Dialectical Materialism Exam -- Final Paper 2010

Remember, this is not meant to be taken seriously!

Specially Designed For Fans Of The Dialectic Who Cannot Be Bothered to Read My Essays, But Who still Pontificate About Them

Rules:

1) Work steadily though; attempt every question.

2) Extra marks will be given for inconsistency; however, an automatic pass with honours will be awarded to any candidate who submits contradictory answers.

3) The use of incomprehensible jargon is mandatory; any attempt at clarity will be penalised, the offending answer paper shredded.

4) Anyone who even so much as tries to be original will be shot -- or worse, they will have 'Revisionist' painted on their foreheads, made to read the works of Gerry Healy and then forced to listen to the collected speeches of Ted Grant.

Start:

Question One: Which ruling-class theory can you come up with that will help guarantee Marxists have to endure another 150 years of failure?

[Hint: it was invented by an idealist mystic, who lived in Germany about 200 years ago. It is also incomprehensible --, which fact, incidentally, has nothing whatsoever to do with the revolutionary left going nowhere slowly for the last 150 years. Any allegation to the contrary is a bourgeois lie!]

Question Two: Is 'Being' identical with but at the same time different from 'Nothing', the 'contradiction' resolved in 'Becoming'?

[Warning: do not allow the fact the both Lenin and Trotsky thought this sort of stuff the "work of genius" influence your answer in any way at all.]

Question Three: Does the fact that everything in the entire universe is a unity (if not identity) of polar opposites, which are locked in ceaseless 'struggle', and which will inevitably turn into one another, mean that male cats will change into female cats (and vice versa) someday soon?

Question Four: How many dialecticians does it take to change a light bulb?

[Warning, the Smart Alec answer we got last year: "None at all, the light bulb changes itself" will lead to automatic expulsion from the International Party of the Proletariat (consisting of four comrades and a goldfish), with hysterical accusations that the individual concerned is an "empiricist!", a "sophist!" or a "formal thinker!"]

Question Five: Complete this well-known phrase or saying: "Everything in the entire universe is interconnected, except..."

[Spoiler: "...the long term failure of Dialectical Marxism and its core theory, materialist dialectics". Oops! Damn it!]

Question Six: Lenin said this:

It is impossible to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.

But, did the fact that Lenin admitted he could not understand parts of Hegel's Logic mean he did not understand Das Kapital?

[Hint: Ignore this one; everyone else does.]

Question Seven: According to Engels:

Motion itself is a contradiction; even simple mechanical change of place can only come about through a body being both in one place and in another place at one and the same moment of time, being in one and the same place and also not in it. And the continual assertion and simultaneous solution of this contradiction is precisely what motion is.

But, who did the 'asserting' and who the 'solving' before sentient life evolved?

Question Eight: According to Lenin:

(Among the elements of dialectics are the following:) Internally contradictory tendencies…in (a thing)…as the sum and unity of opposites…. (This involves) not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other...

Explain in detail why this does not mean that you are about to change into a giant squid.

Question Nine: Explain why there is no conflict at all between these two quotations from Engels:

(1) Finally, for me there could be no question of superimposing the laws of dialectics on nature but of discovering them in it and developing them from it.

(2) Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be…. Matter without motion is just as inconceivable as motion without matter. Motion is therefore as uncreatable and indestructible as matter itself; as the older philosophy (Descartes) expressed it, the quantity of motion existing in the world is always the same. Motion therefore cannot be created; it can only be transmitted.

Question Ten: There is no Question Ten -- it has in fact turned into its opposite: Question One.

In which case, go back to Question One, and begin again.

Do not stop until the materialist penny has finally dropped.

End Of Test

Hand your completed scripts to the invigilator with the Transitional Program tattooed on her forehead.

Leave the exam room in a disorderly fashion, and make sure you have a caucus first to decide which door is the exit.

If you receive full marks, you can find out where you went wrong, here.

[This is one unity of opposites that should be resolved immediately.]

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© Rosa Lichtenstein 2010

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