Wrestling with Marx- Negations, Continuity and change- Help!
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https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/jospeh-dietzegen
It was not Plekhanov who created the concept of Dialectical materialism, it was Joseph Dietzgen and we have an article about that too. The A Z on Marxism says that there is not an agreement on the SP on regard to a dialectic which that there different point of view about the concept of dialectic and Marx point of view on dialectic, therefore it does not mean that we are wrong. Is the Socialist Standard publishing lies?
MS – ‘thousands of Marxists’
Where are these Marxists? I wish they’d join the Party.
MC – ‘I can’t separate Marx the polymath, into discreet sections from the philospher, dialectician, anthropologist etc et al.’
I couldn’t put it better myself – one of the holistic principles of the dialectic.
Where are these Marxists? I wish they’d join the Party.
There is a big world out there that probably you do not know, there is a big world outside of the socialist party, I might ask the same question why thousands of others members of others organizations do not join the socialist party?
At times i wish Marx and Engels never ever existed…
At times, i wonder if socialism would have been better off without them…
At times, i think we didn’t need them…
And yet we thank them…
And yet socialism has found expression with them…
And it could have come into being in many ways… The road to socialism…
And with/without, a difference is being promoted, ending oppression…
And yet a Utopian worker is born and becomes conscious of that history to come…
And here we are… making socialism speak, no matter the ‘Royal road to science’…
🙂
At times i wish Marx and Engels never ever existed…
At times, i wonder if socialism would have been better off without them…
At times, i think we didn’t need them…
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The Socialist Party has written that without Karl Marx and Frederich Engels they could have created their own theory of socialism, and I think that they are right despite the fact that I have supported Marx and Engels for many years. Personally, I do not need philosophy, philosophers and dialectic to understand Marx and Engels and in order to be a socialist, and I think that without philosophy and without dialectic socialism would have existed too.
I am not afraid of dialectic, I went thru that ideological world for several years, I was a Hegelian and a dialectician and I rejected it and I do not want to come back to it,( if I want to come back I have the contacts ) that am I mistaken? I have been mistaken many times in my life, and if I would get paid for committing mistakes I would have become, or retired as a millionaire, but personally, at the present, I think that I am not mistaken in this one
That I do not have any specific pieces of evidence that Marx abandoned dialectic, Marx never indicated in one specific work his definition of socialism, it is spread in different parts of his works, and there are many works of Marx where he does not use dialectic to express his ideas, I can also say that they abandoned many of their ideas expressed on the Communist Manifesto, there are not any specific works indicating that, but in several of their works they abandoned some of their ideas expressed in the communist manifesto
‘There is a big world out there that probably you do not know, there is a big world outside of the socialist party, I might ask the same question why thousands of others members of others organizations do not join the socialist party?’
MS – the answer to your query is quite obvious, they do not join the Party because they are not Marxists. I speak, of course, of the thousands who have encountered the SPGB and rejected it.
‘At times i wish Marx and Engels never ever existed…’
Alan – I wish at times that capitalism had never existed. Sometimes socialists seem to think that if Marx agreed with their specific perspectives then it is proved correct instead of occasionally using Marx’s own theory to disprove some of his conclusions.
A counter-challenge, Wez. Can you point to Marx having written anything or even expressed an interest in philosophy after he had settled his accounts with German philosophy in 1845?
Of course this could just be a question of semantics about what the word “philosophy” means. For Marx it seems to have been German (mainly Hegelian) philosophy. These were the philosophers who he said had only interpreted the world, even the best of them Feuerbach.
After he had settled with them, Marx only expressed ideas on the methodology of economic, social and historical research and analysis. Which falls into the realm of the theory of science not speculative philosophy.
Marx’s contemporaries in the communist movement who did speak about philosophy after 1845 said like Engels that philosophy came to an end with Feuerbach or like Duetzgen that the positive outcome of philosophy was science. Dirtzgen was interested in epistemology, which is a branch of science not philosophy.
As has been pointed out here, it was only an accident of history that the communist who first development a coherent explanation of capitalism and its economic laws happened to have come from a background of German philosophy. I doubt if anyone other communist did. And there is no reason why they should, certainly not today. Marx’s intellectual development is interesting from some points of view but not crucial to being or becoming a socialist/communist.
As I keep repeating, even if he lost interest in ‘philosophy’ Marx’s analysis was dependent on a dialectical critique which was, undoubtedly, philosophical in origin. The same can be said of science since logic, empiricism and materialism on which it depends are all philosophical concepts. Philosophy after Marx went from strength to strength under the Frankfurt school. You have previously poured scorn on the philosophy of science but it is only through the critique of what science is and what it is not can it be rescued from becoming an ideological religion. There has never been anything more ‘speculative’ than science’s present theory of ‘dark matter and dark energy’ which could well mark the beginning of the end of present scientific paradigms.
A counter-challenge, Wez. Can you point to Marx having written anything or even expressed an interest in philosophy after he had settled his accounts with German philosophy in 1845?
The dialecticians are basing all their argumentation on the 1844 Manuscripts, but their argumentation is not based on the following years. For Marx, Philosophy was the German Ideology, and they settled their account with philosophy
“You have previously poured scorn on the philosophy of science.”
I don’t recall doing that. In fact I am all in favour of the theory of science, i.e., discussing what we mean when we say we know something and the methods of verifying this. Nothing wrong with that at all. That’s all that’s left of “philosophy” (except, I suppose, folksy sayings about what attitude to take the vicissitudes of life and wild theories often linked to religion, eg Nietzsche, Jung, etc).
That’s a matter of opinion. I’ve seen the term “Jungian philosophy” bandied about. In any event he was a dealer in wild, unprovable speculations typical of “philosophers”.
Mao and Lenin are being considered as philosophers and for the Maoists, Mao Tse Tung is the philosopher of our time, and his philosophical ideas ( Mao Tse Tung thoughts ) are all speculative, and he is a dialectician too
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.ht
The Marxists Humanists are saying that Lenin became a different theoretician after he read Hegel Science of Logic, I have not seen too many differences between the Lenin before 1914 and the Lenin after 1914 when he wrote Imperialism. Probably he was closer to Marx before 1914 and before the creation of the vanguard party to lead
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