No problem about the misread ... it happens.
Dialectical Materialist, huh? That's the heart of Marxist thought and it has proved pretty unsuccessful at predicting social or political development anywhere.
The problem with Marxism and related philosophies is that they simply can't get good with the realities of humanity. They try to reason their way into utopia using metaphors that simply don't apply to human psychology.
The ancient Greeks talked about the metaphor of the phase transformation of water from liquid to gas. You heat it, heat it, heat it with no change ... but then, PRESTO, at some critical moment, it transforms into a gas, the same molecule but with radically different properties. Marx. and the communist regimes that would adopt his ideas, loved using this metaphor to explain how societies could suddenly transform from "base capitalists" into "socialist utopias."
And yet it never happened. Anywhere.
Humans are humans and they have a stubborn tendency to "revert to the mean" (to biological imperatives) ... that's why "history never repeats, but it rhymes."
There are universal human characteristics that are hard-wired and this limits the degree to which we can change.
Leftists hate this. Their worldview is based upon viewing human beings "as they could be" rather than human beings "as they are."
You can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear.
Thanks for the reply - I see we start from diverse points of view. Yours, perhaps idealism and determinism - mine, historical materialism. I don't believe we are born as sows ears, our conditions turn us into that and can equally have us become silk. I have reached this conclusion from seeing how those born into privilege are all-but-guaranteed to live lives of comfort, while those born into poverty are condemned to stay there regardless of how hard they attempt to get out. It is these conditions which lead to revolution - ask the Americans living under British rule about that - it become insufferable, they revolted - Revolution isn't a bad word for me, but each revolution can be judged in terms of history and the gains which were achieved for the society as a whole.
I have really enjoyed the exchanges, SIr - and look I forward to many more.
@trumanity,
I am a Canadian (so still part of the British Commonwealth) and so I learned a different perspective on the causes of the American Revolution ... although to be fair, Americans scholars have become a lot more honest in the past 30 years.
Americans WERE NOT living in intolerable conditions under the British. Even the famous "Tea Tax" that helped spark the Revolution, left Americans paying less for Tea than Londoners.
What drove Americans nuts, and rightly so, was lack of direct political representation in the British Parliament. In this sense, they were "second-class citizens."
To be fair to the British, the logistical nightmare of having direct political representation for colonies 2-3 weeks (in the best-case-scenario) away by sailing ship, would have been insoluble.
Mercantilism also played a big part. By restricting Americans from trading with non-British entities severely inhibited their economy ... leading to dramatically different economic interests and massive law-breaking (smuggling).
With respect to the "cow's ear" thing, let's be careful about making moral inferences based upon singular analogies.
I do not believe humans are born being "sow's ears." I believe human beings are born being human beings ... and that entails a lot of hard-wired biology that cannot be overcome with political platitudes.
People work harder for their own self-interests than they do for some nebulous concept of the State. "Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely." If you accept these premises about human beings, as I do, you design a dramatically different society than that envisioned by Marx.