Re: [Marxism] Banal Platitudes and Marxism-Clulesslism (was Re: Diabolicaland Histerical Materialism)

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Carlos A. Rivera" wrote:
>
>
> >But if you (a) see it as a collective study text for those directly
> >involved in political practice and (b) quite properly written at the
> >same level of sophistication as a 9th-grade civics text, then it is easy
> >to see it as every bit as useful as sks claims it to be in this post.
>
> Lets, for arguement's sake, see D&HM as both.
>
> What is so banal about a "collective study text for those directly involved
> in political practice[...]quite properly written at the same level of
> sophistication as a 9th-grade civics text"?
>
> Of course, i'll have to wonder if you have read it or are simply following a
> sectarian approach to the question.

I have not only read it and reread it but have conducted study groups
using it as a text. It's been 20+ years since my last reading of it, so
I won't now argue your specific points about the text. Probably 9th
grade was extreme -- say 12th grade. You point out that it "didactically
structures and abridges the writings of Marx's, Engel's and Lenin's
writings on D&HM" -- i.e., that it is a text book. We aren't that far
apart. Incidentally, if you want to claim theoretical (as opposed to
didactic) importance for Stalin, the text you should cite is _Marxism
and Linguistics_. While it has Stalin's habitual clang from paragraph to
paragraph (and I have quarrels with the base/structure metaphor), M&L
powerfully points out that language is _not_ part of either the base or
the superstructure but relatively continuous through changes in both.

D&HM, like most introductions to marxism, does contribute to the bad
habit of so many marxists (particularly on maillists) of _starting_ a
polemic or critique with some such proposition as "X is unhistorial" or
"X is undialectical," which are legitimate only when they come at the
_end_ of the critique, when the writer has already shown in practice
that he/she does know what it means to be "historical" or "dialectical."

Carrol


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