No such thing as "historical materialism." No such thing as "dialectical materialism." No such thing as a continuous historical narrative with Marx. Is there some sort of continuity between, say, the 1844 Manuscripts and Capital? Sure. I'm not an Althusserian, and don't believe in an epistemological break. Every discourse contains elements of previous discourses that it is distancing itself from. So it is with the mature critique of political economy.
Nonetheless, there's no such thing as Marxism. I know 150 years of Social Democracy and Leninism have constructed an ideology that says otherwise, but there's no imperative to treat the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach and the first volume of Capital as two elements of a coherent worldview.
Dialectic? Sects like yours use the term to browbeat unsteady members who aren't seeing things "dialectically," which is just a fancy synonym for "seeing the whole picture" or "seeing how things are connected."
You know the only thing dialectical about Marx? The method of depiction in Capital. The logical development of a category out of the contradictions of the previous category. Marx isn't asserting that reality is dialectical. Dialectical is just the method of portrayal. It's a charming 19th Century conceit by a Hegel student. It's not even essential to understanding Capital (I know, I know, Lenin says otherwise).
We need to discard "historical materialism" (what *is* historical materialism, anyway?). We need to discard "dialectical materialism." Class struggle? It exists, but Marx didn't discover it, and it's a tautology. The motor of history? Please.
Critique of political economy. Fetishism. The commodity. Value. This is Marx's real contribution to our understanding of society. Integrated with the insights of Weber, Foucault, Adorno & Horkheimer, and we have a compelling account of how a specific form of rationality concerned with quantity and measure emerged out of feudal Europe to shape the world. There's enough still left to explore there without the dubious baggage of "Marxism."
A friend and mentor told me that in the early Soviet Union, they actually took the first chapter of Capital and put it at the end of the book in order to aid understanding! Imagine, the foundation chapter, the one that is essential for understanding all the categories that follow, that one that aids understanding, and they put it at the end!
That's a greater crime of Bolshevism than any show trial. :-)
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