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Anonymous Tue Jul 30 21:20:35 2019 No.13558166 [Reply] [Original]

>Hegelism is like a mental disease; you can't know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you have got it -- Max Eastman

Is Eastman right though? And if you disagree: why deny the simply facts of life?

How else are we to account for Engels's own 're-discovery' of dialectics later in life, after a brief youthful dalliance and subsequent rejection of it in the 1840s (alongside Marx)? How else can we make sense of an analogous course taken by Lenin and Trotsky?

Admittedly, it isn't easy for Marxists to accept the validity of this depiction of the founders of our movement, in view of the almost god-like stature these comrades have assumed over the years. That, of course, is part of the problem! It prevents revolutionaries thinking for themselves, 'outside the box', in this direction, lest they are branded "Revisionists!", or traitors to the cause. This helps guarantee that they, too, put a slavish adherence to tradition ahead of the search for truth.
In this way, and to change the image, the gravitational pull of the Black Whole of Hegelian Idealism would become irresistible --, indeed, as Hegel himself foresaw:
>Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is carried out

Nevertheless, this goes some way toward explaining Engels's later drift back into Hegelian Idealism. In his case, it accounts for his use of Hegel's obscure concepts as a "master key" to unlock nature's underlying secrets, which supposedly govern all of material reality for all of time, even while he denied he was doing just that!

This also helps account for the fact that subsequent generations of revolutionaries have uncritically accepted a demonstrably, if not lamentably, weak theory, and one that has presided over decade after decade of failure.

These theorists and these activists have consistently displayed a level of philosophical gullibility that is impossible to explain in any other way -- especially in view of the fact that elsewhere they think and behave like hard-headed materialists --, except we appeal to extra-logical factors, such as their class origin and their need for some form of consolation in the face of long-term failure. You guys have no idea how many contemporary Marxists, are going exclusively analytic. And this is only the beginning.

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