sentence talking about cl*****
and class struggle.  OK maybe he was a Stalinist, but hey if Stalin
said the world wasn't flat would he be wrong just because he's Stalin.