Theolectics

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Comrades in branches don't talk about dialectics much when organising leaflet design or strike support. The unity of opposites doesn't play a major role in chanting at protests.

In fact, most members of most socialist groups don't care about philosophy, cosmology, or the nature of ultimate reality. Dialectics is a closed book to them, and they show no inclination to open it.

Marxism has a strong anti-intellectual current, as shown by the scarcity and poor quality of its major philosophical works, endlessly quoted without critique in the minor works.

But dialectics is used by the leadership, and the layers of party hacks who address meetings, organise demos and transmit policy to the branches. It gives an air of educated authority to presentations, it gives the appearance of impressive theoretical justification to policy flip-flops, and it papers over the cracks of inconsistant positions.

It serves an authoritarian purpose. A bit of Hegel is great for bullshitting the members.

But do the hacks, leaders and party intellectuals belive it? Most of them probably believe it when it's convenient for them to do so. When they want to discipline an errant member who's written an article questioning the party line, they passionately believe the inconvenient article is 'undialectical'. It's probably 'idealist', 'petit-bourgeois', 'mechanical', 'ahistorical' and 'reactionary' too.

The rest of the time, dialectics is like the god of the anglican - not so much disbelieved in as forgotten about when not needed.

If this were the whole story, the ghost of Hegel haunting Marx would be an annoyance, but not a major issue.

If it were the whole story, Engels would not have set aside real work for a year to produce the Anti-Duhring, and later the Dialecics of Nature. Lenin would not have turned away from intensive political activity in 1908 to attack Bogdanov.

Marxists want to make you free. But they also want to make you to believe their supersitions.

In the ideal future world of evangelical christians, everyone will submit to christ of their own free will. In the hypothetical post-capitalist socialism after the revolution, everyone will take dialectics as an unquestioned axiom. And they'll do it because they've seen the light.

After the revolution, everyone will be a marxist.

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