[1]mim3@mim.org says: I really have to thank K's ex-grotto for really bringing all this to a boil! I'm glad we had to dig in our heals on solipsism or we would have never learned the root of Tani's thinking and why she thinks she likes Lysenko. We also would not have learned what is absolutely essential to get Phil to do in his paper on Lysenko. Thanks to a xerox Tani sent us March 20, it is now clear that Tani spent the last 100K talking about a SECONDARY source in regard to Lysenko and MEC. Her repeated parroting of Liberal shit about Lenin comes from page 139. (I believe the author is Dominique Lecourt.) If she had only read p. 137 as carefully, she would have noted that MEC came out in 1909 and her author was referring to 1920 (just as I said in previous posts before I got this document from Tani)! In other words, Tani's secondary source did not make the mistake Tani did: claim Lenin did not read Bogdanov as if Lenin were criticizing something he hadn't read. She did not read MEC and Bogdanov. We here at MIM did long ago; yet she is so eager to preen against (new transitive verb) us that she pulls out of context bits and pieces from a secondary source to attack MIM with! This secondary source should have made a lot of things clear to her that MIM has been saying all along. 1. Talking about Lysenko without talking about MEC is nonsense. Rightly this book she sent parts of goes into that in detail. (Tani complains about my references, but at least I mentioned a title in that one Proletariat reference. All the stuff she has ever sent me is devoid of both author and title. Talk about psychic vampiring, we gave her author and title.) 2. The writer does explain like MIM said that Bodganov is ultraleft and should show Tani the roots of her own errors in this regard. 3. The writer says Khruschev backed Lysenko to the hilt. That means something has to give. Either this source does not take up the correct politics or Tani is continuing to infiltrate us with Khruschevism the same way Khruschev did by hailing Stalin. Either this source does not take up the correct politics or Tani is continuing to infiltrate us with Khruschevism the same way Khruschev did by hailing Stalin. 4. "Anyone who has read MEC would be justified in thinking that Bogdanov could hardly survive such an onslaught and that his system, dismantled and denounced by Lenin as an eclectic assemblage of 'unspeakable nonsense' could be expected to have disappeared promptly." (p. 138) The author considers this a reasonable conclusion but only tempers it with the rise of the proletcult ultraleftism. 5. Tani's SECONDARY source reached at least one similar conclusion to what I said, that Bogdanov was "a good idealist." (p. 154) "This thesis finds a place in what has to be called the idealist philosophy of history constructed by Bogdanov." (p. 152) So take it from MIM or take it from Lecourt who Tani and Phil supposedly admire for his book. What is not possible to get from the book is this. A. Mao said it all better and briefer. He distinguished between the AGENDA of science and its OBJECT OF STUDY. He wrote at length on dialectics and uneven development, but in essence this distinction that Mao drew on the summation of Lysenko is the one Lysenko did not draw. This is something that should have been seen in Tani's reading of the Science for the People folks who wrote about China under Mao. Stalin was right to fund Lysenko. It was urgent to raise crop yields. The Ivory Tower geneticists simply hadn't produced and often seemed like they didn't care. Not caring or answering DIFFERENT questions is a matter of AGENDA. They might be proceeding scientifically to answer what INTERESTS THEM, but the proletariat has the right to decide where to spend its money! It has the right to decide who it is going to feed, clothe and shelter for the purposes of science. Same for artists. Where Lysenko and Stalin lost is where they went into the OBJECT of study and intervened politically. If nerds want to study drosophila forever in their labs and offer no promise of application for the needs of hunger and homelessness or other proletarian needs, then screw them right there! That's enough reason to be done with them, cut off their funding. It is not necessary to go and deny that there will ever be DNA discovered. That is how this thing is read now and that is our only failing in the Stalinist camp, something Mao fixed and on a much more massive scale than Stalin's and Lysenko's relatively puny intervention. Mao was able to generalize this whole issue to a much higher level in accordance with dialectics and apply it to the whole society. Tani should also know this already, because she knows that Lewontin does not try anything so foolish as to sum up Lysenko without reading what the Chinese had to say at length first. We can talk about Ivory Tower elitism, snobbishness, Lysenko's green thumb, Lysenko's political agenda, the racists' agenda etc. all by distinguishing agenda from object. Nothing worthwhile in Tani's political project is lost, only the solipsism and post-modernism. B. Proletarian science does not consist of a different answer to the same question that bourgeois science asks. Bourgeois science does not care about feeding the people. It has a different agenda. There is no need for Bogdanov's solipsism to distinguish between a proletarian science agenda and a bourgeois one. What Bogdanov's theory of knowledge is NOT is dialectical. It is rather every class an island, every social group an island, ultimately post-modernism's every individual an island and it leads to Lunarcharsky's god-building. The writer agrees and calls it "epistemological relativism." (p. 151) Welcome back S&M to K's grotto. Bogdanov said it's OK. Anyone can check the Bogdanov quote on p. 122 of whatever it is Tani sent me. It's post-modernism. Calling Sir Francis Galton or Eysenck "bourgeois science" is too much respect. It's pseudo-science. Even a bourgeois can figure that out. C. It is not necessary to reject monism to recognize the impact of the MOP on thought. That the brain is matter was put forward by all of Lenin, Stalin and Mao and they put the proletariat's resources on the line with exactly that thought. Tani's contention contrary is hogwash. D. Bogdanov's monism is no different than empiricist monism or Hegelianism. The "Amerikan" founding fathers said that God placed something in each persyn. Hegel thought God manifested itself in matter. There is nothing new about such perceived unities. It is not that Bogdanov "hated dualism" as Tani says, but that he sought to smuggle battered dualism into the only place where it might be safe from Marxist critique. Finally, I would like to say that if I were you COSers and I read the footnote on page 146, and someone else could not call that out as pure idealism being described, I'd be screaming Damasio.