Learning Dialectical Materialism/Historical Materialism

Which chapters?

I don't think anyone on Holla Forums actually understands what dialectics is. I've made a honest attempt at understanding what it is but everything I've read said different things, often contradictory.

That's because dialectics isn't a method, but an umbrella term for many different concepts. There are so many possibilities to "analyse" something dialectically that you can look at any development and then retro-actively "predict" it from the earlier situation using the fitting variant of dialectics and thus "proving" that dialectics works.

anti-dialectics.co.uk/page 12_01.htm#Aims-Of-Essay-Twelve

This is all you need, stop engaging in mental masturbation.

I don't feel confident explaining 'how to dialectize' first here is Marx carrying out a dialectical analysis of "Consumption and Production"

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm

dialectics is a process, the process of immanent critique, showing how a thing's concept is insufficient for the thing by no means other than the thing.

It would be cool if you could annotate it somehow to show how it is "dialectical"

I refer you back to the passage in question

"The important thing to emphasize here is only that, whether production and consumption are viewed as the activity of one or of many individuals, they appear in any case as moments of one process, in which production is the real point of departure and hence also the predominant moment. Consumption as urgency, as need, is itself an intrinsic moment of productive activity. But the latter is the point of departure for realization and hence also its predominant moment; it is the act through which the whole process again runs its course. The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self-reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production."

it's been a while since I read it and I'm a little high.

I don't get dialectics and I think it's stupid. We can also identify the faults of capitalism and think of it's replacement with conventional logic, no need for this opaque hokus pokus.

Unsurprisingly - history and politics. But any area that doesn't let you get away with formal logic should work.

Our brains aren't wired perfectly. We have biases. Cognitive flaws that could be exploited by sophistry, misunderstandings, or just lazyness. Try reading some books by Kahneman (ex: Thinking, Fast and Slow) to get some insight on what I'm talking about.

Once flaw is introduced into reasoning - anything could be "proved". Therefore, anyone who relies on "conventional logic" is doomed to be conned by demagogues.

This is why we need mental discipline (philosophy) that provides tools that let us think straighter - cross-check our reasoning and remind us how world IRL tends to function.

DiaMat is indeed absolutely alien to formal logic. However, that is precisely why it is so useful.

this is not what dialectics is all about. This is simply a description of teleology.

Dialectics is simple. You start from a conclusion and fudge the premises. Anything that contradicts it, you over-analyze it by exaggerating and omitting facts.

Obligatory.

according to them, since you can't use dialectal materialism's ideas on propaganda it isn't true.

by being dead inside

No.

A wizard comes up with the word "wlack" and tells you that this is an umbrella term to describe objects that are either white or black. The wizard puts some black and white balls into an urn, shakes it, and asks you to take a ball out of it while he looks in the other direction. He tells the world that due to his special super-human abilities he is able to make the amazing prediction that the ball is wlack. Somehow, people are not impressed.

The wizard comes up with another way to prove his superiority. He asks you to choose one of these numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You say: 2. He asks you to open a cookie jar. There are no cookies inside, but a piece of paper with the following words: "I knew you would pick number 2." Maybe you are impressed now. Maybe you figure out that the wizard did hide several messages in various places, one for each number.

And that's pretty much how dialectics works. It's an umbrella term for a huge list of concepts, and you have no idea just how huge that list is. The dialectical wizard lets you choose some topic in the field of politics or history, and then announces, "I knew there was dialectics in how this unfolded." And if you choose two or three topics and ask the wizard to find dialectics in all of them, he will; and you may notice that he uses different versions of dialectics. Maybe this won't make you suspicious, since there are plenty of words in the world that have several meanings. But if you present about two dozen topics and ask the wizard to reveal the dialectics in all of them, you will notice that dialectics is really special in that there are a metric fuckton of possible meanings.

That's all there is to it. It's great to have a passion for dialectics if you want to socialize with charlatans and morons.

Nothing, historical materialism is fake and gay and anyone who defends it is mentally incompetent

how will Holla Forums ever recover?

Since nobody in here who says dialectics is just sooo awesome and wants to give a definition and some examples to show what dialectics even is, how about this: Which of the following has nothing to do with dialectics?

-a situation where influence doesn't strictly go from A to B, it goes in both directions
-some statement appears untrue because it is counter-intuitive, but it actually is true
-something acts as a stabilizer in the short run, but destabilizes in the long run
-Simpson's Paradox
-thing C is in some aspect between A and B, and in another aspect way more different from these than they are to each other
-something develops going back and forth like a pendulum
-something appears to go back and forth, but it's actually your mind approximating a situation by adjusting upper and lower bounds
-referencing some accounting identity
-prisoner's dilemma
-correlation between two values that is non-monotonic
-more general, correlation between two values that is non-linear
-when which of two models is more accurate for a system depends on the number of actors in it
-more general, when there is a big thing made of small parts, and the best small-scale and big-scale models regarding that are very different
-when a structure looks similar at very different zoom levels
-when there is a continuum where people tend to see only a few categories (eg. thin and fat people)
-when people tend to see a continuum, but there are really only a few categories that those thing or people categorized as in-between are pulled towards
-the effect that sometimes something that doesn't kill you makes you stronger
-recurrence
-when a reliable indicator of something turns unreliable once it is used for regulation
-any sort of unstable situation

No one knows what dialectics is because virtually no one here has even read Marx, let alone Hegel.

What does "doing" mean? And what do you mean under "dialectics" - Hegelian or DiaMat?

If you are asking to what DiaMat cannot be applied, the answer is: it cannot be applied to abstract concepts that have no relation to reality. Everything else is a valid target of analysis - after all, one of the tenets of analysis is understanding thing in relation to other things. I.e. expanding scope of analysis.

...

>What does "doing" mean?
Go fuck yourself dialectically, Bill Clinton.

Dialectical analysis on the other hand doesn't get more wrong than it already is when you add errors.

Because no one here is giving you a good intro read to dialectics, try this: empyreantrail.wordpress.com/2016/09/12/dialectics-an-introduction/
It's pretty damn short, and as far as I know does a good enough job of communicating some of the basics

No

Here are some notes I have you may be interested in:
{thesis-antithesis}-synthesis
{abstract-negative}-concrete
That is, there is no dialectical method as a formula

essentially, critical analysis of concepts/objects from within
One basically follows the train of thought set by the concept, the relations already within it, and those that it brings up of its own content and their relations
What is aimed at by such an analysis can be considered three things: testing coherency, testing stability, and testing for a claim to logical/material independence, in other words testing for a claim of being a coherent absolute

How does it feel to revel in ignorance :^) ?

It's remarkable how bad that text is and yet how deep AW has dropped from that (should I blame Hegel or shrooms here?).

So we have to add to the list of what dialectics can mean:
-checking a combination of claims for mutual compatibility
And this isn't restricted to actual persons making claims, and compatibility isn't about strict impossibility here, but also about parts of a thing that are unlikely to work together in harmonious fashion for long (unstable situations are already part of the list in this thread however).

Why not use different words for different concepts then, is that so hard?

So, another way of putting it: "where influence doesn't strictly go from A to B, it goes in both directions"? Then he gives this "example":
But you certainly can have use-value without exchange-value. (Not sure if it's the drugs here or that he isn't familiar with economics.)

Another way of putting it: There is A and B and they fuse into a new thing C, which is in a way "between A and B, and in another aspect way more different from these than they are to each other". The essay starts of vague and gets so vague that it can mean practically anything. Mission accomplished, I guess.