Date: Thu, 23 Nov 1995 21:34:30 -0800
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: ON PHILOSOPHY, MARX, ENGELS, LENIN, C.L.R. JAMES


In the apportionment of blame as to what might be going wrong with
this list, instead of self-righteous hand-wringing over who is
disruptive of an otherwise smooth flow of communication, why not
worry instead about content, i.e. whether there is any integrity
at all to be violated?  And by this I mean not only the moral
turpitude and hypocrisy of those who would materially support
real, material gangsters like Mao or Farrakhan while
sanctimoniously mobilizing over "hate speech"; but just as bad,
the intellectual bankruptcy and utter boredom of people who can
find nothing better or more imaginative to occupy their time than
hackneyed old topics and arguments, e.g. the charges against
Engels's dialectics of nature and Lenin's MATERIALISM AND
EMPIRIO-CRITICISM.

On Engels, perhaps the most stupid of these formulations comes
from Barkley Rosser:

>DM allowed the extension of dialectics to all areas of thought,
>culture, etc. (granted, Hegel did this also).  In Stalin's hands
>this led to DM control of science as with the horrendous Lysenko
>business in genetics.  In short, DM deriving from arguments of
>Engels, not found in Marx, became the ideological foundation for
>the most totalitarian and anti-democratic forms and practices in
>Stalinism, a crucial link in the "100 years of
misunderstanding."

I'm sure Rosser thinks that the pacifist and socialist Einstein's
special theory of relativity, not found in Newton's physics, is
bogus because it laid the foundation for the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The utter idiocy of his formulation is
even more contemptible than most, but these shallow arguments over
ontology are the province of lazy and mediocre minds who would
rather not delve too deeply into either philosophy or ideology or
the real life processes from which they are abstracted.  For them
it's enough to bellyache against materialism, for if we recognize
the existence of an objective, material world, well, by gum, we
are totalitarians who would stomp on people's freedom.  This is
also old and tiresome.

On the other hand, we have Shawgi Tell, whose basic defense of
materialism and opposition to specious notions about modernity,
science, and other philosophical topics are most admirable, but
who otherwise is the most traditional, odious sort of Stalinist.
Tell is one of the last of these dinosaurs who will hopefully die
out before they get the opportunity to cause more mischief.
However, I need to inject a few words about one of these so-called
revisionists, C.L.R. James.

James never played the same games others did, so he never joined
the anti-Engels bandwagon.  His original contributions to
dialectical thought, contained in NOTES ON DIALECTICS, his 1971
speech at Rutgers, and other writings and speeches, all had to do
with the logic of the historical process, and not these silly
debates over ontological materialism.  Engels remained a partisan
of Engels throughout his entire life.  He was not against the
notion of dialectics of nature, but he always expressed caution
about superficial and ill-conceived formulations such as always
crop up.  (We discussed some of these problems on the list at
length a year or two ago.)  This is true from James's 1940
interventions in the SWP split up to his 1986 forward to
Baghavan's book on dialectical materialism.  He chose to leave
dialectics of nature alone to concentrate on the logic of history,
which he considered a much more pressing and creative task.  But
he did not take the easy way out by basing his claim to political,
moral, or philosophical superiority on the rejection of Engels's
dialectics or Lenin's reflection theory.

But this is precisely what Raya Dunayevskaya, James's one-time
co-thinker, did when she began to fancy herself a philosopher.
And Raya's sycophants, such as the loathsome Kevin Anderson, have
followed slavishly in her footsteps.  I read Anderson's article on
Lenin and Hegel in the latest issue of SCIENCE & SOCIETY, the
special issue on Lenin.  The shallowness of Anderson is the old
ontology game -- materialism boo! -- played at its most
superficial level.  Anderson is patently ridiculous, for his
investigation of Lenin's thought is only skin deep, the scraps of
skin being naked isolated quotations on ontological and
epistemological matters from Lenin's writings, held together with
the most elemental of yea-boo commentary.  And this man got a PhD
writing this crap!

Now back to Engels.  I would love to find a sustained,
comprehensive treatment of Engels as thinker, but do you know how
hard those are to find, in English anyway?  As Burford kept
reminding us, this is the centennial of Engels death and we ought
to pay some attention to him, but what have we seen?

OK, here are some sources.  I read Gustav Mayer's old biography of
Engels, which does give an account of his personal and
intellectual qualities, though it is not a study of his thought
per se.  I also read the special Engels issue of INTERNATIONAL
SOCIALISM, no. 65, which summarizes Engels's life and thought.  It
is useful background, and it's a basic defense of orthodox
Marxism, but it does not break new ground, as I recall.  Some
months ago I recommended Ted Benton's "Natural science and
cultural struggle: Engels and philosophy of the natural sciences"
in ISSUES IN MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, VOL. 2.  Benton does something
few people bother to do, provide a context for Engels's work.  Far
from being the lowbrow mechanistic reductionist determinist Engels
is accused of being, Engels employed the only tools he had to
hand, Hegel's  naturphilosophie, to combat the reductionistic,
Darwinist monism of Haeckel and others.

But now let me recommend the book I am currently reading, Georges
Labica's MARXISM AND THE STATUS OF PHILOSOPHY.  So far this is
simply the best work I have read on the young Marx's relationship
to philosophy.  I said Marx's relationship to philosophy, _not_
Marx's philosophy.  The nature of Marx's actual engagement _with_
philosophy, rather than merely the positions he took while passing
through it, are treated in an uncustomarily perspicacious manner.
And Marx's engagement with philosophy is also calibrated with his
engagement with the other two so-called pillars of Marxian
thought, English political economy and French socialism.

But this book does even more.  It treats the Marx-Engels
relationship (up to 1848, which is where the book stops) with
uncustomary intellectual depth.  You can actually get a feeling
for what Engels contributed to Marx as well as vice versa, and for
the respective gifts of each.  Also, the time frames of various
works are considered.  Why was Marx still critiquing philosophy
while Engels was writing THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN
ENGLAND?  Engels gets some real respect in this book, while Marx
still comes out as the deeper if not necessarily more brilliant
thinker in engaging foundational questions.

I think the same thing should be done for the later Engels-Marx
relationship, not to mention Engels in his own right.  Of the
'Engels betrayed Marx' literature I read in the early 1980s, the
most detailed was Levine's DIALOGUE WITHIN THE DIALECTIC, with its
detailed textual comparisons that purport to prove that Engels
distorted Marx's meaning while editing the later volumes of
CAPITAL.  This evidence should be examined again, but I initially
rejected Levine because I thought he himself was arbitrarily
manipulating the evidence to justify the usual preconceived
notions against Engels.

Engels was a popularizer, and maybe he did oversimplify things,
but he was not the fool he is made out to be.  I think Engels
should be studied in more detail and more sensitively.  Why does
nobody bother to analyze Engels's insights into the metaphysical
mode of reasoning (badly named), or the weaknesses of empiricism?

As for Lenin, every time someone gets disillusioned with
Stalinism, they immediately look for a theoretical scapegoat that
allegedly held their mind in thrall.  So, for example, after 1956,
E.P. Thompson attacked Lenin's MATERIALISM AND EMPIRIO-CRITICISM
on the usual grounds, not one of his finest moments.  However, he
was roundly rebuked by Peter Fryer, who also deserted the British
CP.  Interestingly, later criticisms of Lenin's philosophy are
pretty  superficial compared to Pannekoek's much more interesting
critique.

Of course I too have been interested in ontology over the course
of a lifetime, but I have come to the end of my interest in these
abstracted, skin-deep debates over who held what ontology and why
did it support totalitarianism just by existing.  I'm much more
interested in Marx's actual early point of departure, the division
of labor and alienated consciousness.  It is far more useful to me
to read Feuerbach than Derrida, for the former explains the
latter.  I am not the only one who points back to THE GERMAN
IDEOLOGY.  A few weeks ago I heard a _mainstream_ philosopher of
science who, in dismissing postmodern irrationalism, told his
audience that all these issues were masterfully disposed of long
ago in THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY!  And, under my instigation, Paul
Thomas and Justin Schwartz have pursued this line of inquiry,
though they came to similar conclusions independently.

To understand what is objective and what is tainted by alienation,
to understand the intellectual correlates of real material
corruption and political bankruptcy, which is as rampant in the
marginalized and musty church of the left as it is in the larger
society, is to know who and what we must not allow ourselves to be
tainted with ever again, and leave the dead to bury their dead.

"The good are attracted to men's perceptions, / And think not for
themselves; / Till experience teaches them to catch / And to cage
the fairies & elves. / And then the knave begins to snarl / And
the hypocrite to howl; / And all his good friends shew their
private ends, / And the eagle is known from the owl."  -- William
Blake


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