A Dialogue on Historical Materialism
By Andrew Austin
Copyright 1996

				COLLECTION 3

On Sat, 11 May 1996, Workers World, Chicago bureau wrote:
 
  "Austin writes that the distinction between idealism and materialism
  "is arbitrary and artificial" whether one sees it as analytical or
  metaphysical.  Most Marxists will have the immediate reaction: "This is
  silly.  Surely it makes a difference whether you think there is a
  material world or not?  Surely materialism is a defining and
  central characteristic of Marxist thought? Surely the debate between
  dualists and monists has been central to the history of philosophy? I can
  understand an idealist, but how do I understand a person who says,
  Zen-like, 'Between idealism and materialism there is no real
  distinction'?""

I have clearly stated my position over the course of these debates. I am 
a historical materialist. This philosophy recognizes that the ideational 
superstructure rises upon a foundation of social relations and 
technological transformation found in the forces of production. These 
deep social structures make up the base (or infrastructure). The base, in 
turn changes, because of feedback from the ideational superstructure, 
internal dynamics in the mode of production (dialectical processes), or 
adaptation to the natural world. (Like Marx, I did not think I would have 
to state the materialist conception of history every time I went about 
the task of philosophical discussion. But I should know, because 
interpretations of Marx's work where this is not explicitedly stated are 
so often wrong, that I should repeat this position often.)

Marx's materialist project was two-fold, on the epistemological 
level. First, he wanted to demolish absolute idealism (which was cover 
for theology) by setting Hegel on his feet in the material world. That 
is, he wanted to ground the dialectic in the real world of social 
interaction, not in disembodied ideas or laws of historical development 
that stood transepochally. Second, he wanted to move away from Feuerbach's 
vulgar materialism that argued that consciousness was a by-product of the 
material constitution of our brains and that the laws of nature were 
reflected in our thoughts. The young Marx played with this idea, but the
mature Marx came to understand early on that this wasn't the case. 
Our consciousness is a reflection of the character of the SOCIAL relations 
and the power differentials embedded in these relations, not the 
material constitution of our brains. For Marx, the material world WAS 
social relations and the productive forces that transformed nature into 
human use objects for survival. The material world for Marx was the real 
world of human activity. So Marx constructed a HISTORICAL materialism 
which grounded the dialectic in the SOCIAL world, and the social beings 
who lived in this social world transformed society and made history 
through human activity, primarily labor. This is a double reflexive process 
called structuration. At the same times we change the world, the world 
changes us. (I have in a previous post addressed the problematic of Marx's 
double conception of ideology and the notion of false consciousness, 
which puts a break on the realization of objective class position.)

  "Well, Austin is not REALLY blind to the fact that there is an important
  distinction between materialists and idealists.  However, he uses words
  differently than most people, and has relabelled everyone in philosophy as
  one kind or another of idealist.  It is sort of like a grocer who
  believes that everything in the grocery store is "Meat", and has labelled
  all the shelves accordingly:  "Plant Meat", "Animal Meat", "Fish Meat",
  "Artificial Liquid Meat", and so on.  Once you learn the language, you can
  navigate in the store and find what you want."

All of the foregoing should make obvious that which was already evident 
in my previous texts. I did not relabel everyone in philosophy as one 
kind or another kind of idealist. In a general discussion of idealism I 
showed how strict materialists, like Hobbes, Feuerbach, and Engels were 
actually cosmic idealists. When you advance a materialism that 
speculative it becomes idealism. And Engel's dialectical materialism is 
even worse because it is teleological (which renders it logically 
fallacious and well as philosophically untenable). Engel's dialectical 
materialism approaches absolute idealism. It is very close to Hegelian 
historiography. Engel's formulation is a digression.

During my discussion of idealisms, I pointed out that SOCIAL IDEALISM was 
compatible with historical materialism. And I provided, in a follow up 
post, a definition of social constructionism that pointed out the 
compatibility of historicism, phenomenological sociology, and symbolic 
interactionism (all considered social idealisms) with historical 
materialism. Because Marx grounded the historical process in the real 
world social relations of human beings, and because the foregoing forms 
of social idealism also grounded the historical process in the real world 
of social relations of human beings, both historical materialism and 
social idealism express the same thing. So you might say instead that I 
relabeled social constructionism as historical materialism (you would be 
more correct). 

To reiterate, I am not an idealist in the standard use of that term. 
Engels was a classic idealist, materialist rhetoric notwithstanding. 
Marx was not an idealist in the standard use of the term. Both Marx and 
I, Weber and Mannheim, and many of the critical theorists (Adorno, 
Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, Neumann, Lukacs), recognized structuration 
and the imperative of social interaction. And this philosophy--historical 
materialism--is the macrosociological side of social constructionism, a 
philosophy that focuses on the microsociological side of human social 
life. Both historical materialism and social constructionism are neither 
materialist nor idealist precisely because they bridge the gap between 
the two, demonstrating that the distinction is either analytical (which 
is useful if kept at this level) or a false dichotomy (when treated 
objectively).

  "It is the same with Austin. You go down a paragraph and you find that
  ordinary idealists are called "Absolute Idealists", materialists are
  called "Cosmic idealists", and then there is a third sort called "Social
  Idealists".  Let's see what he says about "Cosmic idealists":"

I did not say that all materialists were cosmic idealists. Only those 
materialists who place the dialectic external to the social world, only 
those who place the dialectic in the natural world, and then posit 
transepochal laws of historical development based on dialectical 
transformations in nature, are cosmic idealists. This is the difference 
between cosmic and absolute idealists, the latter locating the dialectic 
in disembodied ideas in the supernatural. The difference between social 
idealists and the former two idealisms is that the social idealist grounds 
transformational processes in the social world, just like Marx.
 
  ""Empiricism, the purist [purest? - LP] form of objectivist idealism,
  manifests here as well..  Empiricism believes that the truth of a thing
  resides in the thing itself, and this truth is reveal [sic] to us through
  sense impressions.  This is the copy theory of knowledge."
  This is indeed Lenin's theory of knowledge, and mine too, although it is
  inaccurately expressed.  There is an external reality, some of it quite
  well known, some less well, much completely unknown.  We do not get a
  complete and full copy of it at any time, but through our interaction with
  the material world we come to understand it better.

This is precisely why empiricism is idealism. It posits a truth residing 
in the thing itself, and our knowledge of the thing is then thought to 
be only a poor reflection of reality. But you are assuming there is more 
there than can be in knowledge. And the difference between what you know and 
what you think don't know is an IMAGINARY (read: only an idea). God walks in 
this space. Reality doesn't work this way. And that is why Lenin was wrong. 
Reality is a social construction, and it is interpreted through socially 
constructed epistemic frames that make sense of the world before you, both 
the physical world and the social world. The object under investigation is 
what it is because we BELIEVE it to be this way. To assert that our beliefs 
are incorrect measured against some imaginary criteria of truth (because 
how can you gauge the ultimate truthfulness of a claim if you do not 
already have a criteria of truth to measure it against? ... which you 
can't because it is the paradigm utilized that makes them true, i.e. they 
are only true in epistemic systems in which specific truth claims are 
held as valid), or only a poor copy of the truth presented by 
the-thing-itself, is to engage in one of the worse forms of idealism. 

Marx recognized that science was a social product. That was why he 
disagreed with bourgeois science (or positivism) because it constructed 
and interpreted the social world in a way that served bourgeois interest. 
And Marx, in turn, believed that the worker should develop a science that 
reflected his/her interest. And this way of seeing the world constructed 
and interpreted a different social reality. Hence we were given a 
flexible philosophical framework and a science of liberation called 
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM.

This is science as ideology, ideology as critique, and then putting 
critique in to action: PRAXIS. My, my, so we see that we cannot separate 
Marx's scientific theory from his theory of praxis. And this is precisely 
what Marx intended. But since he didn't intend for his work to become 
deformed into a strange sort of idealism, then we must separate out Marx's 
work from the body of Marxist-Leninist distortions, which has its roots in 
the deformation of Marxian thought by Engels. 

Let me expand on these two points further.

Let me put this copy theory in a different way, and use the work of Kuhn 
(who used dialectics), Feyerabend, and Rorty. You can say two things 
happen in a paradigm shift. You can say 1) the world has always been 
this way and now our view of it has changed; or you can say 2) the world 
changed when our view of it changed. The result of each is identical. If 
we agree it changed, then it did. However, the first statement assumes a 
reality outside of the one we construct (or the one that is interpreted 
through social constructed epistemic frames). Thus the former view is 
idealism. It is based on speculation, not on what really happened. What 
really happened was that we now have a new way of looking at the world. 
This we know for sure. Why? Because we think of things differently. We 
may in the future have a new view; we KNOW we used to have a different 
one.

What am I saying here? Something very simple. The former view is a 
liberal view. It holds at its core a theory of progress, a progress that  
is inevitable. Our knowledge is unfolding towards greater and greater 
objectification of the truth, which at some end-point all will be 
known (actually believed to be known at each stage) and history will end 
in the perfectability of man. This eschatological vision is absolute/cosmic
idealism. Wasn't Marx trying to get away from this? Of course he was. 
Humans had to change the world in praxis. It wouldn't just happen. Marx's 
critical epistemology revealed truth, but the truth it revealed was that 
the ideas we struggled under were the ideas of the ruling class. This is 
Marx arguing that these ideas were socially constructed and inculcated in 
the masses to produce a false consciousness. This false consciousness was 
false because it caused the worker to work against his/her own interests 
as a class. Marx gave us an alternative interpretation of reality, a 
construction of reality, that if put into action can change the world, 
and in changing the world we change ourselves. We don't turn the world 
back to truth; we turn the productive means back to the people. This is 
a political vision.

Now, it should be noted that a common interpretation of Marx is that he did
hold a teleological view of the world. He believed, perhaps for political 
expediency, that the world was unfolding according to a plan, and that this 
plan was evident by an empirical and historiographical examination of 
past modes of production, the development of generalized laws of historical
development inductively, and then the production of predictions of future 
productive modes. However, Marx cautioned us several times on these points.
He wrote and argued that he would not engage in systematic speculations of 
future socialist and communist societies. He thought this was utopian and 
impossible. He also argued that each stage of historical development 
changed consciousness and the necessary means of political action, 
therefore the specific points set forth in the Manifesto might not be 
relevant, and therefore were subject to modification or complete 
dismissal. He also never felt comfortable enough with his inductive 
methodology (of deriving general laws of historical development from past 
historical periods) to view the ultimate transformation as inevitable. It 
was Engels who made the claim that Marx "discovered" the ahistorical laws of 
historical development, and it was Engels who teleologized Marx's arguments. 

Back to the discussion at hand.

If consciousness is a direct reflection of the material base then 
you are faced with arguing that things have always been this way, because 
at the atomic and molecular level things have been rather stable. And 
with hominids at the physiological and morphological level things have 
been quite stable. And despite changes in the environment, over all these 
have held constant (relatively). But we know that societies have not 
always been the same. Our thoughts have not always been the same. We have 
not had a stable worldview down through the ages. So if the ideational 
world is a mere reflection of the material world how have things changed 
at all?! Clearly a contradiction. The passage I quoted from Engels was 
one he censored from his own work. He did so because of this very 
contradiction. Lenin was wrong for this very reason and the additional 
fallacy of the copy theory of knowledge. And if you hold either a 
rationalist or a copy theory of knowledge, you are wrong as well. Both 
the copy theory (empiricism) and Kantian epistemology (explicit dichotomy 
between appearance and thing-in-itself) are philosophically dead.

But this idea, for Lenin, as I have already expressed, held great utility,
for some one must be able to hold the world transepochally to behold this 
universal process (for you see Lenin also held the cosmic idealist 
position of Engels in locating the dialectic external to social reality). 
This makes Lenin a god, for he alone can see the teleology. And this is 
utter bullshit.
 
  ""It is wrong," according to Austin.  But - I wonder - HOW can it be wrong,
  in Austin's epistemology?  He can't believe it's -objectively- wrong,
  because he doesn't BELIEVE in the objective world, external to himself and
  to me!  He can't consistently believe it's "wrong" in the framework of
  "social idealism", since people construct the world in an unpredictable
  way - how does he know that tomorrow people won't construct the world so
  that Lenin is right?  But this is to anticipate...

I never said I didn't believe in the objective world. I never said people 
construct their world in an unpredictable way. In aggregates human 
behavior is very predictable. But not because they follow external laws 
of transhistorical logic, but because they share a similar worldview.

If things are socially constructed, then right and wrong are socially 
constructed, as well. If, as Marx said, our consciousness is a product of 
a particular mode of production, then the logic of that system, and the 
justifications of the people who control that system, are present in our 
conceptions of morality and truth. And these change. Anthropology supports 
Marx's assertion of the non-transhistorical nature of morality and truth.
There is not a single behavior, content and form -- not function (which is 
analytical) -- that has at all times been immoral. And if you mean by 
"right" and "wrong" some identification with the truth, then you are only 
asserting your belief in what is true. And I have as much right to assert 
what I believe is true as you do! Nothing is more socially constructed 
than truth. Truth is not something that lies external to consciousness or 
the social system. If it were not for man, the concept of truth would 
never have come about. So my reasoning is not contradicted; it is 
consistent with basic logic of historical materialism! It is, of course 
contradicted within the bourgeois paradigm of rational-empiricism that 
you hold. But I just negated this negation by stepping outside the 
rational-empirical paradigm. 
 
  "Here is Austin's 50-megaton killer bomb against the "cosmic idealists",
  that is, materialists: "How empiricists get around the fact that no
  subject ever approaches an object without a preconceived (socially
  constructed) interpretive frame has never been answered."  Perhaps this
  looks familiar?  It creates a deja vu experience?  It should, because it
  is the same old argument that idealists, dualists, Christians, etc. have
  been making against us materialists.  On another shelf of my library I
  have a version from C.S. Lewis, and I think he was adapting it from St.
  Augustine.  In its standard form it is more like this: "You materialists
  think your minds are just matter, following the laws of nature.  But in
  that case all your ideas are the products of those laws ("preconceived
  frame"), so you can't trust them at all."  The identity of Austin's
  argument with the standard anti-materialist argument used by religious
  propagandists is striking.

This is so absurd as to be unanswerable. All the foregoing shows the 
irrational character of this line of thinking. You really must shed 
the bourgeois logic.

A technical note, the poster has put a " after the clause "so you can't 
trust them at all." It makes it appear that I said this. I hope this was 
an accident, but to clear things up, I did NOT say this.

[After reviewing this there is an addition comment I would like to make
here. I did say that the cosmic idealist (dialectical materialist)
believes that the thought-products reflect the underlying material
structure of the brain, and that since the universe is guided by the laws
of the dialectic, then the subjective must necessarily correspond with the
objective. This is Engels' argument. Note that this is the argument to
which the poster has compared my argument, quoted a few sentences before.
Now, what was it I said? "How empiricists get around the fact that no
subject ever approaches an object without a preconceived (socially
constructed) interpretive frame has never been answered." Here I am not 
saying that the dialectical materialist believes this. Dia-Mat DOESN'T 
believe this. What this sentence says is that empiricist argue that it is 
possible to hold truth objectively, and the historical materialist says 
this is impossible because we each approach the world socialized, with 
symbolic systesm and a cultural heritage which gives up the meaning with 
which to make sence of the world. This is a very important point. 
Dialectical materialists believes that thought is a reflection of the 
material. This is vulgar materialism. Historical materialist argue that 
thought is a product of the social world. This is Marxism.]
 
  "By the way, the answer to this is the same that Lenin gave in _Materialism
  and Empiriocriticism_, and that Stephen Gould gave in a recent essay
  (against religious critics of science), and that probably every other
  materialist has made:  That the "preconceived frame", i.e., our thoughts,
  categories, etc., are the products of our experience with the material
  world and FOR THAT REASON are not just any old system, made up at random,
  but a system that has something to do with the real world, and which we
  continually improve.  (We meaning "people", not necessarily "some
  individual"..)  In fact, Austin does us the service of quoting Engels to
  precisely the same effect:  ".. our subjective thought and the objective
  world are subject to the same laws, and hence... in the final analysis
  they cannot contradict each other in their result, but must coincide...""

This is humorous. Gould's argument as you present it does not support 
your position. And the Engels' quote ironically contradicts what Gould is 
here presented as saying. The point is obvious.

This is funny that you would mention Stephen Jay Gould in the first place. 
My notion of science as critique is in accordance to Gould's project. He 
uses bourgeois science to devastate bourgeois science in the same manner 
that Marx used classical economic theory in Capital to demolish classical 
economic theory. Gould understands the concept of paradigm and the idea 
that facts are only meaningful within a paradigm which recognizes their 
validity. This is exactly what I have said. I am much closer to Gould 
than either you or Lenin.

And you should know that that passage I read of Engels' was found in his 
wastebasket. So please be my guest and go ahead and use thrown away ideas.

> "Here Engels admits his idealism," says Austin (although what of it, since
> everyone is an idealist in Austin's scheme; he ought to say "here Engels
> admits himself to be a bad cosmic idealist rather than a good social
> idealist").

Strawman.
 
> Now we come to "social idealism", which is "the only tenable
> epistemology", according to Austin.  "This is the belief that ... social
> reality (which in the end is all reality) is maintained socially through
> symbolic interaction."  Think about this.  Social reality is all reality.
> If it is not constructed socially, it does not exist.  Engels naively
> asked (and Lenin naively quoted him), "Was alizarin (a dye) a constituent
> of coal tar before it was discovered to be there?"  "No," Austin will
> answer, to be consistent, "it was not there until society constructed it
> there."

Again, this accepts the liberal notion of truth. Many stand with you 
here. You are not alone. But as a Marxist, I cannot agree with this bourgeois
mystification.
 
> Finally there is "individual idealism" which "argues that human beings are
> rational creatures innately."  Yes, we materialists believe that people
> have brains which enables us to make sense of the material world.  Austin,
> however, thinks that we are being particularly bad here, since he thinks
> (since he has put "individual idealism" and "cosmic idealism" on different
> counters) that we really OUGHT to believe that (a) there is an external
> reality or (b) people have brains BUT NOT BOTH.  And he takes Engels and
> Lenin to task for trying to believe these two things simultaneously.

You are really confused here. This is a clear instance of you rushing 
through my text. If the world is guided by transhistorical laws in nature 
(cosmic idealism) and the consciousness of human beings is a 
manifestation of these natural laws in thought (individualist idealism) 
then this is consistent, not contradicted. Engels and Lenin were wrong, 
but not always because of contradictions. 

> Anyway, Austin believes that of these belief systems only "social
> idealism" is any good, whereby people construct the social world, which is
> the WHOLE world, in their minds, free from material constraints, free from
> law, unpredictably, like this Star Trek episode I saw where the whole crew was
> sharing the same hallucination and were making these monsters that were
> killing them all off until they realized it was just the product of their
> own minds.  Austin says that the process of production is primary here,
> but of course how he distinguishes 'production' from 'religion' or 'sleep'
> or 'music' without reference to the external world is sort of a mystery.

Laws are human constructs. Does mother nature write the laws by which she 
guides herself? This is so absurd. You might say that we discover these 
laws. Who wrote them? They were waiting for us there to discover? And did 
we find them under a rock? Or did we reveal them through reason? Wait, 
but that is rationalism. Surely a Marxist is not appealing to the 
bourgeois philosophy of rationalism! This whole discourse sounds like a 
pythagorean exercise in cosmology. Because the world can only be badly 
reflected in our consciousness we have to come up with scientific ways to 
get at the truth. These involve measurements and laws. And so the truth 
of the sphere is not that it appears spherical. "No," the rationalist 
says, "this is only an appearance," or the empiricist says, "It is but a 
copy of the sphere." "The truth of the sphere is that its diameter is 6 
inches and that it has a mass of 10gm, and that it density is..." Numbers, 
laws, measurements are all, each and everyone of them, human constructs. 
Without humans here on this planet, without a system of ideas constructed 
socially (for as Marx argued, a Homo sapiens cannot think outside 
society) in which to interpret these things, they do not exist. This in 
no way denies the physical world. It in no way denies externalities. But 
it does show that the logic of the world is human. The world is not a 
thinking thing. It therefore, does not have a logic. And to think that it 
does is not the thinking of a materialist, but of an idealist hiding 
behind the rhetoric of materialism!

> To sum up, if we find ourselves in a prison:
> - An "absolute idealist" will pray to God, since the prison is only a
>   creation of the mind of God, Who can remove it with a thought.

An absolute idealist will either believe that 1) prison can redefined as 
freedom through a dialectical exercise or 2) posit a teleology that the 
inherent progress of the absolute idea (euphemism for God) through history 
will eventually manifest in the preconditions for his freedom from 
confinement.

> - A "cosmic idealist" will believe that the prison is a thing of metal
>   and stone, and that the guards' guns can really kill you.

A cosmic idealist will posit transhistorical laws of nature which are 
revealed in our consciousness, and go on to assert a teleology that 
nature is unfolding along a course of progress towards some ideal state 
of truth at which point history will end. In your example, this results in 
the inevitable freedom from confinement.

> - A "social idealist" will say, "If we cease to believe we are in prison,
>   we can choose to find ourselves in a field of flowers instead."

A social idealist will recognize that the social world is socially 
constructed and interpreted, will engage in a critique of these processes, 
construct an alternative reality that is in the best interests of the 
working class, and then, recognizing that we socially construct our world, 
lead a democratic revolution to put back into the hands of the people the 
productive means and ideological institutions so that society can forge a 
new consciousness. In your example, this results in a prison rebellion 
and the subsequent freedom from confinement.

> - An "individual idealist" will say, "By struggling to get out, we will
>   learn more about the prison, the guards, and our larger environment."
>   (You will note that the individual idealist is cheating here, and is
>   a "cosmic idealist", i.e. materialist, as well.)

The methods of the individual idealist will become very useful in 
demolishing the science of our prison guards, since it is the science they 
have used in constructing our prison. (Your metaphor is very apt; Weber 
used this metaphor for his description of the rational world as an "iron 
cage" of (ir)rationalism from which there could be no escape. He went on 
to predict that even socialist transformations which did not discard 
the rationalist paradigm would become iron cages as well, and his 
prediction was clearly supported by the empirical examples of the 
Soviet Union and other hyperbureaucratized socialist states. This 
idea is also reflected in critical theory of Western Marxism with the 
notion of the concepts of the "irrationality of the rational" or the 
"rationality of the irrational." Using this critique we convince our 
fellow inmates of the fallacy of the warden's thinking. This is an 
important tool for moving the prisoner's subjective perception of their 
state of being (in prison) in line with their objective position as 
prisoners.

> Well, I think I have spent enough time on this, 

Not nearly enough time as you should have. 

> and will conclude with
> the following observations:
> 
> - Remarkably enough, or perhaps not so remarkably, it seems that Lenin's
>   "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" is not so out of date after all, and
>   that on every page you can find something that responds to something
>   Austin has said.  Of course in Bogdanov's case you had an idealist who
>   labelled his idealism as materialism.... in the Austin case you have an
>   idealist who labels OUR materialism as idealism... but the distinction
>   between Bogdanov and Austin is still "artificial and arbitrary" ;-)
> 
> - If you compare the year 1908 to today, it may suggest that materialism
>   comes under this sort of attack predictably, i.e., in periods of
>   reaction following great counterrevolutionary developments.  In that
>   sense, Austin's attacks on materialism are part of the predictable,
>   material world whose study is the task of dialectical materialism..
> 
> - It seems a shame to have to do without Marc V., just when Austin is
>   rehabilitating Bogdanov... *sigh*
> 
> - You can't win deep philosophical conflicts with logical syllogisms,
>   but you can try to demonstrate that one approach makes more sense than
>   another in light of what one is actually trying to do in the world.
>   In my view the materialist view (or "cosmic/individual idealist" view,
>   in Austinese) is compatible with revolutionary struggle, while the
>   "social idealist" view is compatible with sitting around having empty
>   and futile discussions, trying to verbally reconstruct the world ...
> 
> Louis Paulsen
> Chicago Bureau, Workers' World
> 
> 

Louis,

Hopefully you will come to see how your overreliance on Lenin's attempts at 
epistemological thinking have caused you to misunderstand basic Marxian 
thought. I recommend again Neill's piece on historical materialism and 
the sociology of knowledge. Neill addresses these points very cogently, 
revealing that Lenin's reliance on both Lockean (though more implicit still 
more central) and Kantian epistemology led him to a contrary position to 
Marx's basic philosophy. Engel's did the same thing. Both Engels and 
Lenin were enthralled with positivism (while denying it often). Marx's 
theory was a critical theory and stood opposed to positivism. Marx's 
philosophy argued against the assertions of truth presented by 
positivism, the dominant bourgeois science (even today). I would 
recommend you read Marx again, particularly the Philosophic and Economic 
Manuscripts. Lenin couldn't hold a candle to Marx's genius. Why rely on 
Lenin for your interpretation of Marx? This is intellectual laziness. 
Marx's work, taken on the whole, supports my position, not yours. Your 
arguments are Leninist arguments. Lenin isn't Marx. Our disagreement 
isn't over Marx then. It is over whether Lenin's interpretations were 
accurate. And this has been the debate all along. And clearly Lenin's 
interpretations were not accurate. 

Thanks for spending the time you did in addressing my post. Your post did 
allow me clarify my position and refute specific popular misconceptions 
vis a vis the idealist-materialist dichotomy.

Now, I want to finish up this discussion with some quotes by Shlomo
Avineri in his Introduction to his excellent book The Social &
Political Thought of Karl Marx, and then present a final statement 
concerning praxis and nonfallacious teleologies. Because I understood 
both Hegel and Marx early on in life I came to same conclusion that I 
would discover were presented years before me by Lukacs and Gramsci.
Then I read the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts by Marx and I
was even more sure of my interpretation of Marx *in unity*, not in
the fragmented conceptualization made by lazy Marxists that posited
epistemological breaks (such as the writings of Althusser upon
the discovery of the E-P Manuscripts) in Marx's writings. (In fact,
Althusser's work, dense and confusing, is rather useless on the
whole in consideration of these other writings.) Then a couple
of months ago, I borrowed this book by Avineri. And my thinking
was again confirmed. So a few quotes from this introduction will
help clarify my case. It will also demonstrate (and hopefully
educate) that this is the coming (and has been for years, actually)
definitive interpretation of Marx: the unification of Marxian
thought over the whole course of Marx's writings, NOT based on
interpretations by Engels, Lenin, and God knows who else. Time has 
moved on, and so I hope we can all move on with it.

	One of the consequences of this renaissance of the interest in
	young Marx has been that Marx nowadays means different things to
	different people. While some hold him responsible for one of the
	worst totalitarian regimes ever experienced by mankind, others
	see him as the last of the utopian socialists; while others see
	him as a narrow-minded materialist and determinist, others point
	to the basically humanistic vision of his early writings. Still
	others see him as the father of the modern social sciences,
	whereas others discern in him a forerunner of mode
	existentialist thought. If some view him as the theoretician of
	scientific socialism, others find resemblances between some
	aspects of his thought and Zen Buddhism.

	This confusion arises mainly from two causes. First, the recent
	renaissance of interest in Marx concentrates almost exclusively
	on his earlier writings; his later works have hardly been
	reconsidered and scrutinized in the light of the new
	discoveries. A gap between the 'young' and the 'older' Marx is
	almost taken for granted. Secondly, much of what is
	traditionally considered orthodox Marxism is based on the more
	popular of Engels' later writings. If they seem to differ widely
	from those of the young Marx, the conclusion usually drawn from
	this disparity is a statement about the difference between the
	early and later Marx.

The author makes a distinction between Marx and Engels here in
the text:

	...a strict differentiation between Marx and Engels will be
	observed, and the collective personality image projected by
	partisan propaganda will be discarded. Whatever the affinity,
	intimacy, life-long friendship and intellectual partnership
	between the two, they were still two distinct human beings, and
	it would be unreasonable--even monstrous--to suppose that with
	all their differences in family background, education and
	attitude to life they would be of one mind on every issue. 

He then points out the importance of historicity:

	It is a further aim of this study to view the various aspects of
	Marx's thought against the background of their intellectual
	origins.... 

	From this point of view, the main achievement of Hegel's
	philosophy seems to be his incorporation of the historical
	within a philosophically relevant system. In contrast to its
	place in other philosophical systems, history ceased for Hegel
	to be accidental and arbitrary, nor was it just the area of
	fulfillment of philosophical ideas. In this respect Hegel's view
	of history as 'the March of God on Earth' seems to be a unique
	synthesis between the theological traditions of the
	Judeo-Christian world and the intellectual achievements of the
	Enlightenment. Consequently, the eschatological element in the
	Judeo-Christian tradition as such, nor did it originate in
	Marx's Jewish ancestral background. It is a consequence of his
	Hegelian antecedents.

	Hegel's view of history is analogous to the mainstream of
	Christian theology in its seeing in history an elaborate pattern
	of meaningful events. which must be deciphered and explained in
	terms of a cosmic significance. Yet since theology was
	handicapped in its view of history by the doctrine of original
	sin, man's history had always been subsumed by the theologians
	under God's trans-historical providential guidance...

	By postulating the Cunning of Reason as the vehicle of
	historical development, Hegel could divorce the subjective
	element in history from the objective significance of the
	historical process....Such a historization of philosophy
	consequently caused every critical discussion of Hegelian
	philosophy to imply a discussion of historical reality. If the
	rational is the actual, if philosophy is 'its own time
	apprehended in thought', every philosophical critique becomes
	simultaneously an immanent social criticism of the historical
	present. Philosophical discussion becomes a social debate, and
	in this sense Marx's socialism can be viewed as a direct outcome
	of Hegel's intellectual and speculative achievements. 

	One can indeed show how Marx, in his first confrontation with
	Hegel, could construct his materialist view out of the Hegelian
	system itself. Marx's later writings merely articulates the
	conclusions at which he arrived at this early stage of his
	intellectual odyssey. The various economic, social and
	historical studies undertaken by Marx are but a corollary of the
	conclusions he drew from his immanent critique of Hegel's
	political philosophy.

	Once Hegel has solved the problem implicit in the tension
	between matter and spirit by postulating matter as one of
	spirit's manifestation, albeit an inferior one, the traditional
	dualism of Western philosophy was overcome, and Hegel was of
	course the first to point this out. But once the spiritual
	substance of matter was recognized, i.e. once matter was shown
	to be nothing but spirit in self-alienation, then,
	paradoxucally, matter was also rehabilitated in a fashion more
	far reaching that anything hitherto known to Western philosophy.
	Even eighteenth-century French materialism could not have
	achieved anything like it. From Hegel on, matter could no longer
	be conceived as the absolute negation of spirit or its total
	absence. Hegel's phenomenology of spirit could thus really
	become the culmination of philosophy--in more that one sense.
	Since the secret of spirit was solved, only the movement of
	matter, its historical manifestation, remained significant. The
	discussion of the physical, material world would not
	henceforward be a negation of the spirit, as in traditional
	materialism but its very affirmation. Here Engels' materialism,
	based on the mechanistic traditions of the eighteenth century,
	differed markedly from the main stream of Marx's thought. 

This has been an interesting thread. Certainly I can say more here, but I 
don't want to be overbearing. Sorry for the length of this post, but Louis' 
post, despite its rushed nature and inaccuracies, did afford me the 
opportunity to not only clear up perceived ambiguities in my own writing, 
but to complete the mission of my original posts in this area. With that, 
allow me to say one final thing about teleologies.

It is no longer a teleological fallacy to talk about progess if the 
subject is restored to the center of historical transformation, because 
the nature of the world is then the result of human activity. The purpose 
of social reality is the one human beings give it, not some purpose that 
stands external to the social world. This is teleological. It perpetuates
alienation because it removes from human beings the recognition of the 
power of construction (and, therefore, reconstruction) of the social 
order. Thus the transformation of the social dialectic into a natural 
dialectic not only creates a idealized version of historical materialism 
(called dialectical materialism) but destroys the praxical elements of 
Marx's emancipatory project.

It is time to move on, abandon inferior theoretical formulations of 
the Marxian program, and take a full accounting of not only the 
philosophical advances made since Marx's day, but the whole body of 
Marx's writings IN UNITY.

Thanks for your patience,
Andrew Austin