Re: The 'formalising' of dialectics.

On Jul 15, 11:48 am, Tom Cod <t...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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!

Leon Trotsky in  "In Defense of Marxism": A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition
in the Socalist Workers Party: Theoetical Skepticism and Exlecticism

"The authors of the article did not show, could not and did not care
to show, this internal connection between philosophy and the material
development of society, and they frankly explained why.

=93The two authors of the present article,=94 they wrote of themselves,
=93differ thoroughly on their estimate of the general theory of
dialectical materialism, one of them accepting it and the other
rejecting it ... There is nothing anomalous in such a situation.
Though theory is doubtless always in one way or another related to
practice, the relation is not invariably direct or immediate; and as
we have before had occasion to remark, human beings often act
inconsistently. From the point of view of each of the authors there is
in the other a certain such inconsistency between =91philosophical
theory=92 and political practice, which might on some occasion lead to
decisive concrete political disagreement. But it does not now, nor has
anyone yet demonstrated that agreement or disagreement on the more
abstract doctrines of dialectical materialism necessarily affects
today=92s and tomorrow=92s concrete political issues-and political
parties, programs and struggles are based on such concrete issues. We
all may hope that as we go along or when there is more leisure,
agreement may also be reached on the more abstract questions.
Meanwhile there is fascism and war and unemployment.=94

What is the meaning of this thoroughly astoni****ng reasoning? Inasmuch
as some people through a bad method sometimes reach correct
conclusions, and inasmuch as some people through a correct method not
infrequently reach incorrect conclusions, therefore ... the method is
not of great im****tance. We shall meditate upon methods sometime when
we have more leisure, but now we have other things to do. Imagine how
a worker would react upon complaining to his foreman that his tools
were bad and receiving the reply: With bad tools it is possible to
turn out a good job, and with good tools many people only waste
material. I am afraid that such a worker, particularly if he is on
piece-work, would respond to the foreman with an unacademic phrase. A
worker is faced with refractory materials which show resistance and
which because of that compel him to appreciate fine tool=92s, whereas a
petty-bourgeois intellectual =96 alas! =96 utilizes as his =93tools=94
fugitive observations and superficial generalizations =96 until major
events club him on the head.

To demand that every party member occupy himself with the philosophy
of dialectics naturally would be lifeless pedantry. But a worker who
has gone through the school of the class struggle gains from his own
experience an inclination toward dialectical thinking. Even if unaware
of this term, he readily accepts the method itself and its
conclusions. With a petty bourgeois it is worse. There are of course
petty-bourgeois elements organically linked with the workers, who go
over to the proletarian point of view without an internal revolution.
But these constitute an insignificant minority. The matter is quite
different with the academically trained petty bourgeoisie. Their
theoretical prejudices have already been given finished form at the
school bench. Inasmuch as they succeeded in gaining a great deal of
knowledge both useful and useless without the aid of the dialectic,
they believe that they can continue excellently through life without
it. In reality they dispense with the dialectic only to the extent
they fail to check, to polish, and to sharpen theoretically their
tools of thought, and to the extent that they fail to break
practically from the narrow circle of their daily relation****ps. When
thrown against great events they are easily lost and relapse again
into petty-bourgeois ways of thinking."

The entire article is at:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/09-pbopp.htm