Re: Marx, materialism and idealism

James, your reply much appreciated.

> Sorry for the perhaps provocative, smart alec throwaway line, but it
> is an expression of resentment over ruthless state and (all)party
> enforcement of conformity about mind-boggling propositions, which
> derived from a Kautskyan and Plekhanovite mechanistic bourgeois
> mindset which ejected the writings of Marx's formative years out of
> the canon as juvenilia.  That's why I called it Diamat and not
> dialectical materialism.

Well, yes, your comment understood.

But my real concern is, why should we be concerned with this
"mechanistic bourgeois mindset"?

Whether we happen to be bourgeois reformers or Marxist
revolutionaries, our real concern is action today and the intellectual
environment that informs our action. Of course, I can read Alcuin,
Bonaventura or Adam Smith with pleasure and benefit, but that is a
personal pleasure and a very minor achievement in relation to class
struggle today.

I don't want to appear anti-intellectual, but it seems to me that the
old (pre-WWII?) intellectual framework (whether we speak of the
bourgeoisie or working class) seems today to be pretty decrepit, and
at the same time there are new exciting intellectual currents that are
sorely in need of our development.

We often assume that one way to advance understanding is to launch a
critique of received opinion, but this is not really what is involved