On Jul 22, 2:48 pm, stephen <srdiam...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Jul 20, 7:25 am, rab <rogeralanblackw...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote, first
> quoting me:
>
> <Deletion>
>
> > > The question no one seems to want to look at is whether Trotsky's
> > > intervention concerning dialectics advanced the discussion. Was
> > > Trotsky's intervention a helpful corrective to Shactman's
> > > undialectical thinking or did it merely express truisms that didn't
> > > require dialectics to reach or that weren't actually relevant to the
> > > issue of the nature of Russia? Trotsky says dialectics isl a tool.
If
> > > so, what work did it do in responding to Shactman that couldn't be
> > > carried by other methods? It seems to me these would be the
questions
> > > asked by any Marxist serious about understanding the practical role
o=
f
> > > dialectical thinking. But the dialecticians refuse to get specific,
> > > and the anti-dialecticians refuse to address the points Trotsky
> > > actually makes about how dialectics fits it.
>
> > > srd
>
> > Trotsky's murder cut short the struggle for theoretical clarity
> > regarding the US SWP. I think he would have done more work on the
> > subject over a period of time. What we do know, however, is that
> > Lenin's work on philosophy that culminated in his work 'Materialism
> > and Empirio-criticism' played an im****tant role in clarifying the
> > issues for the Bolsheviks during a difficult time for the party. And
> > of course Lenin went on to study Hegel again during World War I to
> > sharpen his understanding of dialectics. He didn't do this because he
> > was 'into mysticism'.
>
> You can use Lenin as the example, if you wish, but my Trotsky example
> is probably easier to handle for immediate discussion, because
> Trotsky's discussion focused on a particular issue. But your comment
> does not seem to me a scientific approach to the use of dialectics.
> Lenin studies Hegel, but we should not merely take Lenin's opinion,
> without independent study, as whether this study was useful
> politically. He undertook a study of Hegel during World War I, but the
> question is, how did the understanding he extracted from Hegel
> actually help him solve specific political problems?
>
> I have to admit, I don't understand Trotsky's remark about dialectics
> being like finger exercises for a musician. This comment could be
> taken to imply that dialectics is helpful because its study tones
> mental processes, a position that seems like yours. I gather you think
> that by studying Hegel, you become better equipped to deal with
> political crises, even if you never make use of dialectical premises.
> Although I can't offer a counter-interpretation of Trotsky's remark, I
> really don't think that's what he was recommending, since, after all,
> he _directly_ applied dialectical thinking to the Russian question.
> (Also, Lenin said chess--not dialectics--was the "gymnasium of the
> mind." <g>))
>
> In my view, the average political issue requires little of express
> dialectical thinking. It isn't that dialectical processes aren't
> involved, but that once the underlying issues are understood, they
> become incor****ated into formalized theory. Those who remark on a
> commonplace political conclusion being "dialectical" --Holmes is a
> major offender--seem not to understand the role of dialectical
> thinking. The class nature of Russia was such a question, one breaking
> new ground, where habitual and purely formal approaches are
> inadequate.
>
> I think Trotsky's discussion contains the answer to my question and to
> Tom Cod's objections. I think posters are unable to explicate the
> actual role of dialectics in arriving at Trotsky's conclusions on
> Russia because they don't understand them and make the same
> undialectical error in considering the class nature of various regimes
> today. I think the explanation I offer agrees with and descends from
> Wohlforth's explication of Trotsky's discussion, if I recall, in the
> WL pamphlet "Marxism and American Pragmatism," which I recall being
> impressed with.
>
> "Vulgar thought" says of a specified social system that its current
> functioning is what matters. "Common sense" tells us that it doesn't
> matter how a system got the way it is; only its current functioning
> matters. How often have you heard this informally from people
> espousing an exploiting class analysis of Stalinist Russia? Whether
> because of the dominance of a metaphysical bourgeois ideology or a
> natively static nature to the first phase of cognition--bothi, in my
> view--it seems at first sight _absurd_ that anything but the present
> characterization of a system should be involved in predicting its
> future evolution. But, dialectically speaking, there is no "present"
> characterization, because there are no infinitesimal points in time, a
> notion useful as an abstraction in physics but disastrous for
> sociology.
>
> Trotsky is saying you can only appraise the nature of Russia
> historically, by looking at the process of the state's formation.
> Marxism is a historical science, in the sense that when it deals with
> the nature of social institutions, the first criterion is the manner
> of their formation. This historical conceptualization of institutions
> issues from dialectics. Relying on vulgar thought or ordinary common
> sense, one would never arrive at a historical characterization of the
> Russian state. On the surface, it is just too "obvious" that the
> nature of a state must be contained in its present nature and cannot
> be inferred from its history.
>
> The point continues to be lost today by those who *****s Russia and
> China--or in the other direction, those who wrongly *****sed Cuba in
> 1961. The existence of billionaires or the expliotation of labor in
> today's China, for example, has no direct bearing on the nature of the
> Chinese state. Trotsky would say to those taking a metaphysical
> approach, "when did the counter-revolution occur." For China to be
> capitalist, a qualitative change had to occur, and if we can find no
> event where quantity was transformed into quality, we must reject the
> *****sment that the nature of the state has been reversed. The same
> goes for Russia, theoretically, although empirically better candidates
> exist for a transformative event. (I think the problem some of us have
> with *****sing Russia is that we just don't know enough of the _right_
> kind of facts to *****s the nature of Yeltsin's ascension. But the
> absence of an apparent social revolution must be the starting point of
> analysis.)
>
> If dialectics is a "tool," it makes specific contributions to
> political discussions. Those contributions are part of what must be
> understood. It isn't enough to speak in general laudatory terms about
> dialectics.
>
> srd
Just a point of clarification:
You said, =93He (Lenin) undertook a study of Hegel during World War I,
but the question is, how did the understanding he extracted from Hegel
actually help him solve specific political problems? =93
Correcting the misconception in the first part of this statement
answers the the question in second part of your statement.
The position that Lenin =93undertook a study of Hegel during World War
I=94 is a falsification of history which will lead to confusion about
the history of the Russian Revolution and about role of dialectics
itself. (Ilyenkov spells this out in the Introduction to his 1979 book
=93The Metaphysics of Positivism=94. It is located at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/posit0.htm
)
The misconception that Lenin began his study of dialects during WWI is
based on Lenin=92s Philosophical Notebooks which he worked on from
1914-15. The mastery of dialectics had been an ongoing task for Lenin,
however, ever since he began preparing to write =93Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism=94. After the defeat of the 1905 revolution in Russia,
all parties on the left, including the Bolsheviks, were awash with
idealist and religious mystical theories. These reactionary trends
seized on the new developments in physics to claim that Marxism needed
to be revised in an idealist way. Ilyenkov says in =93The Metaphysics of
Positivism=94:
=93Lenin had been writing his book (=93Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism=94=
)
not only during these months, but throughout his entire preceding
life. Prior to the day when he actually set pen to paper, he had
already endured and suffered over this book. Throughout long winter
months in Shushenskoe, when, according to the memoirs of N. K.
Krupskaya, he studied the classics of world philosophy, including
Hegel and his Phenomenology of Spirit; over long conversations with
Plekhanov; throughout the correspondence with Lengnik and Bogdanov, in
the course of which Lenin=92s letter (which, alas, have been lost) grew
into =91whole long treatises on philosophy=92 measuring =91three
notebooks=
=92=85
And, finally, the last meeting with Bogdanov and his friends on Capri
in April 1908, which once again convinced him of the urgent and
inescapable necessity of giving open, final and decisive battle to
Machism.=94 (p. 10)
To those who claim that Lenin didn=92t undertake a study of dialectics
until the =93Philosophical Notebooks=94, and the =93Materialism and
Empirio=
-
Criticism=94 is based on a materialist, but not dialectical,
understanding of Marxism, Ilyenkov says:
=93And as for the conversations about how Lenin supposedly still wasn=92t
thoroughly acquainted with dialectics when he wrote Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism, these are out-and-out falsehoods which could only
appear to be true to someone with a very limited (and highly dubious)
conception of dialectics itself.=94 (Ibid., p. 22)
Later, Ilyenkov elaborates on his earlier statement about the
development of Lenin=92s understanding of dialectics, =93But he (Lenin)
had perfectly well grasped the essence of Hegelian dialectics even
earlier. We know that while he was at Shushenskoe he became familiar
with the Phenomenology of Spirit, a work where this essence comes
through the text much more clearly, vividly and concretely than in the
texts of the Science of Logic or the Lectures on the History of
Philosophy. The fact that the notes from this period were not
preserved, of course, by no means serves as sup****t for the
interpretations of Garaudy and Petrovic. While preparing to write a
materialistic Science of Logic by retaining everything in Hegel which
is truly scientific and not of passing value, and by rigorously
purging the Hegelian logic of everything in it connected with
idealism, he studied, made notes, and commented on the Hegelian texts
at the same time that the cannons of the first world war were
thundering in Europe and the great October Revolution was reaching
maturity. In 1908 he defended the rightness of the dialectics of
Capital, and he defended its interests in the front lines of the
battle for it =96 along the border that then divided (and now divides)
the materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels from the surrogates
which resemble it on the surface, including belated Hegelianism. This
includes idealism in general as well as the idealist version of
dialectics. Lenin had no doubts that the Machist diversion in the rear
lines of revolutionary Marxism was the direct continuation of the
attack on materialist dialectics begun earlier by E. Bernstein. This
is shown in his note to the article 'Marxism and Revisionism', which
concludes the section of this article devoted especially to
philosophy.=94 (Ibid., p. 23, 24)
So this answers the question in the second part of your statement:
=93... how did the understanding he extracted from Hegel actually help
him solve specific political problems?=94 It was the theoretical clarity
which Lenin attained through his dialectical understanding of
materialism which gave him clarity about the economic, political, and
history problems of Russian society and the working class
internationally early in the 20th century. This is why he became a
leader of the Bolshevik Party. It is their application of dialectical
materialism as the guide to action, and their obvious grasp of the
situation, that led the Russian working class to turn to the
Bolsheviks during the revolutionary crisis of 1917.
|
