From: cyrilsmith-at-cix.compulink.co.uk (Mr C Smith)

In-Reply-To: <GL036-at-mdx.ac.uk>

The 'dry old books' I am concerned with are largely those of Marx, Hegel and Aristotle. My - admittedly limited - aim in looking more carefully at those than we used to, is very specific: I believe that they provide a starting-point for illuminating the problems faced by humanity in the twenty-first century.

By the way, I was amused to see 'the Bolsheviks' quoted as a benchmark for philosophical development. I'll deal with Lenin's work in a moment, but apart from him the philosophical knowledge of the Party was pitiful. Bukharin's crudities show the level only too clearly. (Riazanov found that he could not staff the Marx-Engels Institute without drawing heavily on Old Mensheviks, when their organisation had been made illegal. Lenin used to pull his leg about this.)

Lenin himself, of course, is always interesting. (I am not thinking of 'Materialism and Empirio-whatnot': that is too dreadful to contemplate.) Lenin reading Hegel to try to understand what had happened to his teachers, Kautsky and Plekhanov at the start of the war, was an amazing thing for him to attempt. But he told absolutely nobody about what he read. And when we measure his idea of 'The Science of Logic' with the great human significance of Hegel's work as a whole, it is clear that Lenin had not the faintest idea of what it was about.

I shall only allow people to ease off their study of 'the old books', when they have separated their message from the false tradition called 'Marxism'.

Cyril