Dialectical Emptyness

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> "Robert Day" <radicalrob@xxxxxxxxxxx> 06/26/00 09:38PM >>>
Pardon me for butting into this and dissolving my status as a humble lurker.
But I always get very edgy and skeptical when I hear glorious, bland
Hegelian rhetoric being tossed about. I'm not the first, and hopefully not
the last, marxist to cringe at the impulses of historical materialism,
economic determinism, or the unfortunate ornate metanarratives of Hegel and
his wayward triangular followers. Without wishing to create a rupture of
bickering and denials of economic determinism excellent marxists and
snobbish indigence by postmodern cultural critics, I submit the following:

If orthodox leftists were in the bumper-sticker making business, their first
product would be something involving the inverted-Hegelian/marxist
dialectic - possibly a cute picture of Marx dangling poor Georg by his feet,
or some gorgeous triangular visual fugue with syntheses soaring both upward
and downward.

((((((((((((((

CB: Don't qutie follow you here.

Technically speaking , Marx and Engels flipped Hegel OFF of his head and onto his feet, like people in the material world are constructed.

"Orthodox leftists" tend to have much less concern with beautiful logical schemes than intellectuals, so their bumperstickers are more like " People Before Profits" and "Jobs, Peace and Equality". The slogans tend to reflect interest in practical-critical activity rather than just critical thinking ; or it is practice that breaks the mold of simple cookie cutter thinking, so cookie cutters are hardly central.  Proof of the cookies is in the eating and all that.

And the problem with "unorthodox leftism" is that it seems unconcerned with bumper stikers or other efforts to move masses, (which is the only way to change the world), and more concerned with sophisticated thinking and how that is not simplifiable.


(((((((((((




This is precisely the problem. Orthodox marxism WOULD fit on a
bumper sticker. A neat slogan - Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis - or possibly
an elaborate equation using the labour theory of value. These ARE valuable
tools, but their centrality and cookie-cutter dominance, real or perceived,
to left discourse is stinks every bit as the Third Way, "pragmatic
progressivism", or the Human Rights Campaign's bizarre and ironic "equality"
sign. I, for one, hope that electronic mailing lists are not mere bumper
stickers for intellectuals and that we are not afraid to both widen the
scope of what marxism or leftism mean to cope with new and unique problems
AND retain useful and intriguing methods for dissecting capital.

-Robert Day
radicalrob@xxxxxxxxxxx

> > The "contradictions" in this situation are explicable.  But the thesis
and
> > antithesis, as it were, will only be synthesized by aiming at the enemy
who
> > creates both aspects--property and profit.  We can't explain that on a
> > bumper sticker, but that's not who we are, is it?