Probably that is too high. Maybe it's 999 out of 1000, assuming that there are that many Marxsits philosophers left. There'a Harry van der Linden and who else?
>>^^^^^^^^
>
>CB: This is just another angle to make your anti-dialectical materialist
>argument,
Now you are insulting me. I never EVER argue that a doctrine is false because it unpopular. The dimat is (at best) false because it is a bunch od meaningless unhelpful obscurantist doubletalk. Of course lots of stuff that fits that bill has been very popular, such as New Age spirituality, postmodern "theory," and religious fundamentalsims of various sorts. So the popelarity of a doctrine is not at all related to its truth value, and you know that I have always thought that.
>Furthermore, people who are religious-nationalist existentialists don't
>exactly strike me as the one's whose judgments I would respect that
>dialectical materialism is bad.
Nor me either, I was just pointing out that not all, indeed nost most, Soviet philosophers were Marxists, and most of them bailed out for something else as soon as they could do so without being fired or going to jail. That doesn'r mean theyw ere right to do so, of course, but given what they thought Marxsim was (the diamat) I find theira ttitude understandable.
>
>(Gorbachev's wife was a philosphy teacher too)
>
Actually Raisa Gorbacheva is or was a sociologist, which comes under the philosophy faculty of a Russian university.
>CB; Actually, in the chapter I quote, Lenin explains how Mach started out a
>Kantian and then became more a Berkeleyian. What makes Lenin good is the
>content of his discussion.
I'd have to look at it again. As I said, Lenin was an amateur, but a talented one.
>
>What's that appeal to "authority" you make ? Dogmatism ?
No, knowing something about a subject matter. Harry van der Linden is a real authority on neo-Kantianism. He's studied it enough,a nd written about it intelligently, so that whatever he says on the subject is worth taking seriously.
>
>CB: Lenin doesn't criticize [Mach's0 politics. It is his break with
>philosophical materialism in the guise of still being a materialist that
>Lenin objects too.
On political grounds! He says that it lead to "fideism" (that is, religious faith), which he considers to be retrograde; of course an Enlightenment liberal like Mach was almsot certainly an atheist or agnostic, and also that it leads to various reactionary consequences, which in Mach's case happens not to be true. Also Lenin has more serious objections to thetruthof Mach's views or to Mach's arguments, and these deserve critical attention.
>
>One of the Machists that Lenin criticizes in the book, the Bolshevik
>Lunarcharsky, became Minister of Education, when the Bolsheviks came to
>power. That's how off is your dogmatic, anti-communist , implication that
>Lenin used state power to enforce his philosophical views.
Charles, you're not gonna get anywhereaccusing me of red-baiting. In fact, Lenin did use state power to enforce his views, though (unlikeStalin) not his philosophical ones. It was Lenin who criminalized political dissent in the FSU, established rule of one party,a nd the like. He was quite proud of these things, so don't try to pretend otherwise. As a liberal democart, you cannot expect me to approve. At the same time I have never said that Lenin was merely a paranoid murderous tyrant, a dictator and butcher, like Stalin, and I do not think that he was.
Am I anticommunist? I sure as hell am antiStalinist. I hope I have made that clear. If "anticommunist" means (as it does in post WWII AMerica, a defender of containment and the national security state, some form of McCarthyism at home, and imperial intervention abroad (Vietnam, etc.), then you know it is slander to suggest that's what I am. If it means that I would oppose the establishhment of a Boslhevik regime in America, yeah, I would, but what's the point; I'd also oppose the establishment of a sharia Islamic regime in America, which is probably more likely.
My rejection of diamat has nothing to do with my attitudes towards communism or socialism, and I remain a socialist and a historical materialist. The problem with diamat is just that it's bad philosophy. The fact that it was imposed by political fiat is not a problem with thediamat, except insofara s the diamat was thought to justify this imposition, as with the political system that imposed it.
jks
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