Revisionism

""""In the sphere of philosophy revisionism followed in the wake of bourgeois professorial “science”. The professors went “back to Kant"—and revisionism dragged along after the neo-Kantians. The professors repeated the platitudes that priests have uttered a thousand times against philosophical materialism—and the revisionists, smiling indulgently, mumbled (word for word after the latest Handbuch) that materialism had been “refuted” long ago. The professors treated Hegel as a “dead dog”,[2] and while themselves preaching idealism, only an idealism a thousand times more petty and banal than Hegel’s, contemptuously shrugged their shoulders at dialectics—and the revisionists floundered after them into the swamp of philosophical vulgarisation of science, replacing “artful” (and revolutionary) dialectics by “simple" (and tranquil) “evolution”. The professors earned their official salaries by adjusting both their idealist and their “critical” systems to the dominant medieval “philosophy” (i.e., to theology)—and the revisionists drew close to them, trying to make religion a “private affair”, not in relation to the modern state, but in relation to the party of the advanced class."""

VILenin

We have no love for VI Lenin and bolsheviki, but VIL described the philosophical situation of his time fairly accurately (and dare we say Kultur situation); and indeed his remarks still seem applicable to the postmodernists (including Zizek, who praises idealisms of various sorts, including the psychoanalytical sort, ad nauseum), to the rise of religious fundamentalism, and even to a certain type of liberal mysticism which follows the latest pronouncements of the "professiorial class", say the Swineford Physics Department, regarding "possible/alternative worlds". In his contempt for the professoriat, VIL's quite close to Marx's own thinking. At the same time marxist dialectical materialism should not be mistaken for Darwinism as a political model; however ugly, nauseating, or terrifying the average 'Merican might find marxism, humans are still human --not merely the Darwinian primate*--and allowed to think, plan, create as they obtain their economic and biological necessaries. It's make friends with your inner Bolshevik day here on Contingencies!

(*though evolution does hold, and Darwinists performed a service to humanity in terms of revising the dogma of monotheism. Marx himself in fact praised Darwin, at least initially (and for that matter, quoted Hume once in a while, generally not in agreement, but acknowledging his influence). As a psychological model for humans, however, Darwinian determinism has shortcomings, and has been put to nefarious uses by "social darwinists." ).