an implicit but "pesky rejoinder to Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism" (Introduction, xiv, quoting Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism, 2002, 76)

Foreword to the 5th edition

explains how Stalin and Zdhanov tried to draw a line between the young 'idealistic' Marx and his 'scientific' work, thereby also trying to deny the influence of Hegel and other predecessors (doesn't name them, probably French communists and Smith and Ricardo) pp. 1-2

Stalin and Stalinists also tried to make materialism scientific, a "reduced to a recognition of the practcial and material world 'as it is' without addition or interpretation. p 2
.
Also reduced Marxism to a single science: political economy - thus marxism became economicist p. 3
Also says that the real reason why Stalinists focused on the 'scientific' content of Marxism was that at the same time the great purges were going on. Thus, the ideological scientific outlook was chosen exactly to divert attention from the real 'theoretical and practical problems' of the Soviet Union. p. 4 paraphrased

last not least, institutional Marxism also refuses to listen to talk about alienation p.4

programmatic nature of philosophy p. 7

Note: Hegelian dialectics as a movement through contradictions recovered in the 'third term'.

Movement is therefore a unity of the continuous and discontinuous, which will have everywhere to be recovered and analysed. There is a 'leap' a discontinuity, a change of qualitative determination or degree, and hence a transcending, whenever a quality has reached its immanent limit, urged on, so to speak, by quantitative changes. In order to understand or predict the qualitative leap we have to study the quantitative changes and determine the point or 'nodal' line where the discontinuity arises. p. 32

Hegel knew that the conflict and the division within modern man are not an invention of the philosophers. As he shows in the beginning of his Aesthetic, modern culture forces man to live 'in two worlds which contradict one another. On the one hand we see man living in the ordinary temporary actuality of this world, weighed down by want and wretchedness, in thrall to matter; on the other hand he can raise himself up to Ideas, to a kingdom of thought and of freedom; inasmuch as he is will he gives himself laws'. But even as he does so ' he strips the world of the living actuality and resolves it into abstractions'. Thus flesh and spirit, everyday reality and thought, real necessity and ideal freedom, actual servitude and the theoretical power of the intelligence, the wretchedness of concrete existence and the splendid but fictive sovereignty of the Idea, all are in conflict. For the past hundred years this unhappy cleavage of the modern consciousness has done nothing but grow more acute, until it is now intolerable. pp. 35-36

Inasmuch as it isn a finished system, Hegelianism leads, like traditional formalism, to a sharp conflict between invention and knowledge, between fruitfulness and rigour. p. 38

Hegel's mind feeds off the world and devours it, causing it to disappear. p. 39

hegel was not content merely to deepen the content and make it explicit in order to attain the form, he reduced it to thought, by claiming to grasp it totally and exhaust it. p. 39

The dialectical method thus came to be added to historical materialism and the analysis of the economic content, once this analysis had been sufficiently developed to allow and demand a rigorous scientific expression. The dialectical method, worked out first of all in an idealist form, as being the activity of the mind becoming conscious of the content and the historical Becoming, and now worked out again, starting from economic determinations, loses its abstract, idealist form, but it does not pass away. On the contrary, it becomes more coherent by being united with a more elaborate materialism. In dialectical materialism idealism and materialism are not only re-united but transformed and transcended.
'This method starts from the simplest fundamental relations we can find historically, in actual fact, that is economic relations.' (quoting Engels from Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) This passage answers certain simplistic Marxists as well as most critics of Marxism in advance: economic relations are not the only relations but the simplest ones, the ones found again as 'moments' in complex relations. As currently interpreted, dialectical materialism looks on ideas, institutions and cultures - on consciousness - as a frivolous and unimportant superstructure above an economic substance which alone is solid. True materialism is quite different; it determines the practical relations inherent in every organised human existence and studies them inasmuch as they are concrete conditions of existence for cultures or ways of life. The simple relations, moments and categories are involved, historically and methodologically, in the richer and more complex determinations, but they do not exhaust them. The given content of life is always a concrete totality. This complex content of life and cosncsiousness is the true reality which we must attain and elicudate. Dialectical materialism is not an economicism. It analysis relations and then reintegrates them into the total movement. pp 72-73

The true subject of the Becoming is living man. Yet around and above him the abstractions acquire a strange existence and a mysterious efficacy; Fetishes reign over him. p. 85

Political eocnomy is a threefolded alienation of man: in the errors of economists, who take the momentary results of human relations to be permanent categories and natural laws, as a science of a substantial object external to man; as a reality and an econommic destiny. This alienation is real, it sweeps away living men: yet it is only the manifestation of these men, their external appearance, their alienated essence. p. 85

Marxism is far from asserting that the only reality is economic reality and that there is an absolute eocnomic fatalism. On the contrary, it declares that an economic destiny is relative and provisional, that it is destined to be transcended once men have become aware of their possibilities, and that this transcending will be the essential, infinitely creative act of our own age. pp. 85-86

a) The materialist dialectic accords primacy to the content - being determines thought. b) The MD is an analysis of this content, and a reconstruction of the total movement. ... It does not lead to axioms, constancies or permanencies, or to mere analogies, but to laws of development. c) Thus understood, the dialectical method therefore constructs the historical and sociological object, while locating and determining its specific objectivity. pp. 90-91 abbreviated transcript

The Third Term is therefore the practical solution to the problems posed by life, to the conflicts and contradictions to which the praxis gives birth and which are experienced practically. The transcending is located within the movement of action, not in the pure time-scale of the philosophical mind. p. 93

Dialectical materialism rescues the human mind from falling back into confusion and one-sidedness. p. 96

110 - 111 definition of technique

Either Reason is a living power, an activity that fights to conquer both in the world and in man, a power creative of order and unity, or else it is an impotent form, destined to give way to mythical interpretations which fetishise the elements of Nature, or social products or both at once (the earth, race, state). pp. 128-9

The total man is 'de-alienated' man. A practical and materialist philosophy cannot allow itself to offer a transcendent ideal; its ideal must be a function of reality. It must have its roots in this reality, and exist there already, as a potentiality. The ideal of the total man satisfies this requirement. Moreover, the reality of what is humanly possible can be determined scientifically, by specifically economic or sociological investigation. p. 150

For such a humanism, the supreme instance is not society, but the total man. The total man is a free individual in a free community. He is an individuality which has blossomed into the limitless variety of possible individualities. p. 152

notion of 'prehistory'

search for 'oneness' p. 152

The Production of Man 102

a critique of science because of its fragmented and reductionist nature (although he does not use the word reductionism).

We must move from the isolated product to the sum of products, from consideraction of this fragmentary activity to that of the creative activity as a whole. This integration is a fundamental operation both in general philosophy and in various specific sciences, in which a change of scale must be effected in order to get from the element to the whole. p. 115-5

The social whole is given as a practical organisation or Praxis. 115

The objective world of man is a world of products forming a whole: what we traditionally refer to as the world of sense-perception. This social world is laden with affective or representative meanings which extend beyond the instant, the seperate object, the isolated individual. In this sense the most trivial object is the bearer of countless suggestions and relationships; it refers to all sorts of activities not immedeately present in it. For child and adult alike, objects are not merely a momentary material presence, or the occasion of a subjective activity; they provide us with an objective social content. Traditions (technical, social, spiritual) and the most complex qualities are present in the humblest of objects, conferring on them a symbolic value or 'style'. each object is a content of consciousness, a moment. p. 116

The activity of production and social labour must not be understood in terms of the non-specialised labour of the manual worker (although this labour does have its function within the whole); it must be understood on the scale of humanity. Production is not trivial. labour must ot be reduced to its most elementary form but, on the contrary, thought of in accordance with its higher forms: total labour then takes on its creative or 'poetic' meaning. The creation that is pursued in the Praxis, through the sum of individual acts and existences, is the creation of man by himself. 'The so-called history of the world is nothing other than the production of man through human labour.' (p. 117 quoting Marx in economic and philosophic manuscripts)

p. 117-118 on instruments and nature, instruments are not totally seperate from nature, yet an existence that is instrumentalised becomes inhuman.

The drama of man that the principle of his increasing power is based on being attained through 'abstraction and logic, and in the consciousness of the theoretical man who is alien to nature. Consciousness expresses therefore both the finitude and infinitude of man.' 120

As Engels points out in the Dialects of Nature even to crack a nut is to perform an analysis. p. 121

The 'uncontrolled sector' all that still lies oustide man's control, in nature and in himself. pp 125-6

'uncontrolled sector' undermines our authority, as modern mind contains countless survivals of primitive ways ... hence the persistence of religion, the invention of new myths and magic p. 128

pure nature is the emptiest of all abstractions p. 131

multiplicity of determinisms reveals objective articulations of the universe. however, iot must not be taken as an absolute. This multiplicity is only momentary, for man is one and the world around him a whole. fragmentations will be overcome in higher unity - thought links to Marx 'the natural sciences will be subordinated to the science of man'.

The social determinism is thus the inhuman within the human, the continuation into the human of natural conflicts and biological realities. It is man as yet unrealised: Nature in man. p. 135

rich meaning of term 'production' p. 143

art, superhuman, ecstatic communion p. 152

The exposition of dialectical materialism does not pretend to put an end to the forward march of knowledge or to offer a closed totality, of which all previous systems have been no more than an inadequate expression. However, with our modern awareness of human potential and of the problem of man, the limitation of thought changes in character. No expression of dialectical materialism can be definitive, but, instead of being incompatible and conflicting with each other, it may perhaps be possible for these expressions to be integrated into an open totality, perpetually in the process of being transcended, precisely in so far as they will be expressing the solutions to the problems facing concrete man. p.99