[OPE] question re published letters Engels

Well Marx and Engels themselves were never afraid to say that bunkum was
bunkum. But okay, Professor Bapuji, if you feel it's unscholarly to vent an
opinion in this way, I will put it in another way.

The onus however is not on me to prove anything - Mr Bettelheim and Mr
Chattopadhyay themselves flipflopped from characterising the Russian
revolution as a proletarian revolution and then subsequently defining it as
a fullfledged bourgeois revolution, even although the Russian bourgeoisie
was expropriated and liquidated. Mr Bettelheim does this in the course of
the same multi-volume book!

I think this is absurd, and I think it is even more absurd, that there
should still be people who are still in awe and reverence of this kind of
"scholarship". The apparently "super-radical" analysis of the "value-form"
by "Marxist authorities" has the result, that these Marxists cannot even
decide what the real class forces in a real revolution are, and do a 180
degrees turn in their analysis!

The tyranny I refer to is the tyranny of orthodoxy and the tyranny of proofs
by definition, the dreary doctrinairism and schematism which has the result,
that today we are asked to believe the exact opposite of what we were asked
to believe yesterday about very fundamental questions, because some reverent
Marxist authority has suddenly changed his mind on the topic. I feel zero
affinity with that kind of "intellectual culture" and Marx and Engels did
not either.

So Professor Bapuji, give me a good reason why I should take people who
perform such intellectual about-turns about very basic questions of social
analysis at all seriously!

Jurriaan

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Received on Mon May 11 02:01:57 2009