Re: Dialectical Emptyness

[bon moun <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

What's an orthodox Marxist?  I hear this all the time, and it seems to
refer to pretty much anyone still accepts dialectical/historical
materialism, class struggle, and the labor theory of value.

It is an effective way, in front of people who don't really understand
these tools, to trivialize Marxists and reinforce caricatures that have
been carefully nurtured by anticommunists over the years.  So I understand
its instrumentality very well.

But I don't know what it means.  Strikes me as an oxymoron.

Not trying to retaliate and start a flame war.  I would invite a serious
discussion, however, about this, since the left in the US is still heavily
contaminated, IMHO, by the vestiges of McCarthyism.  This term does not
strike me as convenient shorthand, but a manifestation of the above described.
"If insurrection is an art, its main content is to know how to give the
struggle the form appropriate to the political situation."

			-Vo Nguyen Giap



"Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms among what are
all too often superficial features of different situations, comparabilities
must be sought at the level of determinate mechanisms, at the level of
processes that are generally hidden from easy view."

			-Eleanor Burke Leacock



"Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity
transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as
motivation."

			-Ernesto "Che" Guevara