A critique of dialectical materialism.

[the desire to rebel]

Hello everyone, I stumbled upon this article by P. Murtaugh about dialectical materialism:

xxx.connexions.org/RedMenace/Docs/RM3-EndofDialectical.htm

(please substitute the xs for ws, since I´m new it seems that i can´t post links yet.)

I would like to know everyone´s opinion on the topic, personally I think that dialectical materialism is an useful tool to understand the world (therefore i do not agree with what Murtaugh criticizes about d.m )

Btw, as an anarchist I have the uttermost respect for Marx and our marxists comrades, although I disagree with the theory of a workers´state.
Greetings :).

[Mr. Natural]

the desire to rebel,

Welcome to RevLeft. I've been here four months and advocate a popularly usable, natural, scientific, Marxist, red-green materialist dialectic of life, community, and revolution.

Your open-minded, sincere post commanded a response from me. Discussions of dialectic at RevLeft, however, have been unduly contentious and unproductive, in good part due to the presence of a relentless obstructionist. As this person (who could also be valuable) is now banned, perhaps we can get something going.

The Paul Murtaugh anti-dialectics essay you referenced is crap, as you assessed. As the "Red Menace Newsletter" in which it appeared declared, "The Revolutionary Socialist Collective categorically rejects Murtaugh's analysis, which we think displays an ignorance of Marx and Marxism ...."

Let's then take a real look at Marx's materialist dialectic, which emerged from his encounter with and subsequent intellectual internalization of Hegel's philosophy of internal relations, which views the world as an internally related whole. The young Marx's encounter with Hegel blew his mind open (see letter to father, written at the age of 19), enabling him to organically comprehend life and society as systemic process and to develop a materialist dialectic that was "the science of the general laws of the motion and development of nature, human society, and thought" (Anti-Duhring).

Bertell Ollman is the Marxist dialectician whose scholarship reveals the Marxist materialist dialectic's roots in the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations and its abstraction process. Ollman, now in his 76th year and still teaching at NYU, has made this his life's work.

I had previously been interested in the materialist dialectic, but Ollman brought it to revolutionary life for me. He enabled me to see how Marx gained his radical understanding of life and society as dynamic, systemic process.

The most comprehensive Ollman work is Dance of the Dialectic (2003). For a survey of various approaches to dialectic, see Dialectics For The New Century (2008), edited by Ollman and Tony Smith. I especially like John Bellamy Foster's essay, "The Dialelctics of Nature and Marx's Ecology" in this latter work. Then the standard approach to dialectics I most value is John Ress' The Algebra of Revolution (1998).

Here is a radically significant aside: the new sciences that reveal the organization, patterns, and processes of life (thus society) essentially confirm Marx's and Engels' materialist dialectic. Life is indeed a systemic process; the world is an internally related whole.

A final note. I assume your expressed dislike of the idea of a worker's state comes from Marx's concept of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Marx employed this perhaps unfortunate term several times, but this phrase in actuality inoffensively refers to the transitional post-revolutionary period in which the reactionary elements of the old order are still powerful and exceedingly dangerous. As Fidel Castro presciently but futilely warned Salvador Allende, "After revolution comes counterrevolution."

Marx and Engels envisioned socialist revolution occurring in the most economically advanced nations where the proletariat constituted a solid majority of the population. The phrase, "dictatorship of the proletariat" doesn't appear in the Manifesto, but this transitional period is described: "The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democracy" (emphasis mine).

A final final note. As a communist, I see myself as an anarchist, for with both, erroneously opposed "isms," "We shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (Manifesto). That's anarchism; that's communism.

My red-green best.