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3/21/2025 Dogmatism, Tatian the Syrian, and the Trotskyite to Neocon Pipeline By: Carlos L. GarridoRead Now Alfred North Whitehead said that “dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.”[1] In a world that is ever-changing, constantly developing, to hold onto any ideas as purely fixed is a grave mistake. I have called this mistake, in the past, a purity fetish.[2] Dogmatism is a clear iteration of it. History teaches us that dogmatism not only stifles your ability to understand the world, but often turns into its opposite. Throughout history it has been the most fervent dogmatists, the most excessive proponents of a stale and fixed worldview, who often become the most heretical. We need only to recall the figure of Tatian the Syrian, the second century Christian theologian. He was a student of the great martyr, Flavius Justinus, also known as St. Justin (A. D. 100 – 164). St. Justin was a cultured convert who traversed through various philosophical schools of thought, from Stoicism, Pythagoreanism, and finally, Platonism, before arriving at Christianity. He was the first, that I know of, to draw out the homologies between Socrates and Jesus. As Frederick Copleston writes, for St. Justin, just as “Socrates, in the power of logos, or as its instrument, tried to lead men away from falsehood into truth, evil men put him to death as an impious atheist; so Christians, who follow and obey the incarnate Logos itself and who denounce the false gods, are termed atheists.”[3] For St. Justin, “the work of Socrates was a service of truth… a preparation for the complete work of Christ.”[4] His condemnation, therefore, was a “rehearsal or anticipation of the condemnation of Christ and his followers.”[5] There was, in St. Justin, a great gratitude to the pagan philosophers, whom he saw as divining the truth “in the power of logos,” whereas “Christ, however, is the Logos itself, incarnate.”[6] The philosophers, then, prepared humanity for the truth which was to be revealed, or embodied, in Christ. Greek philosophy was not a desecration of the truth of the Christians. It’s inability to fully live up to the Christian worldview is not cause for condemnation. There is no purity fetish in St. Justin’s understanding of the relation of philosophy to Christianity. Instead, there is a deep appreciation for the “rational kernels,” from the standpoint of his Christian worldview, which the philosophers anticipated. His student, Tatian the Syrian, is a renegade to this more advanced, procedural understanding of development. Instead of seeing how Christianity is in a process of carrying forward fundamental insights, most of which have been ingenuously anticipated by the pagan philosophers, Tatian looks back at the philosophical precursors as perverters and falsifiers of the truth of Christianity. For him, “Greek philosophers had taken from the Scriptures whatever truth they possessed and whatever they added thereto was nothing but falsity and perversion.”[7] There is then, for Tatian, “little use for Greek learning and Greek thought.”[8] Insofar as it fails to live up to his pure and dogmatic conception of Christianity, it is to be condemned as a desecration. Interestingly, Tatian, who urged against the desecration of the Christian worldview by the impurity of Pagan philosophy, would himself develop into a heretic who “fell away from the Church into Valentinian Gnosticism, subsequently founding the sect of the Encratites.” Here we see a clear case of quantity turning into quality. His excessive commitment to the purity of the Christian worldview would, at a nodal point, leap into its own form of desecration, into hereticism. For any intellectual tradition, dogmatism means the inability to carry forth the outlook into a new world. It is, quite literally, intellectual death. A call to stay stationed in the past, in a moment where the dogma was correct. But time is a silly thing. From one moment to another, what is right turns wrong, what is wrong turns right. Conditions are always changing. Like G. W. F. Hegel said of motion, time too is “existent contradiction itself.”[9] Time is becoming, a coming and ceasing to be. And while there is certainly continuity, it is a continuity that is itself sustained through changing. Like Lampedusa writes in The Leopard, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”[10] Continuity can ever only be sustained through changing. This is what the Hegelian category of sublation teaches us, one advances through simultaneously cancelling and preserving into something new. This dialectical insight was already understood by Aristotle, who held that change itself implied something stayed the same, either the substance or its accidental properties. The virtue of the Marxist worldview, of dialectical materialism, is that it has this appreciation for the ever-transforming character of the world as its basic premises. It is rooted, as I have argued before, in a dialectical ontology of becoming.[11] It is, in a sense, quite literally the opposite of dogmatism. Whereas dogmatism, as an iteration of the purity fetish, seeks to hold steadfast onto pure ideas, Marxism understands that our knowledge of the world evolves out of, and with, the world itself. There can be no ideas which are true irrespective of context. Universal truths, for Marxism as for Hegel, are always concrete; they obtain their universality through their ability to be re-embodied in a variety of particulars.[12] Nonetheless, Marxism has had its fair share of Tatians. In all traditions within the canon there have been those who follow the letter, and not the spirit, of the texts. Those who hold steadfast onto the conclusions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc., and not the worldview which mediated the arrival at those conclusions. In various ways, when such dogmatism develops, it always corresponds to either a stifling of the class struggle, or an explicit turn to the thought of the class enemies. Kautsky’s dogmatism, his inability to see the plurality of forms the class struggle could take, leads him to become a renegade. He lacked dialectics and therefore operated, especially at the end, with a mechanical caricature of Marxism. This excessive commitment to orthodoxy in a changed world turned his “Marxism” into its opposite, into social chauvinism and right opportunism, in short, into a collaboration with the ruling order he once so vehemently fought against. As Lenin tells us, Kautsky fully appreciated the need for flexible tactics; learned and taught Marxian dialectics; but in the application of this dialectic, he committed such a mistake, or proved in practice to be so undialectical, so incapable of taking into account the rapid change of forms and the rapid acquiring of new content by the old forms… The main reason for [his] bankruptcy was that he was “enchanted” by one definite form of growth of the working class movement and of socialism, he forgot all about the one-sidedness of this form, [and] was afraid of seeing the sharp break which objective conditions made inevitable, and continued to repeat simple, routine, and at first glance, incontestable truths, such as: ‘three is more than two.’ But politics is more like algebra than arithmetic; it is more like higher mathematics than lower mathematics. In reality, all old forms of the socialist movement have acquired new content, and, consequently, a new sign, the ‘minus’ sign, has appeared in front of all the figures; but our wiseacres stubbornly continued (and still continue) to persuade themselves and others that ‘minus three’ is more than ‘minus two.’[13] Kautsky would not be the last in our tradition who traversed from revolutionary to renegade thanks to dogmatism, i.e., the absence of a proper dialectical materialist worldview. In the U.S., for instance, there is a whole “Trotskyist to neocon” pipeline. These supposed “Marxists,” like Kautsky, had such a deeply entrenched purity fetish dogmatism, that they rejected how conditions had changed, how socialism, especially in its earliest stages, would look nothing like the highest, or even lowest, stages of communism developed by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program. This would lead them, as they are famous for, to condemn various socialist states for not living up to their pure idea of socialism. None of the socialist states, for them, “were real socialism.” Only the pure idea in their heads was. Like Tatian, whose dogmatic Christianity turned into its opposite, into hereticism, these dogmatic “Marxists” turned into their apparent opposite, to neoconservatives. While most remained only implicitly supporting the imperialist order through their condemnations of actually existing socialism, a great deal of them would explicitly join the ranks of the most ferocious imperialists. From Tatian to the Trotskyite neocons, history teaches us that a dogmatic commitment to a worldview often turns into its opposite, into hereticism or the worldview of our class enemies. It is easy to be a dogmatist. It requires only memorizing conclusions and stale formulas. It certainly is much simpler than consistently reevaluating the concrete concretely. But what it adds in simplicity it takes away in accuracy and efficiency. It is simple precisely because it is untrue, because it seeks to foist on an ever-changing world a map of conclusions from a previous moment in the world’s development. We avoid dogmatism by consistently refining the dialectical materialist worldview. We avoid dogmatism by being radically open to self-criticism. We avoid dogmatism by having the intellectual courage to creatively and critically approach the novel problems of our day.[14] Today technology affords us the capacity to do this together, to study collectively the classics of our tradition to prevent slippages into dogmatism. This is what my seminar on Marxism-Leninism will be doing. You can sign up for that HERE. [1] Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1968), 58. [2] Carlos L. Garrido, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (Dubuque: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023). [3] Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy Vol. 2 Medieval Philosophy Part 1., (New York: image Books, 1962), 31. [4] Ibid. [5] Ibid. [6] Ibid., 32. [7] Ibid., 33. [8] Ibid., 32. [9] G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1993), 440. [10] Guiseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1960): Accessed via: https://books-library.net/files/books-library.online-01090019At2Q0.pdf [11] Carlos L. Garrido, “Introduction” to Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (Dubuque: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022). [12] Garrido, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, 99. [13] V. I. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (New York: International Publishers, 2016), 82-3. [14] For more on this, see: Carlos L. Garrido, “Marxism-Leninism, The Communist Party, and Education,” Red America 002 (December 2024) pp. 17-22. https://redamerica.acp.us/ Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE. Archives March 2025
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