What made you finally 'get' dialectics? What article or book made the penny drop?

What made you finally 'get' dialectics? What article or book made the penny drop?

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nobody gets it cuz its bulshit that dose not make any sense.
Only calssical logic, and racis is true way of thinking

I got triggered by the 9fag logo so I edited that shit out

oh fug i didn't notice it till you pointed it out and must bear the shame of having such a thing tainting my hard drive

...

marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm

Reading Hegel's Reason in History helped me understand the core of dialectic.

Get a load of this pre-Kantian.

For any prospective learner of dialectic, ignore this drivel and read this instead:

bunkermag.org/what-is-dialectic-and-why-care/

I hope that this article accomplishes the aim of clarifying dialectics in a way which very few articles do. What I write here is in no way original conception nor secret knowledge. Many authors have written on this topic with clarity, however, these authors are not known in popular discourse nor are their works the first to come up in a search engine inquiry, as such I set my task here merely as a condensed exposition of dialectics for others in hopes of sparing them the necessity of the same long and still continuing road I’ve taken to reach the grasp of the subject I have now.

=The so-called method=

There truly is no such thing as dialectic as a method. Immanent (internal) analysis is immanent analysis, and insofar as Marx and Hegel engage in such an activity there is no difference, there is no ‘idealist’ nor ‘materialist’ dialectical method. This is not to say there is no fundamental difference between Marxists and Hegelians, but that difference is certainly not dialectics themselves. I shall expand on this later on, but for now the focus shall be on dialectics as such.

What is often called ‘dialectical method’, I must repeat, is a method that exists neither in Marx nor in Hegel like the likewise mythical scientific method of hypothesis-experiment-conclusion. There is no formula to this ‘logic’, no set of rules to apply over and over. There is no thesis-antithesis-¬synthesis, nor abstract-¬negative-concrete. What is wrong with these formulas is not so much that they are just plain wrong, but that they serve to confuse the matter for someone who does not already know the logic of immanent critique. As description of the process the former is understandable to some degree, and the latter even correct to a high degree. The issue, however, is that people generally don’t understand that these are mere descriptions and not the process itself. They conflate a processed result for the process that creates those results, and in thinking that dialectics is this description they are led to misunderstand that the form that results is the method itself.

What is often called dialectics as a method is more properly understood as immanent critique, i.e. critical analysis of concepts/objects from within. This kind of analysis does not use any conceptual resources outside of its concept/object to critique it, no form it must fit into. By this it is meant that 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; the content being investigated leads the investigation itself, and the analyst is more like an observer watching carefully for their suspect to justify or incriminate themselves. What is aimed at by such an analysis can, in simplified terms, be 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.

=Dialectics=

That there is no dialectical method is not to deny that dialectics exist. Dialectics is plural for dialectic. By a dialectic it is to be understood that this must always mean a relation of inner contradiction. For clarification’s sake, let us say that a dialectic is shorthand for a dialectical relationship.

Dialectical relationships: Such relations are of the kind of contradictory forces or concepts that in their meaning, or existence, necessarily presuppose and require their opposite. To have one is to have the other. To think through one leads to thinking of the other. To change one is to change the other. This is the famous unity of opposites dialectics is described as by many Marxists. Such ‘materialist’ relations are: {Worker—capitalist}; {[use-value]—value}; {material—ideal}; {base—superstructure} etc.

The worker and the boss have no meaning or existence without each other, and if you have one you know you have the other, likewise the distinction of use-value and exchange-value requires that each presuppose the other in order to mean anything, etc. In material relations of this kind this means that a change in one is a change in its other, e.g. a change in the economic base leads to changes in the ideological superstructure and vice versa even if not immediately.

Now, you may ask how this fits in with something like a commodity being dialectical. By this all that can be meant is that the thing/concept contains a dialectic as its content. This is much like a version of Hegel’s sublation term, a concept that cancels yet preserves a contradiction by suspending and mediating it to avoid the mortal problem of immediacy, of unavoidable contradiction, a metaphor of a struggle to the death. This movement towards mediation, of avoiding contradictions, is one of the key elements in which Marx turns away from Hegel.

This is, in a strict sense, all that a dialectic can be. Whenever we are engaging in dialectics we know that we are dealing with the study of a plurality or series of dialectical relationships. The logical movement from one dialectic to another occurs by an inner analysis of these contradictory relationships, the inner development of one from the other and back again, and onwards insofar as the analysis generates more concepts to continue. Why do we move from dialectic to dialectic, contradiction to contradiction? The reason is simple: because they are contradictions. In the sphere of thought the clash of contradiction forces thought to move of its own accord, and in the sphere of materiality contradiction manifests as clashing forces which in their relation and contact inherently destabilize. may end in a sublation or dissolution after many moments of sublation.

It is said by some that dialectical thinking is best learned by observing it in action, so here are three examples of a very basic level.

—Example 1—

A classical Hegelian analysis is the famous {Being-Nothing}-Becoming dialectic. Pure Being is empty of content to say anything about; its content is nothing. Since Nothing is what is meant by pure Being, Nothing is treated as the concept that is absolute and the analysis moves on to Nothing. However, if Nothing is the truth and absolute, then Nothing is. Because Nothing is, our thought immediately turns back to Being. Being and Nothing are one and the same content as both are empty, and seem indistinguishable from each other; each is constantly passing from itself to the other, becoming each other, for their meaning rests on implicitly referring to the other. Nothing becomes Being, and Being becomes Nothing as each is thought through. In Becoming we have a concept which mediates the transition from Being and Nothing into each other, yet retains their clear difference. Becoming is the sublation, the cancelation and maintaining of the contradiction, of Being and Nothing as moments of itself. Becoming’s content is Being and Nothing passing into each other, and though in content they seem to be the exact same concept, their mediation through Becoming gives them a sustaining determinate difference as moments of Becoming as coming into being and ceasing to be.

—Example 2—

A classical Marxian analysis is the commodity-{(use-value)-value} dialectic. A commodity, as a concept, contains within it a tense contradiction between two concepts of value in the economic sphere: use-value, what we desire a commodity for in use, and exchange-value, what we can trade or exchange it for. How do we know that commodities contain these two concepts? Because they are necessary presuppositions for commodities to serve the actual economic role they do. These two values cannot be had at the same time. If we want the use-value we must give up the exchange-value and vice versa. The consuming aspect of the market wants use-value, the selling side wants exchange value.

—Example 3—

An example of a simple analysis of this kind is an article I wrote on the concept of free speech. A simple summary of the analysis is that free speech is contradictory in its idea and its reality, and as such it is an {ideal-material} kind of contradiction. Free speech as a right upon analysis leads us to ask what kind of speech actually enacts its condition of protection, and we find it is only dissenting speech of those in minorities or outside the status quo power that actually falls under the need of such a protection of speech. Insofar as one speaks things in the acceptable range of popular or power discourse there is no need for protection. The analysis moves forward and questions why speech, mere words, should give ground for censorship at all.

One finds that speech is not mere words, hot air, but is also activity with practical purpose to convey messages, to create responses and actions. This action related aspect of speech is what censorship aims to stop. If speech were mere words nobody should ever fear speech, but speech has actual capacity to be a force that moves people to action, and action in the social sphere means real struggle for changing the dominant power and the structures of power themselves. Free speech as it is known in the west only protects dissenting speech as mere words, but it does not and cannot protect dissenting speech that aims to make action to change the status quo.

Free speech in the end does not concern itself with speech as a medium of social activity at all, only mere words spoken to the wind. This is the contradiction: {free speech - empty speech}. Free speech, when it is claimed to exist, only exists as empty speech, mere words in the wind with no power, no capacity to make movement happen. This is why being a socialist during most of the last century was grounds for censorship and even imprisonment in the US, because there was a real danger that socialist speech would be a force and spark a revolution if ignored. There is nothing more dangerous than ideas of dissent in a time where critical minds provide fertile soil to push contradictions to breaking points of action.

That free speech is contradictory as a concept is, however, not to imply that dissenters cannot leverage it to their advantage, indeed in reality many people successfully do so precisely because the state apparatus, though it is a tool of the ruling class, is not a conscious machine of perfect repression. An important point about this contradiction, however, is that as dissidents against capitalism we will ultimately lose this card to stay the hand of the ruling class and will have to openly fight to regain and reassert this freedom in a new society.

Notice that I did not bother here to seek a third concept for free speech to be sublated under, I merely wanted to point out the contradiction. If one was to take a guess for what mediates free speech into tolerable contradiction it would most likely be some concept of the state apparatus that finds its place here. Marx remarked that the ideas of ‘bourgeois right’ would continue on into communism until the economy could reach a point of such abundance that the material basis of rights, scarcity and the necessary dependence of humans to each other, would disappear. Until then, like it or not, rights are in some form useful for mediating our troubles and differences regardless of their inherent contradictory nature.

=The actual meaning and difference of dialectical idealism/materialism=

In the realm of reason we cannot abide contradiction as being the final truth, not even Hegel found contradictions acceptable, thus he saw Reason moving from concept to concept to find ways to accommodate these seemingly irresolvable affronts to reason by way of mediating concepts that sublated contradictions and in that way ‘reconciled’ the contradicting terms. For Hegel, reality cannot and must not be accepted as being ultimately a pure contradiction, irrational or irreconcilable. Contradictions are momentary hiccups, misunderstandings, problems whose solutions are only one mediating step away; they always arise, but they also always resolve in mediation. For Hegel all contradictions are resolved in the Absolute Idea which mediates the entirety of the contradictions of his Logic as well as mediating itself.

For Marx there is no final mediation that can stave off every contradiction, some contradictions are fated to end in death, complete cancellation with no sublation nor remainder. This is perhaps the central difference in the “method” of dialectics as alluded to by Marx in the afterword to the second edition of Capital where he claims his dialectics are the direct opposite of Hegel’s [1]. The central difference does not directly make sense understood as standard views of idealism or materialism as the primacy of the mental or the physical even though this is what Marx seems to allude to when mentioning Hegel’s inversion of the world as resulting from thought, the world merely being the external form of the Idea.

Hegel’s idealism is not a metaphysical idealism of the kind in which everything is mental, but rather an idealism of the kind of which the typical centrist liberal suffers from: the world is going on the right path, there are problems but there is no fundamental problem (contradiction) to halt our progress. Hegel acknowledged private property as the root of modern society, capitalism, and its successes and problems. Hegel believed that private property, being the ground of the concept of rights, was the necessary progression of the realization of freedom in the world. What Hegel failed to see, but that Marx did, is that in the end a society grounded on private property could not actualize freedom and was actually a new form of slavery.

What contradiction told Hegel and Marx was something different and directly discernible as their irreconcilable difference. For Hegel contradiction is a signal of incompleteness of understanding, of pieces of the puzzle of the world not fitting properly due to a missing piece. For Marx contradiction signaled that the puzzle was defective from its conception. This is the true difference of Hegel’s idealism and Marx’s materialism. Marx, wrongly or rightly, asserted that there was indeed a knowable and known human nature (contrary to most socialists’ foolish denial and regurgitation of the claim that there isn’t) that is unchanging. What kind of nature? A social nature, and it is this nature that is the ground and justification for the claim that communism is the ‘true’ societal form of humanity. Communism alone is the form of life which is in harmony with human nature, the world in which humanity is fully aware of itself and consciously, rationally, and freely develops its powers and accomplishes its desired aims with no appeal to anything outside of its agency.

=Why do dialectics matter?=

So if dialectics is not a formal method that is applied, and a dialectic is only an internal relation of contradicting concepts or forces, what exactly is useful about it? Why do many socialists value this kind of thinking? Well, first it must be said that dialectics as a term is so vague to most who use it that it is basically meaningless. The good reputation of dialectics on the socialist left comes mainly from the Marxist tradition due to Marx’s vast use of them, particularly the claim that Capital as a scientific economic theory would be impossible without them.

What exactly is the great achievement of the four volume long theory of Capital? There are books upon books written about this topic, an unbelievable voluminous literature exists to dissect and critique it. What Marx achieved were many insights, but three really important discoveries are the logical origin of capitalism in the commodity, the crisis prone nature of capitalism, and the peculiar concept of the working class (proletariat) as a class whose victory over the capitalists was not just its own nullification as a class, but the nullification of class as a social relation entirely.

The dialectic of {(use-value)—exchange-value} is the ultimate source, the gene, of the entire logical edifice of capitalism. This discovery by Marx is monumental in that it really did provide the scientific ground for putting forth a truly anti-capitalist economic mode and social formation. This is the radicalism of scientific socialism, it strikes at the very root of the system and openly and emphatically denies that economic and political revolution can be anything other than the complete eradication of this dialectic. The proper scientific conclusion of socialist economics is that commodity production must be completely rejected.

Something that is often forgotten when the value dialectic is in focus is that there are multiple dialectics in which this particular dialectic is nested in. In the background of the dialectic of value are the {forces of production(FoP)—relations of production(RoP)} dialectic and the class dialectic. While the dialectic of value and class are an unfortunately necessary mistake that ends in its own negation, the {FoP—RoP} dialectic is no such deadly dialectic. The historical contradiction between these two does have a resolution: communism. The reason why is quite simple: the whole contradiction happens only because of the class dialectic happening. It is in communism that the contradiction of a fettering of technologic progress by social relations of class interest disappears. Science in this social mode can proceed unimpeded by problems of destroying jobs, of killing the golden goose of labor which lays the golden eggs of profit, as well as being unchained from servitude to develop for capital’s ends instead of human ends.

Moving on to the dialectic of class it should be well noted that the dialectic of value occurs in class. Class is embodied in the different forms of class society: patriarch and wife, master and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and worker. Class continues to exist from class society after class society, each merely shifting about the problem of the oppressing leech and the oppressed host according to some new justification either by nature, gods, or denial that it is a relationship of class at all. The working class, according to Marx, was a new and unique class whose destiny is to eliminate the dialectic of class. Why is the victory of the working class the end of class? The answer is simple and a bit complex.

First, the working class is the universal class in the dialectic of class. In the {capitalist—worker} dialectic it is really the case of the 1% and the 99%. The working class, in liberating itself, has no other to subjugate in the 1% for they cannot be leeched off for the working class to live better or easier. The working class can only ‘subjugate’ itself, otherwise understood as being its own master. Class as a relation requires two classes, and since it is the case that there is no second class to the working class upon its victory, then it follows that class as an existing socio-economic category is negated with no remainder to sublate.

Let’s take a small detour here and ask something that is in the background of all of these analyses, and that is the question of why some contradictions are fully negated and others are not. Why are class and value unable to resolve in mediated harmony unlike the contradiction between the forces and relations of production dialectic? The answer to that is, though I must say this is only tentative, that the former are dialectics of ideal alienation and the latter is a dialectic of material alienation. The reason class and value must self-destruct is because they are ideological delusions with no basis in the material reality of humanity as human. One could say that the reason these dialectics are fundamentally contradictory at all is because they contradict the material basis of social life and cannot stabilize or realize themselves in it, i.e. the problem of the dialectic of class is that it is, quite literally and philosophically, unreal. A delusion cannot be made to cohere with reality no matter how many ways one twists it, and that is exactly what these dialectics are: delusions of alienated human agency and power.

The dialectic of forces and relations of production take place in and through class, a set of misunderstandings and obfuscations of what has always been the case: that humans have all along had all the power that they thought was in some metaphysical other such as gods, the market, or even nature. Why can’t we say then, if this is the case, that the forces/relations of production dialectic also ends in pure negation with no remainder like class?

The {FoP—RoP} dialectic is grounded in labor and form the content of a mode of production, i.e. forms of society. It is because of labor that we enter into RoP and develop the FoP. The contradiction between these two aspects of human social labor, however, are almost single handedly generated by the dialectic of class. That is not to say, however, that primitive communism had a non-contradictory relation between the FoP and RoP. It is, after all, the development of the FoP into agriculture which destabilizes primitive communism’s nature imposed egalitarianism, and enable the possibility of class relations and surplus extraction.

If you have further inquiries, ask.

Thanks a bunch fam, appreciate the effort.
May the specter of communism bless you with wheat and proletarian revolution

Yui the regressive shitposter strikes again. Go die in a pit faggot.

Dialectics is sexed up Daoism.

Get a load of this mystic

Kant literally invented "transcendental logic" precisely because he thought formal logic was not good enough.

Philosophy of internal relations will help, as will understanding how margs made his abstractions
nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/dd_ch05a.php

Ollman is a cheap Spinozist.

I ain't seeing no monads here

If that's the same article that was posted on bunkermag be warned that that all might be bullshit.

He's a cheap spinozist. Monads is Leibniz, who was a pluralist.

And a quantum logic of history.

He sucks Lenin's dick a bit too much but otherwise this is a nice introduction to dialectics.

work of reconstructing the Soviet national economy, effected the transition
from war communism to the “New Economic Policy" (N.E.P.) and
carried on a struggle against the Trotskyites, Bukharinites, and other
enemies of Bolshevism who were undermining the unity and sapping
the fighting strength of the Party

No thanks I'd rather not read a Stalinist

Triggering intensifies?

Proudhon said all this before Marx, fam.

I'm still not on board with the hole "Hegelian arcane dialectics is the way to absolute knowledge" worship. Like with all systems there are holes in it.

Historical materialism on the other hand seems sensible to me in that it outlines a logic that if not 100% right all of the time, covers most cases. In my opinion Dialectical Materialism is bunk and dilution and simplification of what Marx was trying to outline.

You should post this on bunkermag or at least drop it as pdf somewhere.

Both historical and dialectical materialism are conceptual inventions of Plekhanov.
As a matter of fact, most concepts of marxism are inventions of marxists as opposed to Marx.
I very much agree that Marx was struggling to find the sort of logic that would allow him to grasp the object he was trying to analyze, and Bakunin's annotated copy of Hegel's Logic helped him immensely in that regard. That doesn't mean that Hegel, Marx or Bakunin were right, but it's relevant at the very least.

Is there an article about this? Are Bakunin's notes available online?

As far as I remember, for the time all we have is the knowledge that Bakunin annotated his books and that Marx was gifted Bakunin's copy of Logic by Freiligrath.
-Marx

To my knowledge the book that Marx inherited is lost to history, but I'm also told that research on Marx's manuscripts is ongoing so there might be some small hope that it is recovered.

To the extent that the book is lost, any analysis of the situation would have to make some broad educated guess on what Bakunin might have pointed out in the Logic. Truth be told, it would be fairly less drawn out that some of the more arcane volumes discussing the use of dialectics in Marx, but it would still require either that marxists acknowledge the philosophical and theoretical stature of Bakunin, and actually make some deep research into his works and action, something they are genetically incapable of; or alternatively, anarchists would have to acknowledge Bakunin's use of materialism and dialectics… which of course raises all sorts of messy questions regarding the extent to which "dialectical materialism" was an influence on, contribution of, or endorsed by the father of the revolutionary anarchist movement. This is made extra hard by the fact that "dialectical materialism" is not just the ideological property of leninists of all sorts, but actually has been for the longest time the base of the claim to scientificity that marxists have made for their own ideology.

In all fairness though, a lot of the problem also stems from the fact that Bakunin is criminally neglected in pretty much every academic circle in the history of leftist thought, as well as the fact that Bakunin's works and any accurate portrayal of his trajectory are extremely hard to find. This is slowly and unevenly being solved, but will take at least three decades for the international socialist movement to be on the same page regarding Bakunin's thought.

Hell, Bakunin's magnum opus, The Knuto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution, has been butchered and horribly edited and added to by a lot of the commentators and publishers of Bakunin, and fragments mutilated from context have been published under a variety of made-up titles. Recently, I've come across De baixo para cima e da periferia para o centro, which is the first time I've seen the aforementioned work put together in full (to the extent possible) with the appropriate clarifications.

French and Portuguese (well, actually Brazilian) scholars and militants seem to be slowly picking up on the research regarding Bakunin as well as the revolutionary movements and debates from the French Revolution to the First International, but of course most of their work is shut away from English audiences.

Anyway, anyone who is interested in Bakunin should keep an eye on the Bakunin Library. They are currently in the process of translating The Knuto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution to English, and would be the first edition to actually publish the work in full content and context.

blog.bakuninlibrary.org/

Sorry for the wall of text, also I can recommend some authors if anyone is interested.

As an appendix, here are some other small observations regarding the intellectual relationships of Marx and Bakunin:

- Both were immensely influenced by Proudhon (even if Marx would dread to admit it), and to a certain extent Hegel as well, as pointed out, the influence of both of them is very much ignored. Proudhon's influence on Bakunin is noted, but from the marxist standpoint (which generally ignores the actual intellectual production of both Proudhon and Bakunin entirely) this is a point of slander against Bakunin; while anarchists who care don't tend to make much of the influence other than what Bakunin explicitly stated in whatever manuscript they could get their hands on.
But perhaps more important is that both Marx and Bakunin came from a common intellectual milieu of which we seem to know very little about. I don't know as much about this milieu as I would like to, and I honestly can't tell for sure exactly how relevant this is to their connection, but I'm certain there is something there.

-Bakunin's most famous pamphlet, God and the State, is actually an edited (and added to) fragment of the second volume of The Knuto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution (ripped from a lot of context).

-In understanding the relation of Marx and Bakunin, besides the Logic and its notes, another writing that would be extremely interesting would be Bakunin's Russian translation of Capital (he did as well fully translate the Communist Manifesto and could certainly be found somewhere, but I'd wager it's not all that interesting). He started a translation of the first volume of Capital that, as far as I can tell, never quite finished, but he certainly kept the manuscripts, although much like Marx's copy of Logic, the manuscripts are, for the time being, lost (again, continued research into Bakunin might discover them at some point, with a lot of luck).

-Yet another point of intellectual relation between Marx and Bakunin is, on the one part, the clear hegemony of Marxian thought in late 19th - early 20th century Germany (and Germanic countries as a whole), in contrast with the immense influence of Bakunin in Russia (and Slavic counties as well). Plekhanov, the proper father of the marxist "dialectical materialism" and the understanding of "historical materialism", was, if I don't misremember, a former Bakuninist himself, and I very much suspect that Bakunin's State and Anarchy shaped a lot of Plekhanov's thought on what marxism was or was supposed to be. I don't remember Rudolf Rocker's relation to German marxism, but there might probably be some influence as well in his understanding of Anarcho-syndicalism, which has come under recent criticism from a sort of "Bakuninist standpoint" (still not sold on the criticism itself all that much, but it is worth noting).

-Relating to the point above, Karl Korsch, who from what I can tell was an extensive commentator on dialectics, dialectical materialism, and the sort, became kind of Bakuninist at the end of his life with a lot of interest in the man's theory of the state. I am not aware of any writings he might have left on the subject, but if those exist I'm certain they would be very interesting indeed.

I thought Marx stole Bakunin's book?

Well, I'm not aware that Bakunin's book was taken with his consent, if that's what you mean.

Yes that's right, MEGA2 is still going on. After all these years we still don't have the COMPLETE works of M&E!


I'm actually a Marxist kek, I've always wondered how anarchism came about, well I just hope it's better than Proudhons laughable attempt on Hegel of thesis-antithesis-synthesis

That's because anarchists have never been scholars, unlike compared to the large academic marxism crowd.


You mean on the Hegel-Bakunin-Marx connection?

Don't you mean German Idealism, French utopian socialism and bourgeois political economists?


Yes that was a very bad turn in Korsch's career, contra to the period of "Marxism and philosophy"

whoops didn't mean to quote about dialectical materialism

Also how do you reconcile the supposed usage of materialism and dialectics by Bakunin by the fact many anarchists outright reject Dialectical/Historical Materalism as something that confines oneself to a rigid set of "rules" and methodology and that's authoritarian! Perhaps I'm strawmanning here but I've heard an anarchist say that Marxist Historical Materialism was an interpretation of history as "train track of history"

Or perhaps this philistine "critique" of dialectical materialism

libcom.org/library/end-dialectical-materialism-anarchist-reply-libertarian-marxists

Ugh… look A.W., if you wanna come back to the argument regarding Bakunin and Hegel (that from I could see in my last visit to Holla Forums you decided to abandon), at the very least I'll ask that you keep yourself from spouting Leninist propaganda without the slightest effort of verification.

You might want to tone down the aggressive condescending memes as well, for as far as I can tell, I'm the one bringing information to the conversation, and I don't really have the time or inclination to talk to people who aren't listening (assuming serious discussion was even the goal in the first place here).

With that out of the way:

And you are unfortunately proving that you are unwilling to make the research required I talked about.

"Came about…"? I'm afraid I might be perceiving some form of Great Man theory from this inquiry.

This is sort of (in fact, exactly) what I mean by regurgitating Leninist propaganda.
On this specific point, I actually have a specific text I'd recommend: look up Proudhon and German Philosophy, by Rene Berthier. In fact, if you can read French, both volumes of Etudes Proudhonniens by the same author would be recommended.

There have been anarchist scholars, people just forgot about them. But it is true that marxism, as David Graeber put it, has an affinity with academia that anarchism never had (and probably never will). Not entirely relevant to the argument about Hegel but here it is: theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-twilight-of-vanguardism

Among other things, the relations of Hegel, Feuerbach, Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin and any other number of intellectual figures of the period. The relationship of Hegel, Proudhon, Marx and Bakunin (Feuerbach and Stirner as well) of Etudes Proudhonniens is a case in point.
If you are looking for something that looks specifically at Hegel-Marx-Bakunin, as I pointed out (and you'd do well to read), the scholarship of the relationship of Hegel and Bakunin is in its infancy. A very significant and groundbreaking dissertation of the relationship of Marx and Bakunin through Hegel might take a while, but I'll let you know if I find or remember anything.

This is the Leninist version of the constitution of marxist thought, meanwhile I am very skeptic of the claim that, say, French philosophy wasn't relevant, or even considering Leninism itself, that Russian populism wasn't influential on the constitution of Russian marxism.
Furthermore, if you take "bourgeois political economy" to include essentially every economist before Marx (as Leninists do), then "bourgeois political economy" becomes a gigantic, contradictory tradition that hasn't been properly studied. To a lesser extent the same can be said of "French utopian socialism", in which I am guessing you are including all the German communists that weren't Marx or Engels.

Do you have any elaboration to support this opinion, or is it solely predicated on the assumption that an interest or approach to anarchism is epistemologically bad in itself?
Oh, right, sorry, you don't like epistemology very much, do you?

I am under the growing suspicion that you are not, in fact, reading what I write.

>To the extent that the book is lost, any analysis of the situation would have to make some broad educated guess on what Bakunin might have pointed out in the Logic. Truth be told, it would be fairly less drawn out that some of the more arcane volumes discussing the use of dialectics in Marx, but it would still require either that marxists acknowledge the philosophical and theoretical stature of Bakunin, and actually make some deep research into his works and action, something they are genetically incapable of; or alternatively, anarchists would have to acknowledge Bakunin's use of materialism and dialectics… which of course raises all sorts of messy questions regarding the extent to which "dialectical materialism" was an influence on, contribution of, or endorsed by the father of the revolutionary anarchist movement. This is made extra hard by the fact that "dialectical materialism" is not just the ideological property of leninists of all sorts, but actually has been for the longest time the base of the claim to scientificity that marxists have made for their own ideology.
-Me

In any case, while I've heard of anarchists having the opinion that a "dialectical materialist" approach has an inevitable authoritarian end, you can hardly blame anarchists for this when leninists make the exact same claim, that is, that "dialectical materialism" inevitably reaches a leninist doctrine.
In any case, the claim that "dialectical materialism" is, err, epistemologically authoritarian (oops, epistemology again!) and therefore wrong is a strawman. I hear things of these sorts from the likes of you when complaining about anarchists, but never actual anarchists saying it. Maybe I frequent the right circles.

And the critique you link is not philistine at all: in fact, it very much goes along with your complaints about what you see as the misuse and misunderstading of dialectics. Even you won't deny that a lot of commentary on dialectics is, in fact, terrible, and indeed, "consists of unproved and unprovable assertions, along with enough obvious truisms to give it the air of plausibility.". And you cannot deny as well that "it encourages the penetration of a certain type of individual into the socialist movement — the type who will procede to establish his control over the movement because of his presumed 'intellectual brilliance'." This point is actually enormously relevant if you actually care about the practical ramifications of your theory when taken to social praxis, which for I don't know what sectarian reason you seem to assume is the primordial weak point of anarchism.

Seriously, even when you try to present yourself as well-learned, your obvious ignorance and sectarian bad faith against anarchism shows on all your opinions.
I'm not exactly sure if there is a point going forward. I've personally given up on trying to explain stuff to people who refuse to understand.

tbqh OP I had to get it by experience, it was like 'enlightenment'

I read some good texts though including Hegel, Engels (Anti-Duhring), Plekhanov, Mehring

Also I think dialectics is something people in the East understood at least implicitly for years and years, so some of their philosophers are helpful too like Lao-Tse

He doesn't do that. He drops a bunch of shit and then leaves when people don't instantly agree with him.

prickly pls

That's it?
Analyzing a thing on its own terms?

You faggots keep it to IRC especially you Kane

not prickly, just every time i've gotten into any kind of argument with him he huffs and leaves with his "Ugh so much better than all these unenlightened idiots" crap that I've seen him post on IRC.

Wow, that sounds like the exact opposite of comfy.

Man, I don't even care if you're right. You're a smug, insufferable faggot.

sure kid

We can only assume that "[dialectical materialism] encourages the penetration of a certain type of individual into the socialist movement — the type who will procede to establish his control over the movement because of his presumed 'intellectual brilliance'." hit a little too close home.

I still don't understand it that much, but I at least understand it past the meme tier "thesis + antithessis = synthesis" thanks to Yui.

I need to read more Hegel =(

Don't waste your time, you have proven again and again that you are literally unable to comprehend anything complex.

Have people actually tried to claim shit like this?


LOL

[spoiler]plesen]/spoiler]

plesen
i cannot seem to do spoilers anymore

Fuck.
This is how I understand dialectics.
What am I doing wrong?

Speaking with entire honesty, you have 2 options:
1) Read Hegel, he is a pain, but worth your time.
2) Drop dialectics, it's not the end-all be-all of Understanding.
You are guaranteed to get a mutilated and inappropriate theory of dialectics if you go by whatever random idiots (and idiots pretending not to be idiots) tell you.

This is a bit too complex for Rebel but it might help you:
dialectics4kids.com/

I'm actually not A.W just some random user, I don't know what's between you and A.W. I Will answer some of your points later but for now


The problem is the critique does not philosophically dissect Dialectical Materialism nor even quote works on Dialectical Materialism

Furthermore the critique assumes that the average worker cannot understand the basics of dialectical materialism (that they are not intelligent enough and that dialectical materialism is an intellectual topic for "Marxist Professors") which is actually elitist and belittling to the workers in my opinion thinking that they cannot understand it. In fact probably a petty-bourgeois view of workers


Yes from Stalinists and some Trotskyists but they are hardly the whole corpus. Furthermore all Marxists aside from analytical marxism are dialectical and materialist including non-leninist marxism.

Sidenote: Anarchists are bad at critiquing Leninism/Stalinism, Anarchism often uses the "totalitarianism" thesis which has in fact been appropriated by anti-communists (though some Trots do use this too) to claim any attempt to change society outside of the liberal capitalist framework is doomed to fail

consider Voline's essay "Red Fascism" for example which makes an claim than Stalinism is no different from Fascism, which is nonsense. One should read "Did Someone say Totalitarianism?" by Zizek

How is it nonsense? It's pretty clearly true.

different user here

I thought Zizek was a materialist.

Thomas Kuhn's "structure of scientific revolutions" and Herbert Butterfield's "the origins of modern science" will make you get "dialectics" without ever using the word "dialectic"

He is. Why do you say that?

He states that the difference between Fascism and Stalinism is exactly "their relationship to class struggle

So you analyze a thing in its different forms, aware of its internal contradictions and continual change?
Am I sort of getting it?

I'm into philosophy and have just started reading some. It looks like I'm reading Hegel.

I can't see the difference.

Sort of. Keep in mind that dialectics is just a method to analyse things, don't confuse it with actual analyses made using it like many on this board tend to.

Lmao bruv
wsws.org/en/articles/2011/10/kuhn-o28.html
wsws.org/en/articles/2012/01/kuhn-j30.html
wsws.org/en/articles/2012/02/kuhn-f17.html
wsws.org/en/articles/2011/05/nasa-m13.html

I guarantee you Marx is not talking about Bakunin's annotations, but the Logic's text itself. You can see the structures of the Logic all over Capital.


Since he was supposedly a mutualist, I don't see how. Frankly, I don't care who came up with what. I've read that Marx took a lot from many thinkers. I have read that Marx critiqued Proudhon for his commodity dialectic and rejected it only to return to it later in his own way after reading the Logic himself.

This isn't me. I'm not afraid to face debate, unlike you. I'll put my reputation on the line. Last Bakunin debate I remember was an idiot just claiming things without making arguments.

It wasn't as interested as this article on dialectics itself, but it wasn't bs. It was just mocking ideas about dialectics. Rosa Lichstenstein blessed it :3

Wait, are you the guy I argued with about "anarchist" theory? If so, I'm still waiting. I have a finite time and life, I'm not going to read something that isn't on the level of Hegel or Marx. I don't give a single fuck about Bakunin and his concepts of authority. I'm only bothering with a system that is theoretical and practical, none of this bullshit about "theory" in an idealist sense of what should be.

Yes, that's all it is… Assuming you never stop.

Ayy bruh what is IRC

Goddam you Comatoast. Wasting my time, I swear.

fuck off with the irc drama