New member but long time lurker here and lemmygrad, it might not be a good starter post for my social credit to make such a theoretical posts but nevertheless this article is a great criticism of our method of viewing the world and basing our practice on it.
I myself admit of ideating towards idealism and thinking that diamat explained everything in the world and that the revolution IS inevitable and that there is no need to struggle anymore because it was all going to workout in the end…
I started applying the process of “negation” and “sublation” to my own life and decisions (history as an automatic upward spiral, etc.) which as you might guess lead me to nowhere, but once I realized the mistakes I had made and started epistemic overcorrection and refuted dialectical materialism(for a short while).
I would love for this to be discussed widely…
Thank you very much for the warm welcome!
I will defiantly join in.
Thank you for the physics insight. I too don’t find the mechanical deterministic view compelling, but really it was partly due to my laziness that I judged the users name of Marxism Leninism and assumed he was level headed. Even if we were fully determined, it will eventually lead to fatalism which hinders our socialist cause as the other commentator has mentioned.
Sorry for broad questions but how do you apply this Marxian worldview in your personal/organizational life if you don’t mind intruding? Are there things you take for granted or you constantly criticize your own beliefs?
It’s foundational. Not that I’m some remarkable Marxist but it does inform how I think and act. For example, understanding ideology, how one’s ideology is the product of a dialectical interaction with one’s material conditions. If material conditions are the basis of ideology, then changing someone’s circumstances can gradually change their ideology. Likewise my ideology, my understanding of this fact enables me to recognize the capacity for that change i.e. revolutionary action; Thesis 3 against Feuerbach:
Less abstractly this means understanding how people think, for example reactionary ideology like homophobia; this means understanding how that thought can be changed. If this is not understood then being on the side of revolution becomes very depressing and cynical.
Moreover all of the great Marxists recognized the importance of dialectic, including Lenin and Mao. I believe Lenin said Marx cannot be understood properly without first understanding dialectics.