[Marxism] Marx, materialism and idealism

[james daly]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Haines Brown" <brownh at hartford-hwp.com>
To: "James Daly" <james.irldaly at ntlworld.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 5:45 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Marx, materialism and idealism

Sorry for the delay in getting back to Haines's welcome reply...

*********
Haines wrote

James writes:

The inanities of Diamat about idealism and materialism seem to be the too 
easily resolved conflict over which came first -- rocks or brains.

*******

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.  I still stand by what I said 
about Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx, and I think that is a quasi-agitprop call 
to arms, whereas setting the task as getting the framework of the universe 
right seems, wrongly no doubt, an invitation to soporific quietism.

In fact I fully recognize the value of Haines's anti-positivist, realist and 
emergentist reconstruction of "dialectical materialism", and I acknowledge 
that I have not paid sufficient attention to that area of thought, which I 
came across in Roy Bhaskar, and which I think could be related to the 
Aristotelianism in Marx to which Scott Meikle has drawn our attention.

Comradely,
James Daly