Can someone explain to me what the 'Dialectical' in 'Dialectical Materialism' means? I think I've got the materialism thing down pat, but I'm still kinda struggling with the former. Is it just the idea of thesis and antithesis forming synthesis? How does this have any sort of material basis?
Can someone explain to me what the 'Dialectical' in 'Dialectical Materialism' means...
Elijah Moore
Gabriel Lee
I don't wanna be that guy but you should read the preface to the phenomenology of spirit.
Hunter Lewis
OK, I'll put it on my list. It's been getting kinda hefty, recently, me being a bit busy and all.
Camden Green
It is nonsense which is why analytical marxism is the only way forward.
Sebastian James
Disclaimer: I could be misunderstanding philosophies.
I don't wanna be that guy either but I think the Intro to Science of Logic spells it out well, too. Although people have been saying here that Marx took the "negative" dialectic from Phenom and not the "positive" from Logic.
Here's a piece from Intro to Logic.
"that the negative is just as much positive, or that what is self-contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content, in other words, that such a negation is not all and every negation but the negation of a specific subject matter which resolves itself, and consequently is a specific negation, and therefore the result essentially contains that from which it results; which strictly speaking is a tautology, for otherwise it would be an immediacy, not a result. Because the result, the negation, is a specific negation, it has content. It is a fresh Notion but higher and richer than its predecessor; for it is richer by the negation or opposite of the latter, therefore contains it, but also something more, and is the unity of itself and its opposite."
Lenin highlighted "the negative is just as much positive" and that's also what I took away when I first read it.
So, Hegel's dialectic was applied to forms of thought and different philosophies which superseded one another. The ultimate nature of reality for him was the movement of the Absolute, the Idea, or Spirit, which was in the process of recognizing itself.
This process is the process without a subject. Marx's work is that to show that the development of the Idea is really the unconscious development of the economy, and that the proletariat is to be the conscious element. Back in Hegel's time, capitalism was not really developed in Germany but the class struggle was already pretty clear in Britain. So dialectical materialism, insofar as it is Marx's version of the dialectical method and not some post-festum Soviet creation, is the interaction of social consciousness with unconscious economic development, hence the thesis of history being the history of class struggle.
Austin Brooks
So the negative dialectic for Marx probably means that capitalism would be quite simply negated and then bam history over because no more classes = no more class struggle. Marx may not have felt that communism would be some sort of unity of self and opposite but he was adamant about stating the fact that communism would develop out of the productive forces of capitalism, that communism would have a definite historical basis. As he put it, communist society would bear the birthmarks of bourgeois society.
Gavin Johnson
Not the OP, but whats the bare minimum I will need to read and understand before tackling Hegel and not have my eye balls melting out of my skull as a result? I don't mind if I don't completely understand him all the way through, I just want to dive in myself and explore his ideas.
Christian Adams
Check out The Accessible Hegel by Michael Allen Fox, or Hegel's Introduction to the System by Robert E. Wood. But at the least read through the attached.
Juan Taylor
The way I see it, Hegel is eyeball melting but only because he dazzles you with his system…what's important is the dialectical method which can be grasped by understanding the general history/state of metaphysics and then just reading Hegel who stands contra to prevailing metaphysics. It also helps to see dialectics 'in action' by reading certain authors. Marx, for instance (the way he unfolds the concept of value in Das Kapital). I personally think that Guy Debord was a dialectician, and people say Rosa Lux was one.
Camden Gonzalez
Ok thanks guys. Any general introductions the history of metaphysics?
Jaxson Garcia
Lenin too, to a lesser extent, and Bakunin. Basically anyone who's anyone on the left has engaged with Hegel to a greater or lesser degree. It's the shorter logic that's important for Marxists.
Attached.
Carter Smith
this guy is probably BO, and knows what's up.
Based BO?
Owen Evans
I mean eventually you're gonna have to get nitty gritty so why not just READ THE AUTHORS.
Here's a condensed history right now!
Plato was a fuck. Aristotle wrote 'metaphysics' which means basically 'after physics', as in, students of this philosophy should be acquainted with knowledge of geometry and natural philosophy (early science) before embarking. the idea of metaphysics is to determine first principles of nature. we get the Aristotelean syllogism, deductive logic. The principle of non-contradiction. Then nothing happens for a long time because Dark Ages, Thomas Aquinas fuses Aristotle with Christian theology. Then comes Descartes (read Meditations on First Philosophy) and we get the problem of rationalism versus empiricism (just read about both these terms in an online encyclopedia). Kant comes in and fucks shit up and says metaphysics as a science is impossible. Then Hegel.
That's terrible I know but you need Descartes, Hume, and Kant basically.
Hunter Collins
"Plato was a fuck"
this hurts my feels
Julian Gutierrez
Erm ok, that seems like a very interesting and concise history. I do plan on reading these people but what metaphysics is and how it changed and what Hegel did is pretty confusing.
Austin Walker
What did he mean by this? I'd like to know because he's the only one I've read
Blake Stewart
I didn't mean anything about Plato. Just a throwaway sentence.
I'm really unfamiliar with him outside of the Republic. Hegel commends him for developing dialectics, to my surprise.
Oh there was also a Greek named Heraclitus who had an intuitive grasp of dialectics. I don't think there any extant writings of his, if he wrote at all. I recommend you start with Aristotle's Metaphysics. I've only read selections from it and I don't have the volume present, so I can't really tell you what is critical, sorry. It's really not as daunting as all that I promise.
classics.mit.edu
And for reference:
Adrian Price
Is Holla Forums experiencing it's own Hegelian revival like in academia? Whats with all the threads about Hegel and dialectics?
Ian Barnes
newfag detected
Ryan Baker
Read Trotsky, "ABC of Materialist Dialectics" (I think it's on >>>/freedu/ ) and see pdf attached.
Nolan Bennett
Earlier forms of materialism were "mechanical", meaning that they believed the world to be some sort of machine, like a clockwork, that works according to its own rules and has clear states that it cyclically returns to. In contrast to this, dialectical materialism views it as a process. This means that instead of having clearly separated states they gradually turn into the other, there's no exact returning to previous state, and each state has its own rules that govern its behaviour.
I guess you could think of it as the old materialists believed the world to be a robot, once it was built it would work according to the rules built into until it wears down. Meanwhile the dialecticals would view it as a human being who was born as a baby, matures and finally grows old, each stage having its own specific behaviour.
David Evans
It's just hipsters trying to impress their professors.
Carter Barnes
Not OP, but I'm going to go read up a bit on this. I'm not sure what the summary is getting at, and using mathematical variables at all seems inappropriate for whatever point is supposed to be conveyed.
Brody Morgan
absolutely, Plato is the first dialectician. Republic is a great example of it, but I prefer apology as well.
Austin Wright
stay away from Bertrand Russel and analytics then
also Trotsky was a cool dude before he got feuding with Stalin but he didn't really get ABC's right, it's like a regurgitation of Engels in Anti-Duhring.
bunkermag.org
This might clear things up.
I didn't catch the dialectics in it, can you help me? Was it in the logic of the dialogues themselves?
Joseph Miller
You are confused about dialectics. Dialectics isn't anything reducible to form.
The Logic's Idea is also not a master concept for all of reality. It is only the final concept of thought grounding itself. Nature and Spirit (thinking beings) have their own unique development and absolute form. There is no such thing as ideal or material dialectical method.
Garbage that I btfo'd in an article on Bunkermag.
That's mysticism level shit right there. Are you sure you know what 'materialism' means?
Dialectics are nothing but relations of inner contradiction; a concept/object in some way is dependent on its opposite for its content/determinate existence. There is no formula for this, it's unique to every concept and runs in various orders. Sometimes you end with sublating concepts, sometimes you start with them and derive what they sublate. Sometimes what is sublating self-sublates and only repeats itself as determinations of itself (this happens with Existence).
Read Science of Logic chp. 1. If you can't understand that, I don't know what to tell you lad.
Luke Johnson
Well thanks for pooping on my understanding. Were you the one who said that in Das Kapital, the dialectic has a 'negative' result and not a 'positive' one?
Also, with Hegel, so Logic, Nature, and Spirit form a tripartite (uber)reality? Are the three dialectically related?
How do you think Marx understood Hegel, and what was Marx's REAL PROJECT or purpose?
How was Marx wrong?
Sorry that's a lot but you can be brief. I think part of my confusion lay in thinking that ALL concepts begin from that dual Being-Nothing and always sublate into a state of "being themselves in their Other". Thanks for clearing at least that up for me.
James Morgan
The aim of Capital is a negative result, however the way Marx goes about it is to attempt a logical phenomenology, something Hegel, according to Winfield, says is impossible. Marx uses the Logic's categories at his convenience to describe the concepts of Capital, but this is something Hegel himself tells us is impossible in the Logic. Marx misunderstands Hegel by misunderstanding what Hegel wanted to know, which is what is true regardless of experience and what structures this requires to develop into existence. This is, for Hegel, the only way we could tell what anything in this world >should< be since otherwise empirical "science" is just trading one set of arbitrary assumptions for another. For Hegel freedom is the absolute ethical aim, and insofar as structures allow and >enable< freedom there is an imperative to make such structures. No structure of freedom, however, like the economy, is absolute nor should be expected to be. For Hegelians (I'm not quite there to being fully one) the problems of capital are that people believe it is absolute and do not understand they have to actively keep it in check, just as one must keep politicians in check, and one must keep a stupid dog in check. If you know what you're doing, things should be alright.
You cannot use the Logic as an abstract form you slap on empirical things, that's just abstract formalism. Marx does things right when he begins Capital with commodities as the immediate (abstract) being of capital, but he then injects concepts which do not follow from logical development of those concepts such as introducing an LTV (which is not logically necessary for what exchange assumes of the nature and relation of exchangers) and generalized labor/capital relations as if they automatically follow from generalized commodity production alone, something which history does not show since capital relations had to be forced onto people either by government laws or by natural disasters causing imbalances which were allowed to persist.
Marx's purpose was to show that capitalism is self-annihilating and provides the conditions for communism, which we should recognize and push for. Where he goes wrong is in providing the scientific proof he wanted since he reduces everything to economics in the end, something that empirically is not quite true to what society as a whole does. Capital (civil society) dominates modern social life, but there is nothing about modern social life that necessarily makes this domination inherent to capital's capacity for domination of life anymore than democracy has in it the capacity to generate a populace of idiots who vote in backstabbing tyrants and fascists.
Basically, we must ask ourselves why the problem of markets is anymore special than the problem of bureaucracy and a general populace that is politically apathetic and lacks political will to keep the government in check.
Easton Scott
In a butchered nutshell: Hegel apparently thinks that you cannot possibly force people to be ethical and free by just making structures which ensure they >can't< make the wrong choice. Part of freedom is the freedom to fuck up. Hegel is a soc dem that thinks that if the people lack political will to regulate the market does not mean the market is inherently bad just as a bad horse trainer fucking up with a horse doesn't mean horses are beasts out to trample you to death. Hegelians don't accept that Marx's critique is actually logically devastating, and therefore communism is not an automatic answer to the problems Marx poses. Indeed, someone like Winfield considers Marx's communism to be poor in concept and utterly confused regarding what exactly it would consider freedom to be other than some arbitrary appeals to romantic views of human labor as a kind of aesthetic creativity without ever considering what exactly the full institutions are that would make such a world possible without removing spheres of freedom. Appeals to technology and and ideal of human sociality which is not alienated is not very telling.
Joseph Anderson
Personally, I'm not so sure about Marxism anymore. I kind of agree that political will places an onus on the people to rise up and stand up for their own interest as the general populace as opposed to just blaming the capitalists and their hegemony. Were it for political will social democracy would, seemingly, work.
Democracy is the truth of the state. If the people just understood this and quit being shortsighted the world could be socialist/communist overnight. The structures of freedom exist in a mangled form, but they exist to an extent. It is left to the contingency of historical agency of the working class to wake itself to understanding its power and demanding these structures for its self empowerment. People who are uneducated, who have never been taught to develop thinking (knowledgeable is not the same as being educated, hence degree mills don't do shit), are stuck with poor ideas, reasons, and lack of self-controlled will to do what is socially necessary. They live by the law of the stomach and roof, and they aren't willing to fight until the stomach and roof are threatening to disappear before them in catastrophe. When will a new revolution come that sets up a new political order that allows and ensures such freedoms? No one knows, but waiting for "revolution" doesn't do shit.
Connor Baker
Wow thank you very much!
I've fancied myself a Marxist for a while, the implications of what you are saying will take a lot of time to go through.
Two more things. You once said that the absolute destruction of capitalism would result in communism emerging as the true social form of the human. This sounds very young Marx to me, but is there any particular book of his or some other author that really helped lead you to such a conclusion?
Second, Althusser's issue of young Marx/epistemic break Marx. Does his analysis hold water to you or can we still appreciate things like the 1844 manuscripts and trace intellectual development from them to his later works? Should we in fact be wary of, or embrace 'theoretical antihumanism'? perhaps it has its own legitimate field of operation?
Henry Reed
somber shit dude. I'm having trouble completely reconciling the economic determinism with class-consciousness and subjectivity myself. got an opinion on the SI? I think they were pretty lucid and brilliant, mostly Debord and Vaneigem. sorry for a million questions I just take you rather seriously and know you take it all seriously too
Lincoln Edwards
Bertel Ollman's "Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society" is a good argument against Althusser's epistemic break. There is, however, a real change in methodology from young to old Marx. Marx does learn from the Logic and finally starts using it to an extent when he was working out Capital.
I haven't really stood by that position for a while. Young Marx was too romantic and not philosophically rigorous or charitable towards Hegel. He writes many things early on that amount to a materialist monism/pantheism in everything but name, nearly Spinozist in its deterministic and monistic tendencies.
There are continuities in Marx, but there is a definite break in the approach to the question and its realistic solution. You can notice it in the Critique in the Gotha Program that Marx is trying to put forth ideas that are far more sober and realistic, but which distinctly lack much humanist romanticism. We are left with a planned economy that meets needs, but little is said regarding regarding desires and social structures of freedom beyond that. Communism makes no sense without a humanistic core, antihumanism of Althusser's kind is too extreme a reaction.
Marx's concerns about alienation is a serious one, but just what alienation should mean to us is not tied to his own conception of the human being. There are antihumanist Marxists who think alienation only means alienation from controlling our labor and production, not an alienation from human essence as labor.
Chase Smith
Thanks m8
I'll make sure other folks don't make the mistake of Engels' crude positivism or others' abstract formalisms when discussing dialectics