What You Fail to Understand Comrade....

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A common idea among proselytisers is: "If you disagree, it's because you don't understand", with the corollary that "If we can make you understand, you will believe".

This is obviously rubbish. The church which persecuted Galileo understood heliocentrism perfectly well - they were just committed to not accepting it. Indeed, as the Marquis de Sade pointed out, the same church could easily believe its own doctrines without understanding them.

The opposite idea, however, can be true. If you believe in crystal healing, acupuncture, or transcendental meditation, it may be because you don't know enough about them to know why they're junk. If you study enough of them to see the vacuum at the center and still believe, it's because your faith means more to you than your reason.

But it's still a commonly asserted notion that statement of a truth necessarily entails persuasion, even among those who ought to know better. Marx himself in a letter to Engels wrote that Pierre Tremaux's sort-of-Darwinism only had to be explained to be persuasive. The irony is that Engels trashed Tremaux's incorrect thesis based on a misreading, and Marx supported it due to a different misreading.

Bertoll Ollman writes: "A correct understanding of Marxism (as indeed of any body of scientific truths) leads automatically to its acceptance". He of course inserts the weasel get-out clause that one needs a "correct" understanding - an incorrect understanding doesn't guarantee belief, so if there's no belief, the understanding must be incorrect. Which means each individual student must adjust their understanding until they believe - and that's how we determine when they have the 'correct' understanding.

Lenin noted that Bukharin didn't understand the dialectic. Rosa Luxembourg said the same about Karl Liebknecht. The truth was that Liebknect and Bukharin understood the idea perfectly well, and wrote clearly about why they rejected it. Lenin and Luxembourg also wrote about the dialectic, but never clearly stated why they believed it.

Modern marxists have a habit of patiently explaining to doubters the very thesis the doubters doubt. It might be more helpful if they respected the doubter's intellect, and presented some evidence instead.

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