constantly changing, so theory & practice (must & do) change to meet changing conditions.
Georg Lukas defined (Marxist) orthodoxy as fidelity to the "Marxist method", not fidelity to "dogmas".
Stephen Jay Gould: "Dialectical thinking should be taken more seriously by Western scholars, not discarded because some nations of the second world have constructed a cardboard version as an official political doctrine."
Dialectics is an old philosophical term dating back to Ancient Greece where it signified the idea that truth can be arrived at through dialogue, the clash of opposing arguments. At the end of the eighteenth century, Hegel, inspired by the French Revolution, used a much advanced dialectical method to attempt an account of the whole history of human consciousness and thought as developing through internal contradictions, but in Hegel the dialectic remained confined to the realm of ideas.
Marx took over and transformed the Hegelian dialectic, giving it a materialist foundation. For Marx the driving force of history, both human and natural, was not conflict between opposed ideas or concepts but conflict between opposed material and social forces.
The philosophical starting point of dialectics is that everything, everything in the universe, is moving and changing. This is now established scientific fact and it has profound political implications – think how often you hear people say ‘You will never change such and such’ or ‘ There will always be…racism, inequality, rulers or whatever’ – but it also has philosophical implications because dialectics is the logic of change.
http://johnmolyneux.blogspot.com/2007/03/marxist-dialectic.html
So I guess I don't see why the nod to Zen adds anything. Marxism is all about constantly "rethinking past conceptions."
Zen was the Buddhism of the ruling class (aristocrats & military).
Buddhism...was introduced into Japan in the sixth century A.D... It gained the patronage of the ruling class, which supported the building of temples and production of Buddhist art. In the early centuries...the Buddhist influence was limited mainly to the upper class. From the late Heian period (A.D. 794-1185) through the Kamakura period (1185-1333), Pure Land (Jodo) and Nichiren Shoshu sects, which had much wider appeal, spread throughout all classes of society. These sects stressed experience and faith, promising salvation in a future world.
Zen Buddhism, which encourages the attainment of enlightenment through meditation and an austere life-style, had wide appeal among the bushi, or samurai--the warrior class--who had come to have great political power. Under the sponsorship of the ruling military class, Zen had a major impact on Japanese aesthetics. In addition, as Japan scholar Robert N. Bellah has argued, Buddhist sects popular among commoners in the Tokugawa period encouraged values such as hard work and delayed rewards, which, like Protestantism in Europe, helped lay the ideological foundation for Japan's industrial success.
http://countrystudies.us/japan/61.htm
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