war and the state

[Gordon Fitch]

> "To _blame_ Lenin and Trotsky would be to moralize; but I 
> think Lenin's and Trotsky's morals would be of little 
> practical concern to anyone. However, what I did was 
> examine some of their ideas, ask whether the ideas seemed to 
> result in behavior, and if so, what the behavior led to in 
> history -- in the material and social conditions of the 
> people who were affected by them." 

Dddddd0814 at aol.com:
> Yet, if one advances the supreme premise of idealism-- that "behavior" leads 
> to history-- then, the historical figures in question *are* to blame.

Behavior _is_ history, in the sense of being the raw material
of which it is constituted (if we're talking about the things
people actually do, anyway).  There's nothing idealistic about
that.  You may want to argue that the notion that ideas result
in behavior is idealistic, but that requires a kind of duality
I don't subscribe to and in fact find difficult to follow,
the Cartesian mind-body stuff.  Too idealistic for me.


> An idealist premise of history-- rather than materialist one-- necessitates 
> all "ideas" as subjective products of individuals, independent from the 
> objective forces that motivate them. (i.e. the bourgeois claptrap about the 
> "power of ideas.") Thus in this context "ideas" are no different from 
> "morals", the "worst" of which both are abstractly imposed from above and 
> without by eccentric egotists.

I didn't say anything about the production of Lenin's and
Trotsky's ideas, and I don't see what the particulars of
their production has to do with anything.  It seems as
irrelevant as their morals.  As for the rest, anyone who
has ever tried to fix a broken automobile engine knows that
some ideas are more materially useful than others.

-- Gordon