From: www.ghandchi.com/2055-MarxismEng.htm
Introduction
- Written in 1982 in the USA, first published in Iranian SCI Usenet in 1994.
- The author points out how the crimes of the Islamist regime of Iran had made the religious intellectuals doubt their beliefs and made them reformists, and the records of the socialist states from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Block, to China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia had the same effect on the leftist intellectuals.
- While the effects of the Iranian Revolution and the Islamist regime was direct for the Iranian intellectuals, the experience of the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and others were indirect.
- The author wonders whether the problems of Marxism, mainly statism, are inherent to Marxism or whether it was a problem of people not doing what Marx did, like how Aristotileans did not study the world like Aristotle did, and said that instead of doing what they did, they kept interpreting this and that letter of Karl Marx.
- He points out how instead of giving an objective analysis, both the Islamist and Leftists reformers spent their energies towards defending their founders - Marx and Muhammad from the catastrophe of the existing socialist and Muhammadian societies.
- So in this paper, the author is looking at Marxist and Muhammadian ideas from the outside, like how he respects Aristotle’s achievements more than Aristotleans did.
- Instead of following Marxism like a religion, the author respects Marx’s ideas and scrutinizes his shortcomings.
- The author hopes that Marxists read the paper and wonder whether the new world requires ideas beyond Marxism, or if it can be achieved by a Marxist reformation.
- The author also notes that the end of Marxism does not mean the works of Marx were fruitless, just as the end of Aristotileanism did not mean that the works of Aristotle were fruitless.
Index
From Google’s Gemini 2.0 LLM, I’ve divided the paper into 10 sections, although the paper only has 4 main sections aside from the introduction.
The sections (aside from the introduction) in the paper are:
- (1) Historical Background of Dynamic Monism
- (2) Marx and Marxist Monism
- (3) Marxist Utopia
- (4) Conclusion
The sections I divided the whole thing into using Gemini 2.0 are (including the introduction; with a ~20 word description for each):
- (1) Introduction: The author, reflecting post-Iranian Revolution, critiques Marxism’s monism, questioning its role in statist outcomes globally.
- (2) Dynamic Monism’s Roots: Marxist monism is termed “dynamic,” traced back to Heraclitus’ unity of opposites, contrasting with static monism.
- (3) Renaissance & Dynamic Monism: Scientific advancements during the Renaissance favored dynamic monism over static medieval thought.
- (4) Hegel’s Revival: Hegel significantly revived dynamic monism, influencing various philosophical spheres with his idealistic dialectics.
- (5) 19th Century Influences: Darwin’s evolution, 1848 revolutions, and capitalist crises further shaped the intellectual landscape and bolstered dynamic monism.
- (6) Marx’s Materialist Dialectics: Marx inverted Hegel, grounding dialectics in materialism, viewing philosophy as a tool for change.
- (7) Marxist Utopia Critique: The author criticizes the inherent statism in Marx’s vision of communism despite the “withering away” of the state.
- (8) Critique of Marxist Statism: Centralized authority, inherent in Marxist thought, is argued to be a source of inequality, undermining communist ideals.
- (9) Engels & Marxist Dogma: Engels sought to scientifically ground dialectical materialism, but later Marxism ossified into a rigid dogma.
- (10) Internal Marxist Critiques: While various Marxist schools emerged with critiques, the author doubts their ability to transcend fundamental Marxist limitations.
The Roots of Dynamic Monism
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Marxism has been one of the most influential monistic system in the modern times, and although some of its thinkers have been pluralistic “in their methodology in some fields of enquiry”, Marxism has always been monistic.
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The author views Marxism to have been more dynamic than the static monism of the Catholic Church in the Medieval Times, yet it derives its analysis of the world from a single principle, so he considers it to be a form of dynamic monism.
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To him, pluralism is a belief in a multiplicity of principles, pioneered by Empedocles in Ancient Greece.
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But the author’s view here is about Marxism and Monism, and he had discussed Pluralist view in Western Philosophy in another paper (linked in the article).
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He believes the first consistent formulation of dynamic monism in the history of philosophy to have been in the philosophy of Heraclitus in Ancient Greece.
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He wonders that the Zoroastrians could have been the precursors in religion, but in philosophy, he believes it was Heraclitus who first proposed it by the postulating a Dichotomous Unity as the foundation of his philosophy.
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Regarding Parmenides, he considers him to be the pioneer of static monism in Ancient Greece, as he considered the immutability and indivisibility of the “fundamental substance” as absolute.
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He says, on the other had, to Heraclitus, changes and contradictions occupy the position of the absolute.
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In his philosophy, dialectics was not just a philosophy, but was the actual state of the universe and society.
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Heraclitus considers fire as the “fundamental substance” which is ever-changing, but retains its unity in a state of flux.
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He considers the soul to be made of fire and water, and has a contradictory nature.
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The distinguishing feature of his philosophy is the unity of opposites.
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Two things: (1) the use of force for good, and (2) the belief in war - as the father of all things, comprise the main points of his politics and ethics, and justice is nothing but a strife.
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In sum, the whole development of nature and society is considered in Heraclitean monism as a spiral evolutionary process which unfolds by negations and contradictions.
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Heraclitean thought gained the attention of the intellectuals of Europe during the Renaissance Age.
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The end of the Middle Ages witness two movements controversial to the Catholic Church: Reformation and Renaissance.
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The Reformation was more pluralistic in its outlook relative to the Catholic Church (again, refer the paper on the Pluralist view in Western Philosophy linked in the article), while the Renaissance took a monistic worldview, although a dynamic monism.
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The new scientific discoveries were irreconcilable with the static outlook of the medieval times.
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(1) Copernican heliocentric theory was incompatible with the static notion of Aristotelian and Ptolemaic geocentric systems.
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(2) The discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, Laplace, etc. dealt further blows to the static outlooks of Medieval thought.
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(3) Motion in its mechanical form was increasingly acknowledged by science. The Heraclitean model of monism with its stress on the notions of motion, contradictions and evolutionary flux was more in accordance with the state of science than the Parmenidean model of static monism.
[My comments: So far I don’t see a real reason to favour dynamic monism over static monism from my Indian view of monism and idealism.]
I can read this, and the attached articles (Pluralism in Western Philosophy, and Marxism and Futurism, later)