In his latest emasculation of Marx’s ideas, Jscotlive (J) after running the usual script on the dialectic, which as far as it goes might have been written by the old Jozef himself, throws this little beauty in for good measure: “And here we return to the objective behind Sartesian's mish-mash of a theory - an attempt to erect an argument in support of his desire to withhold solidarity from oppressed peoples and nations lying in the crosshairs of our respective ruling classes in the West. Why? As far as I can see, because in his estimation they fail to pass his checklist of approval - namely, the fact they do not subscribe to his notion of a pure, secular, socialist, and clean resistance. Another name for this condition is 'buckling under the pressure of our own bourgeoisie'. Yes, Sartesian, I feel your pain. It's hard to argue support for those recalcitrant Palestinians of Gaza with our liberal friends and work colleagues. Poor us. Poor, poor us.” I would, if I had time to indulge in rewriting the many ways in which Marx explains how abstraction is in a double sense the real ‘ground’ and mental result of the ideological distortion which a consciousness must impose on itself under the fetishism of commodities, elaborate a critique of each falsely conscious epithet J instantiates with his modicum out-of-context idealizations. Let me make one point as an example. J posits the existence of a “positive” and a “negative”, “Sartesian: The central issue for me in the previous round of discussions is those notions that: somehow "dialectic" means that there is "positive" and "negative" in everything; Reply: Correct. Well done. Finally you get it.” If there is positive there MUST be negative, so that reality is determined by a logic, and not the other way around, viz. not the way in which the working up of concepts is an ideal reproduction of the object following the object’s own necessity, as Marx, Engels and also Lenin took pains to demonstrate; this is where the dialectical method supersedes the limitations of formal logic and not as some yin-yang mirage. Marx, in his ‘critique of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole’ in the 1844 manuscripts is unequivocal: “When, for instance, wealth, state-power, etc., are understood by Hegel as entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form as thoughts ... They are thought-entities, and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract, philosophical thinking. The whole process therefore ends with absolute knowledge. It is precisely abstract thought from which these objects are estranged and which they confront with their presumption of reality. The philosopher – who is himself an abstract form of estranged man – takes himself as the criterion of the estranged world. The whole history of the alienation process [Entäußerungsgeschichte] and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute) thought – of LOGICAL, speculative thought.” And again in ‘the method of political economy’ he explains: "Therefore, to the kind of consciousness – and this is characteristic of the philosophical consciousness – for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality, the movement of the categories appears as the real act of production – which only, unfortunately, receives a jolt from the outside – whose product is the world; and – but this is again a tautology [SIC] – this is correct in so far as the concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending; but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception; a product, rather, of the working-up of observation and conception into concepts. The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical and mental appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head’s conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical. Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition." At the root of J’s politics we can then find the (hypostasized) LOGIC of imperialism: we must either resist or succumb to our own imperialist bourgeoisie, because you see the “underdeveloped” capitalism of countries under the threat of imperialist attack (they are not underdeveloped; in Argentina, where I come from, capitalist relations are fully developed, what one has is a smaller concentration and centralization of capital) somehow is not so dependent on exploitation. Leaving aside the problems that I find with Lenin’s Imperialism and monopoly capitalism, J’s whole argument, which I’ve been following in the thread ‘Iran: whose side are you on?’, deforms into an apologetic seeking to supplant reasoned analysis with prostituted nationalist 3rd worldism, leading to the worst possible illusions. In this fantasy world, if we wanted to build a movement against the occupation of Iraq we would have to write a blank check to the eastern oppressed nation of China, which is to say, the CCP party bureaucracy which oppresses the Chinese working class, and forget that it is the main financier of the whole operation. In short, it isn’t social being which determines consciousness but the Nation’s consciousness which determines social being. But even worse than this is this last ad hominem chicanery that J wants to pull out on S. Artesian’s position to make him/her look as some kind of social chauvinist. Perhaps J could use a little Communist Manifesto himself: ‘Workers OF THE WORLD Unite!’ _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=PID23384::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:NF_BR_sync:082009 ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. 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