Re: Truth?

[Bill Burgess <burgess@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just happened to skim through Kevin Anderson's _Lenin, Hegel, and
Western Marxism (U of Ill. Press, 1995) who argues Lenin's position in
his 1908 Empirocriticism shifted by 1914 when he re-read Hegel to try to
come to grips with Social Democracy's support for war. Thus the
Philosphical Notebooks are Lenin's more mature view on such questions,
and Andersons also tries to illustrate this in later debates like over
trade unions. Anderson suggests Stalinism has upheld Lenin in 1908
and suppressed his later and more nuanced, dialectical approach. Engels
also gets a few boots.

This is a very crude summary. My reason for offering it is to ask for more
discussion on this issue, since I too am tired of the continual
suggestions that 'classical' Marxism ever claimed ABSOLUTE truth or that
subjectivity in knowledge is a pomo discovery. At the same time it does
seem to me that Stalinism did infect a lot of left thinking, and that we
need to be sharper in the contest still being fought between materialism
and idealism, etc.

------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Burgess  (burgess@xxxxxxxxxxx)
Department of Geography,                 Tel: (604) 822-2663
University of British Columbia, B.C.     Fax: (604) 822-6150