VG1917:

Not so, as I have demonstrated here many times.

You need to pay attention.

And Lenin admitted that he himself did not understand parts of Hegel's 'Logic', so that must mean he did not understand Das Kapital!

Now you would know this if you bothered to elevate yourself from that pit of self-inflicted ignorance you currently inhabit:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2009_01.htm


On this see Volume 38 of Lenin's Collective Works, pages 108, 117, 229:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...w/volume38.htm

I think that was one of the times where Lenin was wrong. Yeah, maybe you'll notice how Marx was inspired by Hegel's dialectics if you're more familiar with his system...but I don't think you *need* Hegel to seriously understand Capital or anything written by Marx or Engels, for that matter.

If people want to study Hegel, they ought to study Hegel. However, I have little interest in reading anything more by Hegel than the scarce amount that I have already read.

I don't think it's intellectual philistinism to not want to intensively study Hegel, because you can get a perfectly strong understanding of Hegel's thinking without directly reading very much of his original works.

And yet you have not given a valid reason to study Hegel.

You have given baseless assertions. That is all I suspect you will give, aside from appeals to authority:

Assume for contradiction this is true.

Lenin himself admitted he did not understand the whole of Hegel's Logic.

Therefore Lenin didn't understand all of Marx's Capital, which means he would be in no position to assert this proposition. It follows that this is a false proposition.

Oh well, appealing to authority seemed like a good idea didn't it? Perhaps a logical argument would work better next time...

SP, what exactly is the influence of Hegel on Marx's Kapital (over and above his merely 'coquetting' with a few examples of the former's jargon)?

Marx is far more Aristotelian than he is anything else, and the influence on him of Hegel by the time he wrote his masterpiece amounts merely to 'coquetting'.

Big deal...

Reflect on your own argument for a moment. I suspect in your more measured moments you know yourself that this chop logic is a silly argument that you have posted simply for the sake of argument. Certainly the quality of many of your other posts would suggest that.

Your comment, Comrade Red, leads me to a more general observation which isnt really directed at you or at least you alone.

The tones of vitriol and oneupmanship that come from the anti-Hegel camp on this forum have a parrallel only in the discussions on Stalin - where at least they are understandable.

Does anyone here seriously think that Lukacs or Duanyeskaya or Lenin studied Hegel to be pretentious.... I can really see Lenin sitting there during WW1 thinking 'I want people to think Im clever, now let me see who can I read so people will admire how smart I am.....' I think not - and the people in the anti-Hegel camp dont think so either. So STOP SAYING THIS CRAP.

Its one thing to think someone else is wrong - fine. Its a very different thing to consider one's own view as so self-evident as to conclude that you might as well substitute chastisement for argument. Equally (and this I think is the case in Comrade Red's argument above) throwing in school yard type rhetorical arguments is just a waste of space.

Philosophy is difficult at the best of time (and often in my view not worth the effort) But if people are going to post in the philosophy forum the only way to do it is in a deliberate and calm fashion. The style is bad enough in Rosa's case - because it hides and distorts some quite interesting arguments, but if it spreads to the whole anti-hegel side, it really makes the whole process pointless. Sky attempts a reasoned argument above....and got no reasoned responses. What is the good of that ?

If you have an emotional reaction to Hegel of finding him annoying, suppress it ! It doesn't help. OK let it burst out now and then when you have a bad day.

People on all sides should, in my opinion, should try to do the hard thing - present arguments with clarity, precision and brevity, without links to outside websites and with the minimum of derision and hectoring.

gil:



No, they were all petty-bourgeois theorists, educated in the thought-forms of the ruling class, and so felt it quite 'normal' to accept such ruling-class theories as valid. Even though they criticised these theories -- they were enmeshed in the same tradition, and accepted the same world-view: that there was a rational order to reality, below the surface, and accessible to thought alone (and thus way beyond the material gaze of the working class).

And so are you, as Marx said you would be:

Quote:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

So, no, neither Red, nor myself will stop saying such things; we will continue to expose your intellectual class treachery.

Dont worry Rosa, I wasn't even dreaming that you could change your style of writing - as good as that would be both for the board and the presentation of your own ideas. At this stage your style is almost endearing - the problem is if it spreads to others.

But maybe even you might just wonder about your approach when you draw the conclusion, as you just have, that Lenin was a petit bourgeois traitor to the working class.

The most striking thing about Hegel is that he is stunningly dull. Even Plato's philosopher-king fascism is more exciting than Hegel and his synthesis and spirits.

-Alex

Gil:

Yes, we can't have anyone else here showing such awfull disrespect for the work of ruling-class hacks, to which theories you have sold your radical soul.

And I am sorry I can't write page after page of incomprehensible guff of the sort you find in Hegel, and which you prefer, but as a working class woman, I prefer the language of my class.

If that makes me an enemy of yours, I will take that as a compliment.

Now, you had to add the word 'traitor' here didn't you, to make this example of low grade abuse and distortion work. Nothing I have said implies I think Lenin was a traitor -- just mistaken, and for good materialist reasons (his class origin).

Well, you tell me: what class did Lenin come from?

And, didn't Marx tell us that social being determines consciousness?

Now, if such great revolutionaries can fall for the sort of ruling-class guff you find in Hegel, an intellectual ninnow like you stands no chance.

Unless, of course, I can help rescue you.

But, in your case, I think I'd rather see you continuing to wallow in the class-compromised mire of your choice...

To be honest, I don't think "he reading" hegel has anything to do with his class. I am sure it had more to do with the fact that while reading Marx he stumbled with Hegel.

I was discussing dialectics with somoene and he said something pretty interesting. That probably Marx without Hegel would probably have ended up like a liberal like all the other utopian socialists, including Proudhon.

Those "socialists" didnt visualize society as being changed by class struggle, and the concept of class struggle itself those have a "dialectical" tinge to it.

I dont think you have to use dialectical materialism to understand marxism. Science, materialism, and logic owes some to Aristotle and Aristotle himself had a lot of things wrong. You dont have to know Aristotle to be a good scientist, logician or materialist, and we can probably say the same about Hegel and its bastard son dialectical materialism, that later developed to the "materialist conception of history".

However I do acknowledge that Marxism does owe things to dialectics, but it doesnt needs dialectics itself.

Seriously, when Maoists are so obsessed with dialectical materialisn, I think it is a good idea to stay a bit far from it.

Marmot:


Hegel's work would not have been written had Hegel not been of a certain class; and Marx would not have read it had he been born a peasant. The same goes for Engels (who, in fact was raised in the same religion as Hegel -- more on this below), Plekhanov (the real culprit here, who did more to impose Hegel on Marxism than anyone else) and Lenin (who caught a serious dose of Hegelism from Plekhanov).

Now, Hegel was brought up in Swabia in the pietist branch of the Lutheran religion. So was Engels (although he was not a Swabian). Pietism was heavily influenced by Jakob Boehme, the leading Hermeticist in modern history. Swabia is traditionally also the heart of German mysticism.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism


http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jakob_B%C3%B6hme&oldid=188171205


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietism

http://www.exlibris.org/nonconform/engdis/behmenists.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabia#Famous_Swabians

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/magee.htm

http://books.google.com/books?id=NFI...E8toD8AfaOsgRM


Now, anyone without the right class origins would not have been steeped in such ruling-class mysticism/ideology.

How can anyone possibly know this?

Quote:

Science, materialism, and logic owes some to Aristotle and Aristotle himself had a lot of things wrong. You dont have to know Aristotle to be a good scientist, logician or materialist, and we can probably say the same about Hegel and its bastard son dialectical materialism, that later developed to the "materialist conception of history".

In fact, Marx derived his historical materialism from the Scottish school of Historical Materialists (and so did Hegel -- he simply mystified their ideas), his socialism from the French Socialists, and his economics fro Smith (one of the Scottish Historical Materialists) and Ricardo. The rest he obtained from the struggles of German workers, and others.


Meek, R. (1967a), Economics And Ideology And Other Essays (Chapman & Hall).

--------, (1967b), 'The Scottish Contribution To Marxist Sociology', In Meek (1967a), pp.34-50.


Moreover, Aristotle was a model of clarity compared with Hegel, and Marx's Das Kapital is far more Aristotelian than it is Hegelian.


On Aristotle and Marx:

McCarthy, G. (1992) (ed.), Marx And Aristotle (Rowman & Littlefield).


Meikle, S. (1985), Essentialism In The Thought of Karl Marx (Open Court).

http://www-econ.stanford.edu/academics/Honors_Theses/Theses_2003/Chau.pdf


So, it is entirely possible that Marx would have developed more or less the same had Hegel died in infancy, and had Marx never read a page of German Idealist philosophy. But, once more, it is impossible to say.


The class struggle owes nothing the dialectics, and Marx's idea of the struggle of classes did not come from Hegel -- but from workers in struggle themselves. Proof here:

Draper, H. (1977), Karl Marx's Theory Of Revolution, Volume One: State And Bureaucracy (Monthly Review Press); Chapters Six and Seven.

Yes, it owes it nothing but confusion.