Doug's comment on totalitarianism

[zodiac@xxxxxxxxxxxx (zodiac)]

Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

>It seems to me that lots of "Marxists" profess allegiance to Marxian
>thought, but do so in a highly mechanistic manner, applying quotes from him
>and his heirs mechanically to conditions far removed in time and space from
>their original context. There's nothing dialectical about this mode of
>thought at all; it's about as dialectical as a sledgehammer. All the
>liveliness and dynamism of Marx's thought is lost. What makes reading Marx
>so exhilarating for me is following the twists & turns of his thought; it
>never stands still; it's constantly in motion. It's hard to imagine
>something that mobile turning into totalitarianism.

I agree. I think the dialectical movement here follows this pattern: The
mobile and dynamic thought you rightly laud has to be frozen for a moment to
enable application to a specific situation -- without that kind of temporal
focus, you simply cannot achieve any material activity. (Engels always saw
himself as the "mass arm" of the Marx-Engels Machine: he wrote a letter or
two about it years later, how Marx produced the intensive analysis, and then
Engels would produce the popular pamphlets -- like Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific, etc.)

While this is necessary, it is also "dangerous" because some human beings
will take that "snapshot" of the application of Marxian ideas as the ideas
themselves. They become frozen themselves, adhering to limited and dated ideas.

At the other extreme, some people want to rewrite history and blame
individuals for being subject to their historical conditions, and having to
have made that application to a specific situation at all.

Ken.



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