If you thought the pseudoleft has a legacy from the sixties you weren’t there

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This is a placeholder for notes I should have written in time for the Platypus Forum on “The Legacy of 1968” today, Saturday 2023-06-24 from 1pm to 4pm.

Livestream will become a video at youtube. Youtube account holders can post questions during the livestream, although most questions taken will be from the audience at Trades Hall.

Hope to discuss my two concrete proposals and how to organize for them at the Curtin pub opposite Trades Hall after the forum. Add a comment to this post and tick the box to subscribe to other comments if you want to be notified when I update this post with details. I was given plenty of time to write up, but failed to do so in time and will finish after the forum and will then add a comment when done so you will be notified if you subscribed to comments.

Here’s the prompt for forum panel members. The short version of my responses is in the title of this post.

The 1960s were a period of social upheaval that spanned the entire globe. The “New” Left that emerged reached for Marxism to help it navigate the politics of this decade. Platypus asks: How was this Marxism inherited and transformed? Did it succeed, or discover new problems?

Today, with activists fighting in the streets and calling for liberation along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality, the Left’s every attempt to discover new methods and new ideas seems to invoke a memory of the political horizons of the New Left. We can perhaps more than ever feel the urgency of the question: what lessons are to be drawn from the New Left as another generation undertakes the project of building a Left for the 21st century?

—

Questions that might provoke reflection in your opening remarks:

How were you aware that you were doing something ‘new’ compared to the old left, how was this task transmitted and understood? Which forms of theory and practice did you reach for in this period of upheaval and why? Did the following decades vindicate your choices? Or were you proven to be mistaken? How are today’s left still tasked by the unfinished work – or the new work – handed on by the New Left? Does the task of social emancipation today appear more or less obscure than it did in the 1960’s and 70’s? 

My two concrete proposals are:

  • A research group on Maksakovsky’s “Theory of the Capitalist Cycle” (available for free download from “Library Genesis”)
  • An action group to help end the Russian fascist regime by greater military support for Ukraine

How to organize them:

  1. Use https://meet.jit.si/ immediately for free voice and video conferencing for national and international discussions of initial drafts by invitation to small online meetings similar to zoom, skype etc without registration. Can later add private facilities.
  2. Use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub immediately for interim convenors exchanging draft proposals and then continue to use it for free fully backed up and version controlled web sites, email lists etc. Any active participant can join the 100 million others registered as active users (without publishing their email addresses and with no spam from github). Technical Subcommittee will consist of people who already know how to use the technical features of github for development of internet presence but anyone can easily use the basic facilities to draft documents, including web content, in version controlled “repos” and exchange messages about them as “Issues”.

71 thoughts on “If you thought the pseudoleft has a legacy from the sixties you weren’t there”

  1. Wow I didn’t think that I would get through the whole 3 hours but I did. I thought that the high point of the discussion wasn’t anything about the 60’s but the spirited defense of the Ukrainian peoples right to self defense particularly the acknowledgement and dismissal of Banderaism the overwhelming democratic result of the last elections and the inability of autocracy to survive with a functioning democracy on its doorstep and with family links to within Russia.

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  2. Arthur held up a copy of a history of the Melbourne Maoists that he said was pretty good. I’d like to read it. Is it possible to provide the link? Thanks

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    • “It is right to rebel” is best account of the mass student movement led by Maoists.

      But I don’t think I have a hard copy so could only have mentioned it, not waved it.

      The nominal editor, Mike Hyde, also wrote a fictionalized memoir which conveys “the spirit of the times”:

      All Along the Watchtower

      Unfortunately it isn’t online at Library Genesis but you could probably get a local library to provide it.

      There are two relevant academic theses:

      1. “Melbourne’s Maoists: The Rise of the Monash University Labor Club 1965-1967” specifically on how that movement was led by Maoists, based on interviews with two of the Maoist activists (not me) and four others closely involved. Also has extensive bibliography.

      https://vuir.vu.edu.au/30211/

      That is probably what I actually had with me so I could have waved it.

      2. “Anti-war, radical youth revolt, Victoria, 1965-1975” the wider movement led by Maoists extending to 1975. This is being edited by the author for publication as a book.

      https://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/vital:13500

      I would also suggest looking at:

      3. https://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/biogs/E000612b.htm

      Especially the two issues of internal YCL bulletin “Bolshevik” and “The Red Line”.

      4. Post 1975 “Red Eureka Movement” archived at REM section of longer page:

      https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/australia/index.htm

      “The Rebel” is less interesting than “Discussion Bulletin” 1-12 and other docs.

      Enjoy!

      Feedback welcome.

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      • Thanks Arthur,
        I’ve spent this morning reading some of the Discussion Bulletins with great interest. I’ll go back later and read them properly. I’ve also downloaded “It is right to rebel” and have ordered “All along the watchtower”.

        If I’d been present at the talk I would have asked if you think it would also pay today’s left to study dialectics as well as economics? To my mind, that’d provide the necessary antidote to doomsday environmentalism.

        In the Q&A at the end, a member of the audience asked what’s wrong with capitalism anyway? and you recommended he read chapter 3 of “Socialism – Utopian and scientific”. (I agree: in particular the paragraph beginning: “As a matter since 1825, when the first general crisis broke out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbaric hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every 10 years. Commerce is at a stand-still, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little, the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again…” It’s nothing short of brilliant.)

        But I was wondering what you’d recommend as introductions to dialectics; in particular, any books or articles that give examples of dialectical thinking…. how to approach problems dialectically? Most that I’ve read aren’t very helpful; they give you the theory, but in the end, you still don’t know how to apply it. The only exception I know of is Torkil Lauesen’s “The Principal Contradiction”

        Click to access The-Principal-Contradiction-by-Torkil-Lauesen-z-lib.org_.pdf

        Thanks again,
        Craig

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  4. Am only up to p36 of “The Principal Contradiction” (by Text To Speech while walking).

    Will comment and provide further philosophical reading list later – you already know about Mao’s “On Practice” and “On Contradiction”. That will focus on what gets obliterated by the “New Left” attempts to divert attention away from orthodox Marxism by preferring a “younger” Marx before he was a Marxist and “later” theorists who took a quite different direction from Marxism-Leninism.

    Don’t forget that before the “Young Marx” there was Marx’s doctoral dissertation was on Atomic Physics, more specifically the uncertainty principle in Quantum Mechanics:

    https://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/sakata/ch02.htm

    https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_28.htm

    Click to access Marx_Karl_-_Doctoral_Thesis_-_The_Difference_Between_the_Democritean_and_Epicurean_Philosophy_of_Nature.pdf

    A good follow up to your Engels quote is:

    Click to access stalin1938.pdf

    Specifically I think we need to prepare a new edition of the Leningrad Textbook of Marxist Philosophy that corrects the boastful tone and other errors and connects it to modern developments.

    https://www.marxistphilosophy.org/shirokov.htm

    Missing first section on Historical materialism is at:

    https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/subject/left-book-club/1937/textbook/index.htm

    Modern developments of materialist dialectics is not found among the “Martian academics” but does include work on the philosophy of science eg

    Biology:

    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-mechanisms/

    Mathematics:

    https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/adjoint+modality

    Certainly agree on need to study dialectics together with economics, hence recommendation for Maksakovsky, closely connected with items from p16:

    “Grundrisse (1857–1858), and the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
    Economy (1859). In order to understand its application as a method,
    however, we need to look at Capital.”

    Would add only the preface to the German Ideology for uncloaking the Martian sheep in wolves clothing:

    “Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only
    because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.”

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/preface.htm

    Also agree with “the necessary antidote to doomsday environmentalism.”

    You might like Discussion Bulletin 8 on “Technology and Progress”.

    See more recent item here by Barry York:

    “No such thing as a ‘watermelon’. Why the Green world outlook is not left-wing.”

    No such thing as a ‘watermelon’. Why the Green world outlook is not left-wing.

    I was glad to see that highlighted this:

    “The whole history of humanity is that we are a species that does not adapt its lifestyle to its environment but develops “unsustainably” in ways that require transforming our environment, our technological forces of production and our social relations of production. Our unsustainable development has already terraformed most of this planet so that it is no longer a “wilderness”, substituted “synthetic” for “natural” products for everything we live on (including ancient things like domesticated wheat and other food staples) and will go much further both intensively here and extensively across the universe and at the same time it has totally transformed the way we relate to each other and will continue to do so.

    Throughout our history there have been progressives wanting to speed up the movement forward and reactionaries demanding that we should live within our means. These ideologies are closely connected with the fact that ruling classes fear the instability and threat to their domination that goes with changes undermining our old mode of life while oppressed classes always want more from life than what their exploiters think they should live on.”

    You might want to get in touch with David McMullen, author of “Bright Future” reviewed here:

    REVIEW: Bright Future: abundance and progress in the 21st century

    BTW re need to link study of economics and dialectics, a better copy of DB 12 is at:

    https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/australia/rem-unemployment.htm

    The first 6 parts were in DB 11

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  5. Thanks for the recommendations, Arthur; it’ll take me a while to get through them, but I’ll get there. I especially liked your article – “No such thing as a watermelon”… It’s excellent. I didn’t know about Santamaria’s enthusiasm for back-to-nature, but I’m not surprised – if I remember correctly the Nazi’s were into it too.

    One thing I was hoping for in the Platypus talk about the legacy of 68 was some mention of the books and readings you found to be most useful, and that you’d recommend to young activists today. It’s hard to find out what’s worth reading and what isn’t when you’re starting out.

    I think a grasp of dialectics and Marxist economics would help counter the end-is-nigh outlook that’s overtaken much of the Left. But it’s hard to find introductions to dialectics with good examples. Mao’s “On Practice” and “On Contradiction” are probably the best I know of. I also liked Torkil Lauesen’s “The Principal Contradiction”, and the American prisoner, Bill Dunne’s, pamphlet “A basic introduction to dialectical and historical materialism”.

    A Basic Introduction to Dialectical and Historical Materialism

    But there must be others.

    Thanks again.
    Craig

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  6. “No such thing as a watermelon”. Barry York (who runs this blog) wrote it. I just read it again and certainly agree that it’s excellent.

    I have now finished Torkil Lauesen’s “The Principal Contradiction” and as a result also downloaded Clausewitz and Ai Siqi for which I thank him.

    https://archive.org/search?query=Siqi%2C+Ai++Dialectical+Materialism+and+Historical+Materialism.

    Of the two Word files there this seems the more complete and I will read that now as well as your “Basic introduction” link.

    Have not been following developments among the various “anti-imperialist” and “anti-capitalist” remnants, some of which did originate from revolutionary communist groups in the sixties. From a quick look there is some “rebel spirit” and anybody with time available should check them out.

    But I’m not optimistic about finding much useful there.

    I don’t think Torkil has had much success in applying dialectics to analyse the concrete conditions. His “anti-imperialism” actually ended up with these gems of a dialectical analysis:

    “This new principal contradiction in the world system is also reflected in the proxy war between NATO and Russia on Ukrainian soil.”

    The long transition from capitalism to socialism

    “The US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is also an attempt to destabilize and encircle China.”

    New Year status 2023

    He may recover but until he does there is no risk that his advice on how to analyse the world will gain much traction.

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  8. 37 page file lists 162 boxes at Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU Canberra.

    https://archivescollection.anu.edu.au/index.php/albert-langer-collectioin

    Click to access Z457.pdf

    The full recommended reading list mentioned in Bolshevik No 1 would probably not have been marked as from YCL or anybody else but could be in a YCL or Monash Labour Club or Bibliography Box.

    Whole collection disorganized but gives an indication of wide reading (and collecting).

    I haven’t time had to look at it the archives and am unlikely to start now.

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  9. Thanks. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Also, I have to apologize – I only realized when I was looking at it again this morning that the prison pamphlet I said was written by Bill Dunne was in fact written by another prisoner, Jaan Laaman, and later updated and revised by Dunne and Laaman.

    For years I’ve been looking for good examples of dialectical thinking. One of the best I’ve come across is in Marx’s “The Holy Family”:

    “Proletariat and wealth are opposites: as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property. The question of exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole.
    Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property.
    The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat. It is the negative side of the antithesis, its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property.
    The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-
    estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature.
    Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it …
    When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as its opposite which determines it, private property.
    When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need — the practical expression of necessity — is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today.”

    Thanks again.
    Craig

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    • I’ve now read the prisoner’s pamphlet on Basic Introduction to Dialectical and Historical Materialism.

      Glad to see it ended with recommendation to get further into it by reading Mao’s On Contradiction and Stalin’s 1938 (linked above). I would add Mao’s “On Practice” for more on “applying” or the (still fairly short) “Four Essays on Philosophy” which includes both. Of the four essays, three are more on “applying”:

      https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=FF41CEB8F403B23E43508DC96B640CE1

      I agree it would be useful to have a current short summary of DiaMat from which basic intros could be produced.

      In the period of the Second International that was Engels “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”. For going deeper it was Engels “Anti-Duhring” from which those 3 chapters were extracted.

      In the period of the Third International it was Stalin’s 1938. For going deeper, the Leningrad “Textbook of Marxist Philosophy” by Shirokov

      Above should be read by anyone wanting to go further and consider how to apply them and especially to provide updated shorter versions (and current textbooks) for modern application.

      To produce an updated shorter version I think people would need to start from becoming familiar with the longer textbooks that were much less widely read.

      1. Leningrad textbook edited by Shirokov (similar textbooks were studied by Mao in preparing his “Four Essays on Philosophy” including “On Contradiction” and “On Practice”. Three of the 4 essays stress application (for China then, not here, now).

      This is available together with many other attempts at explaining philosophy at:

      https://www.redstarpublishers.org/

      Click to access txtbkMarxPhilwIndx.pdf

      The files for text and cover provided there are also used for producing cheap paperback version available from Amazon:

      2. Chinese textbook edited by Ai Siqi (who helped study the Soviet textbooks with Mao). There is a more recent update at archive.org than links I gave previously in this thread, although earlier one also includes publisher’s note:

      https://archive.org/details/AiSiqiDialecticalMaterialismHistoricalMaterialism

      I was surprised to discover that I was able to listen to that while walking using Text To Speech from what appears to be a fully Google machine translation into very poor English.

      I believe that was possible due to being already familiar with much of the content, especially from the many excerpts from classics that are also in Shirokov.

      It certainly needs translation polishing by translators fluent in Chinese, English and Marxist philosophy before it could be widely read.

      But a major step would be simply replacing the excerpts from classics with the best English translations already produced (not necessarily those from Moscow). That would also provide a “Translation Memory” for words and phrases used in the remaining text.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_memory

      There are lots of fluent Chinese and English speakers around, so setting that up at github for anyone to work on could be effective.

      Anyway, necessary starting point for going deeper, after Mao’s “Four Essays” and Stalin’s 1938 is the Leningrad Textbook.

      Please let me know if you intend to read carefully through it. I intend to write some notes on steps that could be taken for combining doing that with preparations for replacing the excerpts in Ai Siqi as part of a wider translation and publishing project that might also include providing a means for adding people’s reading notes and links to other material and also tracking down the original Russian version of part 1 on History that was completely rewritten by English translator. Will accelerate relevant parts of those notes if you or anyone else is on board.

      Hints for actual application HAS to be very specific to time, place and subject. Chinese texts place more emphasis on this, including “mass line” and “methods of work”, but of course related to China.

      I am particularly interested in understanding how capitalism actually works and can be transformed, which is completely obscured by “Martian” academics who call themselves “Marxian”.

      Chapter 1 of “The Capitalist Cycle” by Pavel Maksakovsky explains the “method” that Marx used to study capitalism and write “Capital” and which Maksakovsky uses brilliantly in the rest of that short book to continue Marx’s work instead of obscuring it.

      That is the best example of actually applying the more explicitly “dialectical” philosophy that I know of:

      https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=EAC7E58D683A34F76BC03CBC0934E753

      BTW for a major quotation used in both textbooks the Moscow translation at Marxists.org edited by Maurice Dobb tampers with the translation. I noticed a famous passage which Google translates from the original German with new society being “hatched in the womb” of the old society became much less vivid “matured within the framework”. Stone translation of 1904 also has “womb”. Ai Siqi refers to “fetal cells” (not just “embryo”!). Maksakovsky also makes frequent reference to cell-form, morphology, embryo etc.

      Platypus might be interested in the theoretical question of whether societies hatch eggs and whether speciation occurs in embryo or later in fetus 😉

      Seriously, there is a significant difference between Hegelian conception of germination of developed from Goethe and Marx’s version of the economic cell form that benefited from the contemporary cell theory in biology. That is highlighted in Ai Siqi’s textbook but not in Shirokov’s. I am interested in the detailed discussion by Bob Jessop because it relates to producing a modern simulation model of commodity production using very large numbers of “activity” cells.

      http://www.consecutio.org/2018/11/every-beginning-is-difficult-holds-in-all-sciences-marx-on-the-economic-cell-form-of-the-capitalist-mode-of-production/

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      • The continuing release of volumes in the German MEGA has now reached Marx’s notebooks on science, of which there are hundreds. They show Marx not only digging into these biological cycles but in the complex system metabolic processes of the soil. The result according to Kohei Saito is to up-end the promethean construction put on Marx by mechanistic pseudo-Marxists, from Engels up to this blog – and to argue that Marx’s communism was never about a productivist transcending of all given conditions, but a repair of the metabolic rift with nature, in conditions of human equality and liberation. Saito’s work has created a huge movement in Japan around ‘degrowth Communism’, which is spreading globally. So good luck on that project of getting control back from the pseudo-left!

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  10. Thanks for the links to Shirokov and Ai Siqi. I think that a modern intro to dialectical materialism would be very useful. Perhaps Platypus could consider it. What worries me about much of the current “left”, is it seems to have, to all intents and purposes, abandoned Marxism, and, apart from being pro-environment and anti-capitalist and vegan, have no real philosophy. They’ve conveniently forgotten Lenin’s rule, that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”.

    When I did a quick survey of a number of old revolutionaries from the 60’s and 70’s (most formerly CPA or SWP), all they could come up with on dialectics was Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, John Rees’ “The Algebra of Revolution”, and George Novack’s “An Introduction to the logic of Marxism”. The Rees is easily the best but both he and Novack were Trotskyists and have a very mechanical understanding of dialectics. Much better is Bertell Ollman “Dance of the Dialectic: steps in Marx’s method”, and the short summary he did for “The Oxford handbook of Karl Marx”, ed by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, et al., Oxford, 2019, entitled “Eight steps in Marx’s dialectical method”.

    As well as “On Contradiction”, “On Practice”, and “Five Essays on Philosophy”, Mao provided further insights into the practical application of dialectics in quite a few other speeches that would be worth pulling together, and would add to a good introduction. There’s additional information in Nick Knight’s Marxist Philosophy in China: From Qu Qiubai to Mao Zedong 1923-1945, Springer Dordrecht, 2005, chapter 10, pp 171 – 195, “Mao Zedong on dialectical materialism”. Also, Vsevolod Holubnychy “Mao Tse-tung’s materialistic dialectics” in “The China Quarterly” Jly-Sep 1964, p3-37.

    A good modern intro to dialectical materialism would be well worth having.

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  11. Sorry, I should’ve said:
    Ollman “Dance of the dialectic”, “The Oxford handbook of Karl Marx” and
    Nick Knight “Marxist philosophy in China”
    are all on Internet Archive https://archive.org/

    Vsevolod Holubnychy “Mao Tse-tung’s materialistic dialectics”
    and
    Nick Knight “Mao ZeDong’s On Contradiction on and On Practice: Pre-liberation texts” The China Quarterly, Dec 1980, pp.641-668 (this includes some interesting paragraphs missing from the standard texts)
    are on JSTOR, available from the National Library’s eResources
    https://www.nla.gov.au/
    if you become a member (free to Australian residents)

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    • Thanks. I’ve downloaded to Zotero everything you mentioned plus some others encountered from them. Will include the URLs when I respond further after catching up with some reading already started as a result.

      Meanwhile this is mainly to ensure that you know pretty well any book is available free without registration from:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

      Also journal articles using DOIs from:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

      Zotero makes it easy to organize actual content instead of just bookmarks while browsing web as well producing bibliographies. Can connect directly to Sci-Hub,

      https://www.zotero.org/

      While I am at it:

      1. Thanks for reminder about Nick Knight. I read his book on Mao’s materialist dialectics and have downloaded his other books re Chinese philosophy listed within:

      https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Nick+Knight&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def

      I intend to read the one you mentioned first and the others when and if an Ai Siqi textbook project gets going. Also for related project of replacing the excerpts from classics used by Ai Siqi poor translation with best translations and links to their uses in Leningrad textbook and other sources. Nick Knight mentions other Russian texts that should be mined. There is an extensive related journal literature.

      2. Will read Vsevolod Holubnychy “Mao Tse-tung’s materialistic dialectics from that journal literature next.

      https://sci-hub.se/10.1017/S0305741000042090

      3. After finishing reading short version of Bertell Ollman from Oxford Handbook. (I did not like the 1 page picture of his dancing choreography but am more interested now).

      4. But am still reading through Maksakovsky again and need to correct my advice to skip the long translator’s introduction. After good background info it does get distracted on p xviii, pdf 15 of 202 at section “1. Hegel’s Dialectical Logic” which I would still leave till later.
      But then it DOES return to useful material for understanding Maksakovsky at section “6. The scientific method of economics” p xxvii, pdf 32 of 202. I do recommending reading the rest from there together with the brief editor’s Foreward p3 pdf 56 and Maksakovsky’s Introduction p5 pdf 58 and Chapter 1 on “Methodological Foundations of the Theory of the Conjuncture” p13, pdf 68.

      ie After initial front matter and translator up to pdf 15, start whole book at pdf 32 and continue to end at pdf 202.

      5. Also had a look at:

      READER IN MARXIST PHILOSOPHY
      From the Writings of MARX,. ENGELS and LENIN

      Selected and Edited with Introductions and Notes by Howard Selsam;_and Harry Martel

      Click to access SelsamMarxistPhilosophy.pdf

      Was impressed by reading front matter up to first actual excerpt on p22, pdf 20

      I think it could be very useful in a project connecting the Leningrad and Ai Siqi textbooks with a Translation Memory (see link in comment earlier) as source material for (multiple) projects developing modern updates.

      Multiple projects could benefit from sharing repos with excerpts etc.

      The first excerpt at p22, pdf 20 struck me as highly relevant to producing modern texts on Scientific Philosophy:

      Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the
      bourgeois class, so the Socialists and the Communists are the
      theoreticians of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not
      yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, and
      consequently so long as the struggle itself of the proletariat with the
      bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character, and the productive
      forces are npt yet sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie
      itself as to e:r:iable us to catch a glimpse of the material conditions
      necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation
      of a new society, these theoreticians are merely Utopians who, to
      meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go
      in search.of a regenerating science. But in the measure that history
      moves·· forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes
      clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds;
      they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and
      to become the mouthpiece of this. So long as they look for science
      and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the
      . struggle, they see in pov.erty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it
      the reyolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society.
      From this moment, science, produced by the historical movement
      and associating itself with it in full recc;>gnition of its cause, has ceased
      to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary.
      –
      M AR X; The Poverty of Philosophy (1 847), pp. 1 40/

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      • Update. I have now read short Ollman in Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx 2019. That also has lots of other relevant stuff.
        https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=CF2FDEA7DFB6E17F29E5D9C9985AF495

        From handbook editor’s summary pdf 18 of 867:

        “According to Ollman, the first two critical steps in Marx’s dialectics are the philosophy of
        internal relations and the process of abstraction. The former sees all processes are
        internally related, either directly or indirectly. The second holds central the need to single
        out and focus on particular, fundamental elements of these internally related processes
        and social relations.”

        I agree with that much, and am in favour of eventually developing a “plain language” account that simply presents the ontology and epistemology along with the logic illuminating modern scientific understanding and reasoning about anything, with only footnotes to the previous history rather than relying on excerpts from the classics. Separated from comparable material directly relating to historical materialism and revolutionary scientific socialism.

        I particularly like this bit which illuminates the hopeless confusion of “Martian” academics:

        “The Italian critic
        Vilfredo Pareto noted—with more than a touch of annoyance—that “Marx’s words are like
        bats. You can see in them both birds and mice” (Pareto [1902] 332). But none of Marx’s
        critics and few of his followers could explain it, despite Engels’s explicit warning in his
        Preface to Capital Volume III, that we should not expect “to find fixed, cut-to-measure,
        once and for all applicable definitions in Marx’s works. It is self-evident that where things
        and their interrelations are conceived, not as fixed, but as changing, their mental images,
        the ideas, are likewise subject to change and transformation; and they are not
        encapsulated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their historical or logical process of
        formation” (Engels [1885] 1959: 13–14).
        Unfortunately, the problem Engels addressed is more widespread and even more
        pernicious than it was in his day and thus requires a fuller response than the one he gave,
        because what Marx has done is to supply what are in effect “elastic” definitions for all his
        key concepts. While the changes in their meanings are often small enough to be missed,
        they can also be of a size and frequency to keep most of his readers from fully
        understanding his message. Only the philosophy of internal relations and its
        accompanying process of abstraction can explain what Marx is doing here and prepare us
        to work with its results. Together, it is not an exaggeration to think of them as the
        foundation of Marx’s entire dialectical method, and, in the steps to follow, they will be
        treated as such.”

        But Ollman’s effort confirms how difficult it will be. He very quickly gets lost.

        eg This is simply wrong. Essence is not just a “bigger picture” from “broader spatial and temporal relations” and appearance is not equivalent to a photographic image:

        The most important of these patterns are—Appearance and Essence, which contrasts
        what we learn through our five senses with what can be learned by examining their
        broader spatial and temporal relations up to the most relevant version of the “Bigger
        Picture” for the subject in question. The appearance of anything is the equivalent of a
        photo taken by a camera, but for most of the important questions in life this is insufficient
        without knowing something about the larger context in which it was taken, who took it,
        when, for what purpose, etc., all of which, and more, are included in its essence.

        Then it get worse:

        “Identity and Difference, which alerts us to the fact that any two “things” (or relations
        abstracted as such) that strike us as the same (or different) can, in another context, or
        from another vantage point or extension, or at another time, or with another purpose in
        mind, appear as the opposite of what we took it to be. Take a look at the dollar bill in your
        pocket. Turn it over. Is it the same dollar bill you took out of your pocket? Well, yes and
        no. (Readers will note that what capitalists might misunderstand—because it is in their
        class interests to do so—does not qualify as a legitimate reason for seeing what is
        identical as different, or vice versa.)”

        That is both bizarre and banal (no doubt dialectically).

        He gets wrong all the other “laws” in “Step 3” as well but I will only highlight this:

        “Negation of the Negation takes the long view to bring out the way in which major
        transformations of society have typically involved rejecting the most distinctive features
        of the society that preceded it. This seems to have happened in the passage from the
        more primitive societies to feudalism, and from feudalism to capitalism, with the
        implication that capitalism too is likely to give way to its opposite, which, in this case, is
        Communism. “Negating” the previous society also suggests that it was its worsening
        problems that made it particularly vulnerable to being replaced by another system that
        could resolve them, with the latter suffering a similar fate for the same broad reasons
        over time. While Marx never doubted that a detailed analysis of the problems of any
        society is always needed, the main value of this dialectical law is that it captures an
        actual historical pattern and provides a useful framework for considering what a major
        change to our society would look like and one possible way to look at it.”

        That “philosophizing” fits with the pseudoleft’s efforts to present vague eclectic waffle about an imaginary better world as though it becomes “militant” by extravagently denouncing how things are going from bad to worse.

        So I am reinforced in conviction that it is necessary to start by simply retrieving the classics before developing from there. The first further step should be to connect them with modern developments in overlapping fields of philosophy, cognitive science, complex systems, biology etc. Simpliefied presentations should come after thorough grasping and renewal.

        That reminds me. Nick Knight is an example of a mainstream academic, not claiming to be Marxist (student of and co-author with Colin Mackerras as a “China watcher”) who seriously studies Mao’s marxist philosophy and its connections with Soviet marxist philosophy instead of just making stuff up like the Martian academics.

        Re:

        “What worries me about much of the current “left”, is it seems to have, to all intents and purposes, abandoned Marxism, and, apart from being pro-environment and anti-capitalist and vegan, have no real philosophy. They’ve conveniently forgotten Lenin’s rule, that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”.”

        We are on the same wavelength but I am less worried as I view their real philosophy as actively reactionary and it is good to see reactionaries making such utter idiots of themselves.

        Re:

        “When I did a quick survey of a number of old revolutionaries from the 60’s and 70’s (most formerly CPA or SWP), all they could come up with on dialectics was Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, John Rees’ “The Algebra of Revolution”, and George Novack’s “An Introduction to the logic of Marxism”. The Rees is easily the best but both he and Novack were Trotskyists and have a very mechanical understanding of dialectics.”

        I would not be looking for “old revolutionaries” from the 60’s and 70’s among former CPA and SWP. Some genuine rebels would have passed through those organizations depending on what activist organizations were dominant where they lived. But the CPA was actively hostile to the sixties movement (despite being nowhere near as bad as the more pro-Soviet “tankies” in Europe – eg they opposed invasion of Czechoslovakia). SWP had a huge turnover and was basically a machine for recruiting rebels, inoculating them against remaining interested in politics and spitting them out.

        But I’ll confess that among the genuine rebels study of philosophy did not go much deeper than Engels you mentioned plus Mao’s “On Practice” and “On Contradiction.”

        I’ve downloaded Rees:

        https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=EA2C62C0E2E48F2BAACCC3DCCD8DA82F

        and Novack:

        https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=0629C73F3F1A4EE17C6538B4618BD489

        From quick glance I am not inclined to read them now.

        Also bookmarked Lukacs for future reference:

        https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/index.htm

        Basically I was aware they existed decades ago because they were promoted by “New Left” but the “New Left” never actually descended from academia to rise to the level of the actual participation in the actual theoretical debates that were relevant to the movement so it never became necessary to study and refute their sacred texts. So I am prejudiced to the point of not wanting to spend time on them now unless directly relevant. That may be unfair to Lukacs (and Gramsci) but I would need to be pointed directly to some specific excerpts with insight of current relevance to start reading them or others from there.

        Likewise for Trotsky. Skimming Rees chapter on Trotsky I also bookmarked Labriola:

        https://www.marxists.org/archive/labriola/index.htm

        and downloaded his Socialism and Philosophy:

        https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=151D07CB0082FB57DF9D1A68F87B0206

        also Trotsky’s Notebooks from which I read his notes on Hegel that were of no interest

        https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=7D3CDE7CE6BF4B88AFF99AFF5663C51B

        So I want to stick narrowly to working to make the contents of Shirokov and Ai Siqi more widely accessible, and up to date, along with related texts.

        I particularly want to use them in connection with application to study of capitalist cycle dynamics that will become immediately relevant.

        The notes and other materials jointly collected by people with various different perspectives on projects for which that background would be useful could be a joint project with common github repos that is then useful to whoever wants to use it in whatever direction they want to go.

        eg Platypus might want to leap straight into a pamphlet for some classes on philosophy, while I would not.

        Anyone preparing such a pamphlet would benefit from close reading of the texts, sorting through the excerpts from classics etc.

        Likewise for anyone working on understanding the capitalist business cycle.

        Likewise for anyone connecting to modern philosophy and science.

        Likewise for anyone interested in refuting those remnants of the Martian pseudoleft still pretending to be Marxists.

        Liked by 1 person

  12. Thanks Arthur.
    As always, you’ve given me plenty to think about.
    Right now I’m trying to track down everything I can that Mao wrote on dialectical materialism; and examples of dialectical thinking, and putting it into practice.

    I’ve also been looking at:
    Nick Knight “Li Da and Marxist philosophy in China”, which is available to download from archive.org
    and
    Roland Boer “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” chpt. 3 ‘Contradiction Analysis, history, meaning and application’

    I like some of Ollman’s explanations, but others don’t work for me at all. Like you, I have no idea what he was getting at with the dollar bill example. Nor the one his mate, Bill Livant, used to illustrate the difference between appearance and essence – “The hole in Hegel’s bagel”. (it’s just too cute and doesn’t actually say much). To be fair to Levant, he did recommend that his students put Hegel’s Logic aside, and read Mao’s “Four Essays on philosophy”, if they wanted to understand dialectics)
    Craig

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    Reply

    • 1. “Right now I’m trying to track down everything I can that Mao wrote on dialectical materialism; and examples of dialectical thinking, and putting it into practice.”

      Great! Thanks to your recommendation I’ve just finished reading “Mao Tse-tung’s Materialistic Dialectics” By VSEVOLOD HOLUBNYCHY
      https://sci-hub.se/10.1017/S0305741000042090

      It’s another example, like Nick Knight of a non-Marxist academic that seriously studies Marxist philosophy instead of just spouting like Martian academics. Will jot down some very cryptic notes while they are on my mind. Numbered for easy response.

      2. Are you also recommending Roland Boer?

      3. I will join National Library as you mentioned but not quickly as I’m not planning to work on Ai Siqi project before other stuff that doesn’t need it.

      4, But item 1 reminded me that I used to be able to lookup Chinese stuff from JPRS until the US stopped needing to translate stuff for their English speaking China watchers as they had caught up with learning Chinese. Now JPRS is subscription only but should be available via National Library so I would like to ask a favour for you to use your membership to track down Ai Siqi or Ai Ssu-ch’i or Ài Sīqí (Chinese: 艾思奇) is the pen name of Li Shengxuan (李生萱, 2 March 1910 – 22 March 1966).

      Very likely there would be at least an abridged rough translation of his main DiaMat textbook I mentioned and linked somewhere in JPRS or similar databases.

      https://www.readex.com/products/joint-publications-research-service-jprs-reports-1957-1995#request-info

      Also likely to be mentioned in this book, which I have not found in Library Genesis:

      https://brill.com/display/title/58475?language=en

      or in journal articles that mention him. If you are checking journal articles that mention him (or others re dialectical materialism) please track them with Zotero to pass on as a batch.

      I did get this paper:

      Ai Ssu-ch’i’s philosophy
      Part two: Dialectical materialism
      Ignatius J. H. Ts’ao
      Studies in Soviet thought volume 12, pages 231–244 (1972)

      https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01043516
      https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/BF01043516

      I have not read it properly but quick glance suggested no reference to an English translation.

      Will also later want to track down files of Chinese originals, preferably with OCR already done, of earlier and later editions (including before and after Lin Piao affair as well as Mao’s death). That should be simpler publicly available worldcat or library of congress records.

      Am asking for any english translation early as if found it avoids need to think through how to organize translation from Chinese etc.

      5. Notes below are working through Holubnychy paper. It was interesting enough that I would also like to read his longer monograph described in footnote 1 p3 pdf 1. Presumably not available in English. But machine translation from German might be feasible and might also be useful generally:

      “The parts of the original paper that
      are here largely omitted contain, in particular, more details on the comparison of
      Mao’s dialectics with that of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and modern Russian
      philosophers; a discussion of interpretations of Mao’s philosophy in China, the
      U.S.S.R. and the West; a survey of the preceding literature on the subject of this
      paper; and some specific examples of the relation of Mao’s dialectics to the develop-
      ment of the CCP’s ideological conflict with the CPSU prior to 1962.”

      He certainly has a deeper appreciation of Mao’s originality than Arthur Cohen’s 1961 CIA Current Intelligence Staff Study:
      “M A 0 TSE-TUNG AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
      I. REVOLUTION
      (Reference T i t l e :
      POLO.X-61)”

      Click to access polo-01.pdf

      6. pp4-6 is interesting re Chinese language being inherently more dialectical. The example of a “A white horse is not a horse.” suggests I may have first been exposed to Chinese dialectical thought by watching Mr Ed on TV 😉

      “A horse is a horse of course of course
      And no one can talk to a horse of course.
      That is of course unless the horse
      Is the famous Mister Ed!”

      https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/mredlyrics.html

      6. p8 suggests this linguistic cultural background difference also impacts on Greek Orthodox (including Slavic) philosophy but in the direction of Orthodoxy in the anti-dialectical sense. While Mao certainly advanced on Lenin (and also Marx and Engels) at p8 and later the professional philosopher’s prejudices are quite rampant in discussing Lenin’s philosophical writing. There was a Maoist campaign for mass study of “Materialism and Empirio-criticism” in about 1975 (ie close to the end of Maoist leadership). This was important because it was directed against the subjective idealism (descended from Western Kantianism and dualism) which paralyses concrete analysis of concrete conditions. It wasn’t a work about dialectics but specifically a defence of materialism but the critics own dualism makes him instinctively hostile despite not being hostile to the “Taoist” side of Chinese philosophy.

      7. p17 Mao “never refers, for example, to any of the economic writings of
      Marx, except once to one of the introductions to Capital and twice to the
      well-known preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
      Economy, which both existed in separate pamphlet form in Chinese.”

      The Chinese pamphlet’s with “Preface to A Contribution…” would also include the longer “Introduction…” to the Grundrisse as such pamphlets did since it was first published in German in 1903 and in English in 1904.

      But p21 has footnote 56:

      “A similar method called ” ascending from the abstract to the concrete ” was also used
      by Marx in his Capital. It also has been widely misunderstood, especially by all
      those who think they saw a contradiction between the first and the third volumes of
      Capital. However, Marx explained this method in the first draft of Capital, called
      Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag,
      1953), pp. 21-22, which has not been translated into any other language. The fact
      that Mao uses a very similar method can probably be explained only in terms of an
      independent convergence, however amazing it is. In Mao’s case this method probably
      arose from the typically Chinese objeotivisation and concretisation of reality.”

      Certainly Mao actually understood it and developed it further, unlike the Martians that just quote it blindly and as he correctly describes are appalled to discover “contradiction” in Marx’s writing of Capital. But since Mao read and quotes from the preface he also read the introduction so it isn’t an “amazing” independent convergence. (Also extensively included in the Soviet texts Mao studied).

      8. p18 footnote 46 has a useful list for “trying to track down everything I can that Mao wrote on dialectical materialism; and examples of dialectical thinking, and putting it into practice.” Item numbers added:

      “46 In addition to On Practice, On Contradiction and On Dialectical Materialism, several
      other of Mao’s writings of political, military and ideological nature contain important
      passages of epistemological and dialectical character. Among them of particular
      interest have been found the following writings:

      1. On Rectification of Incorrect Ideas in the Party (1929);
      2. Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War (1936);
      3. On the Protracted War (1938);
      4. The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party (1939);
      5. On New Democracy (1940);
      6. Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art (1942);
      7. Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong (1946); i
      8. The Present Situation and Our Tasks (1947);
      9. The Bankruptcy of the Idealistic Conception of History (1949);
      10. On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (1957).”

      Of those, along with the “Four Essays” (including item 10) items 1 and 4 were recommended for YCL study in February 1969, plus:

      11. Reform Our Study
      12. Orientation of the Youth Movement
      13. On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship

      Click to access d0655.pdf

      Item 3 was recommended for study by people involved in disciplined groups training for dealing with police violence.

      From (vague) memory items 6, 7 and 9 would also have been fairly widely read, though not items 2, 5 and 8.

      9. pp20-21 comparison with American philosophy of pragmatism is interesting. Seems unaware of the connections between pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Pierce and John Dewey with the American Hegelians (including civil war Major-General Willich of the (Cincinnati) “Ohio Hegelians” who was one of the many 1848 German revolutionary fighters that emigrated – Engels was his aide de camp).

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Willich

      10. p25 more uninformed Lenin bashing.

      11. Overall, remarkably good. I have not commented on the many excellent explanations.

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  13. Thanks Arthur,
    I’m glad you liked the Holubnychy article.

    I’ve checked the National Library eResources, but unfortunately, they don’t have electronic access to JPRS publications. I remember they had to cut back on subscriptions a year or so ago and this may have been one of them.

    When I searched their catalogue for Ai Siqi the only book that came up in English was “Chinese dialectics: from Yijing to Marxism” by Chenshan Tian. The blurb describes it as: “an unparalleled investigation into the conversation between Western Marxism and Chinese, or Eastern Marxism….Chenshan Tian contends that the conversation between Eastern and Western Marxism results in a striking feature of dialectics that pervades the everyday thinking and speech of ordinary persons in China. No study to date has undertaken the task of tracing the development of Marxism in China through it’s ancient philosophical texts.”

    The contents page looks promising:

    1.Tongbian: A Chinese Strand of Thought 22
    2 Marxism in China: Initial Encounters 49
    3 Tongbian in Preliminary Reading of “Dialectics” 72
    4 Qu Qiubai’s Reading of Dialectical Materialism 89
    5 Popularizing Dialectical Materialism 108
    6 Ai Siqi: Sinizing Dialectical Materialism 129
    7 Mao Zedong: The Mature Formulation of Dialectical Materialism 146
    EPILOGUE: Marxian Dialectics after Mao 178

    I’ve put it into my ever-growing “To Be Read” file.

    I haven’t got around to the Roland Boer chapter yet. I came across an abstract on Google Scholar and, because it highlighted the importance of Shirokov and Ai Siqi, I thought it’d be worth having a look at.

    Craig
    P.S. I like your reference to Mr Ed….I’d forgotten all about him, and never in relation to Marxism. Surprising the connections the mind makes!

    Like

    Reply

  14. Thanks again, Arthur
    I was looking for JPRS translations yesterday and found this – Mao’s Collected works vol. 1-10. You’ve probably already seen it, but in case you haven’t-
    https://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/mao/cwcia/index.html
    I also found this, but, it seems, only some has been translated, and I can’t work out if the search function applies to the text or only to the titles; the searches I’ve done don’t seem to get the number of results I’d expect if it was searching the full text:
    https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/search?search_api_fulltext=&items_per_page=10&sort_bef_combine=created_DESC&f%5B0%5D=topics%3A86602&fo%5B0%5D=86602

    I get through a few articles each day, just picking out the ones that sound most interesting, but now I’m going to start all over, take notes, and try to organize my thoughts.
    Thanks again for your help.
    Craig

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    Reply

  15. Thanks again, Arthur,
    I’d like to read Chenshan Tai (especially the two chapters you mention) but I haven’t been able to get a copy. I downloaded it from Library Genesis but it evidently requires an application that’s not on my computer (it doesn’t say what). I’ve never had a problem before…It’s a pity. And, just to rub it in, it’s not on archive.org

    I’ve been putting together a collection of books and articles that I’ve found most useful in explaining dialectics (especially its Chinese interpretation and refinement), but there’s so much I haven’t got to yet. I hadn’t really thought of producing a bibliography… I don’t think I’d be qualified.

    Like

    Reply

  16. Thanks for that, Arthur; I thought it’d be something like that. I blame Apple for most of my computer problems, and I’m usually right – things that are freely available for a P.C. are not free, or easy to use, for Apple.

    I can’t find an open source document converter that’s recommended. The one I found with good reviews is the Cisdem document reader, but it’s $30 U.S. per year and I’ll have to think about it.

    I meant to say that the trove of documents you found on the Internet Archive’s Waybackmachine is unbelievable….truly amazing. I’ve only had a quick look at some of them.

    I’m also not on Facebook, so I can’t check it for the few good things that may be on it. That’s why I haven’t been able to get a copy of Michael Hyde’s “All along the watchtower”, or his novel “Hey Joe”. I tried to order them from Vulgar Press but they told to me to contact Michael through his Facebook page. Which isn’t much help if you’re not on Facebook.

    Never mind…..I’ve still got plenty to read.
    Craig

    P.S. If you want to email me directly, that’s fine.

    Like

    Reply

    • Will still leave other stuff till later but there should be no problem reading djvu on Apple Macintosh despite Apple being even worse than Microsoft for creating obstacles

      You mentioned Cisdem $30 per year. They advertize it as “Free Download”. Could be misleading or could be that extra features included with a $30 p.a. “premium” version that you don’t need. Either way same page lists alternative free software that they claim is inferior:

      https://www.cisdem.com/resource/5-best-djvu-readers-mac.html

      Google “mac djvu reader free” for others.

      But do switch to Linux eventually, after more pressing matters like reading dialectics 😉

      Free software is after all the communist mode of production in the fetal cells of the old womb and it already runs the internet.

      If your Mac has an intel processor it should be straight forward to also install Linux. I recommend Fedora:

      https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/can-fedora-linux-be-installed-on-mac-os/79881

      If it isn’t intel but instead “Apple silicon” there may be other Linux distributions suitable eg Asahi for Apple M1 and M2 laptops.

      Fedora/Asahi remix should be available by end of this month:

      https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-for-apple-silicon-macs/

      As a you are unfamiliar I would not recommend installing current test versions:

      https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/%22When-will-Asahi-Linux-be-done%3F%22

      PS 1. I have sent a message to Mike Hyde suggesting he join this thread and tell you how to get his book.

      2. I hope somebody else reading this thread will volunteer to checkout Kamran Heiss facebook and report back for the benefit of those of us wise enough not to be on facebook.

      Like

      Reply

    • 1. Here is a translated 1961 collection including “Oppose Book Worship” plus other material on methods of work for investigation and research which are about “applying dialectics”. Will need to check whether post-Mao official translation differs significantly.

      Click to access %E6%AF%9B%E6%B3%BD%E4%B8%9C%E8%AE%BA%E8%B0%83%E6%9F%A5%E7%A0%94%E7%A9%B6.pdf

      The horrible URL is Chinese characters on address bar.

      The site looks like the place to find translations and translators:

      http://prchistory.org/

      2. No response from Mike Hyde yet but I noticed there is a contact box on the web page for his site:

      Contact

      All Along the Watchtower

      That may be what you already tried.

      Just after typing above I noticed phone message from Mike saying he has left his email for you. If it doesn’t get passed on by Barry in a day or so let me know and I will phone him.

      3. I am much more excited about the 114MB and other 3 torrents from Kamram Heiss at archive.org than what I have seen at lenin.biz so far – mainly post 1960s Soviet revisionism.

      4. Kamram Heiss archive.org Soviet Translations includes both the 1932 Leningrad textbook (Shirokov et al – with the original part 1) and the works by Mitin that Ai Siqi and Mao studied. I will be reading those now.

      5. BTW better paper by Jessop is:

      Click to access E_2019b_1857_to_1867_Marx_s_Method.pdf

      Very relevant to the dialectics needed for understanding and further developing Capital as in Maksakovsky.

      Got to rush again.

      Like

      Reply

  17. Arthur,
    I’ve emailed Michael. I hope he’ll get back to me; I’d like to read both books.

    Thanks for the link to “Mao Zedong on investigation and research”. I’ve never seen it before; it looks very interesting.

    And thanks for the quote from “Poverty of philosophy” the other day. I was looking at it again tonight and started reading Chapter two, “The metaphysics of political economy – Section 1: Method”, in which Marx criticizes Proudhon’s misuse of dialectics…. I’d want to include it in any introduction to dialectical materialism. It’s superb piece of writing:
    “If we had M. Proudhon’s intrepidity in the matter of Hegelianism we should say: it is distinguished in itself from itself. What does this mean? Impersonal reason, having outside itself neither a base on which it can pose itself, nor an object to which it can oppose itself, nor a subject with which it can compose itself, is forced to turn head over heels, in posing itself, opposing itself and composing itself – position, opposition, composition. Or, to speak Greek – we have thesis, antithesis and synthesis. For those who do not know the Hegelian language, we shall give the ritual formula: affirmation, negation and negation of the negation. That is what language means. It is certainly not Hebrew (with due apologies to M. Proudhon); but it is the language of this pure reason, separate from the individual. Instead of the ordinary individual with his ordinary manner of speaking and thinking we have nothing but this ordinary manner purely and simply – without the individual….”

    I like the way Marx ridicules the simplistic use of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis formula when it’s removed from history; from the forces and relations of production of a particular time and place (as it is in Proudhon).

    Instead of Proudhon’s Reason and “eternal principles’, Marx constantly pulls us down to Earth.

    “….we are necessarily forced to examine minutely what men were like in the 11th century, what they were like in the 18th, what were their respective needs, their productive forces, their mode of production, the raw materials of their production – in short, what were the relations between man and man which resulted from all these conditions of existence. To get to the bottom of all these questions – what is this but to draw up the real, profane history of men in every century and to present these men as both the authors and the actors of their own drama? But the moment you present men as the actors and authors of their own history, you arrive – by detour – at the real starting point, because you have abandoned those eternal principles of which you spoke at the outset.”

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    • Topic that comes to mind re “Investigation and Research”. A major topic for theoretical pontification is what happened to “socialism” in Soviet Union, China and elsewhere. I’m not aware of much concrete investigation and research but some starting points that come to mind for applying dialectical materialist concrete study of concrete conditions include:

      There are several works by Charlets Bettelheim:

      https://libgen.is/search.php?&req=charles+bettelheim&phrase=1&view=simple&column=author&sort=def&sortmode=ASC&page=2

      also:

      1975 “Restoration of Capitalism in the U S S R” by Martin Nicolaus (translator of Marx’s Grundrisse and author of a materialist alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous)

      http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=e578176226bfe32de5795e0471c36623

      Chinese eg “Gang of Four” did some work, but mainly in context of their own fight against similar restoration BEFORE it was completed.

      Click to access rcp-mao-5.pdf

      There was some in their Shanghai journal “Studies and Criticism” I expect there would be more there and elsewhere translated by JPRS. Some is included in above collection. It shows that they fought right up to the end eg “Proletarians are revolutionary optimists” by Pei Sheng was a farewell message immediately before they were overthrown.

      Much deeper analysis is needed. I don’t know what has been published. Quite possibly there is some in academic journals.

      David McMullen might be able to point to some:

      http://www.simplymarxism.com/

      I think we have to focus on thorough study and analysis of our own capitalist systems. Analysis from other times and circumstances should be very be helpful to that – eg the Chinese stuff shows examples of thinking dialectically, but we have a big job to get a level where we can benefit much from whatever work has been done on other times and places.

      I’m just interested in extracting the useful work done on philosophy from any dross that got included – as background to developing that further and in particular for application to dynamics of modern capitalism, in particular for crossing the abyss in the nearly one hundred years since the last theoretical advance on the subject that I am aware of was made by Maksakovsky.

      As for the “Martian academics” pontificating about their theories on this subject, I honestly don’t see that they are worth arguing with. Refuting them won’t actually develop useful theory.

      BTW by astonishing coincidence somebody threw out several copies of “Monthly Review: An independent socialist magazine” where I was walking by yesterday. It used to have some (bad) influence when there was an active left. April 2022 issue has a detailed explanation from the editors that the war in Ukraine is caused by US imperialist efforts to surround Russia and China. Ends with “Only a return to socialism in both Ukraine and Russia can offer a solution.”

      Accompanied by an article with the inspiring title “For an Ecosocialist Degrowth”.

      For sheer emptiness they actually managed to outdo Chris Cutrone’s classic article on Ukraine, with the accurate title “More of the same”, plus 13 footnotes and zero content – brilliantly encapsulated in a comprehensive refutation of numerous other allegedly “left positions” by simply drawing attention to this fact:

      “There is no reason whatsoever to doubt that the present conflict is between the Ukraine and Russia.”

      https://platypus1917.org/2022/04/01/ukraine-more-of-the-same/

      There is no reason to believe there is any point writing articles with “more of the same” refuting people who cannot even reach that level of concrete analysis of concrete conditions.

      Would anyone actually writing about the current war in the real world rather than the ideas in the heads of people who are not thinking about the real world make the mistake of referring to “the Ukraine”?

      This is a good time to study philosophy, the point being to change the world.

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    • Thanks. I did get that paper by Chenshan Tian earlier.

      Have now finished Shirokov part 1 and also Trotsky “Results and Prospects” and “Stalinism and Bolshevism”.

      I still have lots of reading to catch up on as a result of these very fruitful discussions with you.

      But I also intend to get back to you on ideas for project to enlist others in enabling philosophical study. May take a few days.

      Meanwhile I did just come across something directly relevant to what you originally asked about. Excerpts with examples of dialectics from Mao:

      https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/mao/examples-of-dialectics.epub

      It isn’t listed on the Mao page:

      https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/pdf/index.htm

      But it is listed here:

      https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/

      Does not include citations for each excerpt. Same sloppiness in quite a few quotes from other classics of the “history of shaving” in other texts. That promotes dogmatism instead of critical study.

      Very important to keep track of where things came from in Zotero.

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  21. Thanks Arthur,
    Since you suggested it I have been using Zotero, and adding the books and articles on dialectics that I’ve found especially useful into a bibliography.
    I found that compilation of “Examples of Dialectics” a while ago; it’s a pity that whoever assembled it didn’t think it necessary to include references. At least with the Little Red Book there are references, so that you to go from an excerpt to the original and read it in context. I’m someone who habitually goes to the references and footnotes to find out more, and hopefully get a better understanding of what a writer’s on about.
    Craig

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    • The examples of dialectics are good but appear to be from conversations and speeches. I doubt whether it will be feasible to add references. The published works include similar examples without repetitions etc. Context is generally the actual concrete issue under discussion rather than elaboration about the philosophy expressed by those examples. I would include different expressions of similar concepts in current materials rather than referencing them as excerpts from classic texts.

      I see it is also available in hypertext at:

      https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_48.htm

      From there I found details of the source at:

      https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/lions-paper-tigers-and-ghosts-conversations-mao-long-live-mao-zedong-thought#_ftn1

      Those details should be included with any copies circulated. There was an immense amount of “internal” stuff circulated by competing Red Guard factions during Cultural Revolution.

      Glad you are using Zotero and starting bibliography.

      Am hoping a future project can use github repos so anybody can add notes and links etc for potential inclusion.

      Have just finished Lukacs “History and Class Consciousness” and would add that to the Soviet textbooks and Ai Siqi and Maksakovsky as well as the “classics” in related projects that should have cross links to common term glossaries, references and annotations aimed at developing modern texts. Multiple competing drafts for glossary entries and annotations etc can best be handled in a common repo. Likewise for translation work. Such collaborative annotation with full version control could result in deeper understanding of what a writer is on about, through unity and struggle of different annotations (and translated paragraphs) than can be achieved working separately.

      There are about 100 million people working that way in github and 30 million in wikipedia. The Communist mode of production is developing quite well in the fetal cells of modern society. Communist philosophizing belongs there. Like any other projects it can evolve step by step. The version control facilities facilitate collaboration unfolding dialectically from simple starts like a bibliography file and taking multiple directions rather than always dying out when not enough people are working on them together. Github repo contents in Markdown can be conveniently transformed for marxists.org wikimedia and archive.org.

      Will have to also checkout Gramsci as I was pleasantly surprised by Lukacs. I will start with:

      https://archive.org/details/Gramsci-ProblemsOfMarxism

      The examples of dialectics from Mao are quite a sharp contrast from the shrill denunciations in Soviet texts.

      I think Lukacs is clearly wrong on key issues but he had, at least initially, enough “conquering spirit” to openly and honestly present his alternative views so he was wrong from within Marxism as was Rosa Luxemburg. The nonsense produced by “Western Marxism” goes well beyond merely amplifying those errors. Serious responses to his views on such questions as the relevance of dialectics to natural science and his support for Rosa Luxemburg’s errors on Accumulation of Capital might be helpful in recovering from “Western Marxism”. He was certainly right about “Communist arrogance” but also exhibited it in his absurd deification of both “the proletariat” and “the party”.

      I have the impression “Western Marxism” is just fading away anyway but actually renewing debate on philosophical issues from the 1920s and 1930s could be more fruitful than trying to engage with current academic stuff that went nowhere and looks like it never will.

      I gave up reading Googlish translation of Deborin on Lukacs as I found it unreadable. I think the problem was in the shrill German content, not the auto-translation:

      https://www.lana.info.hu/lukacs-gyorgy/irasok-lukacsrol/a-tortenelem-es-osztalytudat-a-huszas-evek-vitaiban/abram-deborin-lukacs-und-seine-kritik-des-marxismus/

      https://www-lana-info-hu.translate.goog/lukacs-gyorgy/irasok-lukacsrol/a-tortenelem-es-osztalytudat-a-huszas-evek-vitaiban/abram-deborin-lukacs-und-seine-kritik-des-marxismus/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB

      It may be necessary to checkout:

      Lenin, Hegel, and western Marxism: a critical study
      https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=7BE7A3BB7D371E76B55D667B45565AEA

      The Bewitched World of Capital: Economic Crisis and the Metamorphosis of the Political
      https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=F922E7871710E767B76618D7BC83D282

      Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day
      http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=1C80E41128ADAF7DDCAF946B9F131C50

      But I doubt that I will have time as I need to focus on Maksakovsky.

      I’ve included Maksakovsky because the main reference for Marx’s dialectics is “Capital” and Maksakovsky actually had enough conquering spirit to complete a key missing part of it with a crisp succinct explanation of the method that simultaneously refutes pretty well all the major errors that have been served up from people who actually took Marx seriously like Hilferding and Rosa Luxemburg, not to mention the Martian academics. So cross referencing that to the others would also be useful from a philosophical as well as political economy perspective.

      I did look through an Adorno bibliography but remain unconvinced that there is anything there of interest.

      If anyone following this thread can suggest a particular work of Adorno’s that I should read to at least understand why he is of interest regarding Marxist philosophy, please do.

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    • Quick note re:

      ” I’m someone who habitually goes to the references and footnotes to find out more, and hopefully get a better understanding of what a writer’s on about.”

      Me too. Essential requirement for auto-didacts to liberate dialectics from the Martian academics. People that don’t also tend to just learn from their teachers instead of developing things further (and often don’t even understand their teachers).

      I found a reference in direction of context for long Mao dialectics example “23. Onesidedness is of Dual Nature”. I think that example re fighting both dogmatism and revisionism will be very useful. It also illustrates the need for accurate citations, and annotations of translation decisions.

      Long story but here’s the punch line. Original could not have been talking about well known Wang Ming. But somebody ignorant “corrected” reference to “Wang Meng” (both in epub and html – presumably not in original Chinese).

      https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_48.htm

      JPRS Miscellany part 1 has correct version at pp217 to 218.

      Presumably this Wang Meng:

      https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat7/sub39/item1695.html

      Took a lot of work to get that far and I’m not pursuing it further.

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  22. Hi Arthur,
    That was a good piece of detective work. There’s nothing worse than incorrect references (or serious typos, like the one you found). One of the problems with the internet is that an error of that sort, whether deliberate or accidental, gets copied repeatedly, and then winds up in databases and bibliographies all over the place…. and it’s almost impossible to correct it. It’s a nice feeling when you can.

    I found a copy of the JPRS Miscellany some time ago at:

    Click to access MiscellanyOfMaoTse-tungThought-1949-1968-JPRS-Part1-1974-OCR-sm.pdf

    When I read a book or article (or listen to an interview!), I’m always scribbling down references. I know I often get more out of the notes and footnotes than the book I’m actually reading.
    The other day I read a passing reference to Ira Gollobin’s “Dialectical Materialism”, but the only review I could find was scathing – Gollobin had had the temerity to include Mao in his book! So, I tracked down a copy and read the opening paragraphs:

    “This treatise culminates a journey of many years which at its inception had a very limited objective. In 1950 I proposed to a publisher that I write a primer
    based mainly on A Textbook of Marxist Philosophy, prepared in the early 1930s by the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy. The publisher agreed.
    Aware that there were areas of the subject that I knew little about, I began a course of reading that I believed would be completed in a relatively short time.
    Contrary to my expectations, the more I read the more I realized how much more there was to know. As years passed, it seemed to family and friends that I was engaged in a mission impossible, and that the reading and the writing were a kind of perpetual motion without end.
    This impression was reinforced by numerous protracted interruptions necessitated by my work as an attorney. During the 1950s and 1960s I represented
    persons attacked in the Cold War witchhunts – some in deportation proceedings based on their affiliation with or membership in left-wing organizations and
    some subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Senate Internal Security Committee. In the 1970s my focus shifted to defense of refugees. Other activities also made considerable demands on my time. Actually, these involvements were an integral part of work on the book. They
    provided many opportunities for practical testing of my formulations of the concepts of dialectical materialism and, in turn, of correcting or deepening these formulations….
    My hope is that in the present period of increasing complexity, intensifying turmoil, and accelerating tempo of events, the book’s comprehensive account of dialectical materialism will enable readers to understand better-and more effectively change – the world and themselves. Above all, I hope the book will be useful for those striving to achieve a socialist society.”

    It certainly whetted my appetite. Now I want to read the rest. It’s over 600 pages of small print, so it’ll take me a while. Craig

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    • 1. Fascinating! I have downloaded it from:

      https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=1402A4A09EB9257C8EDB38BDFBCB34FD

      The OCR is adequate for solving the small print problem.

      I have read the front matter to page 19. Unfortunately p20 is blank.

      Last line on p19 is:
      men is not a judgment on the inherent capabilities of women. The insights of

      2. Please confirm whether p20 is present in your hardcopy. May need to scan it and other pages. There is no other online copy that I know of apart from Google Books which is likely to be the same scan.

      https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/_/06qwAAAAIAAJ

      If you do have p20 please search for a phrase in it in google books to see if we can fix it from there.

      I will try to read (TTS) the Addendum p456-506 tomorrow:
      On Historical Experience with Socialist Revolution
      and Its Consolidation: A Query and a Hypothesis

      Then perhaps Part IV: Conclusion, p419-453.

      Will postpone rest until your recommendation.

      Found the testimonial at:

      https://web.archive.org/web/20220117183626/http://gollobin.org/category/testimonials/

      You should have linked it!

      I have not checked out the rest of that memorial site. But can see there would be no copyright problem preventing inclusion of the book in marxists.org etc.

      There is also another hostile site apparently from very bitter estranged family members that doesn’t look of any interest.

      https://web.archive.org/web/20230607023656/http://iragollobin.com/

      3. I am pretty certain the “correction” changing from Wang Meng was not a “serious typo” but deliberate change in ignorant belief that correct name was a typo intended to refer to the notorious “Wang Ming”.

      4. I will postpone reading Gramsci and Adorno. My interest is more in Chris Cutrone as reciprocal interest in platypus to their interest in encountering egg laying Maoists. Have read a preliminary chapter by him on Adorno and Benjamin with some other notes:

      Click to access cutrone_adornobenjaminphilohistory052908a.pdf

      Will postpone reading the whole dissertation on Adorno and Marxism, or perhaps even postone it along with Moishe forever:

      http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=17c0da1f7eae90bd4e1f1e0b995abc60

      5. I suspect Ira would also postone Adorno. His footnote 158 on p85 in “Brief Summary” of Ch 3 on Materialism seemed rather as though Marx had a premonition about Adorno, though he failed to forsee the obscurantists using terms like “reification” instead of “mere subjective chains existing inside me”:

      Idealism-in this era the guile of the bourgeoisie that seeks to beautify, to
      idealize, to eternalize exploitation, “changing real, objective chains that exist
      outside me into mere ideal, mere subjective chains existing in me, and thus to change
      all exterior, palpable struggles into pure struggles of thought. ” (Marx and
      Engels) 158

      158. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, p. 111

      Google Books has edition with exact words at p111 also available as ebook. It is similar in:

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06.htm#6.1.a

      6. I am reading Cutrone’s 2023 “The Death of the Millenial Left” with much more interest.

      By 1981 it was obvious enough that what passed for “the left” was completely bankrupt to publish this for May Day:

      https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/australia/may-day-81.htm

      That’s when Chris got involved with what he thought was the heirs to the sixties left so he has a fascinating mixture of subsequent correct diagnoses and misconceptions that result from the odd place he started from. Anyway I do think it is interesting and worth engaging seriously with.

      7. Have finished 15 page 1946 “Basic trends in Soviet Philosophy”. I think it is basically accurate, although too polite about what John Somerville calls the “temper” and “mores” (ie the shrill denunication instead of philosophizing).

      https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/2181667

      Anyway it reinforces my prejudice that it is important to rescue the “new philosophy” that emerged after defeat of “mechanists” and “menshevizing idealists” and correct its failure to properly respond to what became “Western Marxism” by renewal rather than just recovery. I am still hopeful translation of Ai Siqi will be an important step forward.

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  23. Arthur,
    I thought you might like this, too:

    An Indefatigable Man July 19, 2008
    Posted by admin in : Ira, Testimonials , comments closed
    Ruth Misheloff, New York, NY

    “I met Ira in the early ‘80s, I think. His book, Dialectical Materialism, which he’d been working on for over a quarter-century at that point, was still in manuscript, but the end was in sight and he needed a copy editor to help prepare it for publication. He was a very good writer, fluent, strong, precise, supple, yet even the best manuscript needs an outside eye to vet clarity and continuity, catch inconsistencies and typos, query possible citation errors, and mark up headings for the designer. I took on the job happily, figuring not only to make some money but to learn a lot in the process. So I started on what became at least a two-year gig, reading line by line, making marginal notes or attaching post-its, and providing additional sheets of queries. When he returned the first batch of manuscript so I could check the changes, I discovered that while responding to my queries, he’d had fresh thoughts, incarnated as new sentences, new paragraphs, and whole new pages.

    And that’s what happened with every batch of manuscript I returned to him. It came back to me not only with fixes for the things I’d marked but with elaborations, augmentations, amplifications. I’d comment or query about the new material, of course rereading the old in the process — and then the revised sheets would come back to me amplified yet again!

    Ira’s partner in producing these endless new versions was his heroic daughter Ruth, who typed every blessed page, over and over. (Remember typing? On a typewriter? And carbons? White-out? Manual cutting and pasting? It’s sobering to recall what it took to produce a good and careful book in those days, even with a Selectric! If Ira had had access to a computer, the book might have turned out twice as long, if indeed he would have ever been able to stop….)

    Even while realizing how painful it probably was for Ira to separate from a project in which he’d invested so much, eventually I couldn’t help chaffing him that he needed a 12-step program to kick his book addiction, and once I may have even conjured up the image of myself and his daughter Ruth as Chaplins on a Modern Times assembly line! He responded goodnaturedly, of course, but was undaunted, and the iterations continued. I began to wonder (silently) if he would experience the authorial version of post-partum depression when he finally turned the manuscript over to the printer.

    Ira was an amazing, indefatigable, stalwart, intense, bright-spirited, and dedicated man, and a multi-tasker before the term was invented. One example that has stuck in my mind: when he used to go out running — yes, he did that, too, possibly till he was in his late 80s — he carried index cards with passages of poetry to memorize. Once he “had” the lines, they were his forever. No senior moments for him, at least to my knowledge. He used every second of his time in this world. I can hardly imagine him gone.”

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  24. Sorry Arthur,
    I meant to send the link as well :
    https://gollobin.org/?s=ruth+misheloff&searchbutton=go%21

    Unfortunately, I don’t have a paper copy of Gollobin’s “Dialectical Materialism” either. I’m not sure where the scanned copy I’ve got came from, but the original source must be the same – it’s missing page 20, too. I don’t know how much they charge, but the Library of Congress has a copy and they might scan a page if I ask.
    Craig

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  25. Arthur,
    I just received a photo of page 20 from a guy in California who owns a copy. I can’t attach it to this email, but it’s not very long so I’ve typed it out.

    Craig

    20 AUTHOR’S NOTE

    scientific philosophy, and their use in changing the world, are fundamentally impeded and diminished so long as scientific philosophy is largely restricted to the talents and accomplishment of less than half the human race. Only when women are no longer hampered in their ideological development and the disparity in philosophic attainments of the sexes becomes a historical curio can philosophy attain its deserved status and potential and effloresce as a broad, truly human endeavor.

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    • Thanks for p20.

      Dave has produced an OCR .txt from the scanned copy of Ira Gollobin “Dialectical Materialism”. I have just uploaded his .zip file here:

      It has much less OCR typos than the text embedded in the .pdf scanned 70 MB copy and is less than 2MB. It retains original pagination and paragraphs. You can easily print it to .pdf if preferred.

      https://c21stleft.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/ira-gollobin-dialectical-materialism_-its-laws-categories-and-practice-petras-press-1986_0001.zip

      The minimum work needed to make it accessible to wider audience was done by whoever got the scanned pdf to Library Genesis. So there is no urgent need to do anything further with it now.

      But if you are reading it right through anyway, it could save some work if you simultaneously edited remaining OCR typos that you notice and can verify by comparison with the pdf, while retaining exactly the current pagination and paragraphs for future automatic processing.

      If that interferes with your reading it probably isn’t work doing right now as anybody could do it later.

      If you do any typo editing any other suspected typos that are not verified from examination of the pdf (eg made in the original) should just be mentioned in a separate file of your notes referencing the same page numbers (and paragraph numbers starting from 0 if the initial paragraph began on the previous page).

      Then no additional time would be wasted if we set it up in a repo to process for archive.org, marxists.org, wikimedia, print on demand publishers etc (and no new errors introduced like “Wang Ming”).

      I won’t be reading in front of a computer to edit at present. Will continue only listening via TTS while walking. Have listened to ppp0-19 (plus read your p20) and pp434-453 so far. Will alternate with also finishing Cutrone 2023.

      New post of old article on “Technology and the Future of Work” will be more suitable for any comments and excerpts from philosophical and other theoretical reading. I will post any comments on actual content that I have there and suggest you and any others do too.

      Technology and the future of work: a Marxist perspective

      Keep this thread for organizing, exchanging references etc as at present.

      BTW I should have included link to a site on “Dialectics for Kids” that was mentioned in golloboin.org site:

      https://web.archive.org/web/20220123004021/http://dialectics4kids.org/

      I haven’t checked it out but it may have interesting stuff, especially related to his interest in Piaget. It is still online:

      https://dialectics4kids.org/sitemap.htm

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  26. Arthur,
    I’d like to have a go at editing the txt copy of Gollobin’s book, as long as I can take my time over it – I can only stare at screens for so many hours a day. But before I get going, could I talk to you or someone about it, just to make sure I’m doing it correctly? I’d hate to spend a lot of time on it, only to be told at the end that I haven’t done it the right way, and that what I’ve done isn’t of any use.
    It’d be nice to know I’ve been a part of making it available on marxists.org
    Craig
    P.S. I thought you’d appreciate one of the first typos I found:
    “A Texibook of Marvin Philosophy, prepared in the early 1930s by the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy.”
    It seemed apposite.

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  27. I usually look at footnotes, notes and references when I’m reading a book or article. It can lead to so much more.
    The other day it was Bertell Ollman’s “Dance of the Dialectic: steps in Marx’s method” (University of Illinois Press, 2003).

    When I read note 17, of chapter 3, which quotes Dietzgen, the German tanner whom Marx introduced to the Hague Congress of the First International by saying “Here is our philosopher”, it literally blew me away…..I could understand why:

    “Is not every thing a part, is not every part a thing? Is the color of a leaf less of a thing than that leaf itself? . . . Color is only the sum of reactions of the leaf, light, and eye, and so is all the rest of the matter of a leaf an aggregate of different interactions. In the same
    way in which our faculty of thought deprives a leaf of its color attribute and sets it apart as a ‘thing itself,’ may we continue to deprive that leaf of all its other attributes, and so doing we finally take away everything that makes the leaf. Color is according to its quality no less a substance than the leaf, and the leaf is no less an attribute than its color. As the color is an attribute of the leaf, so the leaf is an attribute of the tree, the tree an attribute of the earth, the earth an attribute of the universe. The universe is the substance, substance in general, and all other substances are in relation to it only particular substances or attributes. But by this world-substance is revealed the fact that the essence of the thing-in-itself, as distinguished from its manifestations, is only a concept of the mind or mental thing” (1928, 103-4).
    It should be recalled that it is Dietzgen’s account of the “thing-in-itself as a thing made of thought” that Engels said was “brilliant.”

    Deitzen, Joseph 1928 The positive outcome of philosophy, trans. W.W. Craik
    Quoted by Ollman in “Dance of the Dialectic”, p. 49

    This left me stunned : it’s a superb description of dialectical thinking.
    Craig

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  28. Arthur,
    It seems the publisher, Charles H. Kerr & Company, Chicago, had a new translation done by W.W. Craik for the hundredth anniversary (1928) of Dietzgen’s birth, but I haven’t been able to find a downloadable copy
    https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Manifesto_of_the_Communist_Party.djvu/67

    The previous translation, by Ernest Untermann (available in various editions from archive.org) is O.K., but I can see why Ollman used the new translation.

    Click to access positiveoutcomeo00diet.pdf

    “Is not everything a part, is not every part a thing?
    Is the color of a leaf less of a thing than that leaf itself? Perhaps some would call the color simply an attribute and the leaf its substance, because there might be a leaf without color, but no color without a leaf…. Color is only the sum of reactions of leaf, light, and eye, and so is all the rest of the matter of a leaf an aggregate of interactions. In the same way in which our reason deprives a leaf of its color attributes and sets it apart as a “thing itself,” may we continue to deprive that leaf of all its other attributes, and in so doing we finally take away everything that makes the leaf. Color is in its nature no less a substance than the leaf itself, and the leaf is no less an attribute than its color. As the color is an attribute of a leaf, so a leaf is an attribute of a tree, a tree an attribute of the earth, the earth an attribute of the universe. The universe is the substance, substance in general, and all other substances are but its attributes. And this world-substance reveals the fact that the nature of things, the “thing itself” as distinguished from its manifestations, is only a concept of the mind.”
    pp.84-85
    It doesn’t convey dialectics as well as the Craik translation….it isn’t as evocative.
    .

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    • That pp84-85 appears identical to same page range from LOC pdf of 1906 Untermann trans. The only difference I can see from the Craik translation is in the last sentence where Untermann ends with “is only a concept of the mind” and Ollman’s quote of Craik translation adds “or mental thing”.

      That may or may not be a more accurate translation of what Dietzgen (and Hegel) said in German about Kant’s “thing in itself” being itself a “thought thing”.

      But if anything just stressing that it is a “concept of the mind” is not as easily misinterpreted as the Machist/Kantian/Subjective idealist philosophy that all we can know about “things” means the world is not objectively existing independently of subjects but is merely peoples “complexes of sensations”.

      Can you spell out what makes Craik excerpt convey dialectics better and be more evocative.

      PS 1. This is an example of the sort of interaction that could occur at any time after loading two versions into github for comparison, with annotations added by anyone later becoming interested and used later still by anyone using the material to produce a modern account.

      PS 2. If you do spell out comparison you might want to try out one of the technical tricks that I hope Andrey could setup for easy use and could figure out how and why to do so by first helping you to do it without that having been setup to make it easier (as it is on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia for comparing two edited versions of the same page).

      Diff is the standard tool to compare two versions:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff

      Semantic line breaks are the recommended technique for editing documents to show such comparisons.

      https://sembr.org/

      If you cut and paste copies of the two Dietzgen versions to separate files then make the line breaks for each correspond to short sentences or phrases ending at punctuation etc then each phrase translated in one will have a corresponding line for expressing the same content in the other translation and diff will highlight the differences in the contents expressed because it compares line by line.

      Then you could produce a third file with added comments to the diff output drawing attention to why one version is better.

      Not worth doing now, but once it is setup (with help from Andrey) it will make all such discussions about advantages of one version over another easier and quicker, without the learning curve required for doing it the first time before it has been setup.

      There are 30 million wikipedia editors. Many do this routinely in arguments are which edits to retain or roll back or modify and how in the “Talk” pages attached to every page on Wikipedia, using the “Diffs” between versions provided by the “History” tab. Take a look at those tabs on some Wikipedia pages.

      PS 3. I did not do it so may easily have missed some obvious aspect of the two versions when just trying to compare them in the comments here.

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    • PS Thanks for links to wikisource page. Odd that it is attached to Communist Manifesto. Looks like somebody is working through publications from Charles H Kerr & Company (the main publisher of marxist works around early twentieth century) and extracting the publisher’s info for each work.

      That might be necessary preliminary to proceeding with the rest in order to confirm that is not prohibited by copyright.

      I suggest you and Andrey should both check out Wikisource thoroughly.

      When you get around to fixing OCR typos of Ira Gollobin after reading it you might be able to start there. Even if ends up having to stop there, you can retaining the work already done for completion elsewhere (eg on both your and Andrei’s PCs as backups of public github repos that might also get stopped).

      They may also have advice on how to get a higher quality OCR from existing scan of Ira and how to do new scan for both Wikisource and archive.org. That could make preliminary OCR correction much less necessary or eliminate it.

      Both will have detailed tutorials and forums for new editors to learn from others. So will marxists.org.

      Likewise for translation work.

      We should definately start from and remain participants in all 3 of those existing instances of the communist mode of production.

      Separate git backups of github repo mainly for coordinating work on shared database of excerpts etc and other future stuff and stuff that temporarily has to only be preserved at Hathi, Library Genesis or Sci-Hub and peer to peer distribution.

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  29. Arthur,
    I often try compare two or three translations of things I’m reading. I generally find one works for me more than another. It might be as simple as the use of a slightly different word or word order. In this case what stuck me most was the Craik’s use of italics (which unfortunately doesn’t come out here but you can see in the Ollman note.
    Also, what is important is context – I read the note while reading Ollman’s chapter 3 on internal relations and chapter 4 on putting dialectics to work, specifically in the writing of “Capital”.
    When I read the quote from Dietzgen’s I thought “That’s it!” – that describes what was Marx was doing in “Capital” perfectly….That’s how he thought.

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  30. A excellent example of Marx’s approach can be found is an appendix to his “Contribution to the critique of political economy”, which was a rough draft found in his papers after his death

    Click to access Marx%20Karl.%20A%20Contribution%20to%20the%20Critique%20of%20Political%20Economy.pdf

    see pp. 188-221
    esp. p. 204-205: “The conclusion which follows from this is, not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they are links of a single whole, different aspects of one unit. Production is the decisive phase, both with regard to the contradictory aspects of production and with regard to the other phases. The process always starts afresh with production. That exchange and consumption cannot be the decisive elements, is obvious; and the same applies to distribution in the sense of distribution of products. Distribution of the factors of production, on the other hand, is itself a phase of production. A distinct mode of production thus determines the specific mode of consumption, distribution, exchange and the specific relations of these different phases to one another. Production in the narrow sense, however, is in its turn also determined by the other aspects. For example, if the market, or the sphere of exchange, expands, then the volume of production grows and tends to become more differentiated. Production also changes in consequence of changes in distribution, e.g., concentration of capital, different distribution of the population in town and countryside, and the like. Production is, finally, determined by the demands of consumption. There is an interaction between the various aspects. Such interaction takes place in any organic entity”

    This is quoted by J. W. Freiberg in his article “The Dialectic in China: Maoist and Daoist”

    Click to access 1620471161487-0.pdf

    Freiberg shows that Mao’s significant contribution to dialectics can only be fully appreciated if you take into account his writings on military strategy and tactics (i.e. how his dialectical theories were put into practice), as well as his philosophical writings

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    • Yes. I strongly recommend reading the whole of “Contribution to the Critique” before starting Capital.

      1904 Translation by Stone is better for “Contribution…” . I mentioned in this thread at comment 6866 how Moscow version turned more vivid “hatched in the womb” into “matured in the framework”

      “https://c21stleft.com/2023/06/24/if-you-thought-the-pseudoleft-has-a-legacy-from-the-sixties-you-werent-there/#comment-6866”

      The appendix is the Introduction to Grundrisse which also helps understand Capital. Introduction by Maurice Dobb only spreads confusion. Needs a critique but until available simpler to just ignore it. Martin Nicolaus (Penguin) translation of Grundrisse may be better for that Introduction in the appendix.

      That particular paragraph you quote is taken up in detail in Vol 2 and is essential for understanding implications of Maksakovsky’s “The Capitalist Cycle” so I hope your interest in that results in participation in work on Maksakovsky.

      In fact I just checked and the Martin Nicolaus translation of excerpts of your quote from pp204-205 appears at p46, pdf 98 of 202 in 29MB file from Library Genesis with footnote 51 explaining translator’s preference for Nicolaus translation!!

      Thanks for link to Freiberg. I have just read up to end of p4, including his use of your quote from p204-205. Will listen to the rest tomorrow.

      I haven’t read Freiberg on appreciating Mao’s dialectics via military writings yet but I certainly agree. “On protracted war” was commended for study in sixties “collective defence” organizations. As mentioned in comment 6859 I downloaded both Clausewitz and Ai Siqi following reference to them in Torkil Lauesen’s “The Principal Contradiction” suggested by you.

      “https://c21stleft.com/2023/06/24/if-you-thought-the-pseudoleft-has-a-legacy-from-the-sixties-you-werent-there/#comment-6859”

      I did not mention it then except to thank Torkil for prompting the downloads, but I was struck by this excerpt on p46 of Torkil:

      —
      In the early nineteenth century, a Prussian army general, Carl von Clausewitz, studied war meticulously . In his classic account On War (written from 1816 to 1830, and published posthumously in 1832), Clausewitz provides the first scientific analysis of war. If Marx used industrial capitalism in England as the empirical foundation for his analysis of capitalism, Clausewitz used the Napoleonic Wars for his military studies. In a letter to Marx dated January 1, 1858, Engels wrote:

      I am reading, inter alia, Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege. An odd way of philosophising, but per se very good. On the question as to whether one should speak of the art or the science of war, he says that, more than anything else, war resembles commerce. Combat is to war what cash payment is to commerce; however seldom it need happen in reality, everything is directed towards it and ultimately it is bound to occur and proves decisive.45

      Engels made a point of noting Clausewitz’s analogy between war and trade, and the interpre tation of war as a test of strength, a violent competition between nations’ material and ideological capacities. However, neither Engels nor Marx ever elaborated on this in their books. Clausewitz wrote On War half a century before Marx wrote Capital. Clausewitz was familiar with Hegel’s dialectics and Adam Smith’s political economy. In the preface to his book, Clausewitz describes the method he employed as an interplay between theory and practice: “They are the outcome of wide-ranging study: I have thoroughly checked them against real life and I have constantly kept in mind the lessons derived from my experience and from association with distinguished soldiers.”46 He added: “Analysis and observation, theory and experience must never disdain or exclude each other; on the contrary, they support each other.”47

      45 Frederick Engels [1858], “Letter to Marx in London, July 1, 1858.” In: Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 40, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975): 241.
      —

      Curiously the July 14 Letter in same volume 40 pp325-327 is central to transition to commodity “cell form” with study of contemporaneous developments in physiology. Even more curiously I got there as a result of above typo in reference to p241 which should have been “Letter to Marx in London, January 1, 1858” pp241-242.

      The point was about comparison of “realization” of military purposes by actual combat with “realization” of exchange value by cash payment. Torkil missed it.

      What originally struck me in Torkil excerpt was Engels “An odd way of philosophising, but per se very good.”

      I have been studying a lot of military strategy in connection with Ukraine war and was interested in the dialectics of modern concepts such as “power to the edge”. Also justifying some of my excessive obsession with the technicalities of military force generation and procurement relation to combat capabilities in architectural frameworks.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Architecture_Framework

      That stuff is very much about dialectical spiral development of models of both capitalist and revolutionary “enterprises”.

      Interestingly even Australian Defence research has more interest in dialectics than what passes for “the left”

      Click to access 016.pdf

      (sigh) Correct reference to MECW40 is “Letter to Marx in London, January 7, 1858” pp241-242

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    • PS I just discovered that Maksakovsky is now available as pdf from publisher Brill as well as in scanned copy of hardcopy from Library Genesis. Says it was published April 2004 but I looked for it well after that and could not find it. Price EUR 93

      https://brill.com/display/title/8732

      The free excerpts include the pages with footnote 51 on p46

      https://brill.com/display/book/9789047413257/BP000004.xml

      Despite being an academic publisher they do not appear to have provided the bibliography properly marked up for indexing. But only 5 items on p147 are missing from the formatted text available in snippet for pp145-146.

      https://brill.com/display/book/9789047413257/BP000009.xml

      But it has now been picked up by Google Scholar

      https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?cluster=14545285684194582758&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5

      Scholar also claims a reference to it in:

      https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=dc25b7a74d9afff9ade217736f5e7433b07a5454

      But I will have to follow up later.

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    • Correction: The full passage from Nicholaus Grundrisse pp99-100 corresponding to Maksakovsky fn 51 on p46 is:

      The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution,
      exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form
      the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production
      predominates not only over itself, in the antithetical definition
      of production, but over the other moments as well. The process
      always returns to production to begin anew. That exchange and
      consumption cannot be predominant is self-evident. Likewise,
      distribution as distribution of products ; while as distribution of
      the agents of production it is itself a moment of production. A
      definite production thus determines a definite consumption,
      distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between
      these different moments. Admittedly, however, in its one-sided
      form, production is itself determined by the other moments. For
      example if the market, i.e. the sphere of exchange, expands, then
      production grows in quantity and the divisions between its
      different branches become deeper. A change in distribution
      changes production, e.g. concentration of capital, different distri­
      bution of the population between town and country, etc. Finally,
      the needs of consumption determine production. Mutual inter­
      action takes place between the different moments. This the case
      with every organic whole.

      Freiburg is excellent. Thanks!

      I reckon you have already found the core authors needed to do a bibliography on Mao’s dialectics:

      Freiberg, Gollobin, Holubnychy, Chenshan Tian, Knight, Ai Siqi/Ai Ssu-ch’i plus the various collections of published and unpublished philosophy works.

      Anything of interest will likely either be cited from them or will cite them so can be found by Google Scholar as citations index.

      I’ll look forward to reading anything you recommend from that. Will also be useful to include such a bibliography with Ai Siqi translation in a trade book “companion” to collections of excerpts from Leningrad textbook, Gollobin, encyclopaedic glossary etc.

      But I will have to focus on Maksakovsky work.

      BTW the Grundrisse quote from Freiberg and his chart 3 also relate closely to his emphasis on military dialectics – not just Chinese but also Western that I mentioned finding interesting in relation to Maksakovsky.

      Specifically see figure 1 here:

      https://incose.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sys.21624

      When I squint at it carefully I see a pretty exact parallel with the point Clausewitz was making that Marx was also making.

      Just take it as as metabolism with “Nature” instead of combat with “Enemy” (which is after all part of “Nature”).

      “Consumption” is “degradation”, “Production” is “maintain”.

      Squint harder to see stocks and two sectors.

      Figures 2 to 5 require more background. Especially figure 5 needs familiarity with UML notation.

      But they are about the organizational units involved in production, and the transformation of both producers and their relations involved in developing the capabilities to perform tasks.

      War is indeed politics and therefore also economics. Force generation and procurement is about technological change, development of the productive forces and changes in social relations of production. Especially so for revolution.

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  31. I’ve got a lot of reading to do.

    Thanks for recommending the Nicholaus translation – It’s also available at:

    Click to access grundrisse.pdf

    That specific quotation is on p. 32-33

    One of things that leapt out at me in Freiberg’s article was his reference to Scott Boorman’s “The Protracted Game: a Wei-ch’i interpretation of Maoist revolutionary strategy”. A brief summary I found in a blog, says:
    “In 1969, Scott Boorman published a book called The Protracted Game: A Wei-chʻi Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy. In it, he argued that there was a fruitful and rigorous parallel to be drawn between the game of Go (or Wei-chʻi, its Chinese name) and the military strategies pursued by Mao Tse Tung and others, particularly in their execution of long-run campaigns of guerrilla warfare that often involved extended, complex frontiers of conflict (rather than focused battlefronts) and rapid shifts of apparent territorial control (as opposed to decisive victories brought about by single strategic errors). The game of Go had long been played and analyzed in China, Japan, and Korea, and was explicitly invoked by Mao himself on more than one occasion in his discussion of his strategy. A theme of the book is the value of thinking in terms of Go rather than Chess (or Poker) as a metaphor for ongoing conflict on a large and open field:
    [There are] three structural characteristics basic to the motifs of the game’s higher strategy: wei-ch’i is a protracted game; it is a “war of jigsaw pattern”; and it is a game in which victory and defeat are relative phenomena. … Although one player may be defeated tactically in one part of the board, he may recover his position by strategic out-manuevering of his opponent. In the best-known Western board games of strategy, chess and checkers, on the other hand, a single mistake in tactics is—given optimal play on the part of the opponent—fatal to the blunderer. … [T]he board is blank, or nearly so, at the beginning of the game … Consequently there is no restriction on the ability of either player … to play his stones deep in hostile spheres of influence or behind any emerging “front line”. Second, the encircling mode of capture creates complex patterns of encirclement and counterencirclement and induces the development of mutually discontinuous groups … Any conscious or unconscious assumption of zones of safety will result in severe disorientation ….
    The book goes on to specify the analogy in more detail and apply it to a series of Mao’s guerrilla campaigns in the 1940s. It closes with some cautions about the limits of formalizing an approach to interpreting strategy in this way, but also an argument for its advantages, in particular “the most important single feature of the formalist approach: a logical and consistent point of view from which to analyze one facet” of strategic decision making in insurgency.
    The Protracted Game is one of those books that it is hard not to admire even as one struggles to know quite what to make of it. Boorman wrote it when he was nineteen years old.1 One of the intuitions you can see driving it is the effort to keep the fluidity of real conflict squarely in view while still getting some sort of analytical purchase on what is happening. While the book’s reach may exceed its grasp, I could not help but be reminded of it this morning as I listened to a discussion emphasizing the huge gulf between Go and anything of serious interest or concern in the real world of politics and conflict. Scott Boorman tried to find a way across that gulf in 1969 as a Harvard sophomore. He did not quite succeed, but perhaps we are a little closer today.

    His earliest publications, from several years before, are reviews of works on Chinese military history co-authored with his father. Boorman went on to publish several seminal papers in social network analysis as a student of Harrison White’s, as well as doing pioneering work on optimal searching in networks, the evolution of cooperation and other topics. His early work really is quite astonishing. He even shows up in a footnote early on in A Theory of Justice, where Rawls thanks him for clarifying an issue about how the difference principle is evaluated by individuals in the original position. ↩︎

    https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2016/03/10/the-protracted-game/

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    • Thanks! I have added a Scott Boorman folder to Zotero (under Philosophy!). Starts with your blog link plus the book (.djv):

      https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=33E4942A67D6FE91A1838EF3773E0851

      I’m especially interested in this:

      “Boorman went on to publish several seminal papers in social network analysis as a student of Harrison White’s, as well as doing pioneering work on optimal searching in networks, the evolution of cooperation and other topics. His early work really is quite astonishing. He even shows up in a footnote early on in A Theory of Justice, where Rawls thanks him for clarifying an issue about how the difference principle is evaluated by individuals in the original position. ”

      Am very keen on linking classical material on dialectics of nature to modern science. Extensive literature on emergenct properties of networks in complex systems is major source of examples that scientific philosophy is the philosophy of modern science.

      Have reached Ch 6 of Gollobin and am very glad to see how gives much more up to date examples from other sciences than in Leningrad textbook (which was also updated in that respect from Marx and Engels). It is a major dividing line from “Western Marxism” which cuts itself off from modernity, let alone science, let alone Marxism following Lukacs cutting off Dialectics of Nature.

      I’ve only played a couple of games of Go. That operational level of protracted war strategy wasn’t relevant to defence groups against police tactics at demonstrations.Closest we came to that level was a feint on heavily defended US Consulate for July 4 1969 diverted to successful attack on South African Consulate further down the road.

      Game we used for understanding united front political strategy later in seventies was “Diplomacy” and I still strongly recommend it:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)

      Different aspect of dialectics, probably not as dialectical and illustrative of fluidity etc as Go but has a strong emphasis on sudden transformations into opposites.

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  32. I’ve just finished reading Michael Hyde’s “All Along the Watchtower” and his YA novel “Hey Joe”. I wish I’d read them before. Both are excellent accounts of the anti-war movement and the real Left in Melbourne in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Also, both had me crying laughing at some of the things the revolutionaries got up to. I’d recommend them to any kid growing up today and wanting to do something about the world we’re living in .

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  33. Reading an old issue (#5) of The Rebel I found another good example of Marx’s dialectical thinking (from The Holy Family chpt 4.)

    “Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property. The question is exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole.
    Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property.
    The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat. It is the negative side of the antithesis, its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property.
    The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature.
    Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.
    Indeed private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of private property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanization which is conscious of its dehumanization, and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounces on itself by producing wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property.”

    “Diplomacy” sounds fascinating; I’ll check it out.

    I became interested in Go after seeing a movie called “The Go Masters” on SBS years ago (strangely, a joint Chinese/Japanese production). But when I was told by a Chinese friend that Go was much more complicated than chess, and takes a lifetime to learn, I decided it wasn’t for me.

    I haven’t played many board games. One I played a few times in the late 70’s was called “Class Struggle”, invented by Bertell Ollman. It’s a long time ago, but I don’t remember there being too much strategy involved. Reading the chance cards you picked up was the best bit.
    http://www.critical-theory.com/class-struggle-board-game-greatest-exist/

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