Re: The 'formalising' of dialectics.

Obviously I share your disdain for Bush and I appreciate your
different vein on this issue.  Yes, we really do need to put out a
program on the burning issues of the day-and not run from that.  The
War in Iraq and the economic issues, but we need to do this,
particularly the latter by DE-MYSTIFYING these issues for people, not
further mystifiying them.  This is the danger I see in abstract
speculations about theory divorced from any material context.
Questions like the nature of money, banking-all the mystifying
rhetoric that intelletuals and talking heads use almost like a in-
group dialect amongst themselves to confuse people and make them think
that the economy is some kind of barely understandable force of nature
beyond humans' control.

This is where I see the need for education.   There is a universe of
knowledge out there that no individual can possible appropriate to
himself or herself; a concept related to the need for division of
labor etc.  Thus, an explication of these economic issues-not
diatribes about the nature of logic in general (leaving aside
intuition)- is something the working class really needs to have laid
bare in this period, whether as the product of intellectual
"dialetics" or not.  In that regard, it bears pointing out that Marx's
ideas were not solely the result of intellectual work in a library but
were also a function of his involvement with the early labor movement
and interactions with individual workers and other social observations-
like his watching the speculators at the cotton exchange.

An excellent brief book in this regard, from someone who made no
pretentions of being a Marxist, is Isaiah Berlin's brief biographical
sketch of Marx published in 1939 and reissued in 63 which gives Marx
his due explicating his social, historic and intellectual roots and
background.  Engels', "Ludwig Feuerbach", which I read as a college
student, is also a good "popular" explication of the intellectual
background of the rise of Marxist thinking.  Marxism and politics for
that matter, although many talk about "political science" is a science
if at all by being a social science or humanity, meaning not an exact
science as anything dealing with human beings and their behavior
beyond bare biology, can never be that given the subjective factors
involved.