Re: The 'formalising' of dialectics.

It bears pointing out also in regard to your point about Shactman and
Burnham that their intellectual arguments needed to be taken with a
grain of salt.  It's not so much that they didn't genuinely understand
something, but that they were advancing arguments in bad faith,
whatever they could come up with, to justify-particularly as to
Burnham-their own capitulation to reaction, something Burnham did
consciously, starting from what he viewed as his own personal
interests as a rich bourgois.   Shortly thereafter in Partisan Review
in June 1941 he referrred to Nazi Germany as the lesser evil whose
victory over Soviet Russia he stated he would welcome.  From the 1950s
onward he had a column in the National Review entitled "The Third
World War" devoted to stoking the flames of the Cold War.  He was
awarded the "Medal of Freedom" by Reagan.  Shactman, as I recall
became intimate with the AFL-CIO tops and, correct me if I'm wrong,
was linked to the CIA in the 1950s.  Their political evolution was not
the result of some naive misapprehension of correct ideas but had more
banal and corrupt motives.

Thus workers need not to become lost in pie in the sky daydreams and
pipe dreams but keep their eyes on the ball so to speak.  I remember I
worked in this cannery one time where the union was under incredible
pressure and where one of the people playing a really scabby role was
this ostensibly ultra-left intellectual versed in the all the
obscurata associated with that.  He would say stuff like the union was
an obstacle that he wouldn't defend, we needed soviets now etc.  I
kept noticing that he had a hard time keeping a straight face, part of
the mocking contempt he had for us.  Sadly we had to deal with him in
a non-intellectual manner in the end just to prove what retards we
were, but he appreciated our point.  I was in his apartment once
previously and noticed how nice it was, sure didn't come from cannery
wages, maybe that anti-union law firm of "consultants" the company
hired had something to do with it.  A French comrade I knew in the US
said a dual citizen guy we knew who always hung around all the faction
fights-and who was well versed in all of it- took his smart aleck,
know-it-all routine to a higher level in seeking to run interference
on a grocery workers strike in Paris in the late 70s.