File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-08-17.000, message 137


Date: Fri, 12 Aug 1994 14:25:52 -0400 (EDT)
From: Stephen Grossman <SGROSSMAN-AT-umassd.edu>
Subject: Re: PDM


Date: Fri, 12 Aug 1994 01:56:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: ReDionysus-AT-aol.com
Subject: PDM

>I guess I'm pretty much a Praxis Marxist, and get the odd
>feeling that anyone who isn't has just missed the point of Marx.

Assuming that Praxis is action with an end or purpose, I agree. I recall an 
academic Marxist philosopher telling me that dialectics is merely  theory
and not   practice. I much prefer Mao's superior philosophical understanding 
that, "Communists the world over are wiser than 
the bourgeoisie....they understand dialectics and they can see further."
Considering that Mao had a certain amount of success in a profoundly difficult 
situation, his comment should be considered as profoundly practical. And in 
_Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism_, "One of the important reasons for the 
great victories won by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and other 
Marxist Parties lies in the fact that in their policy, in all their 
activities[!], Marxist parties are guided by the method of materialist 
dialectics." In contrast, anti-theory Pragmatists would agree with 
Zbigniew's Brzezinski's 1967 claim that "Communism is dead....It is 
increasingly fragmented by conflicts." Poor Zbig! Even tho he was, at that 
time, part of the US State Dept's Policy [hah!] Planning [hah! hah!] Council, 
with its presumably vast resources, he just didn't get it. And, wonderful 
irony, all this fool had to have done was to have read, in the 1964 _NYT_[!], a 
comment from Mao's _theoretical_ journal, _Hongki_, "Unity, 
struggle or even splits, and a new unity on a new basis-such is the 
dialectics of the development of the international working-class movement." 

I agree with Stalin's recognition that, "Dialectics is the soul of Marxism." 
Stalin lamented "that disease of narrow empiricism and unprincipled 
practicalism [Pragmatism] which has not infrequently caused certain 
'Bolsheviks' to degenerate and abandon the cause of the revolution." 


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