Normally I would recommend the Prolewiki articles, but considering its down, I would go to Maurice Cornforth’s Materialism and the Dialectical Method. It isn’t short, but it is comprehensive. Luna Oi’s work on translating the Vietnamese textbooks on Marxism-Leninism for those not majoring in it is also phenomenal, there’s one on dialectical materialism and one on historical materialism. Outside of those, Mao is an excellent teacher in On Contradiction, as well as On Practice.
Comprehensive is a stretch. It is a good primer for a Marxist, and a good place to start (as the poster requested). Cornfourth leaves a fair amount on the table. That’s to be expected from 100 pages written for a lay audience. To pick up the remaining aspects of the dialectic requires study of Hegel and of Hegel’s relation to Kant and Marx, at minimum.
One glaring thing (imo) that Cornfourth doesn’t really discuss at all, at least that I could find, is he does not talk about form and content, appearance and essence. Dialectic is not only about evolution of history, it is present also in the stable epochs. In Capital Marx does use a Hegelian method of analyzing the form (as in appearance) of value, as opposed to its content or substance, and why necessarily value must express itself through forms, and how the imperfection of expression can lead to problems. This I think needs to be added to what Cornfourth writes in his book.
I think we are working off of different uses of the words “minimum” and “comprehensive.” If one wants to be a scholar on dialectical materialism, even Hegel isn’t enough, one must begin at the Greeks, study Fichte, Hegel, etc. One must also study Daoism. Among the Marxist canon, one must also study Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, On Contradiction, and much more. Cornforth’s work is “comprehensive” in that it leaves very little of immediate use to the average organizer off the table. Is this where one should stop? Absolutely not! Is it enough to consider yourself someone who understands dialectical materialism? Yes, and that’s what I was getting at.
I would place dialectics solidly in the category of: you don’t need to learn this unless you want to be a scholar.
“I wanna learn dialectics” is the Marxist version of when first-year physics students say “I wanna learn quantum mechanics”. One can hand them an introductory primer; this gives a general idea, but I would not call that understanding. If someone wants to learn dialectics then they have already decided that they want to be a scholar, so they should be reading the primary sources. There should not be this middle ground, as though dialectics is an introductory topic requiring no prerequisite knowledge (i.e., the lineage of the theory against which Marx counterposed his own dialectic). We should be willing to tell people that they aren’t ready to learn something yet, because they need to learn something else first.
It would be good to know what OP strives to achieve from “learning dialectics” or what they mean by that. Are they just trying to get some practical knowledge to situate themselves, or are they trying to deepen their understanding of theory (which one)? Unfortunately they never responded or gave any indication of what they are looking for with this question.
I would firmly disagree. Dialectical materialism is core to how socialists understand the world and how we engage with it. When it comes to organizing, we have to understand how change and development works in order to know what to prioritize and do.
If dialectical materialism is core to socialist theory (I agree with this) then that only underscores the necessity of properly understanding it.
For a non-physicist, it is enough that they know that quantum mechanics is a thing. Maybe show them the double-slit experiment. What does this amount to? A basic familiarization with the results of quantum mechanics. We have not trained a new expert in quantum mechanics. They did not receive a comprehensive education of all the details, and it is not necessary unless they want to be a physicist.
A physicist has to spend years studying quantum mechanics, learning the mathematical and philosophical concepts. It takes a long time to master it. And of course, it can’t be summed up in 100 pages.
If someone asks me how to start with quantum mechanics, I would want to know what is their goal. Are they interested in an overview or a deep understanding. If they want an overview, I’ll send them a YouTube video. If they want to actually learn it, I’ll send them a textbook that will take a year to study. I would not consider the first person to have learned it.
You might think I’m being too severe but I don’t see how we can extend Marxism, apply it to concrete conditions, without having experts who spend years deeply studying it, beyond the introductory texts.
I’m not arguing against having experts. A good analogy is engineers and physicists. Engineers do not go to the same depth of study, but depend heavily on what is discovered and understood by physicists. For more complicated engineering, a deeper understanding of physics is required. For an average organizer, Cornforth’s work is sufficient. For an organization, it is not, and will need people that go beyond that. The difference between rank and file training for cadre and having people dedicated to analysis and pedagogy is in the level of depth required. As much as it would be nice for everyone to become an equal expert, this is not a realistic proposition, and while any good communist party encourages and even enforces long-term study, this is not the same as having as minimum a requirement for everyone to delve into Hegel to organize.
Even without mastery of dialectical materialism, knowledge of it as laid out by Cornforth is still very useful to any organizer. I will stand by that point.
im probably gonna start a bit more of a discussion in a question thread but i remember someone on here or lemmygrad at some point saying that Politzer’s elementary principles of philosophy had dialectics wrong and shouldnt be recommended?
do you know or remember why
think it had something to do with Politzer seeing dialectics as opposing forces rather than opposing processes or something but i dont understand why or how the distinction, if i even remember it right
The thread comrade Edie linked is the best source. Politzer’s work is 95% really good, 5% critically wrong. For anyone relying on it, reading On Contradiction fixes the 5% that’s wrong, but without knowledge of its limitations it can be pretty hard to recommend. In short:
Politzer sees internal contradictions as two opposing forces inside a thing, when in fact dialectical contradiction is the struggle between two stages of development (two identities, two categories, two moments, two possibilities, etc.) of a thing.
In short, Politzer messes up auto-dynamism.
Politzer work is really good but makes critical errors. Cornforths is good enough and doesn’t make errors. This is dialectics (/j)
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Excellent bit
That being said, you summed it up! If Politzer didn’t make those errors I’d never have bothered searching for a replacement, and your help was invaluable.
I think, in dialectics in general, these might both be examples of the more general case which is genuinely just best defined at ‘something contradicting itself’, because I dont think that there is a general philosophical requirement that the previous stage of a thing must be the source of the contradiction or the opposite side of the contradiction.
But for all intents and purposes relevant to marxism and dialectical materialism in political economy, the definition you give is complete and good
The resolution of a contradiction contains both the negation of the original relationship and the negation of that negation, which is a new relationship at a different level of development. The new relationship contains elements of the old.
These are notes I pulled from Prolewiki. Prolewiki also defines contradictions as coexistent diametrical links between two forces. For the rest of this comment, I will be pulling from the Lemmygrad thread. Pulling from Politzer, though, we can see the error of Fichte:
Affirmation also called thesis - Negation or Anti-thesis - Negation of the negation or synthesis - These words summarize dialectical development. They are used to represent the sequence of stages, to indicate that each stage is the destruction of the preceding one.
Engels, however, takes the opposite stance, one of sublation rather than destruction:
Negation in dialectics does not mean simply saying no, or declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes. Long ago Spinoza said: Omnis determinatio est negatio – every limitation or determination is at the same time a negation. And further: the kind of negation is here determined, firstly, by the general and, secondly, by the particular nature of the process. I must not only negate, but also sublate the negation. I must therefore so arrange the first negation that the second remains or becomes possible. How? This depends on the particular nature of each individual case. (…) This has to be learnt, like everything else.
This gets even clearer when they get into examples. I recommend reading the thread, it’s very compelling.
I agree with all this, and understand it pretty well. I’m someone who started with Fichte and Hegel before knowing anything of Marxism. I just mean that the dialectical method is broader generally than just one of stages of development of a thing. I mean Hegels first example in the Encyclopedia is one without any development until the first contradiction was already resolving (Being, nothingness, becoming)
I’ll admit Im being a bit pedantic, and agree that Pollitzer is incomplete in a harmful way. I just also think that we should be honest that dialectics is broader than the Marxist Dialectic we all love and internal opposing forces is one of the ways that a dialectical can work. For beginners and non theory fanatics this is entirely ignorable
I also read your thread back then and just checked again, also nothing I outright disagree with. Just like to point out that dialectics in some fields and situations can take the form of opposing forces within something unrelated to its specific development into its current state
Gotcha! Then yes, I don’t disagree with you!
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9504415/7210979
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ayo thanks
Damn you speedran that before I could respond, lmao
Less controversial answer: Stalin wrote a concise and clear introduction to dialectical materialism which you can find and download for free here
More controversial answer: dialectics is not that useful as a philosophy. It’s often bundled up with historical and philosophical materialism (which are the good bits) in the context of Marxism, but it’s not a falsifiable evidence-based thought system, which in many cases causes a lot of Marxists to get lost in the philosophical weeds trying to understand cryptic writing of Hegel instead of learning more applicable and useful empirical parts and skills of Marxism like economics, history and organizing. You can look up Paul Cockshott’s thoughts on the topic.
Counterpoint: we have to understand how the world actually works in order to analyze it properly. Philosophy in this instance is the science of how we know things, and knowing things correctly is core to changing the world the way we want. Dialectics may be complex, but form a core component of dialectical materialism, which necessarily advances on mechanical materialism.
I fully agree that we need to understand how the world actually works, but I disagree that dialectics helps us understand the world in as much as it’s unfalsifiable.
dialectical materialism, which necessarily advances on mechanical materialism
This is very much debatable. It’s debatable because, again, dialectics are unfalsifiable, so you cannot prove either for or against them being an advance on mechanical materialism. I would argue that they’re a distraction from the falsifiable mechanical materialism.
The assumptions given by mechanical materialism are incorrect, though:
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That the world consists of permanent and stable things or particles, with definite, fixed properties;
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That the particles of matter are by nature inert and no change ever happens except by the action of some external cause;
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That all motion, all change can be reduced to the mechanical interaction of the separate particles of matter;
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That each particle has its own fixed nature independent of everything else, and that the relationships between separate things are merely external relationships.
Each of these assumptions, seeing the world as a purely mechanical system where development is impossible points us to absurdity. I’m sure the mechanical materialists would disagree with the idea that development is impossible, but this is the necessary conclusion of mechanical materialism’s basis. It’s why dialectics is a necessary advancement.
Many of those are a description of 18th-century mechanical materialism, which has been improved upon through falsifiability. The separation between observer and subject has been erased, more or less deleting #4, and refining the others.
You could make the same argument against dialectical materialism, which points to everything being dynamic, by pointing to universal constants like the electric charge of the proton or the speed of light in vacuum regardless of frame of reference.
Neither of those disprove dialectical materialism, though, and I think you’re confusing how dialectical materialism works. 1+1 = 2 is also not against dialectical materialism. Mechanical materialism is not devoid of merit, it was definitely an advancement on idealism. However, it is still fundamentally limited. Dialectical materialism is a framework for understanding the world. It isn’t the common understanding of scientific theory as making testable predictions. You still have to go out into the world, test theory to practice, and carry knowledge forward.
Describing 18th century mechanical materialism doesn’t discredit its 21st century understanding either. Again, I’m not arguing against dialectical materialism, only against the dialectic part of it. I haven’t received a convincing explanation of why talking in terms of “contradictions”, “permanent mutability” and “interconnectivity of everything” is superior to simply saying “try and analyze the variables that describe and influence the behaviour of systems and question everything applying a materialist outlook to reality with the goal of obtaining predictive capabilities that allow you to modify the world in your interests”.
I think you’ll be interested in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The benefits of the dialectical approach are in that it helps us understand relational phenomena, and prevents us from analyzing things as static and unrelational. A deer is not a deer without existing in the context that formed it and the trajectory it is going, there is no such thing as a deer in a vacuum. Dialectical materialism prevents us from thinking that way.
An advantage of dialectical materialist thinking over mechanical materialist thinking is that dialectical materialism provides a way to understand the way things are related to other things necessarily, not simply accidentally. This is the essential technique which allowed Marx to advance beyond Ricardo in his analysis of value, where Ricardo got stuck due to his commitment to mechanical materialism.
The basic idea being that dialectical materialism constructs a totality of interconnected concepts which develops historically. The historical development implies a genetic relationship between concepts, which provides the dialectian with a direction when looking at empirical data. The mechanical materialist cannot help but get lost in the innumerable facts available empirically because they cannot integrate it properly into concepts, without introducing a form of eclecticism which destroys the basis of the concepts.
Edit: I wanted to add that in the end, dialectical materialist thinking is only a manner of thought which helps us reason about the world. A point of distinction between dialectical logic and mechanical materialist logic is in its interpretation of contradiction. The mechanical materialist assumes that a contradiction can only indicate a logical error or a wrong assumption. For Marx (as a great dialectician), a contradiction (can) indicate a point where the theory is too abstract and does not correspond to reality in some manner. Luckily in his reconstruction of Capital, humankind has generally already resolved the contradiction in practice - at which point empirical data is critically important. Rather than throw away the concept of value the moment a contradiction is found, he discovers how reality has dealt with the contradiction, and yet still he is able to keep a strong concept of value containing labor.
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Since dialectical materialism is meant to be predictive, doesn’t that make it falsifiable?
Christianity also attempts to explain natural phenomena and give predictive capabilities, but there’s no evidence it actually does have predictive capabilities. I similarly don’t think it’s possible to produce evidence that dialectical materialism gives better predictive capabilities than mechanistic materialism.
I don’t see why it isn’t? Make predictions with dialectical materialism and with mechanistic materialism, and then see which predictions were better.
The problem with Christianity is that the predictions it attempts to make are usually wrong.
Make predictions with dialectical materialism and with mechanistic materialism, and then see which predictions were better
I’m in no position to quantitatively judge this by myself so, until presented with evidence that dialectical materialism objectively gives better predictive capabilities, I don’t have any reason to study it.
The problem with Christianity is that the predictions it attempts to make are usually wrong
Well, yes, that was my point. I don’t necessarily believe dialectical materialism is intrinsically better than mechanistic materialism.
Okay, but you can study the way dialectical materialism makes falsifiable claims, because it claims to be predictive. Whether you feel like studying it or not is unrelated to the original claim.
More controversial answer: dialectics is not that useful as a philosophy. It’s often bundled up with historical and philosophical materialism (which are the good bits) in the context of Marxism, but it’s not a falsifiable evidence-based thought system, which in many cases causes a lot of Marxists to get lost in the philosophical weeds trying to understand cryptic writing of Hegel instead of learning more applicable and useful empirical parts and skills of Marxism like economics, history and organizing. You can look up Paul Cockshott’s thoughts on the topic.
Dialectics is just systems theory if you think dialectics is not STEMy enough. “Quantitative change leading to qualitative change” is just talking about nonlinear systems where the relations between two variables is not as simple as y = ax, but some complex pdf that doesn’t even have an analytic solution. “Dialectical relationship between theory and practice” can easily refer to how those pdfs with nonanalytic solutions require simulations or experimentation (ie practice). “Base vs superstructure” in systems theory terms is just a feedback loop where the output (the superstructure) feeds back into the system.
I would go as far as to say systems theory is just rebranded dialectical materialism because Western scientists didn’t want to hand the W to a bunch of commies. A lot of the early adopters of systems theory were people who either existed in close proximity or within the periphery of the Soviet intellectual world but who otherwise did their intellectual work within the West.
Systems theory is fundamentally different from, and inferior to, dialectics. I’m also skeptical of the notion (that you wrote in a separate comment) that Marx didn’t come up with dialectical materialism just because Daoists thought about unity of opposites — that’s like saying Charles Darwin, with his theory of evolution, anticipated Animorphs. It is not a useful framing, and it neglects the specific differences between these ideas.
Richard Levins wrote an excellent summary comparison between dialectics and systems theory: Dialectics and Systems Theory
Systems theory is fundamentally different from, and inferior to, dialectics.
I mostly see it as a STEMy understanding of dialectical materialism that has limitations imposed upon it by the fact that it has little to say outside of STEM. You can’t draw a block diagram or come up with a transition matrix of how any given ideology has origins within material conditions. Someone else mentioned that systems theory has no answer for how philosophical ideas change, which I agree with. I still think it’s close enough for people coming from STEM backgrounds who think dialectical materialism is just some weird wishy-washy mumbo-jumbo.
I’m also skeptical of the notion (that you wrote in a separate comment) that Marx didn’t come up with dialectical materialism just because Daoists thought about unity of opposites — that’s like saying Charles Darwin, with his theory of evolution, anticipated Animorphs. It is not a useful framing, and it neglects the specific differences between these ideas.
I think this framing is essential because it completely destroys the argument that Marxism and dialectical materialism are Eurocentric. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a school within Indian philosophy that also essentially analyze the world through an iteration of dialectical materialism. If dialectical materialism has been independently discovered by Western, Chinese, Indian, Lakotan, and Yoruban philosophers for example, then it strongly points to something true and objective about dialectical materialism in much the same way multiple cultures have some form of Pythagoras’s Theorem or Pascal’s triangle. There will be obvious differences in refinement. Some only understand Pythagoras’s Theorem through triangles like 3-4-5 triangles. Some understand the formula itself. Some generalize Pythagoras’s Theorem into something like the law of cosines or sin2x + cos2x = 1 and so on.
The genius of Marx is not so much dialectical materialism itself, but combining dialectical materialism, scientific analysis of political economy, and a political project to emancipate the working class under one roof so elegantly. I have been shitting on the Mohists in my other comments, but that’s only from the perspective of dialectical materialism. But from the perspective of emancipation of the working class, the Mohists were the only Chinese school (outside of the school of agriculturalists that advocated for a stateless and classless society ie communism) who actually recognized the injustice wrought by the feudal ruling class against the toiling peasant masses. Both Confucians and Legalists were interested in perpetuating feudal rule, and Daoists were largely disengaged in politics. Their answer towards grave injustice was, “just model your life after nature, man.”
Neither dialectical materialism nor striving towards emancipation of the working class nor scientific analysis alone can end class rule, which is why Chinese feudal landlords were only liquidated through the ideology of Marxism-Leninism and not Mohism-Legalism.
This is on the lines of what Cockshott argues, but backwards. If we have developed a logically consistent and quantitative description of systems theory, why do we bother ourselves with cryptic philosophical traditions that are mostly used for intellectual jerk-off? Systems theory is perfectly compatible with mechanic materialism, too.
Well, the systems theory exists in part because of the cryptic philosophical traditions, and understanding the cryptic philosophical traditions allows us to recognize when someone is attempting to develop the supposed next best thing after systems theory and they just end up retreading old ground (as liberals so often do).
As well, systems theory doesn’t really do much to explain how and why philosphical ideas themselves change.
systems theory exists in part because of the cryptic philosophical traditions
I don’t share this, except in as much as it depends on Judaism because it was first explicitly formulated in Abrahamic-origin societies.
systems theory doesn’t really do much to explain how and why philosphical ideas themselves change.
Again, I don’t believe that dialectical materialism naturally gives better explanations to that than, say, mechanistic materialism.
Then we just have a fundamentally different idea of where this stuff is coming from.
Mechanistic materialism just side steps the issue entirely. When does an idea qualitatively change? When people stop practicing the actions or when the reason they are doing something changes?
They are functionally discussing different things, imo.
When does an idea qualitatively change? When people stop practicing the actions or when the reason they are doing something changes?
But isn’t that materialism? Can you explain to me where’s the dialectics in that?
Not really. Materialism doesn’t really deal with the process of how or why an idea changes. It can deal with changes in hypotheses and describe that process, but without dialectics, that would, philosophically, just be the creation of another idea, not what it actually is, the transformation of the previous idea.
It’s literally a difference in understanding the metaphysical nature of an idea is. If it sounds like an arbitrary qualifier, that is because metaphysics is mostly arbitrary qualifiers.
My point is that systems theory is dialectical materialism. Marx didn’t invent dialectical materialism. Legalists during the Zhou dynasty were already using dialectical materialism. It’s the main reason why the state of Qin was able to steamroll the other Chinese polities and unify China despite starting out as an incredibly weak state because their main ideological competitors were a bunch of Confucians, Daoists, and Mohists, none of which espouse a dialectical and materialist framework (with the Mohists being neither dialectical or materialist).
Of course, their version of dialectical materialism is cruder than what Marx came up with. Systems theory is just the latest iteration of dialectical materialism. So why call Marx a dialectical materialist instead of retroactively calling him a systems theorist? Well, it goes back to what I said earlier about systems theory being an exercise in branding from anticommunist Western scientists. If anything, systems theory should be rebranded as dialectical materialism. Systems engineering should be renamed to dialectical engineering and so on.
Legalists during the Zhou dynasty were already using dialectical materialism
Can you elaborate on the dialectic part of that? I’m not arguing against materialism as a way of describing and therefore changing the universe, I’m arguing against dialectics being relevant.
They were influenced by Daoists. Daoists espoused an everchanging world with contradictions which resolved themselves only to give birth to even more contradictions. This is in contrasts to Mohists and Confucians which espoused a world that does not change. Confucians believed in destiny that is ordained by Heaven while Mohists believed in destiny that is ordained by a sky god also confusingly called Heaven. Mohists, despite being neither dialectical nor materialist, at least advocated for an egalitarian society while Confucians advocated for a society where everyone knew their place within the social hierarchy.
The consequence of Confucians being undialectical is that most of their works constantly orient themselves based on the reported actions of the sage kings of Yu and Xie. Do X because Yu also did X. Don’t do Y because Xie didn’t do Y. Meanwhile, Legalist works stress the sovereign has to constantly adapt their actions based on the informed observations of their ministers (and methods to make sure ministers actually report what’s going on which mostly amounted to ruthless punishment). This is not the case of Confucians not being materialist especially since one branch of Confucians was headed by a full blown atheist. It’s this atheist Confucian who taught two students who then go on to take the dialectical aspects of Daoism to develop Legalism.
I agree, that those good parts are the goal and that people tend to get lost, but any serious science needs to be at least aware of it’s underlying philosophical assumptions. There’s no science without philosophy and dialectics preceeds the philosophy of dialectical materialism, which preceeds it’s application on social science: historical materialism. But I think for most, it’s fine to start at dialectical materialism. I don’t really plan on ever reading Hegel. I love Luna Ois translations of the Vietnamese textbooks, that cowbee mentioned. They are really accessible and the PDFs are free online (bought the books though).
I would argue against dialectics being a necessary precursor to understanding or applying historical materialism.
Example: to successfully explain why the Bolsheviks chose to apply harsh and radical policy of forced collectivizations one doesn’t need to look at dialectics, one needs to look at economics and geopolitics. The Russian empire was a preindustrial semi feudal state, which socialism inherited. The threat of invasion by capitalist industrial powers such as Nazi Germany, learnt from the lessons of the Russian Civil War, left no choice but to apply an extremely difficult policy of forced collectivizations to group up small landholdings and free up peasant labor that could be allocated to cities to carry out the industrial revolution they needed to (and achieved to) carry out in 10 years before WW2, therefore saving Europe from fascism and themselves from extermination.
This is a materialist understanding of history that doesn’t explicitly rely on dialectics, could you tell me of a way to make it better with the use of dialectics?
If one does not deploy dialectics, one can essentially argue that Russia went from a massive empire with a monarch, to an even larger empire with a dictatorship (the liberal understanding of history).
While instead Russia can be understood as a series of internal contradictory processes, such as the pursuit of modernization (an idea) without the state, bureaucratic or educational institutions to support that pursuit, for example (the material). A potential negation of this is communism. However, it isn’t that simple, and with the external pressure applied, the negation of the negation could potentially look a lot like what Russia under the USSR looked like, with it’s own internal contradictions. A socialist state under the same geopolitical pressures as Imperial Russia.
Basically, the USSR may have somewhat resembled Imperial Russia, but we know that it only looks like that because of the negation of the negation. We could also use materialist or systemic explanations, however, only watching the material angle allows the changes to be obscured.
If one does not deploy dialectics, one can essentially argue that Russia went from a massive empire with a monarch, to an even larger empire with a dictatorship (the liberal understanding of history).
I don’t need to apply dialectical thinking to say that’s bullshit. I can point to the structure of ownership of society, to full-employment, to economic planning without markets, to universal healthcare and education and pensions, to the material help to Vietnam and Cuba and the PLO and to a wide array of anticolonial movements, to the lack of classes in society through material analysis… I really don’t see what’s dialectical about what I said and not just materialist cold-hard analysis.
While instead Russia can be understood as a series of internal contradictory processes, such as the pursuit of modernization (an idea) without the state, bureaucratic or educational institutions to support that pursuit, for example (the material). A potential negation of this is communism. However, it isn’t that simple, and with the external pressure applied, the negation of the negation could potentially look a lot like what Russia under the USSR looked like, with it’s own internal contradictions
This is mostly mumbo jumbo repeating the word “contradiction” for some reason instead of just analysing the process with material evidence without the need to use that word every 3 lines.
Basically, the USSR may have somewhat resembled Imperial Russia, but we know that it only looks like that because of the negation of the negation
?! No! It’s not because of “the negation of the negation”, that’s just philosophical dribble!
All a negation is is something that transforms a part of the internal contradiction. The negation of the negation is something which either brings back the original contradiction, or transforms it further in such a way that it directly contradicts the original transformation.
Just because you don’t understand how something works philosophically does not make it ‘dribble’.
And yes, you could use materialist analysis. You should! But you can also understand it in a purely dialectical method. However, I agree, it isn’t as useful as the combined aspect of a dialectical materialism, which examines the idea using a dialectical method, then tests those hypotheses using a materialist method.
Well, I agree with the analysis you laid out and I’ll gladly admit, it subjectively seems “good” enough for me as it is without explicitly referring to either dialectics in general or specifically dialectical materialism (which is not as broad and difficult as dialectics in general, which I don’t claim to be necessary).
However what does “good” or “better” mean exactly? We know it’s a good analysis, because it’s compatible with the principles of historical materialism. It looks at classes, it takes into account that society has to reproduce itself, it conceives of the world as ever changing rather than static and most of all, aims to change it in the right direction. So why is historical materialism good for producing analysis that is able to change the world? You can’t say it’s good because it produces good analysis, that would be circular. Why can we rely on historical materialism to produce good analysis? Maybe another method would provide even “better” ones? How did it’s inventors arrive at it? By applying the more general philosophy of dialectical materialism to human history.
Why simple things like: “actual change in the world matters more than ideas about it”, “contradictions drive the development of things”, “things are defined by opposing principles”, “gradual change turns into real difference suddenly” are true, is explained by dialectical materialism and that’s what historical materialism is build on.
We don’t all have to get into it, it’s enough if some intellectuals keep it alive. But where it is forgotten completely, mistakes are made. A good example of a wrong analysis, that claims a vulgar materialism but lacks dialectics is the gender essentialism of terfs.
Dialectics helps us understand and analyse the outcomes of historical decisions, as well as helping us analyse the potential outcomes of current decision making. It has an important focus on internal contradictions of a thing, which can help us understand why the class composition of the USSR led to particular historical outcomes besides the looming threat of nazism. It can also help us better analyse the components that resulted in the break down of Soviet socialism, the economic and social factors that led to the break down and why those formed intrinsic parts of the Soviet model. They were not imposed on it from without, they were historical conditions that required navigating by the communists at the time. Without dialectics we can miss the forest for the trees and avoid analysing the system for what it actually is and what it achieved and how those two things shaped and maintained one another.
In your example, why were the collectivisations forced? Why didn’t the classes in the countryside voluntarily accept collectivisation? What was the shape and composition of the opposition to that policy and what were its results? What was the internal make-up of the party within those regions that led to their successes and failures? What could be done to avoid those failures in future? Were they inevitable? A dialectical approach would seek an immanent critique of the social system to analyse why history played out the way it did.
Based on your comment, you’re summarizing dialectics as “look at contradictions” (whichever that is, because it’s poorly translated let alone defined) and “ask questions and critique”. I could argue that breaking up a system into variables and examining the effect of those variables and how they play with each other is not exclusively dialectical, and it’s something materialist instead.
In your example, why were the collectivisations forced? Why didn’t the classes in the countryside voluntarily accept collectivisation? What was the shape and composition of the opposition to that policy and what were its results? What was the internal make-up of the party within those regions that led to their successes and failures? What could be done to avoid those failures in future? Were they inevitable?
I can answer all of those questions without ever having studied dialectics: the collectivizations were forced because they go against the landowner interests, the shape and composition of opposition was mostly petty bourgeois landowners who are a byproduct of the abolition of serfdom in the late 1800s and of the New Economic Policy, the results were resistance from the Kulaks in the form of sabotage and lack of incentive to peasants to obtain increasingly large production, the internal makeup of the party was mostly uneducated landless peasants who were just beginning to understand socialism together with some city emigrees of the working class who taught socialism and organizing to said peasants, in order to avoid to a degree the failures in the future we must not underestimate the necessity for private incentives to proprieted classes, a large extent of the bad consequences were inevitable due to such a big social upheaval forced into such a short time due to external geopolitical causes. Tell me how I’ve used dialectics in answering those questions, and not mostly the material and quantitative study of history.
The point is that those questions were assembled to provide an immanent critique of the policy, and the posing of the questions was in order to carry out a dialectical analysis while you answered with the material factors that existed at the time thus fulfilling a dialectical materialist analysis.
You need dialectics to know where to look, as it were, to understand how to shape your analysis and what questions need asking, and how to handle the answers your investigation generates. The study of dialectics makes us better at knowing how to carry out an immanent critique, what questions to ask, and how to interpret results. The philosophical underpinning for how to do analysis and how to interpret data is vital as far as I’m concerned, I think as Stalin put it: to have a compass that allows us to navigate the seas of history instead of charting a course blindly (probably butchered the analogy but I’m trying to pull it from memory).
Ok sure all of this is true but have you considered that as a masochist I just really enjoy reading Hegel? I thought hexbear was woke but I am still being kink shamed smh my head
You can masturbate your intellect with Hegel as much as you want, I won’t take that away from you or criticise it, I just believe it doesn’t necessarily make one a better Marxist
One of the other criticisms commonly leveled against DHM by those ensconced in the bourgeois knowledge regime is that it is dogmatic and objectivist, or even that it purports to be totalizing in its knowledge claims. However, DHM understands itself to be a science in the broad sense of Wissenschaft—meaning a reliable method and form of knowledge in general—and makes a more minimal claim: it is possible to distinguish between more or less accurate accounts of reality.24 This does not require omniscience or some form of total and absolute understanding of the real, including perhaps predicting the future. Wissenschaft is, instead, a histori- cal process of collectively developing tools of analysis, testing them in real- ity, and modifying them based on experience. As a Wissenschaft, DHM is founded on the primacy of practice, not the dogmatic preeminence of theory or the rigid objectivism found in positivistic bourgeois sciences (let alone the God-like omniscience that anti-Marxists sometimes project on it).
felt relevant. i agree Hegel is not that useful for would-be-revolutionaries. Cockshott i disregard due to hitlerite tendencies. not a serious guy.
Bingo.
Cockshott absolutely has brainworms as a byproduct of being an old man from TERF island, that doesn’t mean his economic and philosophical analysis are devoid of merit. You won’t find a Marxist who provides better explanations and defence of planned economies than Cockshott, and while we should criticise him for his awkward takes on queerness (such as lesbian couples getting paid more than straight couples), we shouldn’t throw out all the good bits, as much as we wouldn’t simply discard the progress of the USSR because of their backwards social policy at times.
impostor syndrome
