[lbo-talk] Dewey on intelligence, co-operation, and class

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Fri Oct 19 07:06:46 PDT 2007


Mike Ballard wrote:


> The concept of class can and usually does remain an
> abstraction to most intellectuals who identify with ruling classes
> throughout
> history, including those of the present bourgeois social order.

Class, for Marx, is an internal relation, an internal relation that's positively developmental of the "human mind." So it's a rejection of the idea of things as "fixed entities," i.e. as externally related "substances," the idea underpinning, as Whitehead shows, "rigid logic." (To the extent required by the reasoning, axiomatic deductive reasoning implicitly assumes that the entities being reasoned about maintain their identities as their relations change.) If we mean by the "conversion of abstractions into entities," as I assume Dewey does, the ignoring of the fact of internal relations, the attribution of this error to Marx's idea of class and class struggle misunderstands the idea.

Ted



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