Re: evolutionism vs. historicism

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

snnoonan wrote:

> . . .
> couching a position in dialectical terminology is not the same as grasping
> the processes of the dialectic itself.

Perhaps the single most important statement on dialectics ever made
was by Engels in the Anti-Duhring in which he points out that *only*
a detailed historical development of a point in *Capital* did Marx
*then* remark, as a sort of addendum,  that the process described
illustrated a dialectical principle. I myself tend to be very skeptical
of arguments which use the word dialectics or dialectical in the
first few sentences. And at least half of arguments which include the
word historical in the first sentence are similarly suspect. An analysis
must, by its detail, *earn* the right to those terms.

Carrol