Dialectical materialism

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard,

As usual I agree with you, but I think fro  memory I have come across at
least one "locus" of the term "dialectical materialism" in the writings of
Frederick Engels (but I cannot relocate it just now). But it is true, Engels
never used this terminology much at all.

This does not necessarily invalidate dialectical materialism of course, it
might be useful in some context as an oldfashioned metaphysic, what is wrong
is just that if we impute that doctrine to Marx and Engels we are on very
shaky ground indeed.

My own objection to dialectical materialism is, that it leads to the
imposition of a world view on the working class, whereas presumably
socialists ought to articulate the real world view of the most advanced
strata of the working class, which have an interest in the transformation of
capitalist society into a consciously planned, liveable, egalitarian
(socialist) society, in which those who produce goodies are directly
involved in the social allocation of what they collectively produce.

In other words, dialectical materialism implies that there is a world view
or cosmology that workers ought to have, or ought to be educated into by the
dialectical materialists. But what I am interested in, is the real world
view that the more advanced workers have, and how this might be related to
the goal of a socialist transformation of society, through a process of
genuine dialogue, discovery and exploration. Which would presumably include
the dialectics of cyberspace.

Dialectical materialism ? Die-I-lacked-I-call  Ma-tear-I-all-ism ?

Regards

J.