P.S. See this hagiography of Healy. Not Dennis! Gerry. http://www.socialistfuture.org.uk/msf/publications.htm (_Gerry Healy: A Revolutionary Life_By Corinna Lotz and Paul Feldman. Foreword by Ken Livingstone MP. 380 pages.
This book is divided into two parts, which cover the whole of Gerry Healy's life. The first part is a personal account of the last four and a half years of his life, when the author was his political secretary and close collaborator. The second part outlines Healy's work in the revolutionary movement from his arrival in England in 1928 up until 1985. In the centre of the book is a fold-out section showing the projection of the path of cognition developed as a teaching aid by Gerry Healy.) http://www.wsws.org/public_html/prioriss/iwb2-12/96wrp.htm http://www.wsws.org/polemics/1996/feb1996/96wrp.shtml
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/theory/index.html http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/369/letters.html Weekly Worker 369 Thursday February 1 2001 Letters
Dead end The error of the strange contribution from the Movement for a Socialist Future (Letters, January 11) can be summarised in Althusser's statement: philosophy is a reflection on practice, not a fixed ontology, however 'dialectical'.
Bizarre as it may seem to mere mortals, Healy's acolytes appear to have found in Roy Bhaskar's critical realism some justification for their views. Those of us who have plodded through Bhaskar's works find much of interest, but rarely a justification of Healy-style DM ['dialectical materialism' - ed.]. Or perhaps, in A realist theory of science, Bhaskar's use of "Aristotelian material causes" (1978 edition, p148) and attempts to revive the medieval concept of "natural powers and tendencies" (ibid. pp229-239) have a certain symmetry with the Workers Revolutionary Party's gibberish. And don't even begin to talk about Dialectics, which would have been best left unpublished.
I don't want to do Roy down. He continues to produce stimulating material on the philosophy of science, and other topics. But there has been much unwarranted debate about critical realism and its relation to Marxism. Many of us who are versed in this matter (check out my reviews of Bhaskar's books in old issues of the Socialist Society publications) recognise it is a complete dead end: why do we need to burden ourselves with a causal metaphysics when what is required is the 'concrete analysis of the concrete situation'?
Andrew Coates Ipswich http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/371/letters.html Weekly Worker 371 Thursday February 15 2001 Letters
Healy acolyte Andrew Coates's letter is packed with assertions, but contains no evidence to back them up (Weekly Worker February 1). It is pitiful to see someone blame Marxist philosophy for his problems, so I shall make some points to try to put Andrew straight.
Firstly, Healy, Bhaskar, and even Aristotle, stand for a dynamic ontology, not a fixed ontology, as you allege. All of these philosophers were/are aware of the changing character of the world and the relative character of knowledge. I suspect that what you are objecting to is the dialectical and Marxist approach to the structured, stratified, tendency-laden character of the world. But without this ontological approach, how would Marxism avoid collapsing into postmodernism and pragmatism, which reject the underlying complexity of the world? You invoke Althusser as if he was a pragmatist, but in reality he (like the philosophers you have aimed your guns at) saw consideration of metaphysical questions as essential to bringing about progressive practice.
Secondly, though I am certainly not an uncritical "acolyte" of Healy, as you suggest, I think your view of Healy's work as "gibberish" is jaundiced, to say the least. Healy studied and lectured about Hegel, thus putting into practice Lenin's call for the formation of a "Society of Materialist Friends of the Hegelian dialectic". In addition to this, Healy's work on the nature of subjective idealism took forward the understanding of this phenomenon, even if ironically Healy was unable to avoid subjective idealism in his own political life. At least Healy was worried by the problem.
Those who have criticised Healy have done it in such a way as to dismiss the philosophical difficulties facing Marxism, so have ended up repeating the error of subjective idealism. Healy was a worker-Marxist who made strenuous efforts to educate himself in philosophy. What people like you are really objecting to is that workers should get so uppity as to train themselves as philosophers. You think it should be left to smug amateurs like yourself.
Thirdly, your complaint against Bhaskar for his use of Aristotelian material causes and for the concept of entities having natural powers and tendencies is philosophically illiterate. Aristotle's fourfold division of causation into formal/efficient/material/final has informed the discussions of philosophers ever since it was formulated. It is part of the armoury of all Marxist philosophers, even if it needs to be handled critically.
And if you want to check out Aristotle's credentials as a dialectical philosopher then you could do worse than consult The Cambridge companion to Aristotle (pp57-62). Similarly, the notion of powers and tendencies is not a mystical form of metaphysics by Bhaskar, but is about the natural potential for change in all things and for their potential to affect other things (e.g., this letter has the potential to spark off ideas in its readers). Your objection to such concepts needs to be argued, not simply stated as a 'fact', since what you are saying is not plausible to existing Marxist philosophy.
And then there is your comment that Dialectic would have been best left unpublished. This would be a philistine comment about any book. The fact that you have made it about one of the top Marxist philosophical works of the 20th century (in my view second only to Adorno's Negative Dialectics) shows the level of ignorance of the pseudo-Marxist left.
Fourthly, you ask, "Why do we need to burden ourselves with a causal metaphysics when what is required is the 'concrete analysis of the concrete situation'?" The boot is on the other foot, Andrew. It is your rejection of Marxist philosophy that leads you to believe that the study of ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, etc, is irrelevant to the working class, which somehow is expected to liberate itself without knowledge. Ah but, you will say, you are for the "concrete analysis of the concrete situation". This stems from Lenin, of course, but the difference is that he never intended the absolute split-off of the concrete from the abstract, unlike you.
Adorno was correct when he characterised your kind of arid analysis as subsumptive thinking (reality is entirely absorbed into the concept) and positivistic (scientific 'fact' is immune from philosophical questioning).
Finally, I would like to express the hope, Andrew, that you will cease to see Marxism as some kind of pure philosophy of science (gutted of its relationship to general philosophy and the metaphysical questions on which you pour scorn). The Marxist philosophers are on your side, but you have to read them with an open mind to see that.
Phil Walden Movement for a Socialist Future