Disjointed thoughts on first grappling with Hegel

• If I understand what I've read so far right - and that's a big motorscootin' if - Hegel argues that the objective and the subjective form a dialectical unity (as compared to the idea that the subjective is a more-or-less imperfect copy of the objective, as mechanical materialism would have it; or that the objective is only an agreement between subjectivities, as Scientology and other wacky New Age beliefs would have it). Doesn't that make him a non-dualist in precisely the same way that Advaita Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, Sufism and Chaos Marxism would recognize? I really hope I've got that right.
• Karl Marx said very clearly that the proletariat would become fit to be the ruling class during the struggle to become the ruling class. The subject of action becomes its object and transforms itself. And yet, actually-existing revolutionary socialists seem to believe in one of the two one-sided, undialectical narratives set forth in this article - either they think that the personal has nothing to do with the political (like Corin Redgrave saying "If Gerry Healey is a rapist, then we need more rapists!") or thinking they're the same thing (viz. "callout culture"). Personal change outside the political struggle is just neoliberal self-fashioning, the ego changing itself into more efficient fuel to be burned in capitalism's engines. But if you don't change as a person via the struggle, and for the better, then you by God have a problem, and you're probably on the wrong track politically.
• I'm thinking of writing a book entitled Read This When You're Depressed: Self-Help For Revolutionaries. Instead of sappy New Age affirmations which build up your ego, it would remind you just how far you are from a special and unique snowflake. Look: if all the above is true, the Universe is a hologram; "as above so below", or in other words, the whole is reflected in the part. Therefore you are as you are precisely because the Universe is as it is, and there could be no other way. "Free choice'', clinical depression and various other psychological states and stations must exist somewhere in this universe - just like, under capitalism, grinding poverty must exist somewhere. So why shouldn't it be you? It certainly doesn't mean you're bad or inadequate - you feel bad and inadequate because the system requires some people to feel bad and inadequate. Once you understand this you can stop blaming yourself, because your Self is an illusion caused by the necessity of living in the $2.99 Material World.

The metaphysical dialectic

I'm too stressed and my brain is too close to a homogenous mush to work this out much further, but I want to extend the point I made in a post below that a dialectic approach to the thought/object, subjective/objective, spirit/matter, machine/soul dichotomy is the only alternative to either mechanical materialism (which lets stupid idealism in through the back door via voluntarism or "positive thinking" bullshit), or stupid idealism (which lets mechanical materialism in through the back door with the idea of cause -> effect between thought and action, eg. the Catholic Church attempting to draw up a scientific analysis of miracles).

And that addition is the question of quality turning into quantity. The way you can tell that Stalinism is a form of capitalism as opposed to a form of socialism is its belief in pursuing quantity above all else, in the blind assurance that this is automatically the same thing as quality. Whether this is measured in $$$ of profit or millions of surplus tons of pig-iron or kitty litter, no-one actually thinks of acting like Marx suggested and seeing what the use value to actual human beings is of all this piled up "stuff", and what its non-quantifiable costs are. A sure sign that a "revolutionary" group has succumbed to capitalist/state capitalist logic is that it measures its success using quantitative tools - X papers sold, Y people at this demo or that meeting, Z extra members. A real revolutionary group would measure itself by its use-value - i.e. what it actually makes happen.

Robert Fripp, who is one of those "intelligent idealists" whom Lenin liked better than the stupid materialists and so do I, talks about "quality" as if it came from a Higher Realm and intersected with quantity. That's at least a bit closer to a materialist dialectic and is a sign of taking the question seriously.