Re: The 'formalising' of dialectics.

No, that's not how politics and political conciousness work and the
idea that a vanguard party of petty bourgois
intellectuals is needed to lead the working class is both a dogmatic
****bboleth and petty bourgois elitism.  In actuality what it leads to
more often than not is the working class being contrained by petty
bourgois class interests and bureacratism.  Rather, intellectuals,
marxists or not, need to learn from the workers about their lives and
issues.  This focus on "philosophy" is fundamentally an idealist
position focused on obscure abstract ideas, not reality and in no way
represents the sine quo non of revolutionary marxism; that workers
need to study obscure and abstruse ideas like philospohy grad students
is silly and a waste of time.  Where do correct ideas come from
anyway?  from PRACTICE.

I has the privilege of meeting Healy once.  A very nice guy, a
militant worker, but someone who struck me as being of limited
literacy.  Thus the idea that he was some kind of philosophe is
laughable; he should have known better.  Nonetheless, as stated
earlier, revolutionary struggle is not about philosophes and their
ideas, it wasn't about that in the 18th Century and it isn't about
that now.  It is both pretentious and politically inept.

No, workers need to become more politically and socially "class
conscious" which is something different than a being conversant in
obscure academic issues of philosophy.  This focus on a "turn to
philosophy" (turn to the peasants, turn to industry, but a turn to
philosophy?) is alien to that, representing the petty bourgois ethos
of small groups of intellectuals and experts studying complex stuff
and then patronizingly doleing it out to the stupid m*****.  As the
Maoist slogan from the Cultural Revolution went:  Better Red than
"Expert"!  We want no condescending saviors!