The materialist dialectic as "Mysticism" [Archive]

cb9's_unity

14th February 2012, 21:22

Why would a dialectical ontology lose the dialectic? Why wouldn't life have an organization the human species must follow? Wouldn't nature's relations be natural human relations as well?

They would if humanity were not such a unique occurrence in regards to all of nature. Human consciousness, whether it brings with it free will or not, makes man operate fundamentally different than any other aspect of nature. Natural science is premised on discovering laws that are basically eternal, that because they existed in the past will certainly exist in the future. However there are no such laws for man, and when we speak of laws in the social sciences they are implicitly less ridged than in the natural sciences. Thus there is a complete ontological break between the laws of nature and the laws of man. The former are true in all situations and at every moment, where the latter are only guidelines observed over time and are often subject to be defied by both nature and man at any given moment.

Life's organization is indeed communist: associations are formed in which the elements maintain themselves and their overall systemic organization in a dynamic, ecological, differentiated unity with the rest of life. Surely these organizational relations apply to us if we are not to separate humanity from nature.Why shouldn't humanity be separated from nature? To insist that the two are fundamentally the same is to turn strict materialist ontology into a faith. There is no other formation of matter known to science that is comparable to man or other aware life. As long as the origins of awareness remain a mystery to science, religion, and philosophy, it is premature to assume that explicitly aware (or conscious) and presumably unaware matter are governed by the same logic. Especially when the moment-to-moment predictability differ so radically between the two.

The scientific work that revealed the organizational relations of life to me and from which I then applied natural dialectical relations to human social systems is the theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra's Web of Life(1996). If this science is correct (it is), it potentially enables us to employ it to move out of capitalism into natural communist human relations. We can develop dialectical consciousnesses that "see" natural organizational relations and enable us to align human nature with Mother Nature.I can't say I'm familiar with the science you've pointed towards. However, I think it is far more important to bring human nature into harmony with itself than with Mother Nature. Ending both man's alienation with his own labor and false consciousness are the priority. If this happens to be in alignment with nature that is all the better. But man's nature must always be dictated in human terms, not "natural" ones.

The crux of this argument is whether dialectics are to be used as a tool, or if they are to understood as the truth. Personally, as long as I'm being honest I'm not concerning myself with whether my beliefs regarding truth are 100% incontestable from every angle. This is why I believe dialectics are so important for an honest and practical analysis of history and society. Dialectics as an ontology always threaten to encourage dishonesty, because it is much more difficult to accept facts that threaten your notion of truth, especially if those notions lay the groundwork for your justification of revolution. Modern social analysis that recognizes dialectical movement should be constantly rebuilt on top of new empirical evidence, understanding that the only certain truth is that no two moments in time will ever be identical.

Mr. Natural

15th February 2012, 17:23

cb9's unity, Thanks for your engagement. I appreciate the open as well as critical mind you bring to the discussion as, like you, I steer away from overheated, take-no-prisoners argumentation. We're all learners, and given capitalism's global takeover and the current inability of Marxists to .respond, we have much to learn.

I wrote, "Wouldn't nature's relations be natural human relations as well?" You responded: "They would be if humanity were not such a unique occurence in regards to all of nature. Human consciousness ... makes man operate fundamentally differently from any other aspect of nature .... There is a complete ontological break between the laws of nature and the laws of man."

Well, the strong indication is that Marx and Engels disagree with you, although Marx didn't trumpet his understanding of man as a natural being. This seems to be more or less assumed early on. Just the same, there is Marx's well-known assertion, "That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature." (emph mine; 1844 Manuscripts)

Also from the Manuscripts: "This communism, as a fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully-developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man ...."

Then, in a letter to Engels, Marx remarks on Darwin and evolution: "It is in this book that the historico-natural foundations of our theory can be found."

It is Engels, though, who in Anti-Duhring (written in close collaboration with Marx) and Dialectics of Nature really emphasizes the natural sciences as a means to understand dialectics, human nature, and man's place in life.

Engels: "we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn [nature's] laws and apply them correctly." (Dialectics of Nature)

Engels: "There could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it." And "Nature is the proof of dialectics." (Anti-Duhring)

I do agree with you that humans are separate from nature, but this is unnatural. This separation is caused by a human consciousness that cannot see thus employ life's essential organizational relations or "laws." These "laws of life" are automatically obeyed by all other living beings and definitely apply to us. Are we not life?

My insistence that humans must develop natural relations (community in its near-infinite forms) is not faith-based by rooted in science. Here we have a problem in that you are not aware of the science(s) to which I refer. Fritjof Capra's Web of Life (1996) is the book that brings systems-complexity science down to Earth for the rest of us to understand and use. Shockingly, I know of no other Marxist who has engaged this new science of organizational relations. How about you? Web is a clearly written masterwork accessible to all.

This neglect of the new sciences of organization by Marxists who cannot get organized should be a scandal. The Sciences and Environment forum at RevLeft is only interested in technology and scientific discoveries and shuns organizational science. Engels at Marx's graveside: "Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force."

You wrote, "I think it is far more important to bring human nature into harmony with itself than with Mother Nature." My response is that harmony with the laws of Mother Nature would by a harmony with the laws of human nature and communism. Communism is naturally organized and would constitute humans consciously living as natural beings.

Finally, you wrote, "The crux of the argument is whether dialectics are to be used as a tool, or if they are to be understood as the truth." Well, dialectics are a tool that is to be used to reveal truth. Dialectics as it stands now is a mental tool that needs further development past its klunky "laws" so it will reveal the organization of life, thus socialism/communism. Developed in this manner, dialectics will become the mental tool that will enable us to consciously design our lives in the company of others. This dialectic would not reveal truth by itself, but would show users how to arrange their minds in the pattern of life and enable them to consciously generate viable, ecological, communal anwers to the problems of life.

To have life and society "come alive" for you as they came alive for the young Marx, see Bertell Ollman's groundbreaking work on the orgins and practice of dialectics, especially his Dance of the Dialectic (2003).

My red-green, dialectical, natural best.

Thirsty Crow

15th February 2012, 17:34

Historical materialism is, itself, dialectical. Dialectical materialism is an attempt to explain the general laws of motion of matter and so is not, in itself, mystical. That's not to say that it might not be wrong, however.Precisely because of this the so called dialectics ultimately amounts to mysticism. There isn't any discursive discipline, dependant only on human language and thought alone, capable of "explaining the general laws of motion of matter". We have science for that.

Btw, those thinkers who have attempted to do away with the dialectic in historical materialism have failed to provide convincing alternatives, they merely lapse into one-sided formulations of voluntarism, technological determinism and/or functionalism.The convincing alternative is science. I don't think class struggle could benefit in any way conceivable from lofty speculation on the general laws of matter's motion.

Actually, I can only understand the materialist dialectic from the point of view of historical materialism. Certainly, that is where it is best applied.Which should actually tell you a lot about the whole dialectics issue, if you think about it (and if you don't wish to end up supporting an anti-scientific abomination such as Engels' Dialectics of Nature).

Yes, I am under the impression that historical materialism is the philosophy of dialectical materialism applied to history. Am I completely wrong?
If we understand dialectics as the investigation of the general laws of motion of matter, then there is no way to "apply" the results of that to history. If there's a part of dialectics, as the investigation of those laws, which can be applied to human history, then I'm not aware of it.

In other words, while adherents of dialectics might argue that you are right, that still doesn't make such "application" valid, maybe even possible.

Mr. Natural

15th February 2012, 19:02

Menocchio, Why is Engels' Dialectics of Nature "an anti-scientific abomination"?

What science are you referring to that "explains the general laws of motion of matter" and replaces the materialist dialectic and historical materialism?

The new sciences of organizational relations (the culmination of which is systems-complelxity science) I employ essentially confirm Hegel's philosophy of internal relations and its dialectical categories and laws, and this is the source from which Marx developed the materialist dialectic and his radical understanding of life, society, capitalism, and communism as organic, systemic processes. However, I don't believe this is the science you are referencing.

The new sciences of organizational relations I employ include evolution, the new physics, cosmology, cybernetics, chaos theory, and the aforementioned systems-complexity science. These sciences affirm Engels' overall presentation in Dialectics of Nature, although the advance of science has also disproved some of the examples he provided.

Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin dedicated The Dialectical Biologist "To Fredereick Engels, who got it wrong a lot of the time but who got it right where it counted."

My best to you and Croatia. Oops! I mean, my best to you and the workers of Croatia.

Thirsty Crow

15th February 2012, 19:15

What science are you referring to that "explains the general laws of motion of matter" and replaces the materialist dialectic and historical materialism?

That's easy, it's physics, though it's patently absurd to think that physics can replace historical materialism (it needn't, though it makes dialectics as I understand it superficial and irrelevant).
I'll try to respond to the rest of your post when I'll find the time.

Grenzer

16th February 2012, 01:55

Thirsty Crow

16th February 2012, 09:43

Thanks for the responses so far, though I've been hoping to see some of the anti-dialectics folks come in.

I still don't understand(or rather, I remain unconvinced) that Historical Materialism is necessarily dialectical. What part of Historical Materialism presupposes organization into a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis?
This is, in fact, Fichte's dialectic, one which Hegel didn't take up, and we all know that according to DM fans, it was Hegel that provided Marx with the foundation of his method. (and I'm offended that you don't count me as part of the anti-dialectics camp).

Hegel's dialectics is essentially based on the demonstration that everything that exists actually exists because it is rational - because it is a product of the absolute (mind as opposed to mere reason), whereas there are also three members of the chain, and I think those were something like:
the transitory (non-existence) - becoming - the non-transitory (existence).
In essence, this dialectic is bound to the demonstration of the self-movement of the absolute.

Mr. Natural

16th February 2012, 14:52

Cicero, $lim_$weezy and I have given rave reviews for Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic. I first took notice of Ollman two years ago when someone described him as the leading theorist of dialetics.

Ollman is profound but highly readable. Why don't you answer your own questions and read Dance? I don't know of another dialectician who accurately presents Marx's roots in Hegelian dialectic and his transformation of it.

Dialectic is essential, for it brings the systemic processes of life and society to life in the mind. The old dialectical categories and laws suggest these living processes, but need to be re-defined and embodied into a full system by the new sciences of organization I that I continually insist must be engaged by Marxist revolutionaries.

There is no question but that Marxism is currently stuck in place. In light of this, I am appalled that no Marxist of whom I am aware has engaged this new science and dismayed that the left is so theoretically conservative.

Grenzer

16th February 2012, 16:18

This is, in fact, Fichte's dialectic, one which Hegel didn't take up, and we all know that according to DM fans, it was Hegel that provided Marx with the foundation of his method. (and I'm offended that you don't count me as part of the anti-dialectics camp).

I was waiting for your post about how Physics replaces Dialectical Materialism. Well at least there's one anti in this thread, here's to hoping more come in.

Grenzer

16th February 2012, 16:23

There is no question but that Marxism is currently stuck in place. In light of this, I am appalled that no Marxist of whom I am aware has engaged this new science and dismayed that the left is so theoretically conservative.

I can certainly agree with that. Dogmatism is a huge problem, five minutes in this forum will tell you that. I think a large part of the problem is how marginalized communists are in general, in most places at least. Hopefully with the new class awakening that we slowly see unfolding, theory can grow and expand somewhat. Not that there aren't innovators now, but they seem to be few in number.

Hit The North

16th February 2012, 17:27

Precisely because of this the so called dialectics ultimately amounts to mysticism. There isn't any discursive discipline, dependant only on human language and thought alone, capable of "explaining the general laws of motion of matter". We have science for that.

I wasn't aware that DM presents itself as a "discursive discipline dependent only on human language and thought alone." But even if it does, this does not equate to mysticism, although it might incur other insults. To be clear, I am not interested in defending DM as a set of metaphysical principles, as it has usually been interpreted and sometimes meant. But I note that I don't know of any alleged champions of DM from Marx through Engels and down to Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin who have argued that DM should replace science. This would appear to be more of an anti-dialectics red herring.

The convincing alternative is science. I don't think class struggle could benefit in any way conceivable from lofty speculation on the general laws of matter's motion.

Historical materialism is its own science, it doesn't need another. Meanwhile, the class struggle is itself the dialectic of history and so doesn't require help from either scientists or philosphers. But I take your point. However, historical materialism needs an account of science as a factor in history and a continuing force in capitalism. Should this account of science be dialectical, in other words take into account the historically emergent nature of human knowledge, including the sciences; the connections between science and the dominant property relations; the contradictions of its employment within a class society; in other words, science as a socially and historically conditioned phenomenon? I'd suggest it does, but if you have a more convincing way of organising our knowledge of science and tracing its development please proffer one.

Hit The North

16th February 2012, 17:30

I can certainly agree with that. Dogmatism is a huge problem, five minutes in this forum will tell you that. I think a large part of the problem is how marginalized communists are in general, in most places at least. Hopefully with the new class awakening that we slowly see unfolding, theory can grow and expand somewhat. Not that there aren't innovators now, but they seem to be few in number.

Maybe we put too much stock in 'theory'. Perhaps we have enough theory and what we need is more practice?

blake 3:17

17th February 2012, 07:45

Coming from a heavily Hegelian Marxist Trotskyist background, it's been hard to shake The Dialectic as super important. From one anarchist friend I heard it dismissed as "what Marxists say when they don`t don`t know what they`re talking about`-- the charge rings true.

The big beef I had with the few analytic Marxists here was that they bored everybody to tears with their self righteous garbage about dialectics were the worst thing ever. You couldn`t talk about Sartre, Benjamin, or Lukacas because they were poisoned by dialectics.

In recent years I`ve become more interested in non-dialectical thought, especially Nietszche, Derrida, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari as well as certain Christian thinkers. It is plain stupid to knock them down because Wittgenstein Was Right!

My relief through Nietszchean thinking has been not feeling the need to totalize everything. Pragmatism is OK.

My interests are arts (in the broad humanist sense), drawing, poetry, education, and revolutionary politics.

I feel like I`m justifying my existence against RL`s miserabilism.

Arilou Lalee'lay

17th February 2012, 08:22

The dialectics stuff is cool nerdery that's fun to read about but not particularly important for anyone today to understand. You can understand marxism without knowing the extensive philosophical underpinnings. We can figure out what is to be done with plain, old-fashioned, logic.

If you have access to a big university library i'd recommend hegel, heraclitus, and marx, the first part of the book does a really good job of explaining what the dialectic actually is and its history. If you have a thorough understanding of it you'll be able to decide for yourself pretty easily, it's not as complicated as it seems.

oh and if you want to hear from the other side go find rosa or the person with the bill hicks avatar. I saw rosa getting banned on sites well before I knew revleft existed, it shouldn't be too hard.

Thirsty Crow

17th February 2012, 09:35

oh and if you want to hear from the other side go find rosa or the person with the bill hicks avatar. I saw rosa getting banned on sites well before I knew revleft existed, it shouldn't be too hard.
Just this brief comment: above all, go find the book by Lucio Colletti entitled Marxism and Hegel where a great job is done in several departments, among them being the exposition of Hegel's dialectic as the selv-movement of the absolute and the demonstration of radical differences between him and Marx.

black magick hustla

17th February 2012, 10:18

Btw, those thinkers who have attempted to do away with the dialectic in historical materialism have failed to provide convincing alternatives, they merely lapse into one-sided formulations of voluntarism, technological determinism and/or functionalism.

:shrugs: I could equally say that "dialectics" leads to stalinist/maoist brutal demagoguery and the worst of trotskyist opportunism. In my experience, when yellow socialists try to justify some sort of reformism and opportunism, they justify it by talking about dialectics, and they dismiss principled positions as "ultraleft" and "mechanistic thinking".

I am not a philosopher by trade, but I did take a good amount of philosophy classes when I was an undergrad, and there are plenty of philosophers today who aren't "voluntaristic" or "deterministic" and do not rely on dialectics. in fact, there is all sorts of papers written in everyday language about the whole free will vs determinsm case. You can check some of the stuff related to philosophy of action too.

People talk about change all the time without dialectics. In fact, I would argue that "dialecticians" in general are ignorant of philosophy and science because they strawman everything else as mechanistic thinking. I don't think dialectics encourages dynamism and muscular thought, in the contrary, it encourages obscurantism, dogmatism, and people who think they have figured everything out by using fancy slurs they don't really understand like "empiricist". every time a marxist insults someone by the term empiricist a kitten dies.

black magick hustla

17th February 2012, 10:21

For some interesting formulations about free will vs determinism, written without an appeal to grandiose language read about compatibilism,

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

black magick hustla

17th February 2012, 10:23

btw, i do not condone any of those views. i generally think this sort of questions can't be answered because to paraphrase wittgenstein, in this usages, words tend to break. however, its an example about how people have attempted to talk about this things with precise and clear language as opposed to poetics

blake 3:17

17th February 2012, 10:30

black magick hustla

17th February 2012, 10:33

Thank you for using such clear language.

i know i touched your nerve don't need to play coy

blake 3:17

17th February 2012, 10:45

Good touch, bad touch.

LuÃs Henrique

17th February 2012, 14:11

Precisely because of this the so called dialectics ultimately amounts to mysticism. There isn't any discursive discipline, dependant only on human language and thought alone, capable of "explaining the general laws of motion of matter". We have science for that.
[snip]
The convincing alternative is science.

Indeed. So let's put it like that: dialectics aren't a discipline, and there are no general laws of motion of matter. So neither science can account for those inexistant laws.

Herein in the problem: there is no "Science"; there are sciences. Reducing them to a single system beyond their method means quite certainly yelding to the assumption that the system of natural sciences - most notably that of Physics - applies to all sciences, history included.

I don't think class struggle could benefit in any way conceivable from lofty speculation on the general laws of matter's motion.

It can't. It can't benefit either from undue expansion of assumptions from Physics or biology into social science.

If we understand dialectics as the investigation of the general laws of motion of matter, then there is no way to "apply" the results of that to history.

Which only means, however, that we should not consider dialectics as the investigation of the general laws of motion of matter. Indeed, we would need to repeal the very notion of "general laws" of motion of matter.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

17th February 2012, 14:14

DM fans

We should avoid such Lichtensteinite jargon. Call people for what they are; if they are Stalinists, say so. If they are idealists hegelianising Marx, then say that.

"Fans" is something we would expect Amy Winehouse has, or George Clooney.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

17th February 2012, 14:17

That's easy, it's physics, though it's patently absurd to think that physics can replace historical materialism (it needn't, though it makes dialectics as I understand it superficial and irrelevant).
I'll try to respond to the rest of your post when I'll find the time.

Physics doesn't "explain the general laws of the motion of matter". It cannot explain biological phenomena, not even to talk about social matters. Any science that could explain the "general laws of the motion of matter" would be the only science. Such does not exist.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

17th February 2012, 14:19

Hit The North

17th February 2012, 14:33

:shrugs: I could equally say that "dialectics" leads to stalinist/maoist brutal demagoguery and the worst of trotskyist opportunism.

Except that it is not an equal claim. My claim was that attempts to construct alternative (that is, anti-dialectical) versions of historical materialism are usually inadequate in one way or another. Your claim appears to be that a particular theory leads to the rule of brutal demagogues. This is not a very materialistic argument and far exceeds the boundaries of my own.

In my experience, when yellow socialists try to justify some sort of reformism and opportunism, they justify it by talking about dialectics, and they dismiss principled positions as "ultraleft" and "mechanistic thinking".
I'm not sure what you mean by "yellow socialists" but originally this denoted anti-Marxist socialists who, as far as I know, rejected dialectics along with other central tenets of Marxism. But to your general point: all kinds of words can be used to justify all sorts of abominations. An appeal to "the Party" or "Communism" or the "dictatorship of the proletariat" have been employed by all sorts of rascals and charlatans. Does this mean that communism is therefore null and void as a concept and should be rejected?

I am not a philosopher by trade, but I did take a good amount of philosophy classes when I was an undergrad, and there are plenty of philosophers today who aren't "voluntaristic" or "deterministic" and do not rely on dialectics. in fact, there is all sorts of papers written in everyday language about the whole free will vs determinsm case. You can check some of the stuff related to philosophy of action too. People talk about change all the time without dialectics.
I never claimed otherwise. My claim was restricted to non-dialectical versions of historical materialism or, by extension, non-dialectical theories of social change. I'm a sociologist by trade and my discipline is full of non-dialectical accounts of change, both meta theories and messo and micro theories. All of them attempt to deal with the conundrum of free will vs determinism in various guises. There is Weberian historicism, Herbert's and Durkheim's organicism, structural-functionalism, symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, structuration theory, rational-choice theory and so on. Some contain valid observations and interesting conceptualisations, but generally they are one-sided or partial.

In fact, I would argue that "dialecticians" in general are ignorant of philosophy and science because they strawman everything else as mechanistic thinking.I've no idea what a "dialectician" is supposed to be except a strawman. Do you mean a "Marxist"?

I don't think dialectics encourages dynamism and muscular thought, in the contrary, it encourages obscurantism, dogmatism, and people who think they have figured everything out by using fancy slurs they don't really understand like "empiricist". Well many approaches (analytical philosophy, for example) can provide the basis for uninformed slur-slinging by ignorant and deceitful persons (witness the title of this thread), dialectics is not special in this regard.

Marxism shares many things in common with empiricism such as a rejection of apriorism and the innateness of ideas, but identifies its central failing. The Marxist criticism of empiricism derives from Marx's critique of classical political economy as presenting the world as a collection of unconnected appearances, or 'facts', without recognising the role of theory in actively organising and critically reorganising the data provided by such appearances in order to re-present in thought, the essential relations generating them (something that Marx claims to do in Das Kapital and the reason he regarded it as the first attempt at a dialectical presentation of political economy). The thing to recognise is that Marxism is anti-empiricism but not anti-empirical.

every time a marxist insults someone by the term empiricist a kitten dies.Is this an empirical observation?

LuÃs Henrique

17th February 2012, 14:33

they dismiss principled positions as "ultraleft" and "mechanistic thinking".

I have seen much ultraleft mechanistic thinking, ultraleft opportunism and theorisation of defeat posing as "principled positions" too; the open support for right-wing reaction in Venezuela on "principled" basis being the most extreme, but by no means the only one.

The merits of political positions should be discussed on their own terms, not on generalisations such as "mechanistic thinking" or "dialectical mysticism"; those "philosophical" drapings don't explain opportunism and class treason, as they are rather a posteriori rationalisations of quite material causes.

When the left praises Gaddafy, Gaddafy's gold is the cause, not whatever pseudophilosophical "reasonings" may be given as excuses.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

17th February 2012, 14:36

i know i touched your nerve don't need to play coy

I don't know about blake 3:17, but pseudoWittgensteinian snobbery does thouch my nerves indeed. It just isn't the nerve you may believe, though.

Luís Henrique

Thirsty Crow

18th February 2012, 11:53

Indeed. So let's put it like that: dialectics aren't a discipline, and there are no general laws of motion of matter. So neither science can account for those inexistant laws.I'm not so sure that there aren't regularities in the world which physics accounts for, which would imply that there are indeed these so called laws, but then again, I'm sure we're all familiar with the so called dialectical laws, which render your assertion that dialectics isn't a discipline invalid.

Herein in the problem: there is no "Science"; there are sciences. Reducing them to a single system beyond their method means quite certainly yelding to the assumption that the system of natural sciences - most notably that of Physics - applies to all sciences, history included.Of course, there can be no question of system building which would inevitably amount to the past attempts at the creation of (philosophical) systems.

It can't. It can't benefit either from undue expansion of assumptions from Physics or biology into social science.Agreed.

Which only means, however, that we should not consider dialectics as the investigation of the general laws of motion of matter. Indeed, we would need to repeal the very notion of "general laws" of motion of matter.

Luís HenriqueBut, as I've stated, numerous dialectical materialists would disagree with you. And that begs the question of defining dialectics clearly, which you didn't do.

We should avoid such Lichtensteinite jargon. Call people for what they are; if they are Stalinists, say so. If they are idealists hegelianising Marx, then say that.

"Fans" is something we would expect Amy Winehouse has, or George Clooney.

Luís Henrique I would hope that at least the spirit of RL will live on here, and that's my modest contribution to that end :p I really can't understand why you people express this weird wish to exorcise all that might be left of RL from this board.

Physics doesn't "explain the general laws of the motion of matter". It cannot explain biological phenomena, not even to talk about social matters. Any science that could explain the "general laws of the motion of matter" would be the only science. Such does not exist.
Why would physics explain biological phenomena since it's, you know, physics and not biology? And why would investigating matter and energy, which does result in the formulation of the so called general laws derived from empirical evidence and observed phenomena, amount to the only science when, for example, gravity as a phenomenon situated in the field of physics says perfectly nothing about Shakespeare's puns or the chemical composition of wine?

And let me remind you once again that you're talking only about what dielctics isn't, according to you, which is clear from this:

If you give such definition to "dialectics", then of course Historical Materialism is not dialectical. But where in the Bible is it written that dialectics have to do with "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis"? Nopw, if I were to draw some conclusions from this string of negative "definitions", I'd have to say that dialectics is totally worthless because:

1) no one can define it clearly (or it is the curious case of every adherent to it refusing to do so, which is again suspicious), which implies

2) dialectics' vague character, which permits to drawing all sorts of things under its wing

black magick hustla

18th February 2012, 13:41

Except that it is not an equal claim. My claim was that attempts to construct alternative (that is, anti-dialectical) versions of historical materialism are usually inadequate in one way or another. Your claim appears to be that a particular theory leads to the rule of brutal demagogues. This is not a very materialistic argument and far exceeds the boundaries of my own.

i wasn't really claiming that dialectics leads to brutal demogaguery, i was trying to point out that it is absurd to say you can't talk about issues of determinism vs free will without being a reductionism if you don't adopt dialectics, my example was a bit of reducto ad absurdum.

But to your general point: all kinds of words can be used to justify all sorts of abominations. An appeal to "the Party" or "Communism" or the "dictatorship of the proletariat" have been employed by all sorts of rascals and charlatans. Does this mean that communism is therefore null and void as a concept and should be rejected?

see above

I never claimed otherwise. My claim was restricted to non-dialectical versions of historical materialism or, by extension, non-dialectical theories of social change. I'm a sociologist by trade and my discipline is full of non-dialectical accounts of change, both meta theories and messo and micro theories. All of them attempt to deal with the conundrum of free will vs determinism in various guises. There is Weberian historicism, Herbert's and Durkheim's organicism, structural-functionalism, symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, structuration theory, rational-choice theory and so on. Some contain valid observations and interesting conceptualisations, but generally they are one-sided or partial.

:shrugs: i am vaguely familiar with some of that stuff, because a lot of it comes from critical theory (which i attempted to study). can you be a bit more specific how this accounts are not as holistic as dialectics? i am not necessarily a big fan of sociological approaches towards politics (actually i hate it for many reasons but this is not the thread), but i kinda suspect that people that say "dialectics" is flexible enough to account for social change do it because is such a vague and fuzzy methodology, with no clarity whatsoever than you can basically make everything fit in it.

I've no idea what a "dialectician" is supposed to be except a strawman. Do you mean a "Marxist"?
no

Well many approaches (analytical philosophy, for example) can provide the basis for uninformed slur-slinging by ignorant and deceitful persons (witness the title of this thread), dialectics is not special in this regard.
honestly, i don't think the term "mysticism" is "uniformed" or "ignorant" in this case. but i guess its a difficult case to defend.

Marxism shares many things in common with empiricism such as a rejection of apriorism and the innateness of ideas, but identifies its central failing. The Marxist criticism of empiricism derives from Marx's critique of classical political economy as presenting the world as a collection of unconnected appearances, or 'facts', without recognising the role of theory in actively organising and critically reorganising the data provided by such appearances in order to re-present in thought, the essential relations generating them (something that Marx claims to do in Das Kapital and the reason he regarded it as the first attempt at a dialectical presentation of political economy). The thing to recognise is that Marxism is anti-empiricism but not anti-empirical.

of course this is not "empiricism" at all, at least as how it is understood in philosophical circles. empiricists don't reject theorization, they simply argue that there is a limit to it (otherwise they would reject theoretical physics). anyway, i think the slur "empiricist" doesn't actually come from marx's old polemics, but from lenin's famous polemics against the machists within RSDLP (empiro criticism), which i suspect where more due to party political than philosophical.

Is this an empirical observation?[/QUOTE]

black magick hustla

18th February 2012, 13:46

I have seen much ultraleft mechanistic thinking, ultraleft opportunism and theorisation of defeat posing as "principled positions" too; the open support for right-wing reaction in Venezuela on "principled" basis being the most extreme, but by no means the only one.

Luís Henrique

well, that is cute and i know exactly what do you refer too, but I am not ICC so I don't know what was the point of that post.

I don't know about blake 3:17, but pseudoWittgensteinian snobbery does thouch my nerves indeed. It just isn't the nerve you may believe, though.

i've realized that, when you showed your extreme ignorance about the subject matter you were attacking a few weeks ago (analytic philosophy). anyway i am not a wittgensteinian, i am a marxist.

LuÃs Henrique

18th February 2012, 17:25

I'm not so sure that there aren't regularities in the world which physics accounts for, which would imply that there are indeed these so called laws,

I am pretty sure that there are regularities in the world that Physics can account for; but I am also pretty sure that those aren't "general laws of the motion of matter".

but then again, I'm sure we're all familiar with the so called dialectical laws, which render your assertion that dialectics isn't a discipline invalid.

I would say those "laws" are bogus.

Of course, there can be no question of system building which would inevitably amount to the past attempts at the creation of (philosophical) systems.

That's true, which on the other hand doesn't stop people from building systems, and earnestly believe they are being "scientific".

But, as I've stated, numerous dialectical materialists would disagree with you. And that begs the question of defining dialectics clearly, which you didn't do.

I haven't, and it would take a bit long post to do it; and even then I would probably deal more in delimiting the matter through examples than giving strict definitions.

I would hope that at least the spirit of RL will live on here, and that's my modest contribution to that end :p I really can't understand why you people express this weird wish to exorcise all that might be left of RL from this board.

Did I express such weird wish?

Some things that look and sound as "to the left" of any given reference might actually be "to the right" of it. But I don't think I am attempting any exorcism of any political position. I do take exception to the expression "DM fans", which I find silly to the point of imbecility, because it is an empty generalisation that would lump together people like Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Stalin, because it is an obvious and childish slur, and because of the disagreeable use of the newspeakish abreviation, but I don't think I have voiced the opinion that people who use such expression should be expelled or "exorcised" from here.

Why would physics explain biological phenomena since it's, you know, physics and not biology?

Indeed. If we believe in a simple, homogeneous world, we might have some difficulty understanding why there is something like Biology that is not easily and obviously contained in Physics.

And why would investigating matter and energy, which does result in the formulation of the so called general laws derived from empirical evidence and observed phenomena, amount to the only science when, for example, gravity as a phenomenon situated in the field of physics says perfectly nothing about Shakespeare's puns or the chemical composition of wine?

Well, if Physics could explain every motion of matter, it would explain Shakespeare's puns and the chemical composition of wine.

And let me remind you once again that you're talking only about what dielctics isn't, according to you, which is clear from this:

Indeed. As stated above, a "positive definition" would demand a lot more work; in any way, those who attack dialectics usually attack their own positive definitions, which would be far from consensual.

Nopw, if I were to draw some conclusions from this string of negative "definitions", I'd have to say that dialectics is totally worthless because:

1) no one can define it clearly (or it is the curious case of every adherent to it refusing to do so, which is again suspicious), which implies

Oh, may be it is one of those all-important things that we can't talk about. Seriously, the discussion is invalid because materialist dialectics are a method, not an ontological system, and those who deny its existence or importance attack ontological systems, not methods.

2) dialectics' vague character, which permits to drawing all sorts of things under its wing

I don't think this is the problem. The problem is that many ontological systems have been built under the notion of "materialist dialectics" (starting of course with Engels), and they are easy to debunk. They are also metaphysical (ie, non-dialectical) and idealist, though.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

18th February 2012, 17:39

well, that is cute and i know exactly what do you refer too, but I am not ICC so I don't know what was the point of that post.

It wasn't to imply that you are ICC or that you shared their obvious blunder, but to make a general point on what is "principled" and what is not. To put it succintly, your "principled positions" are my "opportunist cop outs", and conversely. When you say that "principled positions" are "dismissed as mechanistic thinking", you are stating that those are "principled positions", which no honest person would attempt to impugn. Maybe they are, but maybe they are just "mechanistic thinking" though. Or even worse. And there are no "objective" criteria that can help we decide that, outside material practice.

i've realized that, when you showed your extreme ignorance about the subject matter you were attacking a few weeks ago (analytic philosophy). anyway i am not a wittgensteinian, i am a marxist.

Ignorance is a sin that all of us are more or less guilty of.

If I was to discuss cosmology with a Ptolemaic astronomer, he or she could easily make the point that I am unable to even predict an eclypse correctly, so my "extreme ignorance" should account for my denial of the obvious fact that the Sun rotates around the Earth.

"Analytical philosophers" may have wonderfully sophisticated analyses, and they quite certainly know more about a lot of things than I do. But they ignore that the criterium of truth is practice, so I do think that they
failed to notice Marx's Copernican revolution.

Luís Henrique

Thirsty Crow

18th February 2012, 19:48

I am pretty sure that there are regularities in the world that Physics can account for; but I am also pretty sure that those aren't "general laws of the motion of matter".How is not gravity one general law of the motion of matter? Maybe the notion of a general law is problematic here, and it would be fine if we got rid of it in this debate. But still, my point that dialectics (at least one of its aspects) and physics share the same field stands.

I would say those "laws" are bogus.I'd hope that any reasonable person would say they're bogus.

I haven't, and it would take a bit long post to do it; and even then I would probably deal more in delimiting the matter through examples than giving strict definitions.So?
Think about it, a user wants to know why dialecitcs is viewed as mysticism, s/he is provided with an answer, but other adherents to it claim that this is not really dialectics, but something else is, something which they don't explain. And how am I to argue my position if I don't even know what I'm criticizing? I don't and I can't since I have no clue what we're even talking about here.

Did I express such weird wish?OK, it was a sill, poorly conceived half-joke ('cause I know that even a mention of RL raises some brows around here), let's forget about it (since I didn't imply anything you thought I did, not intentionally at least).

Well, if Physics could explain every motion of matter, it would explain Shakespeare's puns and the chemical composition of wine.
No, it most certainly wouldn't, and this is merely an assertio nwithout demonstration. I'm suspecting that what we have here is a little communication breakdown centered on the definition of "matter".

Indeed. As stated above, a "positive definition" would demand a lot more work; in any way, those who attack dialectics usually attack their own positive definitions, which would be far from consensual.Which is not the fault of the anti-dialectics "camp", and that can be glimpsed from your lack of clear exposition on the subject at hand.

Oh, may be it is one of those all-important things that we can't talk about. Seriously, the discussion is invalid because materialist dialectics are a method, not an ontological system, and those who deny its existence or importance attack ontological systems, not methods.
I'm not sure what you mean by all-important things we can't talk about. Certainly, I'd hope that "all-important" things can be talked about, and that they actually will be discussed.
But this discussion isn't invalid because I still have no clue about dialectics in your view, and there certainly are dialectical materialists who fall under the category I used and argued against.

I don't think this is the problem. The problem is that many ontological systems have been built under the notion of "materialist dialectics" (starting of course with Engels), and they are easy to debunk. They are also metaphysical (ie, non-dialectical) and idealist, though.

Luís HenriqueI also think this is a problem, and especially agree with you locating the beginning of this kind of project in Engels.
But what is interesting here is that you counterpose dialectics with metaphysics, imnplying that there is also a metaphysical method. So, how is dialectics distinguished from metaphysics (maybe this can be taken as a starting point for your try to develop a "positive definition")?

black magick hustla

19th February 2012, 09:33

It wasn't to imply that you are ICC or that you shared their obvious blunder, but to make a general point on what is "principled" and what is not. To put it succintly, your "principled positions" are my "opportunist cop outs", and conversely. When you say that "principled positions" are "dismissed as mechanistic thinking", you are stating that those are "principled positions", which no honest person would attempt to impugn. Maybe they are, but maybe they are just "mechanistic thinking" though. Or even worse. And there are no "objective" criteria that can help we decide that, outside material practice.
Again, this is cute but my point was not so much about whether "ultraleft" is opportunistic and mechanistic, but that doctrinaire superstars tend to patronize me or people who share similar ideas as having them because we don't understand the dialectic. I dislike that a lot.

Ignorance is a sin that all of us are more or less guilty of.

Ignorance is a sin easily forgiveable. Arrogance carries a higher penitence as a sin though. A person is both ignorant and arrogant when he or she attacks something he or she pretends to know but doesn't.

"Analytical philosophers" may have wonderfully sophisticated analyses, and they quite certainly know more about a lot of things than I do. But they ignore that the criterium of truth is practice, so I do think that they
failed to notice Marx's Copernican revolution.

Luís Henrique

Well, "truth as practice" is certainly an interesting slogan. I don't want to be pedantic, but there are analytic pragmatists, and the empiricists more or less talk in those terms.

Anyway, the criterion of "truth" is of course not practice. It is silly to talk about "criterions" of truth, because what is true is contingent to the particular thing we are looking to. 2+2=4 has nothing to do with "criterion as practice" but it is true. But this is another discussion.

I find some aspects of the "analytiic" tradition useful, personally. I am influenced by them in so far that I find clear, logical and tight arguments more useful than hegelian weaving of words. I also think there is such a thing as "bewitchment" by language and probably one of the reasons why philosophical problems have remained unsolved for thousands of years. Of course, my criterion is not as hard as RL and I am not a complete zealot about it, but it is refreshing to find that there were smart people out there who articulated what many people already suspect (a big chunk of philosophy is bs). Of course, the professional philosophers and self proclaimed "educated people" in the left and general will call me a philistine, but whatever, I consider myself decently educated in those things anyway.

Of course it is not "revolutionary" and it is not meant to be a substitute for Marx. Doesn't mean there is nothing one can gain from it, and even apply, at least indirectly, to their everyday life, including politics.

Thirsty Crow

19th February 2012, 13:00

Again, this is cute but my point was not so much about whether "ultraleft" is opportunistic and mechanistic, but that doctrinaire superstars tend to patronize me or people who share similar ideas as having them because we don't understand the dialectic. I dislike that a lot.

Not only doctrinaire superstars tend to (ab)use dialectics, even by means of casual reference, to argue against a political position, and here's an example:

I think Trotsky was an opportunistic piece of shit, however, he was the commander of the Red Army during the cataclysmic counter revolution...Stalin went on to become the symbolic representative of the Soviet Bourgeoisie, and Trotsky became a Liberal-sympathizing opportunist.
However, I myself am a materialist, and believe these human beings not as heroic figures which, if not for them, the revolution would have failed, rather, I see them as mere agents of material conditions.

(I edited the post - formatting and dropping out the irrelevant part - for clarity)

And to this accusation of opportunism, perfectly substantiated by reference to Trotsky's support for one imperialist camp in WWII, a defender of old Leon claims first that there is no evidence for the accusation of opportunism, and finally that:

Are you not a Marxist? History is better understood by dialectical materialism than materialism alone. History is littered with revolutionary opportunity, but only once in history, in Russia 1917, did a revolution take place with the aim of achieving socialism, and two people were key to that, Lenin and Trotsky, the only two workers leaders in spring 1917 who believed in overthrowing the Provisional Government and capitalism.
Which makes no damn sense, and doesn't explain how his/her opponents materialism fails when opposed to this dialectical "analysis" (how is that even dialectical, this quote, is beyond me), and this whole dishonest debating procedure is peppered with the implicit, potential accusation of non-adherence to Marxism (evident in the first sentence), which is supossedly substantiated by the lack of reference to dialectical materialism (in stead of materialism-without-adjectives).
http://www.revleft.com/vb/socialism-one-country-t168025/index.html

And I've seen this crap too many times, and when I think about all the trouble, mentioned above, with defining what the dialectical method is, which also plagues adherents to it, how can I not conclude that it's load of hot air and nothing more?

Hit The North

19th February 2012, 17:20

Which makes no damn sense, and doesn't explain how his/her opponents materialism fails when opposed to this dialectical "analysis" (how is that even dialectical, this quote, is beyond me), and this whole dishonest debating procedure is peppered with the implicit, potential accusation of non-adherence to Marxism (evident in the first sentence), which is supossedly substantiated by the lack of reference to dialectical materialism (in stead of materialism-without-adjectives).

Reading between the lines (and I agree that burying the meaning between the lines is not very helpful) I think daft punk is accusing Rafiq's formulation of human actors as being solely the "mere agents of material conditions" as being an example of the mechanical application of materialism to human affairs that Marx criticises in the Theses on Feuerbach and elsewhere. To whit:

Originally written by Karl Marx (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm)
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated.

LuÃs Henrique

22nd February 2012, 17:13

How is not gravity one general law of the motion of matter? Maybe the notion of a general law is problematic here, and it would be fine if we got rid of it in this debate. But still, my point that dialectics (at least one of its aspects) and physics share the same field stands.

I don't think gravity is a general law of the motion of matter; it doesn't even account for all of physics. It doesn't explain motion of matter caused by electromagnetism, for instance.

So?
Think about it, a user wants to know why dialecitcs is viewed as mysticism, s/he is provided with an answer, but other adherents to it claim that this is not really dialectics, but something else is, something which they don't explain. And how am I to argue my position if I don't even know what I'm criticizing? I don't and I can't since I have no clue what we're even talking about here.

OK, you have asked for it. Starting next post, I will try to give you an actual explanation. It is going to be boring, and long. Beware.

mention of RL

RevLeft?
the Revolutionary Left?
Real Life?
Rosa Luxemburg?

Too many RLs going around...

No, it most certainly wouldn't, and this is merely an assertio nwithout demonstration. I'm suspecting that what we have here is a little communication breakdown centered on the definition of "matter".

Indeed. Isn't a Shakesperian pun matter in motion? And if not, what is it?

Which is not the fault of the anti-dialectics "camp", and that can be glimpsed from your lack of clear exposition on the subject at hand.

Well, yes, it is at least in part the fault of the "anti-dialectics camp". Maybe they are not given an appropriate definition of dialectics that they can adequately analyse, and to that extent this is not their fault. But this shouldn't be seen as license to put their own definition of "dialectics" up, and then debunk it as if it was what other people are proposing.

I'm not sure what you mean by all-important things we can't talk about. Certainly, I'd hope that "all-important" things can be talked about, and that they actually will be discussed.

Oh, it was a jape about Wittgenstein's mysticism. Not really important.

But this discussion isn't invalid because I still have no clue about dialectics in your view, and there certainly are dialectical materialists who fall under the category I used and argued against.

I don't think they are dialectical at all. On the contrary, they seem quite metaphysical to me.

I also think this is a problem, and especially agree with you locating the beginning of this kind of project in Engels.

Nobody is perfect, not even old Friedrich.

But what is interesting here is that you counterpose dialectics with metaphysics, imnplying that there is also a metaphysical method. So, how is dialectics distinguished from metaphysics (maybe this can be taken as a starting point for your try to develop a "positive definition")?

Next post, look below after some time.

Luís Henrique

Thirsty Crow

22nd February 2012, 17:52

I don't think gravity is a general law of the motion of matter; it doesn't even account for all of physics. It doesn't explain motion of matter caused by electromagnetism, for instance. Well yes I agree, it's one of the general laws of matter's motion.
See what I meant when I stated that there's too much terminological confusion here? Both "general" and "laws" are problematic here (the latter being an import from legal discourse, and unfortunate one at that because it has a distinct connotation of universe being a playground for the King/Legislator who makes everything as it is).

OK, you have asked for it. Starting next post, I will try to give you an actual explanation. It is going to be boring, and long. Beware.OK, good, I'm kinda looking forward to it (and please don't extrapolate anything from this about my social life :D).

RevLeft?
the Revolutionary Left?
Real Life?
Rosa Luxemburg?

Too many RLs going around...Indeed. I was referring to the Divine Queen of anti-dialectics, Rosa Lichtenstein.

Indeed. Isn't a Shakesperian pun matter in motion? And if not, what is it?It's not only matter in motion.
When spoken out loud (as it should be!), it is amenable first to study by acoustics, and yes then it is matter in motion.
But comprehension of the pun as pun wouldn't be reached by acoustics.
We have simple comprehension of the sense of the sentence, and again no properties of the motion of matter can tell us what does "sun" mean, and what is the sense of the sentence.
It is also a sentence/utterance in English, and thus subject to grammatical analysis - first of all, syntactical. Here we might get to know if ol' Willy screwed up his grammar (and maybe extrapolate something about him from this) and whether there is a syntactical element which accounts for the effect the pun in question produces.
After that comes rhetorics, and a historical-stylistic comparison between his pun and other such practices, and we can also compare literary historical periods with respect to puns. Again, nothing about sound as studied by acoustics can tell us anything about these questions.
And so on and so on.

Well, yes, it is at least in part the fault of the "anti-dialectics camp". Maybe they are not given an appropriate definition of dialectics that they can adequately analyse, and to that extent this is not their fault. But this shouldn't be seen as license to put their own definition of "dialectics" up, and then debunk it as if it was what other people are proposing.OK, fair enough, but I'd like to point out two things:

1) when criticising dialectics, people often refer to established definitions in lack of alternatives provided by their opponents in the debate (these are the metaphysical ones you mention)

2) those who criticize dialectics often attribute the inability/lack of will to provide definite descriptions to the very character of dialectics as vague, confusing and useless. I think there is merit to this attitude.

Oh, it was a jape about Wittgenstein's mysticism. Not really important.YOu probably couldn't have noticed, but I haven't read a single sentence written by Wittgenstein.

I don't think they are dialectical at all. On the contrary, they seem quite metaphysical to me.That's because they are metaphysical.

Next post, look below after some time.

Luís Henrique
Will do.

LuÃs Henrique

22nd February 2012, 17:54

So let's try to give some positive hints about dialectics.

Prole Art Threat thus quotes Marx:

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated.

This points to the source of the problem.

Ordinary matter has no ends of itself, so it merely resists human efforts through inertia. People on the other hand have their own goals, and act according to them, and are able to react to the actions of others. Consequently, a rock cannot be swayed by anything we say. If it is going to fall, it falls whether someone says it is going to fall or not. In this humans are completely different from ordinary matter. If you tell Oedipus that he is going to kill his father and marry his mother, he will change his course of action due to this prophecy.

And so any actually historical materialism has to take this into account, since it deals with human beings. Now you may say that historical materialism doesn't have to be dialectical at all, and we could lay it at that, as long as we clearly allow that it needs to be different from "ordinary materialism".

But let us ponder a little bit more about such specific materialism. To avoid an unnecessary terminological dispute, let's call it provisorily "folded materialism" (because "ordinary materialism" is, well, matter thinking about matter, while our specific materialism is matter thinking about matter that thinks). So what does this distinction entails, methodologically?

First thing is, it relates to the reality it seeks to explain in a quite different way, because the very act of attempting an explanation does change its object. In theorising about reality, we do build a new piece of reality (as society before our theorisation was a society without our theory, and society after our theorisation is a society in which our theory exists).

Whatever this is, it is no longer the realm of physics or biology. Nature isn't changed by Newton's theory of gravitation or Darwin's theory of evolution; but society is changed by labour theory of value.

Second thing, because of the above, "ordinary materialism" can proceed from the common sence distinction between "objective" and "subjective"; as we are dealing with ordinary, dead, matter, we can profit from the assumption that what we are investigating is devoid of any subjectivity. Not so with "folded materialism"; here the objective/subjective disjunction is clearly false, as the object holds its own subjectivy, and the subject is itself part of the "objective" reality we are dealing with.

Now this is easy to confuse with mysticism or mystified "holism". But such confusion is caused not by the fact that the objective/subjective distinction has no place here, but by attempts to hypostasise the notion of subject (which will of course give us some form of pantheism). When we talk here of the "object holding its owns subjectivity", we don't mean a Subject with capital initial within an equally hypostasised Object. We mean a plural, diverse, object, with so many different subjectivities.

(More to come)

Luís Henrique

Thirsty Crow

22nd February 2012, 18:05

Just to intervene a bit here. I'd appreciate if no one posted here until Luis Henrique is done, for the sake of clarity.

LuÃs Henrique

22nd February 2012, 18:10

Well yes I agree, it's one of the general laws of matter's motion.
See what I meant when I stated that there's too much terminological confusion here? Both "general" and "laws" are problematic here (the latter being an import from legal discourse, and unfortunate one at that because it has a distinct connotation of universe being a playground for the King/Legislator who makes everything as it is).

In that, there is quite a difference between physics laws and "dialectics" laws. The former are theorisations about regularities that can be observed in nature, the latter seem to be mere impressionist takes about how reality behaves.

OK, good, I'm kinda looking forward to it (and please don't extrapolate anything from this about my social life :D).

What, and allow you to retaliate in kind? Never!

Indeed. I was referring to the Divine Queen of anti-dialectics, Rosa Lichtenstein.

Ah, the slanderous troll.

It's not only matter in motion.
When spoken out loud (as it should be!), it is amenable first to study by acoustics, and yes then it is matter in motion.
But comprehension of the pun as pun wouldn't be reached by acoustics.
We have simple comprehension of the sense of the sentence, and again no properties of the motion of matter can tell us what does "sun" mean, and what is the sense of the sentence.
It is also a sentence/utterance in English, and thus subject to grammatical analysis - first of all, syntactical. Here we might get to know if ol' Willy screwed up his grammar (and maybe extrapolate something about him from this) and whether there is a syntactical element which accounts for the effect the pun in question produces.
After that comes rhetorics, and a historical-stylistic comparison between his pun and other such practices, and we can also compare literary historical periods with respect to puns. Again, nothing about sound as studied by acoustics can tell us anything about these questions.
And so on and so on.

And so, the sence of the pun, its grammatical structure, Shakespeare's style, etc., aren't matter? What are they, if not matter?

YOu probably couldn't have noticed, but I haven't read a single sentence written by Wittgenstein.

Lucky man.

That's because they are metaphysical.

They are, but we probably use the word "metaphysical" in different ways.

Luís Henrique

Thirsty Crow

22nd February 2012, 18:31

And so, the sence of the pun, its grammatical structure, Shakespeare's style, etc., aren't matter? What are they, if not matter?

I see where you're going with this. Everything is matter and the discipline studying the general laws of matter explains everything.
First of all, on the superficial level, only the sound and ink used to record speech are matter. But the sense of the sentence depends on language as material practice - as communication. And nothing general about matter can say anything about the phenomena you mention. We established that gravity and electromagnetism are general laws of motion of matter. What do they tell you about Shakespeare? What does the wave structure of sound, and the regularities of its motion, what does that tell you about the grammatical structure of a pun?
Absolutely nothing.

And I think the biggest confusion stems from "general" in general laws of the motion of matter.

LuÃs Henrique

22nd February 2012, 18:36

Now let us read some more Marx:
It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse

Now, what is Marx telling us here?

If we begin with the apparently concrete - the population, for instance - we are in fact beggining from an abstraction. For the "population" is not what it seems to be, a chaotic aggregate of individuals, like a gas is a chaotic aggregate of molecules. The population is a system, a structured whole. It is not a chaotic aggregate of individuals, but a system of relations between individuals - prices, labour, wages, exchange, exploitation, capital, etc.

And so the concrete is not, and cannot be, unthought. We only arrive at the concreteness of our subject through disassembling it into its constitutive parts and then rebuilding it into a functioning system (but this, of course, is a "scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors", because it strips naked the actual, and exploitative, functioning of bourgeois society: the bourgeois rule requires that we don't tell Oedipus his future, that we do not understand bourgeois society).

(still more to come)

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

22nd February 2012, 18:44

First of all, on the superficial level, only the sound and ink used to record speech are matter.

And what is that that is not matter?

But the sense of the sentence depends on language as material practice - as communication.For instance, how can language be a 'material' practice, if only sound and ink do count as matter (and is sound matter, btw)?

And nothing general about matter can say anything about the phenomena you mention.Indeed, and so either they are not matter (and, again, what are they?) or physics does not account for everything that is matter.

We established that gravity and electromagnetism are general laws of motion of matter.I don't feel included in that "we"; I don't think there are general laws of motion of matter, be them within physics or dialectics.

What do they tell you about Shakespeare? What does the wave structure of sound, and the regularities of its motion, what does that tell you about the grammatical structure of a pun?
Absolutely nothing.Indeed - and what does that tell us about the structure of reality? That there is something such as matter, and some things that are not matter? What is the ontological status of what is not matter?

And I think the biggest confusion stems from "general" in general laws of the motion of matter.I think much more confusion stems from the word 'matter', or perhaps its relation to the words 'material' and 'materialism'.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

22nd February 2012, 20:09

So, up to now, I have made two not obviously linked points:

1. The relation of the historical theorist to its subject is peculiar, for s/he is part of that subject, and whatever theory s/he comes up with will be also part of that subject (and thus will directly change it);

2. The apparently concrete is in fact an abstraction; only through a theoretical apprehension is its actual concreteness restored.

Let me now try to bridge them somewhat, and point a bit forward.

If it is true that social theory impacts the nature of its subject, then such impact would be either in the direction of reinforcing the existent structure, or, on the contrary, of subverting it. If we tell Oedipus that he is going to kill his father, will that prevent him from doing so, or, on the contrary, as in the classical account, ensure that it is what he will actually do?

Now, if the subject of the social theorist was self-sustainable, an adequate account of the state of society would show such stability, and consequently reinforce the structure under appreciation. Conversely, if the subject is non-sustainable, an adequate account of its state would show its weak points, and consequently show its discontents where to hit in order to break it down. That is an important point of contention: those who benefit of the structure of society such as it is, and have no reason to change it, will give us accounts of its functioning, as much as those who lose with such structure and would have it changed. They cannot simply avoid the issue, for it would make oppositionist theory the only theory.

But, of course, if society as it is structured is self-sustainable, such account will be much more convincing than if it is not, for it evidently has to stress its stability and strenghts, which will be easier if society is actually strong and stable. And, of course, if the way society is organised is unstable and full of weak points, then conversely revolutionary theory will be much more convincing than conservative theory.

And so, the issue becomes, if we apply the method Marx describes, which departs from the apparently concrete through detailed abstractions back to an actual, understandable, concrete, what actually comes under our examination? A solid, stable, harmonious society, or, on the contrary, a society full of weaknesses, rupture points, etc.?

(still more to come, but probably only tomorrow)

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

23rd February 2012, 11:38

if we apply the method Marx describes, [...] what actually comes under our examination? A solid, stable, harmonious society, or, on the contrary, a society full of weaknesses, rupture points, etc.?

I think we all know the answer. But let's not take it for granted; instead, let's have a look on how social theorists behave regarding such method. If the application of the method would give us the portrait of a stable, harmonious society, conservative, non-revolutionary social theorists would probably embrace it without reservations, while reformist or revolutionary social theorists would probably reject it.

But what we see is the converse. Sure, there are social theorists that style themselves revolutionary and yet refuse or misuse the method proposed by Marx (we have seen here in revleft that there are people who reject labour theory of value, and try to base a revolutionary point of view in utility theory of value). But those are minoritary, even marginal, trends. On the other hand, the bulk of conservative social theorists reject Marx's method - or even pretend it doesn't exist. Some propose alternative methods, some reject the very possibility of an actual method in social theory, but only a few, marginal ones, try to apply it and take conservative conclusions from it.

(A popular non-Marxist method is to begin with the apparently concrete and stay there. This line of thought assumes that appearance is a direct reflection of reality, that if something looks in a certain way, then it is that certain way. That facts speak by themselves, so to say. We will call this the "positivist method" if we need to refer to it again. It is important to mention the positivist method, because its proponents do use the term "metaphysics", and apply it generously towards whatever they disbelieve - and here is an important part of the answer to the OP: why do some label "materialist dialectics" "mysticism"? - in some cases at least, because they view any sophisticated analysis as metaphysical, and they use the terms "metaphysical" and "mystic" interchangeably.)

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

23rd February 2012, 12:08

So it would seem to me that when we apply Marx's method to social reality we get the picture of a fractured, unstable, conflictive society (and indeed, that is what I read into Marxists social theorists - Marx himself, Engels when he is not dealing with philosophy, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Tallheimer, even Kautsky).

Evidently, this does not tell us anything about the actual validity of the method. Maybe it is actually wrong; maybe the positivists are right, or the people who reject any method are, and Marx's method is actually, if not mystic, at least a mystification.

A transversal issue here would then be that of the relation between method and reality. Does the nature of the method in some way relate to the nature of its subject? Exactly how, and why? Take for instance the issue of logic. Our reasoning takes the form of logic; does this mean that reality must itself be logical? Or could it be that reality is in fact not logical at all, or it is, but only to a certain extent? (And what would we do if we conclude that reality is not necessarily logical? How do we reason about the irrational, if it indeed exists?)

(more to come)

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

23rd February 2012, 13:58

Now, what does this all have to do with dialectics? Or with Hegel?

Some more quoting from Karl Marx:

The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse

And,

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi [Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

Karl Marx, Afterword to Das Kapital's second German edition

So a few ideas stem from these passages:

1. Hegel was the first to present dialectics' general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner;

2. Hegel mystified dialectics, however, because he fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind;

3. "Dialectics" and the method that proceeds "from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions" to "the simplest determinations, and then back the concrete again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations" are one and the same, in Marx's own opinion.

4. Hegel's mistake, according to Marx, was to confuse "the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete", which is just "the way in which thought appropriates the concrete", with "the process by which the concrete itself comes into being", which, according to Marx, is completely independent from human thought. To confuse methodology with ontology, in other words, just as I have been long insisting whenever we discuss this subject.

(still some more to come)

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

23rd February 2012, 14:18

doctrinaire superstars tend to patronize me or people who share similar ideas as having them because we don't understand the dialectic. I dislike that a lot.

Yeah, having so many times been at the taking end of the patronising abuse of the biggest and stupidest doctrinaire superstar here in revleft, I can relate.

Ignorance is a sin easily forgiveable. Arrogance carries a higher penitence as a sin though. A person is both ignorant and arrogant when he or she attacks something he or she pretends to know but doesn't.Well, I don't "know" Astrology at all; it won't keep me from attacking it, regardless.

Anyway, the criterion of "truth" is of course not practice. It is silly to talk about "criterions" of truth, because what is true is contingent to the particular thing we are looking to. 2+2=4 has nothing to do with "criterion as practice" but it is true. But this is another discussion.It is another discussion, in no small part because, as you certainly know, 2+2=4 is not the same kind of truth as "the cat stands on the table", "all men are mortal", or "the French bourgeoisie gladly trampled its own conceptions of right and freedom to smash the Commune".

I also think there is such a thing as "bewitchment" by language and probably one of the reasons why philosophical problems have remained unsolved for thousands of years.Maybe there is such bewitchment. Does it stem from accidents in language, or from the structure of language itself? And is such bewitchment by language the cause of philosophical confusion, or the other way round?

Of course it is not "revolutionary" and it is not meant to be a substitute for Marx. Doesn't mean there is nothing one can gain from it, and even apply, at least indirectly, to their everyday life, including politics.I have absolutely no problem with that. Revolution is not all, and not everything deign of steem is necessarily revolutionary. I do have a problem with people who call those who disagree with it "class enemies" or "class traitors", and state or imply that no one can be a revolutionary if they don't accept it as revealed truth, though. I have bigger problems with people who deal in sophistry and twist language to make such points, and even bigger problems with people who outright lie about such subjects (Wittgenstein was obviously a revolutionary leftist, because he voted socialdemocrat, and he obviously voted socialdemocrat because he was a Jew. Harrumph.)

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

24th February 2012, 11:19

So I think I have, up to now, given an adequate account of Marx's understanding of dialectics as a method. I think it is easy to see that such method, as described by Marx, does not imply Engels/Plekhanov ontological musings; indeed, that it has no intrinsic relation to any specific ontology whatsoever. Such account, moreso, is based in two different works by Marx, each of them serving very different purposes (one is a notebook documenting his process of thinking during the composition of Das Kapital; the other, an afterword for Das Kapital, intended as an ex-post justification of his opus magnum. I think it is clear that the tale that has been told, that the afterword is an elaborate joke, and that the Grundrisse remained unpublished cannot hold; the afterword repeats too much from the Grundrisse, concerning Hegel, Hegel's method, Hegel's mystification of his own method, that we can earnestly attribute different reasons for each passage (the immaturity of Marx's thought in the Grundrisse, some obscure jape without a punchline in the afterword). There is a clear continuity there. And indeed the afterword does explain quite squarely why Marx didn't publish the Grundrisse:
Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.

It has nothing to do with Marx's own opinion about the validity of the Grundrisse. It simply wasn't intended for publication first place; it is the "method of inquiry", not the "method of presentation"; we present the method of presentation, not the method of inquiry. And in the XIX century, at a time when publishing was not as easy as today, and when Marx's fame was not as established as now, finding a publisher for such a work would be much more difficult. (And, of course, we may note the absurd inconsistency that would have us believing that Marx's non-published works shouldn't be taken in serious, while Wittgenstein's non-published works should have precedence over his actually published book...) It seems that we should apply Ockham's razor here, instead of inventing epicycles to maintain a clearly unsustainable view.

Anyway, I think that my account has demonstrated that Marx did apply, in his investigation of the capitalist mode of production and critique of political economy, a method of investigation that he called 'dialectical' and earnestly believed he owed to Hegel, that he believed that such method could be separated from Hegel's ontology (and that he, Marx, had succeeded in actually operating such separation), and that he specifically believed that Hegel's mistake (mystification, as he puts it) was exactly to derive an ontology from the form - not the application - of the method.

Now evidently no one is under any obligation to agree with Marx in any of that. But the consequences of such rejection should be clear: if Marx's method of investigation was invalid, there is no reason to cling to the conclusions he reached by using it, nor should his work be taken as scientific investigation. In other words, if "materialist dialectics" is "mysticism", then Marx's whole works are the works of a mystic; positivists would have it right, and the labour theory of value is undue metaphysical philosophisation, intended to deny the "obvious" fact that all economical exchanges, in the average, are "fair" because equivalent quantities of value are exchanged, and so there is no possible systemic exploitation in a capitalist society.

So, I think my job, concerning dialectics as a methodology, is done. On the other hand, up to now I have for the most part avoided a discussion of any ontology (or of the relation between methodology and ontology, other than pointing that Marx disagreed with Hegel on what such relation is), that is, any discussion of what Marx found in his dialectical investigation about capitalism. That, too, I can do, but for now I would prefer to welcome some critique of what I have already written.

Luís Henrique

Thirsty Crow

25th February 2012, 19:24

I think much more confusion stems from the word 'matter', or perhaps its relation to the words 'material' and 'materialism'.

Luís Henrique
Maybe I should remind myself, and you as well, that you stated this in relation to the Shakespeare's pun and physics example.

That being said, I agree. Much confusion stems from both sources you bring up.
I would be more than ready to define "matter" as physics does, as things that have mass and exists as solid, liquid, gas, or plasma.

In our example, obviously that the sense of the sentence/pun does not have mass, and it doesn't exist in the as solid, liquid etc. Here we could as well conclude that language, or products of human language, are immaterial.
And indeed, the word "sense" doesn't refer to anything like the word "chair" does. Sense doesn't exist independent of human language and thought process, while chairs, like trees and bees do (I'm sorry if this seems patronizing or banal, but I'm trying to be as specific as I can be, examples playing a huge part in it, mostly for my own sake, but also for the sake of successful communication).
But any sense, and language with it, is not possible as immaterial since it's precisely material because of the way it's produced (sound waves and brain processes), at least that. It's also clear that language is part of human material practice - there can be no social reproduction without communication. What I'm getting at here is that language is not a divine gift, but a tools for the survival of the species. To be clear, here I'm trying to connect "matter" and "material" and I think I've successfully done it.

Now, to return to physics, matter and puns, it's clear how physics can deal with regularities/generalities concerning matter and energy which result in the formulation of the so called general laws of the motion of matter (as defined), while it absolutely can't deal with the sense, grammatical structure, rhetorical composition, historical stylistics of Shakespeare's puns. I hope I made myself clear.

And thanks for the exposition on dialectics as a method, opposed to ontology. I'll have to go over it carefully more than one time, and I hope I'll be able to summarize your points accurately, after which I might be able to criticize or agree with your overall view.

LuÃs Henrique

26th February 2012, 23:04

Maybe I should remind myself, and you as well, that you stated this in relation to the Shakespeare's pun and physics example.

One thing that certainly distinguishes Marxist materialism, whether we call it "dialectical", "historical" or whatever else, is that it does have little in common with the vulgar materialism that would have everything "determined" by genes or atoms.

I would be more than ready to define "matter" as physics does, as things that have mass and exists as solid, liquid, gas, or plasma.

We should be careful. "Solid", "liquid", etc, are the names of different kinds of relations between molecules. Matter at a submolecular level isn't solid, liquid, or gaseous.

In our example, obviously that the sense of the sentence/pun does not have mass, and it doesn't exist in the as solid, liquid etc. Here we could as well conclude that language, or products of human language, are immaterial.

Certainly.

And indeed, the word "sense" doesn't refer to anything like the word "chair" does. Sense doesn't exist independent of human language and thought process, while chairs, like trees and bees do (I'm sorry if this seems patronizing or banal, but I'm trying to be as specific as I can be, examples playing a huge part in it, mostly for my own sake, but also for the sake of successful communication).

I don't think it is banal. Much bandwith was wasted in revleft in discussion on whether numbers exist independent from human thought processes, for instance.

But any sense, and language with it, is not possible as immaterial since it's precisely material because of the way it's produced (sound waves and brain processes), at least that.

It cannot exist except through the interaction between matter and some immaterial features of the world - space and time, at least.

It's also clear that language is part of human material practice - there can be no social reproduction without communication. What I'm getting at here is that language is not a divine gift, but a tools for the survival of the species.

Sure, and here we are again at the difference I pointed above, between Marxist materialism and vulgar materialism.

Now, to return to physics, matter and puns, it's clear how physics can deal with regularities/generalities concerning matter and energy which result in the formulation of the so called general laws of the motion of matter (as defined), while it absolutely can't deal with the sense, grammatical structure, rhetorical composition, historical stylistics of Shakespeare's puns. I hope I made myself clear.

If we agree that thought processes are rooted in material phenomena within our brains, then the fact is that a Shakesperean (or not Shakesperean) pun, when heard or read, sets into motion some material phenomena within the brains of the listener or reader. And so it seems that there are some kinds of "motion of matter" that physics cannot actually explain.

And thanks for the exposition on dialectics as a method, opposed to ontology. I'll have to go over it carefully more than one time, and I hope I'll be able to summarize your points accurately, after which I might be able to criticize or agree with your overall view.

I'm looking forward to it.

Luís Henrique

REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL

27th February 2012, 00:27

RevLeft?
the Revolutionary Left?
Real Life?
Rosa Luxemburg?

Too many RLs going around...

http://regretfulmorning.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/1267569113531.jpg

Dude..your talking about dialectics and Wittgenstein.

black magick hustla

27th February 2012, 05:03

Well, I don't "know" Astrology at all; it won't keep me from attacking it, regardless.
curiously, that's the logic used by your heroess RL when dismissing most traditional philosophy as mysticism.

It is another discussion, in no small part because, as you certainly know, 2+2=4 is not the same kind of truth as "the cat stands on the table", "all men are mortal", or "the French bourgeoisie gladly trampled its own conceptions of right and freedom to smash the Commune".
in a sense yes. but what makes "the cat stands on the table" true is if the cat stands on the table. has nothing to do with "practice". if a scientist does an experiment and finds out the cat doesnt stands on the table, but the cat actually stands on it, then the proposition is true.

Maybe there is such bewitchment. Does it stem from accidents in language, or from the structure of language itself? And is such bewitchment by language the cause of philosophical confusion, or the other way round?

Well, its more complicated than the "structure of language" because language is a form of life/social activity, so it is tied to the modes of productions etc. But if one realizes how language comes to being, then it makes more sense to understand how language can "break down" too. A good example is asking "what is Being", of course, "Being" is a word that comes out of contextual, social activity, so makes more sense to look at that than to talk about Being in the abstract.

LuÃs Henrique

27th February 2012, 16:06

curiously, that's the logic used by your heroess RL when dismissing most traditional philosophy as mysticism.

I was pretty sure that the feminine form of the word "hero" was "heroin".

To the substance,

Do you think that one has to know all about Astrology in order to dismiss it as pseudoscience? I am certainly not prepared to agree.

But what you seem to be doing here is to accuse me of holding double standards. When we discuss Astrology, or Analytic Philosophy, I would hold that one doesn't need an accurate knowledge of all the details entailed in order to dismiss such, for lack of a better word, "disciplines". When we discuss "dialectics", I would hold that one would have to be actually acquainted with its byzantine subtleties in order to properly dispell it as "mysticism" or "metaphysics".

If so, it wouldn't be too much different from your standing; as you put it yourself,

doctrinaire superstars tend to patronize me or people who share similar ideas as having them because we don't understand the dialectic

it is refreshing to find that there were smart people out there who articulated what many people already suspect (a big chunk of philosophy is bs)

To save us both from that vexing circumstances, I would say that one actually doesn't have to hold a firm grasp on some subjects in order to disregard them as fooleries - a superficial grasp on their main pressupositions, and the way they directly contradict what we know about the structure of reality, should be enough for any mildly educated person to dismiss Phrenology, Chiropraxy, Astrology, Creationism, Lysenkoism, Marrism, Neoclassic Economy, etc., as obscurantist pseudoscience and superstition.

But such superficial level of knowledge about their foundating pressupositions must still be there, and it is still possible for people to reject those absurds on even more absurd bases ("Astrology is superstition because God gave us free will, so it is not possible to read our future on the stars", "Lysenkoism is false because there are no social classes nor class struggle, so the idea of 'proletarian byology' makes no sence at all", etc.) And so, such small amount of superficial knowledge must still be open to criticism.

It is true that I don't know much about Analytic Philosophy. From what I have read about it - both laudatory and critical - it seems to me that it refuses Marx's methodology as described by himself in the passages I quoted above. Maybe I am mistaken, and maybe you can convince me of that. Maybe I have read the wrong texts, the wrong critiques, the wrong apologetics; maybe I got everything wrong. Your - and others' - attitude toward such discussion doesn't help much, because it is exactly what you describe in your complaint:
doctrinaire superstars tend to patronize me or people who share similar ideas as having them because we don't understand analytic philosophy.

(And such patronising, sir, has been far worse than any that you may have suffered here in revleft. Or have you been called a "numpty"? Treated, mockingly, as "Your Highness"? Told that you don't know what a triangle is because you have said that triangles have three sides? Falsely accused of making threats, and then called a woman beater? All that to the silence and conivence of the admin body here? I don't think so. And certainly, absolutely certainly, not by me in any case.)

And so, if you wish to show me where I am wrong in my refusal of Analytic Philosophy as fundamentally incompatible with Marxism, you are welcome to try. But if you are only going to repeat platitudes about how we should "look at how words are used", then don't expect to sway me; it is too little and too feeble for that end.

in a sense yes. but what makes "the cat stands on the table" true is if the cat stands on the table. has nothing to do with "practice".And whether the cat is on the table or not, it certainly has no scientific value at all. At some moments "the" precise cat we are talking about is on the table; at others it is not. So it does not belong in the same department of any of the other statements I have proposed you.

if a scientist does an experiment and finds out the cat doesnt stands on the table, but the cat actually stands on it, then the proposition is true.Sorry?

Well, its more complicated than the "structure of language" because language is a form of life/social activity, so it is tied to the modes of productions etc. But if one realizes how language comes to being, then it makes more sense to understand how language can "break down" too. A good example is asking "what is Being", of course, "Being" is a word that comes out of contextual, social activity, so makes more sense to look at that than to talk about Being in the abstract.I have some problems with some of the expressions you use here.

language is a form of life/social activityI can't see how "language is a form of life". Being a fisherman or a priest is a (n individual) "form of life", or hunter-gathering or agriculture are (collective) "forms of life", but language certainly isn't comparable to any of that. Language is a fundamental component of any form of human social life, and, as such, yes, it is a social activity.

so it is tied to the modes of productions etcI don't think so. English or French were spoken in feudal England and feudal France, just like they are spoken in capitalist England and France, and I don't think it is trivial (and perhaps even possible) to tie the changes from 17th century English or French to the modern versions of such languages to any changes in the mode of production.

But if one realizes how language comes to being, But the sad reality is that no one realises how language comes to being. Its historical origin is long lost in time, completely inaccessible to us. Its individual acquisition is little less difficult to grasp, actual experimentation being ethically impossible.

then it makes more sense to understand how language can "break down" too.What does "break down" mean in this context? I miss the meaning.

A good example is asking "what is Being", of course, "Being" is a word that comes out of contextual, social activity, so makes more sense to look at that than to talk about Being in the abstract.But this isn't "bewitchment by language", this is merely sophistry. The word is taken out of its usual contexts, and given a pseudo-meaning that it actually doesn't have, and speculative theory is built upon such misuse. But "language" doesn't do any of that by itself, nor are those missteps in any way implied in language or in its structures.

(Indeed, there seems to be a lot of conflating between two very different, and probably mutually exclusive, things here in revleft, namely, a) language tricking us into misaprehensions of reality, and b) people using language to trick each others into misaprehensions of reality.)

Luís Henrique

Kronsteen

2nd March 2012, 00:07

Not everyone who rejects dialectical materialism regards it as 'mystical', ie. meaningless.

Some of us regard it as a confused version of what could be a useful idea - if only someone were to work it out rigorously. 'Systematic Dialectics' is an attempt to do so.

Others think it's meaningful but false. Or meaningful and true but trivial.

Personally, I regard it as about one half true but so general and vague as to be useless, and one half either meaningless or simply false. I also don't think marxists use it in practice.

Rosa Lichtenstein views it all as meaningless or false - and a vestigal organ of marxism that can and should be amputated.

Certainly almost all of those on this board who defend it, are unable to define it rigourously.

Mr. Natural

2nd March 2012, 17:03

Kronsteen, I left this thread several weeks ago when no one would engage me when I stated that the new sciences of organizational relations both illuminate and confirm Marx's materialist dialectic. I then got one response when I began the thread, "Marx's and Bertell Ollman's Dialectic" in Learning.

I'm no prize, but the intelligent comrades engaging this thread are completely lost when it comes to organizing against global capitalism--a terminal disease of life and society. Marxism has become a museum piece, and Korsch and the early Lukacs have been substituted for Marx and Engels.

The materialist dialectic is comprehensible and popularly usable in my mind. Is this a headtrip, or am I onto something very important?

I am watching the destruction of the human species at the hand of global capitalism, and there is no effective opposition. None at all.

Kronsteen

3rd March 2012, 07:00

The materialist dialectic is comprehensible and popularly usable in my mind. Is this a headtrip, or am I onto something very important?

I don't know. I do know that there is not one 'Dialectical Materialism' but many, and most of these are vague and inconsistent. Every socialist party seems to have its own version, and every major marxist thinker has a different take on it. That might not be a problem if we didn't all pretend we all had the same theory.

If you can express your ideas clearly and precisely in written form, give dozens of examples for each principle, and rebut the most intelligent objections you can think of, you might be on to something.

You mention Ollman. I think his writing in 'Dance of the Dialectic' sounds very impressive and inspirational, until you ask exactly what he's saying. Then it collapses into incoherence. If you think I'm wrong, I'd be interested to hear why.

As regards science confirming Marx, there's an anti-science culture in modern marxism. Very few of us know any science at all, and we tend to view the scientific attitude as 'bourgeois'.

There may not be a global anti-capitalist movement, let alone a global worker's marxist one, but there is organised resistance to tyranny - eg. the Arab spring - and socialists of many stripes *are* involved. I agree though that most marxist groups are moribund and solipsistic.

LuÃs Henrique

3rd March 2012, 11:38

up to now I have for the most part avoided a discussion of any ontology (or of the relation between methodology and ontology, other than pointing that Marx disagreed with Hegel on what such relation is), that is, any discussion of what Marx found in his dialectical investigation about capitalism. That, too, I can do

So, as threatened, let's move into ontology.

As a first step, let's make it clear what I mean by "ontology". Not a discipline or a method, but only the available knowledge about reality (about whatever "is the case", to use Wittgenstein's terminology). The most important method to produce and organise such knowledge is science, not philosophy, not "empiricism", and certainly not the department within philosophy that is often called "Ontology".

So a few considerations about science. They are important because, as Kronsteen puts it,

As regards science confirming Marx, there's an anti-science culture in modern marxism. Very few of us know any science at all, and we tend to view the scientific attitude as 'bourgeois'.

It must be said that most of the left, at the present moment, has more or less openly renounced any privileged relation to the working class; substitutionism has become so ingrained into the leftist culture that few leftist organisations can claim any actual relevance in the working class culture.

Now there is a relation of cause-and-effect between such phenomenon and the attitude described by Kronsteen - but the cause is the break between the left and the working class, and the consequence is the mistrust of science by many leftists, not the other way round.

But back to science, it is, as I said before, the most important method to produce and organise knowledge about reality. Which means, among other things, that it is a method, not a collection of conclusions, and that it is not the only method, just the most powerful.

This is important so that we can restablish the historical context of science: science is not eternal, it is something that only came into being around the 16th century, not before, and so whatever knowledge we had before that (and it was certainly an impressive amount of knowledge) was not achieved through science, but through other, less effective methods. Now, how does that relate too the dismissive attitude towards science described by Kronsteen? Through the fact that bourgeois ideology, which is not science, and is not scientific, nevertheless indulges in a mistification of science that involves an overestimation of it.

And so bourgeois ideology tends to blurr the concept of science, in order to deny its historicity, as a part of its efforts to "naturalise" the bourgeois order, to portray it as eternal. To such end, it denies science's historical aspect, projecting it into the past, so that it can account for all progress of knowledge - and in doing so, it necessarily dismisses the specificity of scientific method regarding other, less effective, methods of inquiry about reality.

Now, of course this means that any systematic effort to fight back bourgeois ideology must include a debunking of such anti-scientific myths about science. And in times of degeneration of the working class and its project, the debunking of the mythology of "Science" as an a-historical activity may well degenerate itself into a denial of the precedence of science as a method of acquisition of knowledge.

But whence we have established that science is a method to achieve knowledge, we will have a better grasp of what is "scientific" and what is not, and we might understand the historical nature of such issues. For whatever is the state-of-art knowledge in any branch of modern science, it is different from such state-of-art a few years ago. Science ('science' without a capital letter, not "Science") allow us to establish provisional "truths" about things that are, and such "provisional truths" are eventually discarded in favour of new, deeper, but equally provisional, "truths" (and yes, such discarding is more complex than that, and it involves, of course, that awful notion of simultaneously rejecting and keeping - but later with that). So the progress of science is by no means a linear accumulation of knowledge, in which the lackings of our previous knowledge are merely suplemented by new knowledge, but it necessarily involves the systematic destruction of the previous accumulated knowledge.

And so, here we have it: science is always wrong, not always right. And this is not a weakness of science, much on the contrary! Of course, however, scientists - especially if they are not social scientists, and most especially if they are physicists - often forget this. Thence their permanent temptation to believe that within a few years, or a few generations at most, science may come to solve all scientific problems, and establish what is commonly called a "Theory of Everything". Scientists can be anti-scientific, too...

Now, of course, the problem of whether a "Theory of Everything" is possible or not is extra-scientific. Next post I will discuss the nature of such things as they are "extra-scientific". But for now, let me recapitulate all of the above: yes, indeed there is much ignorance, and specifically ignorance about science, within the left; but there is also - mostly not within the left, though of course not exclusively - a peculiar form of ignorance about science that does not translate into a dismissive attitude towards it, but, on the contrary, in a kind of secular divinisation of science (commonly matched by the correspondent capitalisation of the word). Such mythology of Science is anti-scientific too, in the sence that it contradicts scientific method. Even if it is very much "pro-scientific" in the sence that it fosters a positive emotional response to things scientific and "scientific".

Luís Henrique

u.s.red

3rd March 2012, 19:24

And so, here we have it: science is always wrong, not always right.

Luís Henrique

So Hubble is always wrong about the expansion of the universe? Wouldn't it make more sense to say that science is always evolving, dialectically, towards a new contradiction and a new resolution, a new contradiction, etc?

Mr. Natural

3rd March 2012, 20:48

Kronsteen, I just lost a lengthy post to you: "Connection Problem." I appreciated your reply, and will try again tomorrow.

LuÃs Henrique

3rd March 2012, 21:18

So Hubble is always wrong about the expansion of the universe? Wouldn't it make more sense to say that science is always evolving, dialectically, towards a new contradiction and a new resolution, a new contradiction, etc?

Evidently, to say that "science is always wrong" is a rhetoric device to point out that science is not a dogmatic discipline. Of course at any given moment, the state-of-art of any given scientific discipline is the best approximation to what one would ordinarily call "truth" about the object of such discipline. Also of course, it will be superceeded by a better approximation at some moment in a future, when it will be, in consequence, amply recognised as "wrong" or "false".

Yes, this is, in my opinion, a dialectical process; but my attempt here is to bring people to agree with the substance of what I am saying, not to cause them to reject whatever I write because they cannot accept the terminology. And so, what is important to me at this moment is that people realise that scientific progress is not a linear process, not a mere filling of gaps in previous versions of the scientific narrative. If they can realise that, then the most important part of what I am trying to do is accomplished, even if they remain reticent towards any phraseology.

Luís Henrique

Kronsteen

4th March 2012, 02:22

So Hubble is always wrong about the expansion of the universe? Wouldn't it make more sense to say that science is always evolving, dialectically, towards a new contradiction and a new resolution, a new contradiction, etc?

You've just demonstrated several problems with the dialectic, and the common marxist attitude towards it.

1) The image of dialectical progress through contradiction and resolution isn't in Hegel. It's in Ficte, and Hegel dismissed it as a 'lifeless schema'. Which means if it's the system Marx claimed to have extracted from Hegel...then Marx was lying about having read Hegel.

Plus, he would be now outed as a fraud by the failure of his attempt to claim expertise in the philosophy of his time.

So on balance, it's probably not a good idea to follow the party line that Marx viewed the universe as progressing by contradiction.

2) Whever there's two forces pulling in different directions, or two equally valid ways of describing something, or any kind of ambiguity, it can always be described as 'contradictory'. Provided you're willing to redefine 'contradiction' every time you apply it.

*A person has 'contradictory' (multiple) emotions.
*A trade union has a 'contradiction' (dispute) between two factions.
*My cup of hot coffee is changing into it's 'contrary' (lack) of a cup of cold coffee.
*The working class and the rulers have 'contradictory' (incompatible) interests.
*Bass and treble in music have a 'contradictory' (counterpoint) relationship.

And if you find yourself unable to stretch this one word to describe a situation, you've got a bag of other equally elastic words - totality, mediation, transformation, etc. - that you can try. Provided you can temporarily forget your principle that everything in the universe is contradictory.

These terms have no defined meaning, which is why they can appear to explain everything, while explaining nothing.

Now, if marxism is based on dialectics, then marxism is based on a vacuum, and fails as both a theory and a practice guided by that theory. However, I maintain that marxism is not based on dialectics - merely that Marx (and to a greater extent Engels) used the fashionable metaphysics of their time to justify their ideas, to their audience and themselves.

150 years down the line, we're stuck in the legacy of that unnecessary justification.

LuÃs Henrique

4th March 2012, 03:10

You've just demonstrated several problems with the dialectic, and the common marxist attitude towards it.

1) The image of dialectical progress through contradiction and resolution isn't in Hegel. It's in Ficte, and Hegel dismissed it as a 'lifeless schema'. Which means if it's the system Marx claimed to have extracted from Hegel...then Marx was lying about having read Hegel.

Plus, he would be now outed as a fraud by the failure of his attempt to claim expertise in the philosophy of his time.

So on balance, it's probably not a good idea to follow the party line that Marx viewed the universe as progressing by contradiction.

It seems that you are confusing two different things here.

One is the thesis-antithesis-synthesis scheme. It is absent in Marx, at least as a formula.

The other is contradiction-resolution. And this is explicitly present in Marx's work.

2) Whever there's two forces pulling in different directions, or two equally valid ways of describing something, or any kind of ambiguity, it can always be described as 'contradictory'. Provided you're willing to redefine 'contradiction' every time you apply it.

Maybe some do that. But a clear definition of what a material contradiction is can be achieved.

*A person has 'contradictory' (multiple) emotions.

That constitutes a material contradiction only if at least one of these emotions reinforces the other.

*A trade union has a 'contradiction' (dispute) between two factions.

This is merely conflict; conflicts are no contradictions by no means.

*My cup of hot coffee is changing into it's 'contrary' (lack) of a cup of cold coffee.

And that is simply absurd.

*The working class and the rulers have 'contradictory' (incompatible) interests.

They have mutually exclusive interests. It only amounts to a material contradiction because the latter of these classes structurally needs the continued existence of the former, but the former class structurally needs to destroy the latter.

*Bass and treble in music have a 'contradictory' (counterpoint) relationship.

And this is again mere absurd, though perhaps in more levels than the previous ones.

And if you find yourself unable to stretch this one word to describe a situation, you've got a bag of other equally elastic words - totality, mediation, transformation, etc. - that you can try. Provided you can temporarily forget your principle that everything in the universe is contradictory.

These terms have no defined meaning, which is why they can appear to explain everything, while explaining nothing.

But, of course, materialist dialectics isn't based on such absurd word plays.

Now, if marxism is based on dialectics, then marxism is based on a vacuum, and fails as both a theory and a practice guided by that theory. However, I maintain that marxism is not based on dialectics - merely that Marx (and to a greater extent Engels) used the fashionable metaphysics of their time to justify their ideas, to their audience and themselves.

Unhappily this goes against the evidence we have.

150 years down the line, we're stuck in the legacy of that unnecessary justification.

Or rather, we are stuck into incomprehension of Marx's method, into the superimposition of positivist methodology into Marx's reasoning, and into abandonment of the very nucleus of Marx's achivements, namely, that capitalism is not merely "immoral" or "unjust", but that it is structurally unsustainable.

But, since we are playing the game of saying that each others cannot explain what they mean while attempting to explain what we mean ourselves, you could try to suplement your negative definition of Marxism ("it is not based on dialectics") with a positive definition, and tell us on what is Marxism actually based.

Luís Henrique

Kronsteen

4th March 2012, 08:32

One is the thesis-antithesis-synthesis scheme. It is absent in Marx, at least as a formula. The other is contradiction-resolution. And this is explicitly present in Marx's work.

Contradiction in what sense? Contradiction between what, and how many? And what exactly is meant by 'resolving' a contradiction?

a clear definition of what a material contradiction is can be achieved.Tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems you're talking about a dialectic of society - based in concrete human circumstances - as opposed to a dialectic of nature.

That's certainly a more reasonable position than the mysticism we're talking about in this thread, but it's a lot less common.

But, of course, materialist dialectics isn't based on such absurd word plays.Isn't it? I think Marx would agree with you, but almost all theory of dialectic comes from Engels, and he certainly did use such wordplays.

I've spent much of my adult life working with marxist activists, some of who were also theorists, and the examples I gave are from conversations with them.

marxism is not based on dialecticsUnhappily this goes against the evidence we have.Could you expand on that? It sounds like it could lead to the heart of the issue.

positivist methodologyThe term 'positivist' seems only to be used as an insult in marxist circles. Which is odd, as no one's yet explained why checking a theory against evidence and reason should be a bad thing.

abandonment of the very nucleus of Marx's achivements, namely, that capitalism is not merely "immoral" or "unjust", but that it is structurally unsustainable.That's quite explicit in Marx - though it may also be wrong, or technically right but only true in timescales measured in centuries.

That's a whole other issue.

tell us on what is Marxism actually based.That's a rather large issue, which I think would take us too far afield. But I think Lenin was two thirds right - Marxism is based on French socialism and British political economics.

Mr. Natural

4th March 2012, 15:27

Kronsteen, I lost two lengthy posts to you yesterday, so I'm breaking today's attempt into parts.

First of all, the Marxist materialist dialectic's contradictions are not logical contradictions but, as Ollman writes: "Contradiction is understood here as the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation, which is to say between elements that are also dependent on one another." Bourgeoisie/proletariat is the classic example of dialectical contradiction.

And yes, there are many materialist (and idealist) dialectics running around, so which is the one the young Marx engaged, developed, and employed as his means of socio-economic inquiry, comprehension, and presentation? Surely Ollman gets this right. He clearly traces the roots of Marx's dialectic to the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations and its abstraction process. Then as only I am seeing at this time, the new sciences of organizational relations both affirm the philosophy of internal relations and can be employed to embody its collection of laws and categories into a popularly usable conceptual form.

I'm saying that a bottom-up, grassroots revolutionary process based in the organizational relations of life can be developed and brought to life. Such a conceptual tool already exists: I call it "Capra's triangle." Capra's triangle is the popularly perceptible thus usable, natural, scientific, Marxist materialist dialectic we all need, but my initial attempt to present it at RevLeft was shunned.

Kronsteen, the materialist dialectic I'm trying to introduce works with life's organizational "rules," and these rules are invisiible to human consciousness. People see life's "things" but are blind to the critical organizational relations that bring "things" to life. Life has a universal pattern of organization that anarchism/socialism/communism represent well but must understand and replicate if they are to come to life. Our existential dilemma is that we who must design and produce our lives cannot see life's design.

The preceding paragraph points to one reason Marxists and everyone else tend to ignore the new sciences of organizational relations. Another reason Marxists have avoided science, as we agree, is that science--past and current--is dominated by an anti-dialectical, reductionist science of separate things. Yet another cause of modern Marxism's rejection of the new science was a Machist idealist scientific positivism based in the new physics that was heatedly opposed by Lenin.

However, Marx and Engels defined dialectics as a science, wished to develop a scientific socialism, and published Socialism: Utopian and Scientific as the concise expression of their political views. Thus the abandonment of dialectic or its confinement to human affairs and the concomitant rejection of the new science is decidely un-Marxian.

Mr. Natural

4th March 2012, 15:58

Kronsteen, Here is the second half of the Ollman/new science/materialist dialectics post.

You offered three criteria by which whether I am onto something or not may be judged. As for the first, I don't know if I am able to express my ideas clearly to others, for those others do not communicate. So I must fail in this, but isn't everyone else failing to engage? Despite being proclaimed revolutionaries who are firmly stuck in place within capitalism? The root problem here appears to be that learning to see the critical organizational relations of our lives represents some sort of paradigm shift in consciousness for the human species. Again: we see things but are blind to their organization.

I don't employ the various dialectical "laws" found in Hegel in my ordinary dialectical thinking. They serve me as examples of life's pervasive dialectical, organizational relations and processes, but their main service is to firmly establish that life and society are organic, systemic processes. This is the deep nature of life and society. The "laws" of the new science of organizational relations confirm Hegel's dialectical "laws" and categories in general, and this new science can potentially embody these loose dialectical laws into a popularly usable form.

As for your third criterion, I have exhaustively researched and critically examined the most intelligent objections to the living materialist dialectic I'm proposing, and this dialectic/Capra's triangle is always affirmed and strengthened. I have rebutted all challenges. Of course, self-deception is a human art form ....

So I don't agree that Ollman's presentation of Marx's understanding and use of the materialist dialectic ever "collapses into incoherence," for Ollman and this materialist dialectic are confirmed by the new science--the new science that we agree Marxism is avoiding.

Engels at Marx's graveside: "Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force."

Kronsteen

4th March 2012, 17:08

as Ollman writes: "Contradiction is understood here as the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation, which is to say between elements that are also dependent on one another." Bourgeoisie/proletariat is the classic example of dialectical contradiction.

So there's two classes, each defining the other, but they have incompatible interests, so they fight, and in doing so change themselves and each other.

That's fairly simple and clear, so why do we need all this mystifying talk of contradiction and internal self-generated development?

Ollman...clearly traces the roots of Marx's dialectic to the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations and its abstraction process.

Does he also trace it back to the influences which Hegel tried to fuse into one system? Numerology, astrology, alchemy, christianity, natural magic, bible codes and masonic symbolism? The notions that matter itself is alive and the universe is god in disguise?

The cosmic mysteries of Jakob Boehme, Meister Eckhardt, and Hermes Trismegistus? These are the people Hegel quotes most often, not Locke, Hume and Kant.

Marx's offhand remark about extracting the 'rational core' won't make these difficulties go away on its own. Nor will Engels' metaphor of turning Hegel on his feet. An upside-down mysticism is still mysticism, and its far from clear just how this 'rational core' could be surgically extracted without changing it.

the materialist dialectic I'm trying to introduce works with life's organizational "rules," and these rules are invisiible to human consciousness.

Really obvious question: If they're invisible to human consciousness, how come you know about them?

You say 'life'. Are you talking about life in the biological sense, in which case the principles apply equally to plankton and elephants. Do you mean the social, intellectual, emotional etc. life of individual humans? Or do they only come into play when there's a culture of humans with a common language and practices?

Our existential dilemma is that we who must design and produce our lives cannot see life's design.

This sounds like the philosophical notion of the 'authentic way of living' - which presupposes a 'human nature' to live in accordance with.

Do these principles extend down to subatomic particles and/or up to nebulas, or do they operate only at the human scale?

that science--past and current--is dominated by an anti-dialectical, reductionist science of separate things.

That is the standard accusation, yes. The notion that marxists are better at science than the scientists.

Yet another cause of modern Marxism's rejection of the new science was a Machist idealist scientific positivism based in the new physics that was heatedly opposed by Lenin.

Mach's ideas were being developed by Einstein, with remarkably successful results. They were supported by bolsheviks like Bogdanov, who was a pioneer in what we now call cybernetics. If you want to defend Lenin's philosophical views, you can't ignore the fact that Mach's ideas have been vindicated by practice.

Besides, Lenin's Empirocriticism (by his own admission) was less at attempt to construct a distinctively marxist form of physics, than an attempt to refute Bogdanov by constructing something as extremely opposite as possible. And Lenin did that, not to establish a theory, but to discredit Bogdanov in a leadership struggle.

As for Lenin's theory itself, he started by defining matter as the stuff out of which reality is made, and use this to 'prove' that reality is whatever is made of matter. Stopping off to define sensory experience as direct contact with matter.

However, Marx and Engels defined dialectics as a science

But did they mean a science like physics? Or an inexact science like psychology?

I don't think they were looking for either. Scientific socialism was hardnosed, rational, empirically grounded socialism - as distinct from dreamy, vague, utopian socialism.

Unlike modern sciences, marxism doesn't make any but the most general predictions, and is tied to a specific project of political change.

LuÃs Henrique

4th March 2012, 18:48

Contradiction in what sense? Contradiction between what, and how many? And what exactly is meant by 'resolving' a contradiction?

I think here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1132794&postcount=8) we would have a workable definition of "material contradiction".

Tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems you're talking about a dialectic of society - based in concrete human circumstances - as opposed to a dialectic of nature.

Well, not exactly. I am first and foremost making a distinction between methodology and "ontology". Now of course it is true that the study of society requires a different methodology than the study of nature, but that comes after.

That's certainly a more reasonable position than the mysticism we're talking about in this thread, but it's a lot less common.

Well, thanks, but where I stand it is a whole lot more common. Such pseudophilosophies are relics of Stalinism, they have no relevance either in the academy or the political left. Thirty years ago, maybe that would be true.

Isn't it? I think Marx would agree with you, but almost all theory of dialectic comes from Engels, and he certainly did use such wordplays.

Well, no. When I studied methodology - even though that was some thirty years ago - Engels had absolutely no place within the discussion. And, of course, anything based on wordplays is certainly not materialist.

I've spent most of my adult life working with marxist activists, some of who were also theorists, and the examples I gave are from conversations with them.

Well, that is certainly a problem, but not one that I can be held responsible for, and not even one that I can relate too much. Apart from a few remnants of the old Stalinist parties (and even those don't talk much about such things), such ideas are quite irrelevant here. (And yes, I have also spent much of my adult life working with Marxist activists, a few of whom were theorists too.)

Could you expand on that? It sounds like it could lead to the heart of the issue.

Marx certainly refered to dialectics, attributed the historical origin of his method to a creative appropriation of Hegel, talked about contradictions, etc. To deny that would require an enormous amount of circumventing the use of Ockham's razor, to the point that it is certainly not reasonable at all.

The term 'positivist' seems only to be used as an insult in marxist circles. Which is odd, as no one's yet explained why checking a theory against evidence and reason should be a bad thing.

That's simply false. "Positivism" is a well know philosophical position, with well established consequences upon the study of social phenomena. I don't think I have read and studied Comte or Durkheim merely in order to achieve a cuss word.

Checking a theory against evidence and reason is a good thing. It is the way by which you understand and organise evidence that is at stake here, that makes the difference between the positivist method and the Marxist method.

That's quite explicit in Marx - though it may also be wrong, or technically right but only true in timescales measured in centuries.

Hm, no. It is explicit in Marx, and of course it may be wrong. If it is wrong, though, it means that capitalism cannot be superceeded by socialism, and that we are wasting our time trying to help it happen.

That's a whole other issue.

No, it is not. There is no way out of it: if the positivist method is the correct method, then the conclusions we reach by using it are better than the conclusions we reach by using materialist dialectics - or Marxist method, for they are one and the same.

That's a rather large issue, which I think would take us too far afield. But I think Lenin was two thirds right - Marxism is based on French socialism and British political economics.

But French socialism was still moral socialism, and British political economics certainly didn't point to the structural contradictions of capitalism, rather on the contrary. So even if Lenin was one third wrong, the third that he got wrong must be replaced with something else; a mere justaposition of the other two thirds doesn't account for Marxism.

Luís Henrique

Grenzer

5th March 2012, 03:18

I never thought this thread would have gone on for this long, I thank all of you who have posted for your input: it's been interesting; though I do resent the insinuation that a certain poster made that I am ignorant because I called dialectics "mysticism"(something I never actually did). Instead I was actually asking as to why certain people called dialectics Mysticism, which is why I put it in quotations.

For my own part, I have come to the conclusion that dialectics, whether it's applied in the materialist sense or not, is bullshit; though that's just my own opinion, I can still respect those who think otherwise. I hope this discussion continues, it's been interesting to read. Good to see that unlike most discussions that occur on here, it hasn't devolved in to pointless flaming. Carry on lads!

Kronsteen

5th March 2012, 08:40

I think here we would have a workable definition of "material contradiction".

In the post you link to, you say this:

A material contradiction is a situation in which the continued existence of something requires some factor that in the long term undermines that very existence. For instance:

The development of capitalism requires a growing proletariat - but the existence of a huge proletariat will destroy capitalism.So if a parasitic organism will eventually kill its host, is that a material contradiction? What about the hospital patient who needs escalating quantities of a drug, which reaches toxic doses?

The continued use of a natural resource like coal enables a society to prosper, but also shapes the society toward the extraction of more and more coal from the ground...and sets it up for a crisis when there's no more coal. Is this a material contradiction?

If so, then it's a useful idea. Though 'contradiction' isn't the best word for it, and the related 'interpenetration of opposites' is downright obscure.

There are also other terms like 'tranformation of quantity into quality' and 'transformation into opposites' that are just as obscure, and just as liable to be expanded from political terms into cosmological terms by marxists who like to imagine they have a theory of everything.

When I studied methodology Engels had absolutely no place within the discussion.That's certainly refreshing. Here in the UK-SWP, the orthodoxy is that Engels and Marx never disagreed, and Engel's one and a half books (plus Lenin's notebooks) constitute a complete and eternally true analysis of the entire universe.

Marx certainly refered to dialectics, attributed the historical origin of his method to a creative appropriation of Hegel, talked about contradictions, etc.See my response to Mr Natural above.

of course it is true that the study of society requires a different methodology than the study of natureDoes it? People have emotions and agendas, which rocks and electrons don't, but surely that calls for an augmentation of obersvational method, not it's abandonment.

Checking a theory against evidence and reason is a good thing. It is the way by which you understand and organise evidence that is at stake here, that makes the difference between the positivist method and the Marxist method.

This is a false dichotomy - between the scientist who views themselves as outside the system looking in, and the one who views himself as part of the system.

Marxists have a strawman image of the positivist, as someone who believes they're disinterested and incapable of bias, watching the universe from no point of view, unaffected by habits of thought or emotion.

Scientists are always aware of how they themselves can distort their own readings. They can attempt to minimise the effect, or take it into account as a measure of uncertainty, or include 'observer effects' as part of the model.

materialist dialectics - or Marxist method, for they are one and the same.That is open to question. John Rees's book 'Algebra of Revolution' concludes that dialectics is the sum of Marx's method and vice versa. Which is unfortunate, as he gives several incompatible accounts of both.

Also, Marx made mistakes. Was this only when he forgot his dialectics?

But French socialism was still moral socialism, and British political economics certainly didn't point to the structural contradictions of capitalismMarxism has a moral componant - indeed, I think most marxists became marxists for moral reasons.

Ricardo, Smith and even Malthus were all accused of hating capitalism, because they exposed some of its previously mystified structure, and didn't claim it was the only possible economic system, or even that it was morally good.

LuÃs Henrique

5th March 2012, 11:00

In the post you link to, you say this:
So if a parasitic organism will eventually kill its host, is that a material contradiction?

No, because while the parasite certainly needs the host, the host doesn't need the parasite at all. (Edit: though rereading this I realise you might be considering this from the point-of-view of the parasite)

What about the hospital patient who needs escalating quantities of a drug, which reaches toxic doses?Yes, this is a material contradiction.

The continued use of a natural resource like coal enables a society to prosper, but also shapes the society toward the extraction of more and more coal from the ground...and sets it up for a crisis when there's no more coal. Is this a material contradiction?Yes.

If so, then it's a useful idea. Though 'contradiction' isn't the best word for it, and the related 'interpenetration of opposites' is downright obscure.Words are conventional. Since Marx's time, it is conventional to call such things "contradictions". I am not into the game of neologism coining; when and if someone comes up with a better word, I might use it. Until then, I am sticking with the normal use.

I don't use the phrase "interpenetration of opposites".

There are also other terms like 'tranformation of quantity into quality'I suspect it has to do, to the extent that it has any meaning, with emergent properties. Here you have a good - and quite scientific - text that explains why More is Different (http://scholar.google.com.br/scholar_url?hl=pt-BR&q=http://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm2zBvqzCVawURHZDNTzkT5OWm_oTA&oi=scholarr&ei=4pRUT9_rHJSCtge9wcXTDQ&ved=0CCUQgAMoADAA). The Engelsian examples aren't convincing at all.

I don't normally use the phrase.

and 'transformation into opposites' that are just as obscure,It is more confusing than obscure, as people are likely to get into ideas such as "the bourgeoisie is the opposite of the proletariat, so does that mean that the bourgeoisie is going to change into the proletariat". It also seems to assume that both terms of a contradiction are equivalent, with no hierarchy between them. What it does seem to mean to me is, a) since "the existence of something requires some factor that in the long term undermines that very existence", it seems that what are initially conditions of the continued existence of something become the cause of the destruction of such existence (in your examples, the medicine turns into poison, the natural resource that is a condition of progress becomes the cause of stagnation); and b) under certain circumstances, what apparently should have a given consequence, in practice does have the opposite effect (the introduction of machinery should result in less work, and consequently shorter working hours; under the capitalist mode of production, instead, it results in longer working hours, via competition for jobs between workers).

I also tend to avoid the phrase, and when I use it, I try to make clear the circumstances of such transformation.

and just as liable to be expanded from political terms into cosmological terms by marxists who like to imagine they have a theory of everything.Indeed, but this is much more a result of the (very bourgeois and anti-Marxist) idea of a Theory of Everything, than of the phrase itself.

That's certainly refreshing. Here in the UK-SWP, the orthodoxy is that Engels and Marx never disagreed, and Engel's one and a half books (plus Lenin's notebooks) constitute a complete and eternally true analysis of the entire universe.Perhaps you are talking to the wrong people...

See my response to Mr Natural above.Eventually. Today I have still to make good my promise of expanding on the category of "extra-scientific".

Does it? People have emotions and agendas, which rocks and electrons don't, but surely that calls for an augmentation of obersvational method, not it's abandonment.What would the "observational method" be? It doesn't sound to me as anything remotely similar to the scientific method.

This is a false dichotomy - between the scientist who views themselves as outside the system looking in, and the one who views himself as part of the system.

Marxists have a strawman image of the positivist, as someone who believes they're disinterested and incapable of bias, watching the universe from no point of view, unaffected by habits of thought or emotion.

Scientists are always aware of how they themselves can distort their own readings. They can attempt to minimise the effect, or take it into account as a measure of uncertainty, or include 'observer effects' as part of the model.I don't think it is a strawman image. Positivists are quite outspoken about what they call "scientific objectivity" and how it relates to the scientist having no stakes on the object of study.

That is open to question. John Rees's book 'Algebra of Revolution' concludes that dialectics is the sum of Marx's method and vice versa. Which is unfortunate, as he gives several incompatible accounts of both.

Also, Marx made mistakes. Was this only when he forgot his dialectics?
Of course Marx made mistakes. As any scientist does. Any method, never mind how much perfect it is, has still to be used. Reality resists knowledge even more than it resists human physical efforts; making mistakes is an essential part of the process of aproaching "truth".

Marxism has a moral componant - indeed, I think most marxists became marxists for moral reasons.It does, I don't think I denied that. It also has a scientific component; expunged from it, it becomes mere moralistic whining about how the world isn' "fair".

Ricardo, Smith and even Malthus were all accused of hating capitalism, because they exposed some of its previously mystified structure,Oh, they certainly did - particularly Ricardo - but they never systematised that into a coherent body of knowledge on the historical and limited nature of capitalism. Marx could not have been Marx without Smith and Ricardo, but he is also non-reductible to Ricardo and Smith.

and didn't claim it was the only possible economic system, or even that it was morally good.No, they (Smith and Ricardo; Malthus was certainly, among other things, already a reactionary moralist) didn't "claim" such a thing; they of course never came with the notion that capitalism had structural limits and was consequently bound to destruction. Marx did.

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

5th March 2012, 20:28

Kronsteen, Thanks for your reply. But it and the other replies my posts on developing a usable materialist dialectic receive just show how stuck and far off the track of socialist revolution the left is. The left must learn to organize in the pattern the rest of life's self-organizing material systems employ.

And Marx's materialist dialectic, taken from Hegelian philosophy and dialectical relations, is remarkably similar in organization and process to the pattern of organization of life the new sciences reveal.

Dammit! This is quintessentially revolutionary, so where are the revolutionaries?

The point of providing bourgeoisie/proletariat as an example of dialectical contradiction was to give but one prominent example of this dialectical "law" in life and society. Here's another: Doesn't evolution include the "incompatible development of different elements within the same relation, which is to say between elements that are also dependent on one another"? The other laws and categories of Hegelian dialectic also express real, living relations.

Marx extracted the rational kernel from Hegel's mystical shell in developing his materialist dialectic, and his kernel didn't include "numerology, astrology, alchemy, christianity, natural magic,bible codes and masonic system," which you interject. So why bring them up?

I should have written that life's "rules" are invisible to human perception, not consciousness. My bad. Human consciousness engages life and is able to determine various relations, although this has been a slow process. However, we both know what I meant, so why nitpick?

As for the principles of organization of subatomic particles up to nebulas in reference to natural human organization, this is also nitpicky. As I understand cosmological matters, the universe is a dynamic, internally related whole in which energized forces and processes emerge into matter, and in which matter has self-organized to emerge into the life process on Earth. I think and work at the level of life, as do Marx and Engels and the materialist dialectic.

I'm puzzled. If you're intrigued by Machism (I sure am), why are you so opposed to the new sciences that get "Machism" right?

Marx and Engels aimed for a scientific socialism, but they viewed life and society in their material organization, motion, and development as systemic processes, and this complexity cannot be nailed down into precise units and definitions as formal logic attempts. Life and society are composed of and created by dynamically interdependent, self-organized things, and so both analysis and synthesis are needed. Marx employed the materialist dialectic as just such a mental tool.

The "mysticism" charge that Rosa L and the anti-dialecticians throw at dialecticians represents their rejection of life's and society's organizational relations--those relations we cannot readily perceive but can consciously determine if we do not reject the science(s) of relations.

I'm a revolutionary Marxist, and I'm no longer "mystified" by the unseen "rules" of life, community, communism, and revolutionary processes. I've engaged the revolutionary new science.

My red-green best.

LuÃs Henrique

5th March 2012, 22:16

Next post I will discuss the nature of such things as they are "extra-scientific".

In the previous post I have made the point that science is a historical creation, that most of the history of mankind developed before the begginings of science, and, since a lot of knowledge was achieved by humanity before that, science cannot be the only method to achieve knowledge. Now let's discuss another kind of limitation of the scientific method.

The scientific method is not mere observation of nature. It is a method of experimentation, which includes a few discrete steps.

The nucleus, and clearest part, of the method is the experiment, which consists in testing a hypothesis in order to reject it or not. Indeed, it occupies such a central position in the scientific method, that it tends to obscure the steps that come before and after it. And the procedure is quite clear here. You design your experiment to test your hipothesis, so that if the experiment gives you one result, it logically follows that your hypothesis is false, while if it gives you a different result, the hypothesis stands (ie, may continue to be considered, provisionally, as true). In order to do this, the experiment must be repeatable, so that we can know whether it gives us always the same result, which in turn means that we must deal with controlled variables, to understand what would cause different results.

So this part of the scientific method is greately helped by logic. Your hypothesis will take the form of an implication (if A, then B). Since the implication is false if, and only if, A is true and B is false, your experiment ensures that A is true, and asks whether B is true or false (for instance: if I throw a rock into the air [A], it will fall to the ground [B]. So the experiment consists in throwing a rock into the air, thence assuring that A is true. If the rock doesn't fall to the ground, your hypothesis is false; if it does, then your hypothesis is provisionally true).

But, in order to test a hypothesis, you must have one. So the construction of a hypothesis is a previous step in the scientific method, often not quite impressive as the experiment itself. Now, of course, you can't rely on logic as much here as in the experiment. Evidently you will know better than rehash old hypotheses that have already been proven false, and you can use logic to put aside other hypotheses that, while not yet tested, can be logically excluded in consequence of experiments designed to test other hypotheses. But in order to put up a hypothesis, you will usually have to use creativity. And such creativity will often be of a speculative nature.

To avoid rehashing old hypotheses, a further previous step must be performed: you must compulse the previous extant knowledge about the subject of the experiment. In most cases, naturally, such previous knowledge is itself of a scientific nature, having been achieved by the systematic application of the scientific method. But evidently that cannot account for those experiments regarding subjects that have never subjected to previous scientific research - and in these cases, the formulation of a hypothesis will usually rely on pre-scientific knowledge.

But to do a previous bibliographic research you still must know what you want to know: you must be able to ask a proper question, that can be answered by your experiment. And here, while you certainly can benefit enormously from previous knowledge, creativity and intuition will play a central role. So, on the contrary of the experiment itself, where variables are controlled and the logical implications of the results are clear, or must be made clear in the post-experiment step of analysing experimental data, the three previous steps (asking a question, doing previous research, and building a hypothesis) are much less rigorous.

So, in order to properly follow the method, a scientist has to design hypotheses that can be tested experimentally, and must disentangle the variables in order to be sure that his hypothesis is actually being tested (for instance, a critic could object that throwing a rock into the air doesn't prove that any rock, in any circumstance, will fall to the ground if thrown into the air. The critic could object that the result is related to the time of the day of the experiment, or the chemical composition of the rock, so the scientist must be prepared to repeat the experiment at night to refute the hypothesis that rocks only fall during the day, or to throw a marble or basalt pebble into the air to refute the hypothesis that only granite falls, etc.)

But it is not a given that such hypotheses can always be formulated. Indeed, there is nothing that guarantees us that the best hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon can be tested through experimentation. This is most obvious in sciences like History or Paleontology, where repetition is in fact impossible, or Medicine or Sociology, where some experiments, or their repetition with controlled variables, may be morally or politically unacceptable.

It is also a problem in some "bedrock" provinces: for instance, we cannot justify the use of the scientific method in its own terms; we cannot experiment using it, against not using it, and take valid conclusions, for that would be circular reasoning, and would constitute a tautology. And so we must conclude that there are extra-scientific questions: questions that cannot be answered by the use of the scientific method. One of such questions, as I have pointed before, is that of whether a Theory of Everything is possible. We can evidently put up a Theory of Everything and test it experimentally, wich would give us either a refutation of it, or a provisional confirmation (which in practice only means that we don't yet know how to refute it). But even if all ToEs could be easily experimentally refuted, it wouldn't mean that all ToEs are necessarily false; it could be the case that the problem resides in the ToEs we tested, and that there in fact is a true ToE yet untested. Since it is materially impossible to formulate all possible ToEs and put them all to test, the issue cannot be solved by the scientific method.

Next post, I will deal with the issue of what to do with such extra-scientific issues, and try to get back into the subject of ontology.

Luís Henrique

$lim_$weezy

8th March 2012, 05:57

First off, everyone claiming dialectics is mysticism needs to read "Dance of the Dialectic" by Bertell Ollman. Please.

I think it will be helpful to give a quick run-through of Ollman's take on dialectics first. Sorry if anyone has hit this before. I read the thread but I think a summary will help guide discussion.

I will be very clear. Dialectics consists of two things: the philosophy of internal relations and the process of abstraction. I will deal with each of these. This was first/best/whatever worked out by Joseph Dietzgen, by the way.

Dietzgen had a specific ontology--the world was viewed as a great mass of Relations. The basic unit of reality is not an isolated "thing" but a Relation. This is not to say that things don't exist--it is not an attempt to reify the in-between. Instead, it simply means that we must look not at an isolated "thing" that enters into external relations with other things, but take these relations with other "things" as part of what it is. This is what I mean by a philosophy of internal relations.

But, a problem arises. How does one think of or communicate a Relation, which, when extended fully, includes everything that exists? In other words, since "things" do not have ready-made boundaries, how can we draw those boundaries ourselves? The answer lies in the process of abstraction, the work of the mind. This is Dietzgen's great contribution to dialectics.

So, really, the dialectic is not the "motor force of history" or some other such truly mystic nonsense, but a way of looking at things that--it is claimed--avoids the distortions and problems associated with the philosophy of external relations and the ideological abstractions it encourages. Things change, and dialectics captures and deals with that change much better than non-dialectic thought can. Whether this is true everyone must decide for themselves, but to say dialectics is mysticism or "bullshit" is unwarranted.

The implications of this are many and far-reaching. Without dialectics, we cannot describe the world as it really is. Without it, we are led into ideological traps--we take the passed-down cultural and social abstractions of things for how they actually exist, when often this is not the case. In other words, we take the words or concepts we use to tell a story for the actual events of the story themselves. We can get closer to accurately describing the world if we use dialectical abstractions instead of static ideological ones. We can reabstract when we need to, and attempt to abstract so as to "capture" in thought the organic and historical changes occurring around us.

What is so mystifying about dialectics? In light of Ollman's work, I would say nothing. The reductionist philosophy of external relations may be "commonsense" or whatnot but it is still just a particular ontology among many, and should not be treated as true because it is "commonsense". This is all despite the fact that the philosophy of external relations leads to distortions and fetishism caused by the decontextualization of goddamn near everything. Dialectics offers a comprehensive view of society and the world completely in line with Marxist politics.

What makes Marx's conception of communism "scientific" and not utopian is not that utopian thinking is "vague and cloudy" whereas Marxism is hard-lined or specific. Instead, it is that communism was arrived at as an idea by a dialectical study of capitalism. Marx looked to the past to see what tendencies and processes caused the conditions existing in his own time, and then projected these tendencies into the future to see their eventual resolution in communism. Doing this, we can come to a better understanding of our own era's conditions as part of the whole that is our past and future. Is this mystical? Surely not.

Kronsteen

8th March 2012, 10:37

First off, everyone claiming dialectics is mysticism needs to read "Dance of the Dialectic" by Bertell Ollman.

I have. It's rather difficult to know whether what he's saying makes sense, because he never gets around to saying it explicitly.

As for your summary, it would be a lot more comprehensible if you gave examples. Lots of examples - from mundane everyday experiences, the hard sciences, soft sciences and politics.

If any form of dialectics is true, we'll know it by examining concrete examples, not the vague generalisations you and Ollman like to use.

Kronsteen

8th March 2012, 11:03

And Marx's materialist dialectic, taken from Hegelian philosophy and dialectical relations, is remarkably similar in organization and process to the pattern of organization of life the new sciences reveal.

Go read Alfred Lawson. Then flick through Helena Blavatski and L Ron Hubbard. Try Pierre Tremaux and Jakob Boehme.

These people are cranks. And they all thought they'd discovered the principles underlying the universe.

Doesn't evolution include the "incompatible development of different elements within the same relation, which is to say between elements that are also dependent on one another"?

Er, no. It involves selection from mutations.

Marx extracted the rational kernel from Hegel's mystical shell in developing his materialist dialectic, and his kernel didn't include "numerology, astrology, alchemy, christianity, natural magic,bible codes and masonic system," which you interject. So why bring them up?

These notions...

...that Hegel had a single, valid method which he himself badly misunderstood, and badly misapplied...

...that's it's possible to surgically extract a supposedly central part of Hegel's system, without affecting either it or the system...

...are at best highly suspect. They show the kind of mechanical, idealistic thinking which marxists would never tolerate if anyone else proposed them.

Extracting the 'rational core' from Hegel is like extracting a brain from a body, and expecting both to function as well in isolation. Indeed, it's like expecting the brain to function better when it's free of the flesh.

Did Hegel even have a single method? From what I've read in his Encyclopedia and Shorter Logic, he didn't.

the universe is a dynamic, internally related whole in which energized forces and processes emerge into matter, and in which matter has self-organized to emerge into the life process on Earth. I think and work at the level of life, as do Marx and Engels and the materialist dialectic.

The first two clauses of that paragraph make perfect sense. After that, you seem to have reinvented Hegel's teleology - precisely the part of Hegel which Marx most explicitly rejected.

Read Arthur Schopenhaur - he had similar ideas. And yes, he was a mystic.

LuÃs Henrique

8th March 2012, 13:15

I have. It's rather difficult to know whether what he's saying makes sense, because he never gets around to saying it explicitly.

As for your summary, it would be a lot more comprehensible if you gave examples. Lots of examples - from mundane everyday experiences, the hard sciences, soft sciences and politics.

If any form of dialectics is true, we'll know it by examining concrete examples, not the vague generalisations you and Ollman like to use.

Indeed. The dialectic method, as Marx puts it, is the concrete analysis of the concrete case. I haven't read Ollman, but if he goes Engels's way of general pontification about the Universe, then he is going astray. Or, more precisely, back to Hegelian or pre-Hegelian philosophy.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

8th March 2012, 15:06

Go read Alfred Lawson.

Never heard of.

Then flick through Helena Blavatski and L Ron Hubbard.19th and 20th centuries mystics and idealists.

Try Pierre TremauxNever heard of.

and Jakob Boehme.17th century mystic and idealist.

These people are cranks.Helena Blavatski and Hubbard, for sure. Tremaux and Lawson, if you say so. I wouldn't be so harsh on Boehme, though. He never lived to see industrial revolution, the expansion of science in the 18th and 19th centuries, French or American revolutions. We should not demand from individual people what their epoch as a whole cannot deliver.

And they all thought they'd discovered the principles underlying the universe.Which is a vain dream, although still entertained by many scientists.

It involves selection from mutations.Indeed. What selects what, though? How is such selection to be understood, if not within the manyfold relations between the individuals and their species, and between these both and the changing environment in which they have to struggle to survive?

These notions...

...that Hegel had a single, valid method which he himself badly misunderstood, and badly misapplied...

...that's it's possible to surgically extract a supposedly central part of Hegel's system, without affecting either it or the system...

...are at best highly suspect. They show the kind of mechanical, idealistic thinking which marxists would never tolerate if anyone else proposed them.
The first of which is a bad misreading of what I have been arguing, and/or of what Marx himself has said on the subject. When Marx describes Hegel's method, he doesn't tell us that this was a single method. More importantly, there is no such issue as "Hegel misunderstood his own method". What Marx says is that Hegel mistook the way individual intellects come to [reproduce] the concrete by way of thought for the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.

Extracting the 'rational core' from Hegel is like extracting a brain from a body, and expecting both to function as well in isolation. Indeed, it's like expecting the brain to function better when it's free of the flesh.
This is a quite bad analogy. The relation between any philosophy, ideology, religion, superstition, etc, and its "rational core" is quite different from the relation between living organisms and their brains. Rational cores do not need blood, they do not command the functioning of belief systems, and, as they are not alive, they cannot die in the same way both brain and the rest of the organism will if they are disconnected.

Besides, Marx is quite explicit on what he considers Hegel's method's ratonal core:

As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.

And if such is the rational core of Hegel' method, then Hegel's misuse of it is also clear:

In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.And, of course, the history of such misuse should be clear. Hegel still operates within the 18th century conception that method and ontology must reflect one another, so he took for granted that if the universe is best intellectually disassembled and rebuilt into sence by such-and-such intellectual procedure, it follows that that same universe was also assembled into its present state by the same intellectual procedure. Quite like if someone concluded that, since the best way to put a tangerine into use is by severing its carpels, then tangerines are created by assembling separate carpels.

Now, a much more complicated operation than extracting the rational core of Hegel's method is to abstract from Marx's works the references to Hegel and the instances of use of Hegel's categories and methodology, and attribute them to some joke or misunderstanding. If a joke, this would imply that Marx wrote Das Kapital joking, as we can realise by reading the Grundrisse, and then suddenly ripped most of the humour out when assembling the definitive version, but forgot, for some reason, to anotate such final move into the Grundrisse. In which case we are left with the suspicion that any and all passages in Marx's works are japes, for there is no reliable clef, no punchline, and no way to tell apart what is humour and what is not, and we would have to reject the whole as unreliable and unserious. If a misunderstanding, that should lead us to the conclusion that Marx had no clue about methodology, in which case all of his works should come under suspicion.

Evidently, anyone can take those steps, and reject Marx entirely, together with the notion that capitalism is internally contradictory, the labour theory of value, class struggle, surplus value, and socialism. What cannot coherently be done, however, is to reject Marx's analysis of capitalism's internal contradictions and keep his labour theory of value, the conception of class struggle as anything more important than mere distributive conflict, and socialism as anything else than a merely moral project. Indeed, the rejection of the contradictory nature of capitalism has always set the path to reformism, as we can see in Bernstein. If there are no contradictions in capitalism, and socialism is only a moral project, then the working class has no special role in the struggle for it, and we could as well expect that the bourgeoisie itself abolished capitalism, or that it gradually morphed itself into socialism, etc.

Did Hegel even have a single method? From what I've read in his Encyclopedia and Shorter Logic, he didn't.Well, you could perhaps expand a little bit on that. What would Hegel's method(s) be?

the universe is a dynamic, internally related whole in which energized forces and processes emerge into matter, and in which matter has self-organized to emerge into the life process on Earth. I think and work at the level of life, as do Marx and Engels and the materialist dialectic.The first two clauses of that paragraph make perfect sense. After that, you seem to have reinvented Hegel's teleology - precisely the part of Hegel which Marx most explicitly rejected.I don't think the first clause of the paragraph makes much sence, no. That the universe is dynamic, and that it is internally related, no doubt - but in what sence is it a "whole"? Evidently, our interpretations of the universe may be dynamic and internally related wholes, but this is what Marx calls a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. So it seems to me that the reintroduction of Hegel's teleological ontology occurs earlier than you say.

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

8th March 2012, 17:04

Luis Henrique, Kronsteen, $lim $weezy, Grenzer, Others, What's going on? What happened to the thread started in Philos yesterday by DarkMatter, "A Serious Question...?" in which he announced he was bailing out and the rest of us were wasting our time.

My reply, which was post 14, I believe, apparantly got 7 "Thanks": it struck a nerve. The thread has also disappeared. I can find no mention of any admin action.

My post challenged comrades and RevLeft to recognize their theoretical conservatism and re-radicalize. I pointed to the complete absence of any revolutionary organizing theory and suggested that the refusal to engage the new sciences of organization and Western Marxism's renunciation or limitation of dialectics has been responsible for this impasse--this increasingly deadly impasse.

So what's going on? I would expect all comrades to see a potentially big problem in operation here.

Now I'll digest $lim's terrific post, and try to respond to him and Kronsteen. I'm quite taken aback by the possible implications of that disappearing thread, though.

Deicide

8th March 2012, 17:21

^ The thread you're referring to has been moved to the ''trashcan''.

Mr. Natural

8th March 2012, 18:41

Thanks, Deicide, I had just discovered the missing thread in Trashcan, and I had gotten no "Thanks," although my count has gone up by seven overnight. And now the "Thanks" button is missing from Deicide's and my posts, although it is in view for others.

It's hard not to get paranoid around here.

Kronsteen, Would you please cut it out? You're just saying No to the new science that verifies the organization and categories of the dialectic as presented by Bertell Ollman and as understood by Karl Marx. The Hegelian philosophy of internal relations and its dialectical categories brought society and capitalism to life as organic, systemic processes in Marx's mind. Didn't you encounter some of this "living dialectic" when you read Ollman?

Kronsteen, aren't you too analytic? Aren't you expecting too much precision from life's sloppy, dialectical, dynamically interdependent relations? Rosa L. is now up to some 1.5 million words in her magnum opus in which she purports to bring precision and logic to historical materialism and revolution ....

Marx's materialist dialectic employs both analysis and synthesis. It is the synthesis--the dialectical relations--that bring the analysis to life. It is my contention then that a synthesis of the new science and the materialist dialectic can bring revolutionary processes to life.

An example of your unfounded naysaying is your rejection of my observation that matter has self-organized to emerge into the life process on Earth. Well, if matter didn't self-organize, how did we get here? Actually, this pre-biological evolutionary process is accepted overall by most scientists, and many of its steps have been reproduced in the laboratory.

I'm certainly no scientist and have never taken a college science course. My interest in the new science(s) of organization came through reading Capra's Web Of Life and seeing the immediate application of this science to the organization of life, communism, and revolution. Then, when I read Ollman ten years later, I saw how Hegelian philosophy and dialectics and Marx's subsequent materialization of this dialectic uncannily reproduces the organizational relations revealed by science.

It is shocking that there is no mention of the "heart and mind" of life--self-organization--in RevLeft's Sciences and Environments Forum. In fact, with a couple of minor exceptions, there is no mention of the new science at all.

Kronsteen, you wrote that evolution is selection with mutation. This is correct as far as Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory goes, but this theory is incomplete. It leaves out self-organization, the first scientific presentation of which was by Ilya Prigogine in 1967, who called it a theory of dissipative structures. Self-organization has now been confirmed over and over, but is still ignored by mainstream "science."

Take self-organization out of evolution and the organism and life, organisms, and people are hollow shells created by external forces. As for the mutation, genes are no more than bits of dust unless they are organized into a genome within a self-organizing cell. Take self-organization out of life and there is no you in you, and I'm finding you are definitely there, although reluctant to engage the science that shows how you come to be.

All living systems self-organize in dynamic interdependence with each other and physical forces. The "selection" of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory actually consists therefore of "external" self-organizing organisms. Life is a bootstrap of self-organizing systems that create and compose the life process and whose relations keep it all going. A notation I've developed for the complete evolutionary process is "s-o/S-O," in which a self-organizing unit is dynamically interdependent with its surrounding environment of other self-organizing material systems, and the life process, represented by the slash, emerges.

$lim $weezy, I'll have to get to your post tomorrow. My day began with a bit of a stomach upset and moved from there to something of a Revleft headache. I'll note ahead of time that you appear to have done an amazing job distilling Ollman to the essentials, and I want to learn from your presentation.

My red-green best.

LuÃs Henrique

8th March 2012, 19:31

Tremaux and Lawson, if you say so.

After a perfunctory research, yes, Lawson is an obvious crank. Trémaux is a little bit more complicated; I don't think he believed he had discovered the underlying principles of the universe. He seems to have been more on the "field" of pseudoscience than mysticism, though, with baseless ideas about evolution and geology.

Here is Engels' answer to a letter in which Marx mistakenly praised Trémaux's work:

Regarding Moilin and Trémaux I will write at greater length in the next few days; I have not quite finished reading the latter yet, but I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing to his whole theory because he knows nothing of geology, and is incapable of even the most common-or-garden literary-historical critique. That stuff about the nigger Santa Maria and the whites turning into Negroes is enough to make one die of laughing. Especially the idea that the traditions of the Senegal niggers necessarily deserve credence, just because these fellows cannot write! In addition, it is another pretty notion of his to ascribe the differences between a Basque, a Frenchman, a Breton, and an Alsatian to the surface-structure, which is, of course, also to blame for the people speaking four different languages.
Perhaps the man will demonstrate in the 2nd volume how he explains that we Rhinelanders on our Devonian transitional massif (which has not been covered again by the sea since long before the coal was formed) did not become idiots and niggers ages ago, or else he will assert that we are really niggers.
The book is utterly worthless, pure theorising in defiance of all the facts, and for each piece of evidence it cites it should itself first provide evidence in turn.

In this one, it seems to me clear that Engels was right, and Marx wrong.

Luís Henrique

Kronsteen

8th March 2012, 20:55

[quote]...that Hegel had a single, valid method which he himself badly misunderstood, and badly misapplied...is a bad misreading of what I have been arguing, and/or of what Marx himself has said on the subject.

Be fair - I was responding to Mr Natural's position, not yours. And I was talking about the way most marxists speak of what Marx took from Hegel, not what Marx said about it.

there is no such issue as "Hegel misunderstood his own method"If Hegel's system had a 'rational core', and therefore a materialist core, it's difficult to see how he could have produced an idealist system from it...if he didn't miss the point of his own founding insights.

Extracting the 'rational core' from Hegel is like extracting a brain from a body

This is a quite bad analogy.Then it's like extracting a CPU from a computer. The result is a processing unit with nothing to process, and a very large paperweight on your desk.

What happens if you try to plug the CPU into a different computer? It probably won't work.

Marx is quite explicit on what he considers Hegel's method's ratonal coreAs everyone here knows, Marx never got around to writing the promised essay on his version of the dialectic. What we have are scattered paragraphs which suggest different aspects of it, and unlike in Engel's, they're mostly about economics.

Hegel derived economics and politics from cosmology and theology - which he'd unknowingly derived from economics and politics. So the question is: Did Marx start with the economics and politics, and stay there? Or did he invert Hegel by deriving a cosmology (and perhaps a kind of teleological theology) from the concrete?

I rather suspect the latter - projecting the class struggle onto the physical universe.

What would Hegel's method(s) be?

My point was that I don't think he has either a single method or a coherent method. If you could give me a decade to digest his entire output, I might be able to answer your question.

But from what Hegel I've read so far, I don't think it would be a very useful answer for marxists.

Hegel still operates within the 18th century conception that method and ontology must reflect one anotherPlekanov took exactly that lesson from Hegel. And passed it on to Lenin, who passed it on to Trotsky. So it's still hanging around our necks in the 21st century.

Trémaux is a little bit more complicated; I don't think he believed he had discovered the underlying principles of the universe.Yes, I carelessly exagerated there. For what it's worth, Tremaux used the French word sol to mean both 'soil' and 'environment'. I think Marx misread him by mostly taking the second meaning, and Engels misread him by taking the first.

Taking a charitable view of Tremaux, he had the vague but correct insight that species change, national change and personal change are all the result of different senses of 'environment' (metaphorically, the 'soil'), and tried to combine all the senses into one.

Incidentally, you quote Engels' letter to Marx, but did you read Marx's response? He said Tremaux's ideas have only to be clearly explained to seem obviously true. The number of times I've heard that said about dialectics....

Kronsteen

8th March 2012, 21:00

Kronsteen, Would you please cut it out?

When you provide some detailed, concrete, specific examples instead of airy generalisations...I'll stop pointing out that all you've got are airy generalisations.

$lim_$weezy

9th March 2012, 03:02

Kronsteen, I would argue that Marx's own work contains many examples of applications of materialist dialectics. First, however, I will address the perceived problem with Hegel.

Marx took from Hegel his philosophy of internal relations. This philosophy does not itself imply idealism or materialism, but is simply a way of organizing information differently. Where exactly does looking at things as Relations imply metaphysical teleology or any of the other ridiculous things you've leveled at it?

The materialist character of dialectics is quite separate from its organizational and analytical character. We have the way we are going to look at stuff, but what stuff are we going to look at? What even is this "stuff"? This is where Hegel and Marx differed (and Dietzgen of course). I assume all of us here are convinced of the incorrectness of idealism. I'm convinced that one cannot hold a philosophy of external relations and not be an idealist, or at least tainted by ideological abstractions. Why do you abstract things the way you do? Why give things the boundaries you've given them? The abstractions that are made and propagated are specific to the epoch in which they are made--to think anything else is idealism.

Like dialectical thought, non-dialectical thought encounters a differentiation problem. For dialectics, this involves what I have already said about the mental process of abstraction. For the "commonsense" view, however, the problem is different. How can we talk about a thing as distinct from another thing? We must know an individuating factor about it, that can be said of it and nothing else, or else we will not know to what we are referring. However, it is quite easy to see that this individuating factor is a disguised relation--it must be individuating, different from other things, and that is a relation. Thus, we can only really understand things in terms of relations. Dialectics is open about this kind of necessary contextual understanding.

A big, obvious example of applied dialectics is the Marxist view of the capitalist system. To be understood correctly, it must be studied both historically (how did we get to where we are now?) and organically (what are the tendencies we can see at work in the system?). Through the use of dialectical "laws", we can actually articulate the contradictions of the capitalist system. What opposing forces are at work, mutually undermining each other even as they develop themselves? An example is the increased socialization of production in opposition to the increased level of private consumption. Another, already mentioned, is the capital-labor relation.

Again, dialectics does not add anything "new" necessarily. Sure, you could try to explain these tendencies without dialectics, but the task would be at great risk of distortions. For example, the way neoclassical economists treat the market as a natural force that exists independently of people, something that they can never hope to control. It is given a mystical power, and this is what dialectics seeks to dispose of. Under all the layers of capitalist ideology, there is a way to look at things that does not call upon idealistic conceptions of "freedom" or "communism". If you do not abstract from the real concrete adequately, and reabstract when needed, you are misled into taking your thought concrete for the real thing, and that is idealism.

If you don't have dialectics, what is communism to you? Something that would be nice to have? Looking at things analytically is often incredibly misleading.

Am I making any sense? Let's try to keep this civil. I'm open to questions.

Kronsteen

9th March 2012, 03:49

You say this:

Marx took from Hegel his philosophy of internal relations. This philosophy does not itself imply idealism or materialism

But then in the next paragraph you say this:

I'm convinced that one cannot hold a philosophy of external relations and not be an idealist

So which is it? Does a 'philosophy of external relations' entail idealism or not? I see no reason why it should.

Why do you abstract things the way you do? Why give things the boundaries you've given them?

To take a simple, non-contentious example: A beach ball rolling down a hill. The air in the ball is pushing out, and the surface of the ball is containing it. The ball is pulled down by gravity, but the downward motion is modified by the hill, and slowed by air resistance.

We can view this 'externally' as lots of different things interacting, or 'internally' as one system with various forces inside it but one outcome - the rolling of the ball. We can also focus on the way the air (for instance) affects the ball's motion, or view the air and the ball as acting on each other.

You write as though there were two distinct philosophies - one of internal relations and one of external. Wheras in fact we all shift between the two depending on which phenomena we're focusing on, and which parts of the world we want to affect.

Is the ball one system of air and plastic, interacting with another system of gravity, sand and air? Or is the beach a system containing a number of subsystems?

Obviously it's both, and the choice between which of the two to adopt at any moment is one of practicality and convenience - not of which economic class you support.

I view dialectics as a loose bundle of related ideas, some true but trivial, others important but false. The idea that any phenomenon can be treated as a system instead of interacting objects and forces to me is the former kind. The assertion that scientists and ordinary people have difficulty thinking this way is the latter.

I'm afraid this is a very common feature of cults - whether political, religious or whatever. They take some obvious truth, claim it as their own, say it's vitally important, and insist that the rest of the world can't see it.

The abstractions that are made and propagated are specific to the epoch in which they are made

If you mean different cultures divide up the world differently, that's also obvious - and recognised by even the most rightwing anthropologist or linguist.

Looking at things analytically is often incredibly misleading.

That's something else cults do. They take a positive behavior - independence, skepticism, knowledge, imagination - and preach against it as something which inhibits true enlightenment.

How many of us have been told our independence is a bourgeois indulgence? Or told that doubt is a moral failing?

Now it seems thinking 'analytically' is a sin too.

$lim_$weezy

9th March 2012, 05:17

The first two things you quoted me saying are not contradictory in the slightest. As a matter of empirical observation, it appears nigh-impossible to hold the "commonsense" view and not fall into some kind of fetishism of ideas--for example, the taking of the boundaries of abstraction for the boundaries of existence. With the philosophy of internal relations, this problem may be avoided.

If we divide up reality into different systems, some "external" and some "internal", how do these systems interact? This would seem to lead to a confused and contradictory view of the world and how we are to learn about it. The only thing that makes dialectics "less practical" is the difficulty of figuring it out for those who have their "commonsense" views powerfully ingrained in them (including myself, unfortunately).

So it seems like your view now is that dialectics is not illegitimate or mysticism, but that some certain things do not warrant thought about them to be dialectical?

And here we come to the classic mud-slinging at dialectics. The comparisons to cults, religion, and sins are contrived. Your opinion on the matter is quite intellectually conservative.

In the end, since dialectics is a different conception of things, you're going to have to shift perspectives to think about it. It's not some religious conversion where shifting perspectives involves believing whole-heartedly in it.

Kronsteen

9th March 2012, 09:22

You have completely misunderstood.

The example situation I described can be viewed equally validly as a collection of interacting but separate things, or as a system composed of forces pushing in different directions.

Which view we chose depends on what we're trying to achieve, or understand.

Unless you're claiming dialectics is not an empistemology, but an ontology?

If we divide up reality into different systems, some "external" and some "internal", how do these systems interact?

Any system interacting with another system can easily be regarded as a larger system.

So it seems like your view now is that dialectics is not illegitimate or mysticism, but that some certain things do not warrant thought about them to be dialectical?

Some elements of the dialectical hypothesis are true but trivial. The others are interesting but false.

And here we come to the classic mud-slinging at dialectics

You seem to be confusing dialectics with marxists. As for the cult-like nature most marxist groups develop, a few minutes spent reading revleft proves that.

dialectics is a different conception of things

No, it isn't. That's part of the point.

It's a one-sided view - one which insists that it's the only correct one. Does that sound familiar?

black magick hustla

9th March 2012, 11:34

stuff on science
Luís Henrique

i can't bother to reply step by step, but i just wanted to say that there is no such thing as "scientific method", that only exists in textbooks and highschool classes. science, of course, is more of a culture, mode of life, than really anything you could abstract into recepies. science has more to do with paradigms and puzzle solving, than hypothesis testing and experimentation.

black magick hustla

9th March 2012, 11:35

And here we come to the classic mud-slinging at dialectics. The comparisons to cults, religion, and sins are contrived. Your opinion on the matter is quite intellectually conservative.

actually, "dialecticians" are the most intellectually conservative of all. there isn't a more approppiate adjective for a group of people who stick to the remains of a 19th century idealist charlatan.

LuÃs Henrique

9th March 2012, 12:04

Be fair - I was responding to Mr Natural's position, not yours. And I was talking about the way most marxists speak of what Marx took from Hegel, not what Marx said about it.

If Hegel's system had a 'rational core', and therefore a materialist core, it's difficult to see how he could have produced an idealist system from it...if he didn't miss the point of his own founding insights.

I don't think so.

Your equation of "rational" to "materialist" doesn't seem sensible. Aristotle, Scotus or Descartes were certainly no materialists, but I would not call them irrational.

Take for instance Plato's dialectical method. It certainly has a "rational core": most people are open to argumentation, most people will understand things better if they take part in the process of learning, most people are able to come to conclusions, most people share a common way of reasoning, most people will feel better if they discover things by themselves. And yet, no matter how rational such nucleus is, Plato produced a completely idealist system out of it (or perhaps the contrary, he derived the method, its rational core included, from an idealist system).

What you seem to think is that a rational method cannot drive one into not so rational conclusions. That view, besides false, is still tied to the 18th century conception that method and ontology must reflect one another. But one could certainly use Plato's dialectics to come to materialist conclusions; method can only lead to ontology by its use, never by analogy.

Then it's like extracting a CPU from a computer. The result is a processing unit with nothing to process, and a very large paperweight on your desk.

What happens if you try to plug the CPU into a different computer? It probably won't work.

That's another very bad analogy. A belief system is no computer, and its core is no processing unit. "Taking" the core of a belief system doesn't result in a coreless belief system.

As everyone here knows, Marx never got around to writing the promised essay on his version of the dialectic. What we have are scattered paragraphs which suggest different aspects of it, and unlike in Engel's, they're mostly about economics.

Well, we have a chapter in the Grundrisse (probably from 1857), we have the Afterword (from 1873) to the German 2nd edition, and we have youth texts. Disconsidering the youth texts, which you will probably argue are still semi-Hegelian and unrepresentative of Marx's mature thought, the other two don't seem to suggest different aspects of it; on the contrary, they are quite coherent with each other - in spite of the sixteen years that separate them from each other. And they are not about economics - they are about methodology, even if they are about the methodology of "political economy", not about the methodology to discover The Truth. But that's precisely the point. There is no sign, anywhere, that Marx believed in a general methodology, that could be applied, unmodified, to economics and chemistry, cosmology and linguistics.

Hegel derived economics and politics from cosmology and theology - which he'd unknowingly derived from economics and politics. So the question is: Did Marx start with the economics and politics, and stay there? Or did he invert Hegel by deriving a cosmology (and perhaps a kind of teleological theology) from the concrete?

Hegel derived economics and politics from his method. The problem is that he supposed that his method was the same method God (or the Spirit, as he prefered) used to build the world.

I rather suspect the latter - projecting the class struggle onto the physical universe.

Well, Engels did that, and Plekhanov, and perhaps Lenin or Trotsky, and certainly Stalin, and Marr and Lysenko. I see absolutely no sign of anything similar in Marx; on the contrary, he seems to me quite conscious of the specificity of his own subject.

My point was that I don't think he has either a single method or a coherent method. If you could give me a decade to digest his entire output, I might be able to answer your question.

But I don't have a decade to give you, nor would you probably waste a decade of yours on such pursuit. And so I will stick with a guy that actually spent, if not a decade, at least several years, on the subject: Karl Marx.

But from what Hegel I've read so far, I don't think it would be a very useful answer for marxists.

Indeed, I don't think it would. But to anyone who believes that excising Hegel from Marx is a central point to the left, such answer should be matchingly central, too.

Plekanov took exactly that lesson from Hegel. And passed it on to Lenin, who passed it on to Trotsky. So it's still hanging around our necks in the 21st century.

So let's do what I am proposing, and trying to do: let's get back to Marx, and use Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, only as examples of what not to do. But let's do it by actually reading Marx, and trying to understand him - not by misreading "dialectics is crap" where he clearly wrote

In its [dialectics'] rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
And in abandoning Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin or Trotsky's ontologisations of method, let's also be clear on why: they are epigonal philosophers, who could not break with the cartesian idealist notion that method reflects reality or reality reflects method. That notion was taken to its (absurd) conclusions by Hegel, and then criticised and destroyed by Marx.

And let's also realise that the idea that method and reality are simmetrical to each other still thrives in all non-Marxist schools of philosophy. And that certainly includes positivists and neopositivists, the Vienna circle, Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy, as well as existentialists, phenomenologists, structuralists, et caterva.

Taking a charitable view of Tremaux, he had the vague but correct insight that species change, national change and personal change are all the result of different senses of 'environment' (metaphorically, the 'soil'), and tried to combine all the senses into one.

So there would be a "rational core" in Trémaux, hm?

Incidentally, you quote Engels' letter to Marx, but did you read Marx's response? He said Tremaux's ideas have only to be clearly explained to seem obviously true. The number of times I've heard that said about dialectics....

So?

Fermat wrote on a sidenote in a book he was reading that he had a simple and elegant demonstration for a conjecture. But it was too big to fit a sidenote, and it wasn't found among his papers. And then it eluded three generations of mathamaticians, until one could come up with a demonstration that was not simple, and much less elegant. Still, the conjecture was valid and true, nevermind the fact that Fermat didn't prove it.

Marx was referring to Trémaux's work, which is a very different subject from dialectics, a subject (geology and biology and its interrelations) Marx wasn't an expert on. And so he got it wrong, and thought it was a breakthrough, when it was just ignorant pseudoscience (even by the standards of its time). It doesn't have any substance that can make it a valid analogy for dialectics.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

9th March 2012, 12:11

i can't bother to reply step by step,

No, certainly not.

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

9th March 2012, 16:01

black magick hustla, I've enjoyed some of your posts in the past. Why are you writing nonsense here?

Did you actually write that there is no such thing as the scientific method? I won't bother to quote my dictionary. Or refer to a reality the rest of us accept, whatever the results of the scientific method might be.

Did you really write: "'dialecticians' are the most intellectually conservative of all. there isn't a more appropriate adjective for a group of people who stick to the remains of a 19th century idealist charlatan."

bmh, you dismiss Marx along with Hegel and $lim_$weezy and me. And you dismiss sociaist revolution and radical thought and the human future and ....

Are you putting in an application to the Flat Earth Society? $lim_$weezy and I are clearly referencing Olllman's radical, revolutionary understanding of the background to Marx's materialist (not idealist) dialectic, and I claim that the new sciences of organization illuminate and confirm the materialist dialectic and can bring it to life and popular practice.

In the absence of any effective left practice anywhere, I find your out-of-hand rejection of new revolutionary organizing theory based in Marxism, the materialist dialectic, and the new science to be manifestly conservative and, I hope, unworthy of you.

I'm a Marxist revolutionary, and as such, I would consider it my obligation and delight to engage any comrades who claim to have found a way out of humanity's impending destruction at the hands of capital.

Now I gotta get to $lim_$weezy's stuff and do some learning.

$lim_$weezy

9th March 2012, 16:12

Kronsteen, You say you've read Ollman, but I think maybe you need to re-read, because your conception of dialectics is radically different than my own understanding.

Dialectical investigation is a way of coming to know things, yes, but it is based, like everything else, on an ontology. This may or may not be different than the "commonsense" view you take to be self-evident.

The "equal validity" of the two views is questionable. Being a newcomer to dialectis, I of course question my own ability to apply it to every situation, but I see no reason why it could not be done, and I have seen/read about it being applied to myriad situations.

You say any two interacting systems can be taken as part of a larger system, but what "type" of system is it? One of internal or external relations? You just avoid the question by moving it up a level.

What exactly is the "dialectical hypothesis"? Is it distinct from what I have been describing? You say that the true part of dialectics are trivial, and the interesting parts are false. What exactly is trivial about avoiding ideology? Everything, you say. How does the "commonsense" view deal with ideology? Does it even acknowledge its existence?

So are you accusing Marxists or dialecticians of being cult-like? I was under the impression we were talking specifically of dialecticians... I am confused by your comments on the matter.

You seem to hold both the postmodernist "all viewpoints are valid" viewpoint and one that is exclusionary, hence your criticism of dialectics as containing falsity while simultaneously criticizing it for claiming itself to be true. Which is it?

Dialectics put in opposition to the commonsense view appears as a "one-sided" presentation only if both are valid. You have not responded to my claim that external relations philosophy has a (as far as I'm aware) unsolved individuation problem.

blackmagichustla: Your comment is not constructive at all. Whether your claims are the case is what we're debating about.

Mr. Natural

9th March 2012, 18:12

I'm trying to catch up on my reading and comprehension of the many meaty posts in this thread, but feel the need to interject a couple of observations here. One of which is that IMO this is a most worthwhile thread that has the potential to become truly revolutionary.

Kronsteen, You've read much, but you're still stuck in place, along with the rest of the left. You referenced Alexander Bogdanov, whose radical intellectual curiosity and creativity I greatly admire, as a forerunner of cybernetics. May I point out that in The Web of Life (1996) that Fritjof Capra discusses Bogdanov at length and finds him to be the first to suggest there might be a universal science of organization to be developed?

And now, a century later, I believe science has advanced to an understanding of these organizational relations that can be employed to bring the materialist dialectic to popular understanding and praxis.

Here's one of those "airy generalizations" of mine to which you object. It's from Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics. "We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-running water. We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves."

Can you see the emphasis on living pattern here? A living pattern that suggests a universal pattern of organization of life might be a possibility? A living pattern that will show that Machism's idealist positivism was wrong but on the right track?

I'm not trying to argue with you or anyone else. It is my firm conviction that it is now possible to develop Marxist, scientific, dialectically materialist, revolutionary paths into a socialist future. For this to happen, though, various comrades will need to kennelize their dogma and open their minds to new, profoundly radical information.

IMO, there are two essential books that must be deeply engaged as well as read: Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic and Fritjof Capra's Web of Life.

Luis Henrique, I already knew you were a deep, conscientious thinker, and I'm trying to get a good grasp on your position re-dialectics. May I point out that our definitions of dialectical contradiction were essentially the same? So I'm having difficulty determining just where our differences lie, so I may engage them.

I'm puzzled as to your objection to the first clause of a sentence in which I referred to the universe as a dynamically interdependent, internally related whole. Is "whole" the problem? But my "whole" is dynamic and not a "thing." "My" universe can be and probably is dynamically expanding (or contracting), but I don't see the teleology in this explanation.

LH, would you please, please, please read Ollman? You've got to be a voracious reader, so why not sit down to a most pleasing, tasty, revolutionary meal?

My red-green best.

There are two essential books to read: Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic and Capra's Web of Life.

Kronsteen

10th March 2012, 00:52

Kronsteen, You say you've read Ollman, but I think maybe you need to re-read

It puzzles me that Ollman is so popular. He seems to say nothing new, and to say it very unclearly, at a very high level of abstraction.

Dialectical investigation is a way of coming to know things, yes, but it is based, like everything else, on an ontology.

You mean the ontology where everything's turning into its opposite...except where it isn't? The one where all qualitative change occurs suddenly at quantitative thresholds...except where it doesn't? Or the one where opposites fuse, except when they don't.

This may or may not be different than the "commonsense" view you take to be self-evident.

There is no single 'commonsense' view, and I didn't say anything was 'self-evident', whatever that actually means. What I tried to get across was, the internal and external view are two sides of the same coin.

You can describe a clock as a certain assemblage of components, or the components in terms of their relations to each other in forming the clock. Top down or bottom up. Defining a result in terms of the processes that led to it, or defining the processes in terms of the result they produce.

Both kinds of description are correct, both are true. It's just that a lot of marxists write whole books on how only one of them's true, and how only marxists can see it.

You say any two interacting systems can be taken as part of a larger system, but what "type" of system is it? One of internal or external relations? You just avoid the question by moving it up a level.

A system is one of internal relations. External relations don't form a system.

What exactly is the "dialectical hypothesis"? Is it distinct from what I have been describing? You say that the true part of dialectics are trivial, and the interesting parts are false. What exactly is trivial about avoiding ideology?

I said that some of the principles of dialectics are trivially true. For instance, if you decode the 'interpenetration of opposites', you get the insight that any phenomenon can be oversimplified in many ways that are mutually incompatible if one forgets that they're oversimplifications.

Are trade unions progressive or a tool of oppression? Was the sexual revolution a success or a failure? Is my right hand a mirror image of my left hand? Of course the answer is that in some ways one is true, and in other ways the other is true.

This is not exactly a profound insight, however much pseudointellectual verbiage is thrown around it to make it look difficult and deep.

I did not say that overcoming ideological bias or confusion was trivially easy.

So are you accusing Marxists or dialecticians of being cult-like?

Yes, both. The periodic purges in this happy forum show that. The way marxist terms are parroted by hacks who don't understand them. Founder worship. Rewriting of history with barefaced lies. Sectarianism and hostility towards anyone who doubts. All very cult-like.

You seem to hold both the postmodernist "all viewpoints are valid"

I never said anything of the kind.

your criticism of dialectics as containing falsity while simultaneously criticizing it for claiming itself to be true. Which is it?

I have no idea what you're asking there.

Dialectics put in opposition to the commonsense view appears as a "one-sided" presentation only if both are valid. You have not responded to my claim that external relations philosophy has a (as far as I'm aware) unsolved individuation problem.

You mean, how do we define a thing as distinct from other things if they're all inter-related. Odd how the equal and opposite problem is always ignored: How do we define a system if we insist that all it could be made from is other systems?

What exactly are the internal relations, relations between? If you define an object as a set of relationships and a set of processes, what exactly is undergoing the process?

I suggest that both of these problems are the result of one-sidedness. Exactly the kind of view which dialectics is supposed to avoid.

Kronsteen

10th March 2012, 00:57

Did you actually write that there is no such thing as the scientific method?

There is no single method of doing science. Find the debate between Paul Feyarabend and Imre Lakatos for two very different but still useful models of what scientists do.

ChrisK

10th March 2012, 02:21

I don't think so.

Your equation of "rational" to "materialist" doesn't seem sensible. Aristotle, Scotus or Descartes were certainly no materialists, but I would not call them irrational.

I think what Kronsteen was getting at is how Marx would have viewed the rational core.

BTW, Aristotle was a materialist.

Well, we have a chapter in the Grundrisse (probably from 1857), we have the Afterword (from 1873) to the German 2nd edition, and we have youth texts. Disconsidering the youth texts, which you will probably argue are still semi-Hegelian and unrepresentative of Marx's mature thought, the other two don't seem to suggest different aspects of it; on the contrary, they are quite coherent with each other - in spite of the sixteen years that separate them from each other. And they are not about economics - they are about methodology, even if they are about the methodology of "political economy", not about the methodology to discover The Truth. But that's precisely the point. There is no sign, anywhere, that Marx believed in a general methodology, that could be applied, unmodified, to economics and chemistry, cosmology and linguistics.

Thank you for mentioning that. Lets take a look at that afterword.

After a quotation from the preface to my “Criticism of Political Economy,” Berlin, 1859, pp. IV-VII, where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on:

“The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own. ... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx’s book has.”

Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?

http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm

This is Marx telling us what his dialectical method is. Strangely, I see nothing that Engels wrote about. No dialectical materialism. Plenty of historical materialism. In fact, this reads an awful lot like the Scottish Materialists, Aristotle and English economists. In fact...

Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the one hand, I treat economics metaphysically, and on the other hand — imagine! — confine myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing receipts (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future. In answer to the reproach in re metaphysics, Professor Sieber has it:

“In so far as it deals with actual theory, the method of Marx is the deductive method of the whole English school, a school whose failings and virtues are common to the best theoretic economists.”

Hmm so unless David Ricardo was a closet Hegelian, it appears that Marx adapted his method from current methods.

So let's do what I am proposing, and trying to do: let's get back to Marx, and use Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, only as examples of what not to do. But let's do it by actually reading Marx, and trying to understand him - not by misreading "dialectics is crap" where he clearly wrote

In its [dialectics'] rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
And in abandoning Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin or Trotsky's ontologisations of method, let's also be clear on why: they are epigonal philosophers, who could not break with the cartesian idealist notion that method reflects reality or reality reflects method. That notion was taken to its (absurd) conclusions by Hegel, and then criticised and destroyed by Marx.

Which is where we get historical materialism from.

And let's also realise that the idea that method and reality are simmetrical to each other still thrives in all non-Marxist schools of philosophy. And that certainly includes positivists and neopositivists, the Vienna circle, Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy, as well as existentialists, phenomenologists, structuralists, et caterva.

Explain this further. I'm not too sure what you are trying to say here.

LuÃs Henrique

10th March 2012, 18:26

BTW, Aristotle was a materialist.

Either he was a very peculiar kind of materialist, that believed in God and "final causes", or you are wrong here.

This is Marx telling us what his dialectical method is. Strangely, I see nothing that Engels wrote about. No dialectical materialism. Plenty of historical materialism. In fact, this reads an awful lot like the Scottish Materialists, Aristotle and English economists. In fact...

So Aristotle was a historical materialist? Go figure...

You keep refusing to read the appropriate texts, and when you eventually do it, you misread them fundamentally. This afterword is a defence of the possibility of reapropriating Hegel's method in a materialist way, not a mechanical rejection of it.

And of course, you would insist in bringing Engels into discussion: it is the appropriate straw man you need, to reduce Marx to a radical bourgeois philosopher.

Which is where we get historical materialism from.

Except, of course, that you thing that historical materialism is in Ricardo, Hume... and now even Aristotle!

Evidently, if you think that Aristotle was a historical materialist, then we fundamentally disagree about what "historical materialism" is.

Explain this further. I'm not too sure what you are trying to say here.

I think it is quite clearly explained. If you have any doubts, you may ask me to address them, but I am certainly not on the business of talking to the purposefully deaf.

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

10th March 2012, 18:50

Let's take another look at the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations, which Ollman, $lim, and I claim is the root of Marx's materialist dialectic, and which I assert is confirmed by the new sciences of organizational relations.

A couple of Kronsteen's statements provide a good focus. "The internal and external view are two sides of the same coin," and "A system is one of internal relations. External relations don't form a system."

As an aside, I find it interesting that Kron and I agree that external relations don't form a system, whereas neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory's natural selection with random mutation constitutes just such an external organization to life. This accepted but clearly incomplete evolutionary theory doesn't mention the internal organization of an organism that then extends to an "external" dynamic interdependence with the rest of life.

In the evolutionary theory the new sciences indicate that I'm advancing, "external" relations become "internal" at the next hierarchical, emergent level. Thus a cell's internal self-organization extends "externally" to the organ of which it is a part, and this "external" organization of the cell then becomes the internal self-organization of the organ. Organs then become parts of bodies which become parts of herds which are parts of ecosystems .... This is life's universal pattern of organization, and it is in agreement with the philosophy of internal relations.

I offered the notation "s-o/S-O" to illustrate the full evolutionary process, wherein "s-o" represents a self-organizing living system that is dynamically interdependent with surrounding living systems and the physical environment, which are represented by "S-O." The slash then represents the life process that emerges from the relations of the living systems that create and compose life.

The Hegelian philosophy of internal relations captures the overall organization of life, and its dialectical "laws" model many of processes and relations of life. Hegelian philosophy understands life and society as organic, systemic processes, which they are.

Here are a couple of quotes from Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic that might help unpack Marx's approach to the philosophy of internal relations and the materialist dialectic. "Marx's unusual approach to studying history is rooted in his acceptance of the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations, the much-neglected foundation of his entire dialectical method. Based on this philosophy, each of the elements that come into Marx's analysis includes as aspects of what it is all those other elements with which it interacts and without which it could neither appear nor function as it does." (p. 116) And: "Operating with a philosophy of internal relations taken over from Hegel--and never criticized by Marx in all his discussions of Hegel--Marx considers all of reality as an internally related whole..." (p. 188)

The preceding quotations indicate why I believe Marx's ontology and methodology are quite similar. Marx engaged the philosophy of internal relations and gained a "living" understanding of life and society as organic, systemic processes. This brought life's "things" to life in his mind, and was the means by which he came to view the world. Thus the ontology presented in Hegel, which was materialized by Marx, which has been verified overall by the new science, became Marx's methodology.

I am most definitely asserting that life has an organization that must become human social organization. Humans are part of nature. We are natural, self-organizing material systems currently existing quite unnaturally within the capitalist system. Life is communal; natural human life is communist.

I have travelled from a forty-year-old base in Marxism to the new sciences of organization and back to Marxism and Ollman, who brings the materialist dialectic to life in the manner it brought the young Marx's mind to life. What I am proposing would add one, activating word to Marx's and Engels' definition of dialectics, which would become the "science of the general laws of the organization, motion and development of nature, human society, and thought." (Anti-Duhring)

The popularly usable materialist dialectic I see does not tell people what to do but enables them to organize their minds in the pattern of life so they and their comrades can determined for themselves what to do and how to do it. This is a living, natural, materialist dialectic of life, community/communism, and revolution.

My red-green best.

Mr. Natural

10th March 2012, 19:39

ChristoferKoch, You posted a long quotation that Marx approved of as "picturing the dialectical method." This is one of several quotations you and Rosa et al constantly recycle as "proving" Marx's distance from Hegel and dialectical "laws."

CK, that passage is redolent of dialectics, although bereft of its "laws." Read Ollman. The Hegelian philosophy internal relations and its dialectical categories and "laws" brought nature and society to life in Marx's mind, and he internalized this understanding of life and society and capitalism as organic, systemic processes and brought it to bear in all he investigated and explained. But Marx internalized this organic, living view of existence and did not often "coquette" expressly with its laws. Indeed, although dialectical "laws" are expressive of real relations and processes, they constitute a disembodied, largely unusable collection of parts in their present state.

I hope you aren't going to "pull a Rosa" on us and flood this thread with naysaying and page on page of reductionist philosophy that cannot go anywhere. I joined Revleft just as Rosa was banned, and initially thought her banning might have been a bad move. But then I began reading the archives, and discovered what a relentless destroyer of any discussion of dialiectics anywhere she attempts to be. There is nothing positive in her approach and intent. She is a conservative fanatic.

You and Rosa are obviously highly intelligent and well-read. So how about showing Rosa some new tricks and engaging this thread with an open but critical mind. You already have the criticality, but I have yet to detect the necessary openness. You just say NO.

Kronsteen

10th March 2012, 22:08

Either he was a very peculiar kind of materialist, that believed in God and "final causes", or you are wrong here.

You evidently have a very narrow notion of what constitutes materialism. There is nothing anti-material about positing final (material) causes, or for that matter a non-material creator of a material universe.

So Aristotle was a historical materialist?No one has suggested this.

This afterword is a defence of the possibility of reapropriating Hegel's method in a materialist way, not a mechanical rejection of it.So a passage which denies the existence of supra-historical laws, but in the same breath asserts supra-historical laws governing transitions between economic epochs...is not mechanical.

It doesn't mention Hegel or his terms, but there is indeed an implicit teleology of 'necessary' progress from one economic setup to another 'higher' one, which resembles Hegel's. Not that Hegel had a monopoly on teleological models of history. If that's what Marx took from him, Marx took the wrong thing.

And of course, you would insist in bringing Engels into discussionEngels is the one of the duo who wrote specifically about dialectics - and there's no record of Marx disagreeing with him on the subject, or even suggesting there were more important things to do.

Considering the pivotal role Engels played in the history of marxist dialectics, it would be strange not to bring him in.

LuÃs Henrique

11th March 2012, 01:12

You evidently have a very narrow notion of what constitutes materialism. There is nothing anti-material about positing final (material) causes, or for that matter a non-material creator of a material universe.

I don't think I have a narrow notion of what constitutes materialism; consensus is that idealism presuposes the primacy of mind (Idea, God, Geist, Prime Motor): matter proceeds from spirit; materialism, on the other hand, holds that mind, spirit, ideas, etc., proceed from matter. Such a view cannot be attributed to Aristotle. He is an idealist, if a more moderate one than Plato.

No one has suggested this.

No? Perhaps I am reading too much into this:

Plenty of historical materialism. In fact, this reads an awful lot like the Scottish Materialists, Aristotle and English economists.

So it seems that a passage that has plenty of "historical materialism" reads "an awful lot like the Scottish Materialists, Aristotle and English economists". So I would say that it was at least "suggested" that Aristotle was indeed a historical materialist. But perhaps Christopher Koch just mispoke.

What, however, he clearly stated is that

Aristotle was a materialist.

So, in order to believe that Aristotle was not a historical materialist, Christopher Koch would need to assert the existence of some kind of materialism that is not historical materialism. I don't know if he agrees with that, and I think there are several problems for his position in doing so, but only him can enlight us on the subject.

So a passage which denies the existence of supra-historical laws, but in the same breath asserts supra-historical laws governing transitions between economic epochs...is not mechanical.

Erm, no. Most decidedly, no.

There are no suprahistorical "laws", that could be translated into a "necessary" succession of increasing "superior" modes of production. On the other hand, each mode of production has its own internal laws, which determinate which historical outcomes are possible, and which are not (slavery cannot be destroyed by a bourgeois revolution, feudalism cannot be superceeded by socialism, capitalism cannot avoid the increasing tension between concentration (and increased composition) of capital and the necessity to realise surplus value, etc.)

It doesn't mention Hegel or his terms, but there is indeed an implicit teleology of 'necessary' progress from one economic setup to another 'higher' one, which resembles Hegel's. Not that Hegel had a monopoly on teleological models of history. If that's what Marx took from him, Marx took the wrong thing.

I think you misread Marx. He certainly holds no such teleological view.

On the other hand, perhaps we mean different things by the word 'teleology'. I know me and Ms. Lichtenstein cannot agree on its meaning, for instance.

Engels is the one of the duo who wrote specifically about dialectics - and there's no record of Marx disagreeing with him on the subject, or even suggesting there were more important things to do.

Indeed. But his views on the subject seem nowhere to be condoned by Marx, either. And they are clearly incompatible with the little Marx wrote about it.

Considering the pivotal role Engels played in the history of marxist dialectics, it would be strange not to bring him in.

Of course, he must be brought in. The problem is, you bring him in, and I say, and keep saying, Engels' views are a) false; and b) incompatible with Marx's. And then I am repeatedly accused of supporting... Engels' views!

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

11th March 2012, 01:27

Luis Henrique, I already knew you were a deep, conscientious thinker, and I'm trying to get a good grasp on your position re-dialectics. May I point out that our definitions of dialectical contradiction were essentially the same? So I'm having difficulty determining just where our differences lie, so I may engage them.

Well, thanks for the (extremely undeserved) praise.

I'm puzzled as to your objection to the first clause of a sentence in which I referred to the universe as a dynamically interdependent, internally related whole. Is "whole" the problem? But my "whole" is dynamic and not a "thing." "My" universe can be and probably is dynamically expanding (or contracting), but I don't see the teleology in this explanation."Whole" is a problem, yes.

We can only aprehend things in reducing them to systems. But I don't think the "universe" can effectively be reduced to a system; it seems to me a collection of disparate phenomena that does not constitute an actual "totality".

LH, would you please, please, please read Ollman? You've got to be a voracious reader, so why not sit down to a most pleasing, tasty, revolutionary meal?Maybe, in due time. I have already postponed my project of reading Clausewitz because of revleft (and read Wittgenstein's awful Philosophical Investigations instead), and am not inclined to doing it again.

I see you quote him often along with Fritjof Capra. I have had the misfortune of reading some Capra; it is an awful amount of idealist and reactionary garbage; if Ollman is similar to this, then I will probably dislike him very much.

My red-green best.My red-red best! :)

Luís Henrique

ChrisK

11th March 2012, 05:55

Either he was a very peculiar kind of materialist, that believed in God and "final causes", or you are wrong here.

Not at all. You are confusing materialism with historical materialism. In fact, Aristotle was very standard materialist in the Ancient Philosophical tradition. And its an unmoved mover, not God. That would be a medieval add-on. By contrast the Stoics were materialists who believed in material gods and a material soul.

So Aristotle was a historical materialist? Go figure...

Not at all. You misunderstand. Aristotle's scientific method is a method that was later improved upon by the Scottish materialists and English economists. Marx would have further refined this method into historical materialism.

You keep refusing to read the appropriate texts, and when you eventually do it, you misread them fundamentally. This afterword is a defence of the possibility of reapropriating Hegel's method in a materialist way, not a mechanical rejection of it.

Since when have I refused to read anything?

I didn't say it was meant to reject Hegel. I said that it in effect does reject Hegel as a whole. Perhaps you should show where the defense of Hegel actually occurs. I went to the trouble of showing were Marx argues for his method, perhaps you ought to give me some passage where he does the opposite.

And of course, you would insist in bringing Engels into discussion: it is the appropriate straw man you need, to reduce Marx to a radical bourgeois philosopher.

I bring Engels in because he is the originator of dialectical materialism, not Marx. Marx founded his own dialectic method which is evolved from the Aristotelian scientific method.

I do not turn Marx into any sort of a philosopher. Merely into a scientist. Strange that you would think I support any philosophy.

Except, of course, that you thing that historical materialism is in Ricardo, Hume... and now even Aristotle!

Evidently, if you think that Aristotle was a historical materialist, then we fundamentally disagree about what "historical materialism" is.

Once again, you misunderstand. His method is a continuation of an older method. BTW, I never mentioned Hume.

I think it is quite clearly explained. If you have any doubts, you may ask me to address them, but I am certainly not on the business of talking to the purposefully deaf.

Luís Henrique

Not purposefully deaf. Its just so terribly written I don't know what you are attempting to say.

ChrisK

11th March 2012, 06:03

ChristoferKoch, You posted a long quotation that Marx approved of as "picturing the dialectical method." This is one of several quotations you and Rosa et al constantly recycle as "proving" Marx's distance from Hegel and dialectical "laws."

CK, that passage is redolent of dialectics, although bereft of its "laws."

Yes, dialectics as conceived by Aristotle and adjusted over time. Not Hegel oddly.

Read Ollman.

Which book?

The Hegelian philosophy internal relations and its dialectical categories and "laws" brought nature and society to life in Marx's mind, and he internalized this understanding of life and society and capitalism as organic, systemic processes and brought it to bear in all he investigated and explained. But Marx internalized this organic, living view of existence and did not often "coquette" expressly with its laws. Indeed, although dialectical "laws" are expressive of real relations and processes, they constitute a disembodied, largely unusable collection of parts in their present state.

You see, when you debate you have to substantiate. Show me where Marx says this. If you don't then you are simply putting words in his mouth.

I hope you aren't going to "pull a Rosa" on us and flood this thread with naysaying and page on page of reductionist philosophy that cannot go anywhere. I joined Revleft just as Rosa was banned, and initially thought her banning might have been a bad move. But then I began reading the archives, and discovered what a relentless destroyer of any discussion of dialiectics anywhere she attempts to be. There is nothing positive in her approach and intent. She is a conservative fanatic.

Apparently you didn't read carefully. Also, is annoying you ban worthy?

You and Rosa are obviously highly intelligent and well-read. So how about showing Rosa some new tricks and engaging this thread with an open but critical mind. You already have the criticality, but I have yet to detect the necessary openness. You just say NO.

The perceived lack of openness is because I used to agree with you. Reading more and running into Rosa changed my mind. I know your positions and I know that they are wrong. Perhaps you should be open to the idea that you could be wrong.

Grenzer

11th March 2012, 06:54

I hope you aren't going to "pull a Rosa" on us and flood this thread with naysaying and page on page of reductionist philosophy that cannot go anywhere. I joined Revleft just as Rosa was banned, and initially thought her banning might have been a bad move. But then I began reading the archives, and discovered what a relentless destroyer of any discussion of dialiectics anywhere she attempts to be. There is nothing positive in her approach and intent. She is a conservative fanatic.

I'm not sure that I would go as far as to call her a conservative, but I would agree that she tended to have a negative effect on the quality of a thread. I don't see the point in complaining about someone debunking dialectics in a thread where the entire point is to discuss the validity of dialectics, however.

Kronsteen

11th March 2012, 11:48

I don't think I have a narrow notion of what constitutes materialism; consensus is that idealism presuposes the primacy of mind (Idea, God, Geist, Prime Motor): matter proceeds from spirit; materialism, on the other hand, holds that mind, spirit, ideas, etc., proceed from matter. Such a view cannot be attributed to Aristotle. He is an idealist, if a more moderate one than Plato.

There are two separate questions here:

1) Is this universe ultimately material?

2) Are other things outside this universe, including a hypothetical creator, material?

To which our answers are: Yes, and Unknowable.

Aristotle's answers were: Yes, and Maybe.

The answers given by medieval christain reinterpreters of Aristotle were: No, and No.

Christopher Koch would need to assert the existence of some kind of materialism that is not historical materialism.You mean like...almost every materialist philosopher there's ever been. David Hume would be astonished if a time traveller told him he was a Historical Materialist.

There are no suprahistorical "laws", that could be translated into a "necessary" succession of increasing "superior" modes of production. On the other hand, each mode of production has its own internal laws, which determinate which historical outcomes are possibleThat's not quite what the quoted passage says. It says each epoch has its own economic laws, and there are no economic laws which span all epochs. It also says there are laws - implicitly suprahistorical - which determine the transitions between epochs.

Neither Marx nor the reviewer he quotes state that the laws of transition are part of the laws of each epoch. Rather the assumption seems to be that they are outside history.

Your version makes more sense, but it's not what Marx wrote.

perhaps we mean different things by the word 'teleology'Directed towards a predefined goal. In accordance with a plan that has definite states and an endpoint. Controlled by an external intelligence with an agenda.

Again, there are really two separate questions, this time about Marx's teleology, or lack thereof.

1) Did he believe in one?

2) Should he have believed in one if he were self-consistent and unaffected by the prejudices of his time?

The first question is about Marx the man. The second is really about marxism the theory - as developed by hundreds of other since marx.

But his [Engels'] views on the subject seem nowhere to be condoned by Marx, either. And they are clearly incompatible with the little Marx wrote about it.All quite true. But Marx seemed perfectly happy to let Comrade Fred spend years working on this stuff, and to promote it as part of the revolutionary work they both devoted their lives to.

It may be that Marx was simply indulging Engels for the sake of their friendship, thinking all the hegelian stuff would drop away naturally when the workers organised. If so, it was a bad strategy.

Mr. Natural

11th March 2012, 17:36

Luis Henrique, Thanks for your response. I find this to be a most worthwhile thread with its several approaches to dialectics (and anti-dialectics).

My compliment to you is deserved. I've read many of your posts, and your conscientious intellect is always manifest. I work hard to maintain an open but critical mind, too, and see we have some major differences. so let's sort through some of them and see where we wind up.

Yours is the third highly negative review of Capra I've seen in the year I've been on internet left sites. The other two were from Rosa L and Miguel Detonnaciones, but I cannot determine where the heated emotional opposition to Capra is coming from. If he is indeed publishing "idealist and reactionary garbage," then I am way off track and must radically reassess "my" Marxist materialist dialectic.

I try to bring a high level of intellectual, psychological, and political integrity to my theorizing. I am after truth and socialist revolution and the last thing I want to do is foist a headtrip on others. With this in mind, I will state that it is my very strong contention that Capra's Web of Life is the only work that comprehensively brings the new science(s) of organizational relations (culminating in systems-complexity science) down to Earth for regular persons such as myself to understand and employ.

The left has ignored this science. For example, there is no mention of the absolutely essential scientific phenomenon of self-organization at Revleft, nor any mention of the Santa Fe Institute, which is the now-in-decline center of this research.

So what did you read by Capra? Was it his early tour de force, The Tao of Physics (1976), which can be easily dismissed by those unfamiliar with this new science? I assure you that I am open to being shown where Capra is fundamentally wrong, and that I will then change my theory as necessary. (Hell, if Capra is wrong, the entire Hegelian/Marxist/Capraist living, natural, popularly accessible materialist dialectic I'm suggesting is dead.)

Of course, I'm hoping to show you that Capra gets it right, in which case I expect you to revise your dialectics (and you're one of the few who appear open to change as indicated). In fact, if I can show you or anyone else that Capra not only gets life relations right overall but has actually created a popularly intelligible model of life's universal pattern of organization, then we can begin to bring this red-green materialist dialectic to life and revolutionary praxis. We can make your "red-red" scarlet.

As for the nature of the "totality" of the universe, I'm impressed by Geoffrey Chew's bootstrap theory and David Bohm's implicate/explicate order. This is highly "mystical" science, though: a science of relations and not so much the things the relations generate. This science is then in agreement with Ollman's take on the roots of the materialist dialectic.

The new science is organizational science, and we who so desperately need to organize might find it of value.

My red-green, scarlet, dialectical best.

Mr. Natural

11th March 2012, 20:36

CristoferKoch, I just lost a lengthy post to you: "Connection Problem." I'll re-do tomorrow.

LuÃs Henrique

11th March 2012, 20:50

Not at all. You are confusing materialism with historical materialism.

I don't think so. To me, they are very different things. But, in your opinion, what is the difference between historical materialism and materialism sans-phrase?

In fact, Aristotle was very standard materialist in the Ancient Philosophical tradition. And its an unmoved mover, not God. That would be a medieval add-on. By contrast the Stoics were materialists who believed in material gods and a material soul.

The unmoved motor is quite evidently of a spiritual nature. Seriously, you are the very first person I have ever read or heard to classify Aristotle as a materialist. If he is, the bulk of the previous philosophical tradition missed it.

Not at all. You misunderstand. Aristotle's scientific method is a method that was later improved upon by the Scottish materialists and English economists. Marx would have further refined this method into historical materialism.

So Marx's method is merely a refinement of Aristotle's? And in what, precisely, does such refinement consists?

Since when have I refused to read anything?

For instance, you have painfully obviously not read anything that I posted in this thread. You also show no signs of having acknowledged the importance of the Grundrisse's chapter on the method of political economy (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#3). And while you have read the Afterword to the 2nd German edition of Das Kapital, you seem unable to understand it.

I didn't say it was meant to reject Hegel. I said that it in effect does reject Hegel as a whole. Perhaps you should show where the defense of Hegel actually occurs. I went to the trouble of showing were Marx argues for his method, perhaps you ought to give me some passage where he does the opposite.

I have already shown, not one, but many times, where the defense of Hegel is.

And what is that do you misrepresent as "showing were Marx argues for his method"? Perhaps this?

Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the one hand, I treat economics metaphysically, and on the other hand — imagine! — confine myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing receipts (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future. In answer to the reproach in re metaphysics, Professor Sieber has it:

“In so far as it deals with actual theory, the method of Marx is the deductive method of the whole English school, a school whose failings and virtues are common to the best theoretic economists.”

If so, it only shows that your reading method is defective. Marx is clearly showing how disparate (and absurd) are "the various conceptions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of [the method employed in Das Kapital]".

I bring Engels in because he is the originator of dialectical materialism, not Marx. Marx founded his own dialectic method which is evolved from the Aristotelian scientific method.

Quote for Marx saying that his method is not dialectical materialism? Quote for Marx conterposing dialectical materialism vs historical materialism?

I do not turn Marx into any sort of a philosopher. Merely into a scientist. Strange that you would think I support any philosophy.

Oh, of course you do, you just dislike calling it by that name.

Once again, you misunderstand. His method is a continuation of an older method. BTW, I never mentioned Hume.

The same method of Ricardo, isn't it? Just refined... again, what changes did Marx introduce into Ricardo's method?

Not purposefully deaf. Its just so terribly written I don't know what you are attempting to say.

Exactly the standard answer I have come to expect from you pseudo-Wittgensteinians: when we don't understand you, it's because we are stupid and can't see the obvious. When you don't understand us, it is because we are unclear, or because we write so terribly, etc.

Luís Henrique

ChrisK

11th March 2012, 20:50

First off, everyone claiming dialectics is mysticism needs to read "Dance of the Dialectic" by Bertell Ollman. Please.

I think it will be helpful to give a quick run-through of Ollman's take on dialectics first. Sorry if anyone has hit this before. I read the thread but I think a summary will help guide discussion.

Can it be found for free?

I will be very clear. Dialectics consists of two things: the philosophy of internal relations and the process of abstraction. I will deal with each of these. This was first/best/whatever worked out by Joseph Dietzgen, by the way.

Dietzgen had a specific ontology--the world was viewed as a great mass of Relations. The basic unit of reality is not an isolated "thing" but a Relation. This is not to say that things don't exist--it is not an attempt to reify the in-between. Instead, it simply means that we must look not at an isolated "thing" that enters into external relations with other things, but take these relations with other "things" as part of what it is. This is what I mean by a philosophy of internal relations.

Are these internal relations interlinked with one another like a chain? Or are they simply related causal events?

But, a problem arises. How does one think of or communicate a Relation, which, when extended fully, includes everything that exists? In other words, since "things" do not have ready-made boundaries, how can we draw those boundaries ourselves? The answer lies in the process of abstraction, the work of the mind. This is Dietzgen's great contribution to dialectics.

So we create the boundaries with our minds? Hmmmm, that seems an awful lot like what the great idealist George Berkeley said.

So, really, the dialectic is not the "motor force of history" or some other such truly mystic nonsense, but a way of looking at things that--it is claimed--avoids the distortions and problems associated with the philosophy of external relations and the ideological abstractions it encourages. Things change, and dialectics captures and deals with that change much better than non-dialectic thought can. Whether this is true everyone must decide for themselves, but to say dialectics is mysticism or "bullshit" is unwarranted.

Two problems with what you have said above.

You have not avoided ideological abstraction. In fact, your use of abstraction puts you in a position to be accused of linguistic idealism. In fact, any consistent materialist would have to reject abstractions as being idealist for this reason. Abstractions create things with the mind; strong idealism there.
Not true about dialectical materialism best describing change. Calculus, ordinary language and scientific jargon all describe change better. In fact, if you want me to I can provide an argument for how dialectics doesn't allow for change at all.

The implications of this are many and far-reaching. Without dialectics, we cannot describe the world as it really is. Without it, we are led into ideological traps--we take the passed-down cultural and social abstractions of things for how they actually exist, when often this is not the case. In other words, we take the words or concepts we use to tell a story for the actual events of the story themselves. We can get closer to accurately describing the world if we use dialectical abstractions instead of static ideological ones. We can reabstract when we need to, and attempt to abstract so as to "capture" in thought the organic and historical changes occurring around us.

Physics seems to describe the world just fine without dialectics. If anything, what you are writing seems like the writings of an idealist with the answers to the life, universe and everything else, without ever leaving the comfort of your chair.

What is so mystifying about dialectics? In light of Ollman's work, I would say nothing. The reductionist philosophy of external relations may be "commonsense" or whatnot but it is still just a particular ontology among many, and should not be treated as true because it is "commonsense". This is all despite the fact that the philosophy of external relations leads to distortions and fetishism caused by the decontextualization of goddamn near everything. Dialectics offers a comprehensive view of society and the world completely in line with Marxist politics.

The mystic claim is a reference to Hegel being a Hermetic. He was quite literally a mystic. In fact, his ideas were directly influenced by this adherence to mysticism. That is why dialectical materialism is called mystical.

What makes Marx's conception of communism "scientific" and not utopian is not that utopian thinking is "vague and cloudy" whereas Marxism is hard-lined or specific. Instead, it is that communism was arrived at as an idea by a dialectical study of capitalism. Marx looked to the past to see what tendencies and processes caused the conditions existing in his own time, and then projected these tendencies into the future to see their eventual resolution in communism. Doing this, we can come to a better understanding of our own era's conditions as part of the whole that is our past and future. Is this mystical? Surely not.

You have switched from speaking about dialectical materialism to historical materialism.

Kronsteen

11th March 2012, 21:00

CristoferKoch, I just lost a lengthy post to you: "Connection Problem." I'll re-do tomorrow.

As you're no doubt now aware, RevLeft does this quite a lot. So do what I do - make a copy of your post into Notepad or a similar program before pressing 'Submit Reply'.

If the posting fails, you can paste it back into the post window.

LuÃs Henrique

11th March 2012, 21:06

Yes, dialectics as conceived by Aristotle and adjusted over time. Not Hegel oddly.

So certainly Marx was mistaken when he wrote,

The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.

What is it? Was Hegel the first to present the general form of Aristotle's dialectic in a comprehensive and conscious manner? If so, how can Marx's text contain Aristotelic but not Hegelian dialectic? Or is Marx referring to some other dialectic here? But thence, wouldn't that other, Hegelian and not Aristotelic dialectics, be, according to Marx, comprehensive and conscious, as opposed to all the previous forms?

Or perhaps you really mean that Marx hadn't a clue on what he was saying at all?

Which book?

You really haven't read this thread, have you? Darnit, the fellow has been repeating countless times the name of the book he wants people to read!

You see, when you debate you have to substantiate. Show me where Marx says this. If you don't then you are simply putting words in his mouth.

Also, is annoying you ban worthy?

No, but constant spamming is ban worthy, as are constant flaming, namecalling, and slandering.

The perceived lack of openness is because I used to agree with you. Reading more and running into Rosa changed my mind. I know your positions and I know that they are wrong. Perhaps you should be open to the idea that you could be wrong.

This is a sure sign that there is something wrong with Wittgenstein's ideas (and their disparate distortion and misuse by others): apparently it is impossible to hold them without becoming an arrogant knows-it-all arsehole...

Luís Henrique

Kronsteen

11th March 2012, 21:18

"Dance of the Dialectic" by Bertell OllmanCan it be found for free?

Half of it's on Ollman's website: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/

There's 14 books listed, but they have a lot of material in common. I don't mean common themes, I mean the text of entire chapters.

how can we draw those boundaries ourselves? The answer lies in the process of abstraction, the work of the mind.So we create the boundaries with our minds?It's very explicit in Plekhanov, and therefore in Lenin and Trotsky. In Plekhanov, the process of reasoning in the human mind towards the truth is qualitatively identical to the process of development in the universe towards self awareness.

This is a version of the hermetic 'as above, so below' notion in Bohme, which Hegel took over. Plekhanov writes:

In his Phänomenologie des Geistes he compares human life with dialogue, in the sense that under the pressure of experience our views gradually change, as happens to the opinions of disputants participating in a discussion of a profound intellectual nature. Comparing the course of development of consciousness with the progress of such a discussion, Hegel designated it by the word dialectics, or dialectical motion. This word had already been used by Plato, but it was Hegel who gave it its especially profound and important meaning. To Hegel, dialectics is the soul of all scientific knowledge. It is of extraordinary importance to comprehend its nature. It is the principle of all motion, of all life, of all that occurs in reality."
(From Idealism to Materialism, 1917)So, yes it is a kind of idealism, and yes there is an implicit teleology. More specifically, I'd say it views Mind and Matter, thinking in minds and becoming in matter, as either two processes occurring in parallel, or one process with two faces.

Not true about dialectical materialism best describing changeAh yes, the idea that change can only occur by an object being in two places at once. Hegel's non-solution to Zeno's non-paradox of non-movement.

I mean that Zeno's arrow (pseudo)paradox relies on the idea that, once a motion in time and through space has been chopped up into an infinite set of infinitely small units, it can't be reassembled into finite quantities because...all the pieces are infinitely small. I trust I don't have to explain the many problems with that reasoning.

Hegel's (pseudo)solution to the problem of an object jumping from one infinitely divided unit of space to the next was to have the object momentarily duplicated. Exactly how this supposition actually solves the problem...is unclear.

LuÃs Henrique

11th March 2012, 21:20

My compliment to you is deserved. I've read many of your posts, and your conscientious intellect is always manifest.

I think I am a quite intelligent person, and that I have an above-the-average knowledge about a few things, Marxist theory included - I am certainly not afflicted with low self steem...! I don't think this makes me a deep thinker though; I am perfectly aware that there is little original in what I say and write. I mostly repeat Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, with small bits of Lenin or Trotsky and other Marxist theorists here and there.

Yours is the third highly negative review of Capra I've seen in the year I've been on internet left sites. The other two were from Rosa L and Miguel Detonnaciones, but I cannot determine where the heated emotional opposition to Capra is coming from. If he is indeed publishing "idealist and reactionary garbage," then I am way off track and must radically reassess "my" Marxist materialist dialectic.

I try to bring a high level of intellectual, psychological, and political integrity to my theorizing. I am after truth and socialist revolution and the last thing I want to do is foist a headtrip on others. With this in mind, I will state that it is my very strong contention that Capra's Web of Life is the only work that comprehensively brings the new science(s) of organizational relations (culminating in systems-complexity science) down to Earth for regular persons such as myself to understand and employ.

The left has ignored this science. For example, there is no mention of the absolutely essential scientific phenomenon of self-organization at Revleft, nor any mention of the Santa Fe Institute, which is the now-in-decline center of this research.

So what did you read by Capra? Was it his early tour de force, The Tao of Physics (1976), which can be easily dismissed by those unfamiliar with this new science? I assure you that I am open to being shown where Capra is fundamentally wrong, and that I will then change my theory as necessary. (Hell, if Capra is wrong, the entire Hegelian/Marxist/Capraist living, natural, popularly accessible materialist dialectic I'm suggesting is dead.)

It would be The Turning Point. Maybe the Web of Life is different. But The Turning Point is completely idealistic; there Capra is by no means a materialist, much less a dialectical one. He is a holist, and believes in an unstructured, uncontradictory totality - an expressive totality, that can be only spiritual, of course.

Of course, I'm hoping to show you that Capra gets it right, in which case I expect you to revise your dialectics (and you're one of the few who appear open to change as indicated). In fact, if I can show you or anyone else that Capra not only gets life relations right overall but has actually created a popularly intelligible model of life's universal pattern of organization, then we can begin to bring this red-green materialist dialectic to life and revolutionary praxis. We can make your "red-red" scarlet.

As for the nature of the "totality" of the universe, I'm impressed by Geoffrey Chew's bootstrap theory and David Bohm's implicate/explicate order. This is highly "mystical" science, though: a science of relations and not so much the things the relations generate. This science is then in agreement with Ollman's take on the roots of the materialist dialectic.

The new science is organizational science, and we who so desperately need to organize might find it of value.

What do you call "new science"?

Luís Henrique

ChrisK

11th March 2012, 21:22

I don't think so. To me, they are very different things. But, in your opinion, what is the difference between historical materialism and materialism sans-phrase?

Materialism is a metaphysical position about what reality is comprised of. Historical materialism is a scientific theory of class struggle throughout history and as to how society advances.

The unmoved motor is quite evidently of a spiritual nature. Seriously, you are the very first person I have ever read or heard to classify Aristotle as a materialist. If he is, the bulk of the previous philosophical tradition missed it.

No, the unmoved mover was what Aristotle thought was the only rational explanation for how the universe started. Nothing mystical, simply wrong.

So Aristotle can regard it as obvious that material entities like animals and plants and earth and water and the sun and the stars are substances

That is materialism. All my professors teach him as a materialist. In fact take a look at this (http://www.google.com/imgres?num=10&um=1&hl=en&safe=off&biw=1366&bih=663&tbm=isch&tbnid=G8izvwMB1oJ89M:&imgrefurl=http://www.stenudd.com/aristotle/aristotle-life-05-academy.htm&docid=AcEc0Y5osyQhXM&imgurl=http://www.stenudd.com/aristotle/images/raphael-schoolofathens-detail.jpg&w=340&h=502&ei=yANdT6CjCcSfiAKKvMC9Cw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=980&vpy=109&dur=2501&hovh=273&hovw=185&tx=87&ty=166&sig=100157553442660700210&sqi=2&page=1&tbnh=133&tbnw=96&start=0&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:4,s:0)painting.

Notice that as Plato points up to the realm of ideas Aristotle outward to the real world.

So Marx's method is merely a refinement of Aristotle's? And in what, precisely, does such refinement consists?

That would be a long-ass list, but for starters he removed final causes, a rejection of Aristotle's belief that this leads to universal truth, a rejection of Aristotle's notion of abstraction, etc, etc.

For instance, you have painfully obviously not read anything that I posted in this thread. You also show no signs of having acknowledged the importance of the Grundrisse's chapter on the method of political economy (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#3). And while you have read the Afterword to the 2nd German edition of Das Kapital, you seem unable to understand it.

I'll read that piece and respond to it by tomorrow.

I have already shown, not one, but many times, where the defense of Hegel is.

Are you referring to the coquetting quote?

And what is that do you misrepresent as "showing were Marx argues for his method"? Perhaps this?

If so, it only shows that your reading method is defective. Marx is clearly showing how disparate (and absurd) are "the various conceptions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of [the method employed in Das Kapital]".

I'll accept your criticism about the English economists bit. But I'll also point out that you seem to have missed this

I cannot answer the writer better than by aid of a few extracts from his own criticism, which may interest some of my readers to whom the Russian original is inaccessible.

Which precedes that long quote which is very much not dialectical materialism. He is endorsing a passage which has a very Aristotelian influenced method. He calls that his dialectical method.

So I'm going to have to ask you to show me the dialectics in this passage:

The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own. ... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx’s book has.

Doesn't seem to be there.

Quote for Marx saying that his method is not dialectical materialism? Quote for Marx conterposing dialectical materialism vs historical materialism?

See above.

Oh, of course you do, you just dislike calling it by that name.

No. What philosophy do I support then?

The same method of Ricardo, isn't it? Just refined... again, what changes did Marx introduce into Ricardo's method?

Not as certain on this one. Most I know of Ricardo is that he followed a refined Aristotelian method and Marx read a shit ton of his works. I'll have to read more Ricardo and get back to you.

Exactly the standard answer I have come to expect from you pseudo-Wittgensteinians: when we don't understand you, it's because we are stupid and can't see the obvious. When you don't understand us, it is because we are unclear, or because we write so terribly, etc.

Luís Henrique

I'm being quite serious.

And let's also realise that the idea that method and reality are simmetrical to each other still thrives in all non-Marxist schools of philosophy.

"simmetrical" is not a word. I'm going to assume that you mean symmetrical. I'm really not too sure what you would mean by the symmetry of method and reality. Do you mean that these theories are imposed on reality?

LuÃs Henrique

11th March 2012, 21:29

So we create the boundaries with our minds? Hmmmm, that seems an awful lot like what the great idealist George Berkeley said.

Is there a working class?

Luís Henrique

ChrisK

11th March 2012, 21:35

So certainly Marx was mistaken when he wrote,

What is it? Was Hegel the first to present the general form of Aristotle's dialectic in a comprehensive and conscious manner? If so, how can Marx's text contain Aristotelic but not Hegelian dialectic? Or is Marx referring to some other dialectic here? But thence, wouldn't that other, Hegelian and not Aristotelic dialectics, be, according to Marx, comprehensive and conscious, as opposed to all the previous forms?

No, Marx is wrong. That comprehensive and conscious manner was presented by Kant, mystified by Hegel and found by Marx within Hegel. When you demystify Hegel you find Kant. Evidence being:

"Kant's historical conjectures are inspired less by Scripture than by the model of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. But Kant's philosophy of history also goes beyond Rousseau in many ways.... As should be evident by now, Kant's theory of the human race's development bears more than a casual resemblance to the materialist conception of history later worked out by Karl Marx. Kant's vision of humanity's historical future as well as its past has more in common with its greatest nineteenth-century descendant than has usually been appreciated.

"Kant's Idea for a Universal History proposes to view history as the process through which human beings develop their species-capacities. As we have seen, for Kant the decisive trait of the human species -- the original empirical meaning of its rationality and freedom -- is its ability to devise its own way of life. Thus along with Marx, Kant understands the basis of history as the development of people's socially productive powers, their collective capacities to produce their means of subsistence. In history, these capacities change and grow, and the historical process follows on this growth. As becomes clear in the Conjectural Beginning, history for Kant has passed through several different stages, each of which corresponds to the then dominant modes of productive activity. If the key to historical development is the growth of human species powers, the fundamental determining powers are productive ones. What fundamentally characterizes each historical epoch is not only the mode of material production characteristic of it, but also the social conflicts this mode of production involves....

"Like Marx, Kant regards history as a scene not only of conflict and strife, but also of deepening inequality and oppression.... As in Marx's theory of history, the root of social antagonism is a struggle between groups of people with opposed economic interests, where the different groups represent different stages in humanity's economic development. And in both theories the victory in this struggle tends to belong to the group whose mode of production more fully develops the productive powers of humanity.

"Marx's theory of history is 'materialist' in more than one sense. First, it treats 'the mode of production in material life' as the key to humanity's historical development. Second, and perhaps more significantly, it understands the social 'form' of human society as grounded on its economic 'matter'. Kant's theory of history is materialist in both these senses. It treats humanity's activities in producing their means of subsistence as the historical basis for the development of all their capacities.... And Kant regards the employment of these capacities as conditioning the social relations -- in particular, the property relations and political forms -- that characterise a given historical epoch. Kant's theory of history, therefore, is correctly described as a form of 'historical materialism.'" [Wood (1998), pp.25-27.]

Wood, A, (1998), 'Kant's Historical Materialism' in Kneller and Axinn, Chapter Five.

Kneller, J., and Axinn, S, (1998), Autonomy And Community: Readings In Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy (State University of New York Press).

You really haven't read this thread, have you? Darnit, the fellow has been repeating countless times the name of the book he wants people to read!

Nope.

You see, when you debate you have to substantiate. Show me where Marx says this. If you don't then you are simply putting words in his mouth.

I don't know of any place where Marx said "Which book?" Sorry....

No, but constant spamming is ban worthy, as are constant flaming, namecalling, and slandering.

What spamming?

As for the last three you mean like calling someone a pseudo-Wittgensteinian and always insulting before arguing? You mean you ought to be banned?

This is a sure sign that there is something wrong with Wittgenstein's ideas (and their disparate distortion and misuse by others): apparently it is impossible to hold them without becoming an arrogant knows-it-all arsehole...

Luís Henrique

You write that after writing that name calling and slandering are bad. Holy shit you are quite the comedian.

Sorry if I used to be one of you an realized that the idea was worthless. If maybe you would would stop being a know-it-all asshole then you would actually read something and learn.

ChrisK

11th March 2012, 21:36

Is there a working class?

Luís Henrique

Most definitely. And its created by material conditions, not the mind.

LuÃs Henrique

11th March 2012, 22:05

Materialism is a metaphysical position about what reality is comprised of.

No, it is not. Whether metaphysical or not, it is about precedence of matter over ideas, not about whether only matter exist.

Historical materialism is a scientific theory of class struggle throughout history and as to how society advances.And it does that without absolutely no ontology, I suppose? Doesn't it need to assert that social classes exist, in order to theorise their role in the advancement of societies?

No, the unmoved mover was what Aristotle thought was the only rational explanation for how the universe started. Nothing mystical, simply wrong.And it established goals for the creation, so it evidently had a mind of its own.

So Aristotle can regard it as obvious that material entities like animals and plants and earth and water and the sun and the stars are substances

That is materialism. All my professors teach him as a materialist. In fact take a look at this (http://www.google.com/imgres?num=10&um=1&hl=en&safe=off&biw=1366&bih=663&tbm=isch&tbnid=G8izvwMB1oJ89M:&imgrefurl=http://www.stenudd.com/aristotle/aristotle-life-05-academy.htm&docid=AcEc0Y5osyQhXM&imgurl=http://www.stenudd.com/aristotle/images/raphael-schoolofathens-detail.jpg&w=340&h=502&ei=yANdT6CjCcSfiAKKvMC9Cw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=980&vpy=109&dur=2501&hovh=273&hovw=185&tx=87&ty=166&sig=100157553442660700210&sqi=2&page=1&tbnh=133&tbnw=96&start=0&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:4,s:0)painting.

Notice that as Plato points up to the realm of ideas Aristotle outward to the real world.So? Even a Platonist realises matter exists, and is composed of substances. That's not what materialism entails, though.

That would be a long-ass list, but for starters he removed final causes, a rejection of Aristotle's belief that this leads to universal truth, a rejection of Aristotle's notion of abstraction, etc, etc.So all those things were accepted by everybody until Marx came and proposed something better?

I'll read that piece and respond to it by tomorrow.Thanks.

Are you referring to the coquetting quote?What do you mean by "coquetting quote"? BTW, can you delimitate where is Marx coquetting starts and where it ends? Last time I read about it, it seemed there was no way to tell where Marx was coquetting and where he was not. Indeed the coquetting had already infected the very Afterword where he was supposed to explain it...

I'll accept your criticism about the English economists bit. But I'll also point out that you seem to have missed this [long paragraph by the Russian reviewer of Das Kapital]We have already seen that this passage is not a reliable description of Marx's method - or results fwiw -, because it explicetly says that

Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence.

Which is directly contrary to what Marx actually held about "social movement", that he by no means considered a "process of natural history".

Which precedes that long quote which is very much not dialectical materialism. He is endorsing a passage which has a very Aristotelian influenced method. He calls that his dialectical method.

So I'm going to have to ask you to show me the dialectics in this passage:
Doesn't seem to be there.Although, as we know, it doesn't actually describe his method.

See above.No. Nowhere there Marx says anything similar to "my method is historical materialism, not dialectical materialism".

No. What philosophy do I support then?Judging by what you write here, I would say a distorted version of Wittgenstein's linguistic idealism.

Not as certain on this one. Most I know of Ricardo is that he followed a refined Aristotelian method and Marx read a shit ton of his works. I'll have to read more Ricardo and get back to you.Marx indeed read a shit ton of Ricardo (as he did read a shit ton - and a half - of Hegel's). But one can read Ricardo for his conclusions and ignore his method.

I'm being quite serious.I know, and think this is quite a big part of the problem; if you didn't notice, I was being really serious too. Indeed, it is most of the gut-part of my rejection of Wittgenstein. If a philosophy would turn me into some arrogant snob, I would like no part of it, thanks.

"simmetrical" is not a word. I'm going to assume that you mean symmetrical. I'm really not too sure what you would mean by the symmetry of method and reality. Do you mean that these theories are imposed on reality?Thanks for the correction. My first language has a reasonable orthography (please look up for me if the amout of Hs here is right, will you?), so I tend to misspell English words.

Kronsteen put it very succintly and clearly, so here it is for your consideration:

This is a version of the hermetic 'as above, so below' notion in Bohme, which Hegel took over.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

11th March 2012, 22:06

Most definitely. And its created by material conditions, not the mind.

Yes? And how does it happen that so many people seem unable to see it?

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

11th March 2012, 22:29

No, Marx is wrong. That comprehensive and conscious manner was presented by Kant, mystified by Hegel and found by Marx within Hegel. When you demystify Hegel you find Kant. Evidence being:

Ah, so there we have it, black on white: Marx was wrong about his own method. He thought Hegel presented dialectics in a comprehensive and conscious manner, but that was Kant; he thought that demystifying Hegel we would find Marx himself, but instead we would only find Kant.

Nope.And then you complain when I accuse you of purposeful deafness?

What spamming?The constant spamming of her own website, with countless quotes and links, refusing to engage people in discussion and telling them that everything they might ask would be contained in her own holy writings.

As for the last three you mean like calling someone a pseudo-Wittgensteinian and always insulting before arguing? You mean you ought to be banned?No, I mean like constantly calling people "numpties" or "class traitors", falsely accusing other members of making threats, or playing the gender card when arguments fail, and accusing others of being woman-beaters, out of the blue.

That is what I mean by "flaming, name-calling, and slandering".

You write that after writing that name calling and slandering are bad. Holy shit you are quite the comedian.Well, your arrogance is terrifying (please look up if I placed the Y correctly there, will you?) You had just said this to Mr. Natural:

The perceived lack of openness is because I used to agree with you. Reading more and running into Rosa changed my mind. I know your positions and I know that they are wrong. Perhaps you should be open to the idea that you could be wrong.So, in short, you simply know that his positions are wrong. You don' "think" that, you don't "find" that, you don't "feel" that: you "know" it. And you don't want to be called arrogant?

But that is even minor. Wittgenstein's own arrogance was monstruous (what with threatening to physically attack Popper with a poker, because of a philosophical divergence?), and Ms. Lichtenstein's isn't noticeably smaller.

Sorry if I used to be one of you an realized that the idea was worthless. If maybe you would would stop being a know-it-all asshole then you would actually read something and learn.More arrogance, more insults, and more I get convinced that that philosophy you supposedly don't hold is a force for the debasing of discussion, for the rejection of plurality, for some new form of totalitarianism perhaps.

This thread, albeit dealing on sensitive subjects, was mostly civil until you came out of the blue, and, without reading it, without even trying to understand the positions at stake, started to pontificate about what you "know is wrong".

Luís Henrique

ChrisK

11th March 2012, 22:42

No, it is not. Whether metaphysical or not, it is about precedence of matter over ideas, not about whether only matter exist.

Actually, no. This is fairly introductory philosophy. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/

And it does that without absolutely no ontology, I suppose? Doesn't it need to assert that social classes exist, in order to theorise their role in the advancement of societies?

It does indeed. You don't need ontology to assert that there is a working class.

And it established goals for the creation, so it evidently had a mind of its own.

Yes. Not divinely, but something that does not move, but initiates motion by thought. Strange I know and definitely not his best idea.

So? Even a Platonist realises matter exists, and is composed of substances. That's not what materialism entails, though.

Plato doubted the senses to the point that he doubted in there are actual substances. He ends up in a sort of dualism, which is not materialism.

Here, Aristotle was indeed a materialist.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-met/

So all those things were accepted by everybody until Marx came and proposed something better?

Not all, but most. Final causes were being rejected around the 1500's. Marx most certainly improved upon the idea and correctly applied it to history.

What do you mean by "coquetting quote"? BTW, can you delimitate where is Marx coquetting starts and where it ends? Last time I read about it, it seemed there was no way to tell where Marx was coquetting and where he was not. Indeed the coquetting had already infected the very Afterword where he was supposed to explain it...

This one.

The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi [Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him.

He seems to make it quite clear that he coquettes throughout the whole thing. Including, as he puts it, "in the chapter on the theory of value". At least, as I read it that would include in the Afterword.

Additionally, this passage demonstrates Marx avowing himself on the grounds that others hate him. Marx seems to be being intentionally provoking the others.

We have already seen that this passage is not a reliable description of Marx's method - or results fwiw -, because it explicetly says that

Which is directly contrary to what Marx actually held about "social movement", that he by no means considered a "process of natural history".

The reviewers mistake was assuming that there are laws about human development independent of being human. The rest that is said is clearly about historical materialism. I see him mentioning that human historical process (ie class struggle) determines a great deal of how people are. He mentions the evolution of history through this manner. He points out that economic laws hold only in certain economies.

Also you have to deal with this

Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?

Marx says he's right.

No. Nowhere there Marx says anything similar to "my method is historical materialism, not dialectical materialism".

That is something you have to see. Where do you find dialectical materialism in the above quote? Its his method.

Judging by what you write here, I would say a distorted version of Wittgenstein's linguistic idealism.

Linguistic idealism in Wittgenstein. Hmm, you might have to substantiate that.

I know, and think this is quite a big part of the problem; if you didn't notice, I was being really serious too. Indeed, it is most of the gut-part of my rejection of Wittgenstein. If a philosophy would turn me into some arrogant snob, I would like no part of it, thanks.

Its not arrogance to not understand. I was asking for help understanding and you spit upon that request in an extremely arrogant way.

Thanks for the correction. My first language has a reasonable orthography (please look up for me if the amout of Hs here is right, will you?), so I tend to misspell English words.

Kronsteen put it very succintly and clearly, so here it is for your consideration:

So it is indeed as I thought about imposing ideas upon reality. Since that is the case, then dialectical materialism has a lot of explaining to do as it does just that.

Kronsteen

11th March 2012, 22:42

Materialism is a metaphysical position about what reality is comprised of. No, it is not. Whether metaphysical or not, it is about precedence of matter over ideas, not about whether only matter exist.

Materialism is the idea that apparently non-material things - thoughts, emotions, language, even god - are ultimately products or behaviors of material things.

Thus it's the idea that, although non-material things exist in a sense, they depend completely on matter.

Materialism and idealism are both inherently metaphysical ideas because they deal not with an examination of empirical phenomena, but 'deeper' than that, into questions of what principles underlie these phonomena.

Thus there is a perfectly respectable school of thought that questions of materialism and idealism are uninvestigatable, and pronouncements about them inevitably vaccuous. But that's a whole other thread.

What do you mean by "coquetting quote"?There's a paragraph in the Grundrisse where Marx speaks of his younger self 'coquetting' (flirting, dancing) with Hegel's terminology, presumably as opposed to his ideas.

There's a lot of disagreement about what it means, but it's surprising that you haven't heard of it.

Judging by what you write here, I would say a distorted version of Wittgenstein's linguistic idealism.Again, you use words like 'idealism' in a very odd way.

Wittgenstein's early work could perhaps be called idealistic, in the sense that it views reality and mathematical logic having the same underlying structure, and propositional language being a noisily coded version of mathematical logic. But it's something of a stretch.

Wittgenstein's later work rejected all that, and it's his later work that you've previously referred to.

Kronsteen put it very succintly and clearly, so here it is for your consideration:

This is a version of the hermetic 'as above, so below' notion in Bohme, which Hegel took over.
Pleasant as it is to be quoted, the words you quote undermine your position.

You're claiming that marxism is materialist. But the hermetic notion you've just agreed with doesn't view non-material things as reducible to material patterns. It views non-material and material as two aspects of the same thing.

Lenin, in 'The Three Components of Marxism', called material reductionism 'vulgar materialism', and went on to define his 'true materialism' as...a unity of opposites! A synthesis of vulgar materialism and idealism.

Unfortunately, this new higher materialism incorporates the teleological aspect of Hegel's idealism. For Lenin - following Plekanov, following Engels, following Hegel - the universe, human consciousness and human society have an inbuilt direction and goal.

There may not be a timetable, nor any details of exactly how they're going to reach their destination, but there is an endpoint, and a force pushing towards it.

In other words, Lenin's new materialism...is idealistic.

ChrisK

11th March 2012, 22:43

Yes? And how does it happen that so many people seem unable to see it?

Luís Henrique

So you see atoms?

ChrisK

11th March 2012, 22:53

Ah, so there we have it, black on white: Marx was wrong about his own method. He thought Hegel presented dialectics in a comprehensive and conscious manner, but that was Kant; he thought that demystifying Hegel we would find Marx himself, but instead we would only find Kant.

No, he was wrong about Hegel. Seriously, take a read about what Kant wrote and you might understand.

And then you complain when I accuse you of purposeful deafness?

I didn't say that, now did I.

The constant spamming of her own website, with countless quotes and links, refusing to engage people in discussion and telling them that everything they might ask would be contained in her own holy writings.

Maybe she did that because almost everyone of those essays is the length of "The Hobbit" and she didn't want to have to write it all out again. Don't complain about people not wanting to read the works you demand if you wouldn't read hers.

No, I mean like constantly calling people "numpties" or "class traitors", falsely accusing other members of making threats, or playing the gender card when arguments fail, and accusing others of being woman-beaters, out of the blue.

That is what I mean by "flaming, name-calling, and slandering".

Ah, so what you do all day also.

Well, your arrogance is terrifying (please look up if I placed the Y correctly there, will you)? You had just said this to Mr. Natural:

So, in short, you simply know that his positions are wrong. You don' "think" that, you don't "find" that, you don't "feel" that: you "know" it. And you don't want to be called arrogant?

I didn't say I didn't want to be called arrogant. I was pointing out the irony of being against name calling while calling me an arsehole.

But that is even minor. Wittgenstein's own arrogance was monstruous (what with threatening to physically attack Popper with a poker, because of a philosophical divergence?), and Ms. Lichtenstein's isn't noticeably smaller.

Indeed he was arrogant
Perhaps you should read Wittgenstein's Poker. As it turns out he wasn't threatening Popper. He was engaging in his common habit of punctuating his points in the poker.

More arrogance, more insults, and more I get convinced that that philosophy you supposedly don't hold is a force for the debasing of discussion, for the rejection of plurality, for some new form of totalitarianism perhaps.

This thread, albeit dealing on sensitive subjects, was mostly civil until you came out of the blue, and, without reading it, without even trying to understand the positions at stake, started to pontificate about what you "know is wrong".

Luís Henrique

Okay. If you don't want to read contrary points to yours, then simply ignore my posts.

LuÃs Henrique

12th March 2012, 00:30

It does indeed. You don't need ontology to assert that there is a working class.

Well, one certainly does not need Ontology as a discipline. But whe we are asserting the existence of something, we are dealing on ontology; we are saying what is and what is not the case.

But notice how we do have strong disagreements even here among us in revleft about who is and who is not part of the working class. Are bank tellers, children, soldiers, retired people, housewives, prostitutes, policemen, part of the working class? So what draws such boundaries, human minds or material reality?

If it is material reality, how is it possible to be wrong about that? How is it possible that there is more than one opinion?

Yes. Not divinely, but something that does not move, but initiates motion by thought. Strange I know and definitely not his best idea.An idealist idea, I would say.

Plato doubted the senses to the point that he doubted in there are actual substances. He ends up in a sort of dualism, which is not materialism.Indeed, Plato is a dualist, and far from materialism. Even then, he ascribed a lower kind of ontological position to matter - a reflection of the "actual reality" of immutable Ideas, just like the shadows in the cave are a reflection of the higher reality of what we would commonly call "the world".

And so is Aristotle, though he evidently was much less radical than Plato. After all, he was the guy who initiated the whole "Metaphysics" deal, and he firmly asserted the existence of a supra-sensible world of quintessence, incorruptible, immune to change, and, as such, closer to abstract Being than the material world.

Not all, but most. Final causes were being rejected around the 1500's. Marx most certainly improved upon the idea and correctly applied it to history.Hm, I would think that Vico or even Machiavelli would have primacy here.

But what does that mean? That humans do not actually plan for the future, and indeed make things happen when they deem it necessary? So, is it wrong to say that the peasants reap because they sowed, and that they sowed exactly in anticipation of harvest?

And so, one of the few original aspects of Marx would be such a crass mistake?

He seems to make it quite clear that he coquettes throughout the whole thing. Including, as he puts it, "in the chapter on the theory of value". At least, as I read it that would include in the Afterword.So the Afterword is part of the chapter on the theory of value? It doesn't seem such to me. If we take him at his word, he would be coquetting in the chapter on the theory of value, and so would not be coquetting in the Afterword - but it is in the Afterword that he much decidedly says the following:

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.

Additionally, this passage demonstrates Marx avowing himself on the grounds that others hate him. Marx seems to be being intentionally provoking the others.So?

The reviewers mistake was assuming that there are laws about human development independent of being human.And so, as I already said, it is not a proper description of Marx's method.

The rest that is said is clearly about historical materialism. I see him mentioning that human historical process (ie class struggle) determines a great deal of how people are. He mentions the evolution of history through this manner. He points out that economic laws hold only in certain economies.Indeed, the Russian reviewer didn't get everything wrong. He even says,

The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry.Which evidently shows us that Marx's method isn't just the "scientific method" applied to history or economy.

Also you have to deal with this

Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?

Marx says he's right.He says, but, as you have just agreed, he cannot be right here, for the Russian reviewer contradicts one fundamental aspect of Marx's method.

Its not arrogance to not understand. I was asking for help understanding and you spit upon that request in an extremely arrogant way.
I don't think it was a honest request for understanding. I have expanded a lot about those issues in my posts in this very thread, as well as in other threads, some of which I am quite certain you participated. If you were willing to understand, you could have taken some time to read this thread. Or at least pointed what exactly what your doubts were, instead of asking me to repeat myself for your private entertainment. See why I "spate" in your request? See how you came out as extremely arrogant and impolite, even abusive?

So it is indeed as I thought about imposing ideas upon reality. Since that is the case, then dialectical materialism has a lot of explaining to do as it does just that.What you call dialectical materialism, ie its Engelsian distortion. Yes, sure; I don't think I have argued otherwise.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

12th March 2012, 00:59

No, he was wrong about Hegel. Seriously, take a read about what Kant wrote and you might understand.

But since he characterises his method in terms of Hegel, it follows that he was wrong about it, too.

Seriously, Marx would be what one would call an expert on Hegel; he studied Hegel a lot, and even wrote a critique of Hegel's philosophy of Right. If as late as 1873 he was still getting it wrong, he must not have been the brightest bulb in the lot.

Maybe she did that because almost everyone of those essays is the length of "The Hobbit" and she didn't want to have to write it all out again. Don't complain about people not wanting to read the works you demand if you wouldn't read hers.I have tried to read them. They are enormous, and they rely on such illogicalities that I had to dismiss them as foolery. On the other hand, I don' think I pontificated about they being wrong without providing appropriate quotes, and I mostly responded to her posts here, which I have always read before criticising. Now evidently she would try to elude that by demanding people to read her Oeuvres Complètes, which I find an abusive practive.

Ah, so what you do all day also.Actually not. I try to be civil most of the time. And then some guy tells us that Ghaddafy was semisocialist, or demands that I repeat myself because he can't take the time to read what I have already written, and I discover again that I am merely human, and that a few things really, really, really irritate me.

I didn't say I didn't want to be called arrogant. I was pointing out the irony of being against name calling while calling me an arsehole.It is indeed a bad thing; it is also something that cannot be always avoided.

Patience has limits.

1. Indeed he was arrogantMassively.

2. Perhaps you should read Wittgenstein's Poker. As it turns out he wasn't threatening Popper. He was engaging in his common habit of punctuating his points in the poker.Perhaps. I wouldn't like to be on the wrong side of Wittgenstein's poker though.

Okay. If you don't want to read contrary points to yours, then simply ignore my posts.I usually read posts with points contrary to me, and most of them I don't even reply to, or I reply and no problems ensue. So that does not seem to be the problem. If you doubt that, you can read this thread, and see that while I strongly disagree with Kronsteen, or Menocchio, discussion was civil until you came in.

You can be sure that it is not a pleasure to read your posts or to answer to them, but what would ignoring them achieve? You, and - worse - other people believing that I haven't responded to them because I can't? You winning out of sheer unbearability? Is that the way you have designed to quell dissent?

Luís Henrique

Kronsteen

12th March 2012, 00:59

The reviewers mistake was assuming that there are laws about human development independent of being human.
it is not a proper description of Marx's method.

So why does Marx agree with it? Why does he quote it at length and then describe it as his method?

Are you suggesting Marx was mistaken about his own method?

Separate question: Why does Marx describe it as dialectical?

It contains no dialectical terms or concepts - no quantity and quality, no transformations into opposites, no unity of opposites either. The only Hegelian thing about it is the suprahistorical laws of epochal progress.

Okay, so maybe these are part of Engels' version of dialectics, not Marx's. If so, what exactly is Marx's version of the dialectic?

the Russian reviewer contradicts one fundamental aspect of Marx's method.

But Marx doesn't call him out on it. Marx doesn't even hint at it. Why not?

You seem determined to read your own version of dialectics into Marx, presumably to use the prestige of his name to promote your own ideas. It would be better just to admit that Marx sometimes made mistakes.

LuÃs Henrique

12th March 2012, 01:01

So you see atoms?

No, so how does one knows atoms exist?

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

12th March 2012, 01:15

So why does Marx agree with it? Why does he quote it at length and then describe it as his method?

My take is that Marx was writing in 1873, a time when his positions were quite isolated, and when he would have gladly passed over some disagreement in order to present a favourable review of his work.

Are you suggesting Marx was mistaken about his own method?

I would prefer to believe that he was wrong about his own method by ignoring a sentence that contradicts it in a generally favourable review, than by having gotten it completely wrong from the source - if those are the options we have at hand.

Separate question: Why does Marx describe it as dialectical?

Evidently, he seems to have thought it was dialectical. So, are you suggesting that Marx was mistaken about his own method?

It contains no dialectical terms or concepts - no quantity and quality, no transformations into opposites, no unity of opposites either. The only Hegelian thing about it is the suprahistorical laws of epochal progress.

Which aren't there, as you can see:

But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own.

And if you read Das Kapital, you will see that dialectical terms and concepts are there.

Okay, so maybe these are part of Engels' version of dialectics, not Marx's. If so, what exactly is Marx's version of the dialectic?

Here: The Method of Political Economy (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#3).

But Marx doesn't call him out on it. Marx doesn't even hint at it. Why not?

See above.

You seem determined to read your own version of dialectics into Marx, presumably to use the prestige of his name to promote your own ideas. It would be better just to admit that Marx sometimes made mistakes.

I don't think it is "my own" version of dialectic, no. It is quite current in the Brazilian academy, at least. Or it was, thirty years ago, when I was there.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

12th March 2012, 01:36

Materialism is the idea that apparently non-material things - thoughts, emotions, language, even god - are ultimately products or behaviors of material things.

Thus it's the idea that, although non-material things exist in a sense, they depend completely on matter.

Yes, that is materialism.

Materialism and idealism are both inherently metaphysical ideas because they deal not with an examination of empirical phenomena, but 'deeper' than that, into questions of what principles underlie these phonomena.

In your definition of metaphysics, maybe; but since I don't accept it, we will have to agree to disagree, or find common terminological ground on which to discuss this.

Thus there is a perfectly respectable school of thought that questions of materialism and idealism are uninvestigatable, and pronouncements about them inevitably vaccuous. But that's a whole other thread.

It is.

There's a paragraph in the Grundrisse where Marx speaks of his younger self 'coquetting' (flirting, dancing) with Hegel's terminology, presumably as opposed to his ideas.

Is it? I don't think so. That would be the Afterword.

There's a lot of disagreement about what it means, but it's surprising that you haven't heard of it.

I have, and have even discussed it. The result was that, in order to maintain the idea that any mention of dialectics in Marx must be coquettery, we cannot know which parts of Marx are a joke and wich are serious; indeed, it could be that all of Marx was a humungous jape.

Again, you use words like 'idealism' in a very odd way.

I don't think so. Wittgenstein was of the opinion you describe above, that "questions of materialism and idealism are uninvestigatable, and pronouncements about them inevitably vaccuous".

But such an opinion, to me, is eminently idealist: we cannot know whether ideas are just an emanation of matter, because such distinction is a mere quirk of language. And so even the distinction between mind and matter is a creation of mind.

You're claiming that marxism is materialist. But the hermetic notion you've just agreed with doesn't view non-material things as reducible to material patterns. It views non-material and material as two aspects of the same thing.

Eh? I don't agree with the hermetic notion, and have made it explicit in this thread, more than any other poster. Indeed, I incisively disagree with such vision; the relations between "above" and below are not of sYmmetry.

I merely tried to explain what I am against to Christopher Koch, and your succint explanation seemed a quite good one to me.

Lenin, in 'The Three Components of Marxism', called material reductionism 'vulgar materialism', and went on to define his 'true materialism' as...a unity of opposites! A synthesis of vulgar materialism and idealism.

Unfortunately, this new higher materialism incorporates the teleological aspect of Hegel's idealism. For Lenin - following Plekanov, following Engels, following Hegel - the universe, human consciousness and human society have an inbuilt direction and goal.

Yeah, but, for the umpteenth time, I disagree with Lenin, Plekhanov, Engels, Hegel, etc.

In other words, Lenin's new materialism...is idealistic.

It has idealist aspects in it, no doubt.

Why do you keep ascribing his positions to me, when most of what I have done in this thread is exactly to dissociate from them?

Luís Henrique

Kronsteen

12th March 2012, 01:48

My take is that Marx was writing in 1873, a time when his positions were quite isolated, and when he would have gladly passed over some disagreement in order to present a favourable review of his work.

But we're not talking about a disagreement over a minor aspect. We're talking about a fundamental misinterpretation.

Who knows? Maybe Marx did decide to tactically ignore a significant point of disagreement for the sake of keeping relations friendly. If so, it wasn't a very wise tactic.

Evidently, he seems to have thought it was dialectical. So, are you suggesting that Marx was mistaken about his own method?

Perhaps he was. Though I'd perfer to think Marx used dialectics as additional support for his real work - support which is completely unnecessary, and indeed mystifying.

The only Hegelian thing about it is the suprahistorical laws of epochal progress.Which aren't there, as you can see

Here's what you didn't quote. The parts which show he did believe in such a law:

Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over

The Method of Political Economy (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#3).

I need to read this in a lot more detail, but from a preliminary scan, he uses the terms 'method' and 'dialectic' interchangably to refer to scientific, empirical investigation. The word 'contradiction' occurs three times, referring to social and economic forces pushing in different directions, and 'ironies' of uneven development.

Kronsteen

12th March 2012, 02:04

in order to maintain the idea that any mention of dialectics in Marx must be coquettery, we cannot know which parts of Marx are a joke and wich are serious; indeed, it could be that all of Marx was a humungous jape.

I did not suggest Marx wasn't being serious. In fact I'm not sure anyone did.

But such an opinion, to me, is eminently idealist: we cannot know whether ideas are just an emanation of matter, because such distinction is a mere quirk of language. And so even the distinction between mind and matter is a creation of mind.

That's a conflation of idealism with solipsism. Solipsism can't be a form of idealism because idealism makes claims about reality, whereas solipsism is the position that no such claims are possible.

To be fair, there is one position, sometimes also called solipsism, that all of a person's experiences are generated internally by that person's mind - and that these experience actually are all there is to reality. That certainly is idealistic, in that is claims to know what reality is, and that reality is mental. But because it makes claims about reality, it shouldn't be called solipsism.

I don't agree with the hermetic notion...I merely tried to explain what I am against to Christopher Koch, and your succint explanation seemed a quite good one to me.

Ah, then I misunderstood.

I disagree with Lenin, Plekhanov, Engels, Hegel, etc.

Fair enough. Though it leaves me puzzled as to what you do believe in, and why you call it dialectical.

LuÃs Henrique

12th March 2012, 02:16

There are two separate questions here:

1) Is this universe ultimately material?

2) Are other things outside this universe, including a hypothetical creator, material?

To which our answers are: Yes, and Unknowable.

Aristotle's answers were: Yes, and Maybe.

Well, no, our answers are not Yes, and Unknowable, because my answers are, Yes, and No, because there is nothing "outside this universe".

And I don't think that Aristotle's answers were those, either; rather No, and No.

You mean like...almost every materialist philosopher there's ever been. David Hume would be astonished if a time traveller told him he was a Historical Materialist.As much as I am astonished to find people believing that there is no fundamental rupture between Marx and his predecessors.

That's not quite what the quoted passage says. It says each epoch has its own economic laws, and there are no economic laws which span all epochs. It also says there are laws - implicitly suprahistorical - which determine the transitions between epochs.I fail to see that, but if so, the Russian reviewer is again wrong; the "laws of transition" would be the internal laws of the decaying mode of production. So no suprahistorical laws in Marx, even if so for the Russian reviewer.

Directed towards a predefined goal. In accordance with a plan that has definite states and an endpoint. Controlled by an external intelligence with an agenda.This evidently poses a problem, for in such case human activity would be essentially teleological, and we should have no problems with teleology in Sociology, History, etc.

Again, there are really two separate questions, this time about Marx's teleology, or lack thereof.Marx explicitly says that human activity is finalistic, ie, that humans direct their activities to a predefined goal, act in accordance to plans with definite states and endpoint, externally control things, and have an agenda. The fact that he uses the word "finalistic" instead of "teleological" is in my opinion not casual; to him, teleology would require a very external intelligence, ie, external to the world (or imanent in it, but external to any of its parts, as in Hegel). And in that, Marx certainly didn't believe.

All quite true. But Marx seemed perfectly happy to let Comrade Fred spend years working on this stuff, and to promote it as part of the revolutionary work they both devoted their lives to.Indeed, and it is a pity. But Comrade Fred cannot be reduced to his metaphysical musings; he was also Marx's best friend, his financial supporter, an important colaborator in much that Marx wrote, his main interlocutor on the subjects of his work, the guy who would question his manuscripts, suggest objections, a man with superb historical knowledge, and, as we have seen in Trémaux's case, actually a finer knowledge of natural sciende than Marx. Would you lose all that over question that are not your central interest?

It may be that Marx was simply indulging Engels for the sake of their friendship, thinking all the hegelian stuff would drop away naturally when the workers organised. If so, it was a bad strategy.I guess that was the case, and yes, it had some quite problematic results. I am not sure that a different strategy would be better; it could have resulted in Marx dying twenty or thirty years earlier of starvation or some preventable disease, leaving us without Das Kapital.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

12th March 2012, 03:17

I did not suggest Marx wasn't being serious. In fact I'm not sure anyone did.

Ms. Lichtenstein certainly did. Particularly in these posts:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1307123&postcount=99
http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1307626&postcount=106

The thread as a whole is this one:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/rosa-marx-dialecticsi-t92737/index5.html?highlight=coquetting

In which you can see how such idea is stretched completely out of proportion, to the point of ridicule, while Ms. Lichtenstein dishes out an impressive repertoire of terms of abuse.

That's a conflation of idealism with solipsism. Solipsism can't be a form of idealism because idealism makes claims about reality, whereas solipsism is the position that no such claims are possible.

To be fair, there is one position, sometimes also called solipsism, that all of a person's experiences are generated internally by that person's mind - and that these experience actually are all there is to reality. That certainly is idealistic, in that is claims to know what reality is, and that reality is mental. But because it makes claims about reality, it shouldn't be called solipsism.Yes, the latter is what I am informed of as being solipsism; I don't know what the other thing you refer to as solipsism is.

But I don't think I am conflating idealism with solipsism, even though, of course, solipsism would be a far heavier word to call Wittgenstein's position. In his position, the disjunction between mind and matter is created by mind - and that is a statement about reality.

Ah, then I misunderstood.Surprisingly enough, for I thought I had been quite clear about that:

And in abandoning Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin or Trotsky's ontologisations of method, let's also be clear on why: they are epigonal philosophers, who could not break with the cartesian idealist notion that method reflects reality or reality reflects method. That notion was taken to its (absurd) conclusions by Hegel, and then criticised and destroyed by Marx.

And let's also realise that the idea that method and reality are simmetrical to each other still thrives in all non-Marxist schools of philosophy. And that certainly includes positivists and neopositivists, the Vienna circle, Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy, as well as existentialists, phenomenologists, structuralists, et caterva.

I hope you don't have trouble in understanding that by 'simmetrical' I meant 'symmetrical'.

Fair enough. Though it leaves me puzzled as to what you do believe in, and why you call it dialectical.

Well, I unhappily cannot really sit here all day and explain to you everything I believe in a very short span of time. Some things are complex, and demanding. The most I can offer, if you are really interested, is this thread, and related ones, that you can find by using the search function. Or, if you prefer, since I am such a bad writer in Christopher Koch's opinion, read Marx; there shouldn't be much difference, since I don't make any actual claim of originality.

As for why I call it dialectical, well, I do not know a better word.

Luís Henrique

Kronsteen

12th March 2012, 03:45

there is nothing "outside this universe".

Unless you have access to a tardis, you have no way of knowing that. That's why it's unknowable.

I am astonished to find people believing that there is no fundamental rupture between Marx and his predecessors.

It is indeed the orthodoxy that Marx made a fundamental break with his predecessors.

But it's also the orthodoxy that he had no significant disagreements with Engels, that Lenin wasn't on the right wing of the bolshevik party, and the mystical doctrines of Plekanov are identical with the rational core Marx took from Hegel. Neither of us are orthodox marxists.

the Russian reviewer is again wrong; the "laws of transition" would be the internal laws of the decaying mode of production. So no suprahistorical laws in Marx, even if so for the Russian reviewer.

In post 150 (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2382782&postcount=150) I give my reasons for thinking otherwise.

This evidently poses a problem, for in such case human activity would be essentially teleological, and we should have no problems with teleology in Sociology, History, etc.

Teleology involves goal directedness where the goals and impetus for movement are external to the thing directed. Thus teleology in human history would involve something external to humanity (angels, demons, aliens) guiding humanity on a path.

You make the same point later in the same post, distinguising 'finalistic' from 'teleological'. So it evidently doesn't pose a problem.

(At a stretch, I suppose teleology could apply to the conspiracy theories of some secret, powerful group within humanity (the bilderbergs, the illuminati, the 'liberal elite') influencing events.)

Comrade Fred cannot be reduced to his metaphysical musings

Indeed not, but there is the question of how much damage his mystical insertions into marxism have done. Would the German revolution have suceeded if we Engels didn't have too much Hegel? Or the Spanish? I don't know.

I will say one thing though: Many of those attracted to marxism are attracted to its mystical side, and for some its the main attraction. More than that, many of those who find themselves unable to swallow marxist ideas are really only objecting to the mystical elements.

ChrisK

12th March 2012, 05:48

Alright, I combined all three of our posts into one.

I want to start first by saying that I have come to realize that I coming to the same realization with you that I came to with S.Artesian. I misread you from the beginning. I assumed that when you used the term "Dialectics" that you meant "Dialectical Materialism" as it is conceived by most Marxists. I did not expect you to hold the views you did and made a bad assumption. Sorry about that.

If I am correct in my view, we are speaking at cross-purposes. What I am calling Historical Materialism, you are calling Dialectics. The confusion came from my assumption about the meaning you were applying to this. A bit further down, I'll explain why I think that.

In which case, then I think our debate can be limited to what debt Marx has to Hegel and to what extent philosophical theory has a place in Marxism.

Well, one certainly does not need Ontology as a discipline. But whe we are asserting the existence of something, we are dealing on ontology; we are saying what is and what is not the case.

I don't think so. What we need is the verb "to exist" to talk about what is and isn't the case.

But notice how we do have strong disagreements even here among us in revleft about who is and who is not part of the working class. Are bank tellers, children, soldiers, retired people, housewives, prostitutes, policemen, part of the working class? So what draws such boundaries, human minds or material reality?

It would be material reality. The important difference being that this is a scientific category. This means that one must stipulate a definition of what is meant by working class and, within the paradigm of historical materialism, define who is and isn't working class.

If it is material reality, how is it possible to be wrong about that? How is it possible that there is more than one opinion?

In the same way that scientists have been wrong while studying material reality. IE, there were for many years debates about whether light was a wave or a particle. Both were studying material reality, but there were two different conclusions.

An idealist idea, I would say.

Arguably so, but not the accepted interpretation.

And so is Aristotle, though he evidently was much less radical than Plato. After all, he was the guy who initiated the whole "Metaphysics" deal, and he firmly asserted the existence of a supra-sensible world of quintessence, incorruptible, immune to change, and, as such, closer to abstract Being than the material world.

Sure, and he was awfully wrong about it. For him, this was a form of moderate realism that thought of things like essences as part of material reality.

Also, it would be Anaximander who was the first metaphysician. Aristotle just named the subject.

Hm, I would think that Vico or even Machiavelli would have primacy here.

I believe it was Bacon who first rejected it. Galileo did also.

But what does that mean? That humans do not actually plan for the future, and indeed make things happen when they deem it necessary? So, is it wrong to say that the peasants reap because they sowed, and that they sowed exactly in anticipation of harvest?

And so, one of the few original aspects of Marx would be such a crass mistake?

Final causes was the deterministic belief that all things aim at some end that is natural to them. Humans aim at a virtuous life for example. Peasants don't naturally aim at the harvest with some sort of anticipation. What you have given would be more akin to the efficient cause.

So the Afterword is part of the chapter on the theory of value? It doesn't seem such to me. If we take him at his word, he would be coquetting in the chapter on the theory of value, and so would not be coquetting in the Afterword - but it is in the Afterword that he much decidedly says the following:

You misread me. Its the whole book. He points out the chapter on value to show that it is even in the most important book that he does this.

That passage supports my opinion actually. Not on his debt to Hegel, but on his dialectical method being historical materialism.

So?

So he's fucking with them.

And so, as I already said, it is not a proper description of Marx's method.

I disagree here. Marx endorsed it, ergo I accept it.

Indeed, the Russian reviewer didn't get everything wrong. He even says,

Which evidently shows us that Marx's method isn't just the "scientific method" applied to history or economy.

Here is where our main misunderstanding of each other lies. I endorse a view that Marx is using an updated form of Aristotelian scientific method (which was rejected by the natural sciences around the time of Kepler) which is also known by the name dialectics. Aristotle considered his method to be the dialectical one, which is almost the same as what Marx mentions in the Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy and in the aforementioned review.

I never use the term dialectics myself, because it gives off an Engelisan vibe. I use historical materialism so that people won't confuse what I support with the gibberish found in works like the Anti-Durhing.

I don't think it was a honest request for understanding. I have expanded a lot about those issues in my posts in this very thread, as well as in other threads, some of which I am quite certain you participated. If you were willing to understand, you could have taken some time to read this thread. Or at least pointed what exactly what your doubts were, instead of asking me to repeat myself for your private entertainment. See why I "spate" in your request? See how you came out as extremely arrogant and impolite, even abusive?

I really didn't understand. The sentence was worded in a way that I was having trouble understanding. That is why I asked for more explanation.

But since he characterises his method in terms of Hegel, it follows that he was wrong about it, too.

He characterized it in a terms of Hegel in a teasing manner.

Seriously, Marx would be what one would call an expert on Hegel; he studied Hegel a lot, and even wrote a critique of Hegel's philosophy of Right. If as late as 1873 he was still getting it wrong, he must not have been the brightest bulb in the lot.

I was saying he was wrong about Hegel being the first. Kant was. My bet is that as a student, Marx read a shit ton of Hegel and probably Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant does not give the dialectic its most conscious form then. He did it in much more obscure works, the ones that Woods was referencing.

I have tried to read them. They are enormous, and they rely on such illogicalities that I had to dismiss them as foolery. On the other hand, I don' think I pontificated about they being wrong without providing appropriate quotes, and I mostly responded to her posts here, which I have always read before criticising. Now evidently she would try to elude that by demanding people to read her Oeuvres Complètes, which I find an abusive practive.

I never saw her only demand people read her essays. She would do that if they told her she was attacking only the surface. Then they would tell her it was too detailed.

From what I remember of your debates with her (its been a while) she actually would respond to your points.

Massively.

Perhaps. I wouldn't like to be on the wrong side of Wittgenstein's poker though.

Made me giggle a bit.

By the way, if you would like I can set up a thread to discuss our differences in interpretation about Wittgenstein. Perhaps there you would be willing to explain why you think he imposed is method on reality.

I usually read posts with points contrary to me, and most of them I don't even reply to, or I reply and no problems ensue. So that does not seem to be the problem. If you doubt that, you can read this thread, and see that while I strongly disagree with Kronsteen, or Menocchio, discussion was civil until you came in.

I became upset when you said this:

I think it is quite clearly explained. If you have any doubts, you may ask me to address them, but I am certainly not on the business of talking to the purposefully deaf.

It seemed to me that you were telling me to go fuck myself for having trouble reading, so I responded insultingly.

No, so how does one knows atoms exist?

Luís Henrique

Experimental evidence that these things ought to exist.

LuÃs Henrique

12th March 2012, 18:24

Unless you have access to a tardis, you have no way of knowing that. That's why it's unknowable.

Or you have it by definition; to quote,

The world is all that is the case.

So, if it is the case, it is part of the world; if it is not the case, it is not part of the world, and conversely.

It is indeed the orthodoxy that Marx made a fundamental break with his predecessors.

But it's also the orthodoxy that he had no significant disagreements with Engels, that Lenin wasn't on the right wing of the bolshevik party, and the mystical doctrines of Plekanov are identical with the rational core Marx took from Hegel. Neither of us are orthodox marxists.But what would be the orthodoxy? The Soviet Union is over; kapput. The "orthodoxy", here in Brazil, has abandoned class struggle, socialism, even the defence of short-term working class interests, indeed the notion of a working class and of social classes in general, Marxism altogether, and its own name as Brazilian Communist Party; they now style themselves Socialist Popular Party, and oppose our government from the right, in alliance with the PSDB and the DEM (and are often more radical in their opposition than those bourgeois parties). Their small splinter to the left maintained the name... and now tails bigger (much bigger, though still quite small in the general Brazilian political scene) Trotskyist parties in opposing the government from the left.

The left is more or less in the situation the Catholic Church would be if the Vatican State dissolved itself or adopted protestantism as its official religion; only the heterodoxies are left.

Now, you point out a few positions as "orthodox":

that Marx made a fundamental break with his predecessors.
that Marx had no significant disagreements with Engels
that Lenin wasn't on the right wing of the bolshevik party
that the mystical doctrines of Plekanov are identical with the rational core Marx took from Hegel.

All of those, of course, are part of Stalinist orthodoxy; but rejecting Stalinism doesn't necessarily mean we have to reject all of them. I personally would reject the second (with some clarification) and the fourth, but would maintain the first and (again with some nuance) the third.

In post 150 (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2382782&postcount=150) I give my reasons for thinking otherwise.OK. I can't agree with you, for reasons also already explained. To me Marx's method is intrinsically anti-teleologic; it doesn't mean that Marx doesn't eventually make teleological assumptions, but that those are incoherent with his general line of thought.

Teleology involves goal directedness where the goals and impetus for movement are external to the thing directed. Thus teleology in human history would involve something external to humanity (angels, demons, aliens) guiding humanity on a path.

You make the same point later in the same post, distinguising 'finalistic' from 'teleological'. So it evidently doesn't pose a problem.Not from that point of view, no, I think.

Indeed not, but there is the question of how much damage his mystical insertions into marxism have done. Would the German revolution have suceeded if we Engels didn't have too much Hegel? Or the Spanish? I don't know.It is indeed impossible to know, as we cannot rewrite history. Which makes the proposition that they were a major cause of those disasters unfounded at best (at worst, though unrelated to its unknowability, it is uncompatible with historical materialism, as it assumes the preponderance of a particular set of ideas - Engelsian teleology - over the material causes of such events).

I will say one thing though: Many of those attracted to marxism are attracted to its mystical side, and for some its the main attraction.Many attracted to Marxism are attracted to it by the expectative of unbridled violence that a "revolution" promises; for some it is the main attraction. Should that mean that we must reject all the violent consequences of a materialist analysis of upper class behaviour, in favour of a toothless Marxism of class cooperation or revolution only if peaceful?

More than that, many of those who find themselves unable to swallow marxist ideas are really only objecting to the mystical elements.And many, many more of those who reject Marxism are willing to label any of its elements "mystical" in order to give their rejection a venner of intellectual respectability. Margareth Thatcher said once that there are no social classes, only individuals and families; she could have added that social classes are metaphysic, or mystical, or anti-scientific, dreams of maladjusted people, part of a sociopathology perhaps. And, of course, I have read accusations of mysticism towards the labour theory of value ("value is a metaphysic concept, only prices actually exist"), towards the distinction between capitalism and older modes of production ("feudalism isn't structurally different from capitalism, it is only less developed, the Marxist distinction is just a consequence of Marx's teleology"), etc.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

12th March 2012, 19:27

I want to start first by saying that I have come to realize that I coming to the same realization with you that I came to with S.Artesian. I misread you from the beginning.

Thanks for that.

I assumed that when you used the term "Dialectics" that you meant "Dialectical Materialism" as it is conceived by most Marxists. I did not expect you to hold the views you did and made a bad assumption.

It happens. It will happen less often if you actually read other people's positions before attacking them.

Sorry about that.

Mkay. Apologies accepted.

If I am correct in my view, we are speaking at cross-purposes. What I am calling Historical Materialism, you are calling Dialectics. The confusion came from my assumption about the meaning you were applying to this.

Yes, I think part of the problem is terminological - but not all.

In which case, then I think our debate can be limited to what debt Marx has to Hegel and to what extent philosophical theory has a place in Marxism.

No; I think the important issue here - and it is the fundamental issue I have with the attempts to fuse Wittgenstein and Marx - is the issue of whether Marx's method is a fundamental rupture with previous methodologies - Hegelian, too, yes, but also Aristotelic, Baconian, Ricardian, etc.

I don't think so. What we need is the verb "to exist" to talk about what is and isn't the case.

I use ontology, lower case, to refer exactly to that: an ontology is merely a list of things we know to exist, a list of things we know don't exist, and a list of things about which we don't know whether they exist (perhaps divided into things we know that we cannot know, and things that we don't know wheter we can or cannot know).

In any case, historical materialism still does need to assert the existence of social classes.

It would be material reality. The important difference being that this is a scientific category. This means that one must stipulate a definition of what is meant by working class and, within the paradigm of historical materialism, define who is and isn't working class.

You see, stipulating definitions is a mental operation, so your boundaries will be created by mind, even if that resembles Berkeley. Unless you mean that the proper categories are imposed into our minds by reality itself, which is the positivist methodology. But, if so, the logical conclusion is to deny the existence of social classes, as reality really does not impose their existence unto us.

In the same way that scientists have been wrong while studying material reality. IE, there were for many years debates about whether light was a wave or a particle. Both were studying material reality, but there were two different conclusions.

And we know what allowed science to move past such controversy: experimentation, which showed that light is both, even though that seems a quite mystic opinion.

Now what kind of experiment would allow us to define whether drug dealers or shop assistants are, or are not, part of the working class?

I believe it was Bacon who first rejected it. Galileo did also.

I don't think either Bacon or Galileo ever wrote about final causes in history; they may have rejected them in physics, but that is another thing.

Final causes was the deterministic belief that all things aim at some end that is natural to them. Humans aim at a virtuous life for example. Peasants don't naturally aim at the harvest with some sort of anticipation. What you have given would be more akin to the efficient cause.

Perhaps; would have to review that.

You misread me. Its the whole book. He points out the chapter on value to show that it is even in the most important book that he does this.

Evidently, I cannot read the quote in that way. He points to a specific chapter - and the whole point gets lost if we admit he was coquetting in the Afterword too.

That passage supports my opinion actually. Not on his debt to Hegel, but on his dialectical method being historical materialism.

What it doesn't support, though, is your opinion that the relation between historical materialism and pre-Marxian methodologies is one of mere refinement - more continuity than rupture.

So he's fucking with them.

Bad mental image.

But I still miss the relevance of that. What he is saying is simply, a bunch of idiots that, in his opinion, know nothing about Hegel, has made a sport of mudslinging the philosopher; as he despises them - including for their ignorant reaction towards Hegel - he made a point of defending him.

I disagree here. Marx endorsed it, ergo I accept it.

Yet the text is clearly contradictory with Marx's established method, as it says that the laws of social science are not only independent of human will but indeed determinate such will.

And also the text is contradictory to your own interpretation of Marx's method, as it clearly says that to equate economical or sociological laws to chemical or physical laws is a mistake.

Here is where our main misunderstanding of each other lies. I endorse a view that Marx is using an updated form of Aristotelian scientific method (which was rejected by the natural sciences around the time of Kepler) which is also known by the name dialectics. Aristotle considered his method to be the dialectical one, which is almost the same as what Marx mentions in the Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy and in the aforementioned review.

I cannot accept such interpretation, for to me Marx's method is in complete rupture concerning Aristotle (which by the way is by no means a scientific method).

In my opinion, your position makes it impossible to distinguish between Marx and radical liberals in politics, and between Marx and bourgeois ideologues in methodology.

In this thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/natural-orderi-t81678/index3.html?highlight=enlightenment), starting in post #43, you can see Ms. Lichtenstein evading, for four pages, the distinction.

I never use the term dialectics myself, because it gives off an Engelisan vibe. I use historical materialism so that people won't confuse what I support with the gibberish found in works like the Anti-Durhing.

You sure can do that, though I believe it is more or less of the same quality of one self-identifying as socialist at the times "communist" has a bad fame, and "communist" at the times when the ragged word is "socialist".

I was saying he was wrong about Hegel being the first. Kant was. My bet is that as a student, Marx read a shit ton of Hegel and probably Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant does not give the dialectic its most conscious form then. He did it in much more obscure works, the ones that Woods was referencing.

Any way, either Hegel was the second to do this, and Marx's mistake would be just one of precedence, or Hegel never did, and Marx completely misread him - albeit being probably the person in the best position to offer a precise criticism of Hegel.

I never saw her only demand people read her essays. She would do that if they told her she was attacking only the surface. Then they would tell her it was too detailed.

She did that to the point it became nauseating.

From what I remember of your debates with her (its been a while) she actually would respond to your points.

As the thread I offered you above shows, that is not the case.

Made me giggle a bit.

Good.

By the way, if you would like I can set up a thread to discuss our differences in interpretation about Wittgenstein. Perhaps there you would be willing to explain why you think he imposed is method on reality.

We have done such things already. It generates more heath than light, I would say.

Experimental evidence that these things ought to exist.

But you see, atomist hypothesis predates any experimental evidence by more than two millenia. And what experiment would show the existence of atoms, if the hypothesis wasn't formulated previously?

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

12th March 2012, 19:43

ChristoferKoch, Others, Damn! Revleft was down to me for less than a day, and now I'm two weeks behind in my reading and responses?? How do you guys do what you do?

CK, Thanks for your reply and the tone in which it was delivered. I was a bit testy in my initial contact with you, but my "paranoia" is based in the reality that it has been nearly impossible to discuss dialectics at Revleft in the past due to the relentless interference of a certain anti-dialectician.

Capitalist globalization means the human species has been mentally and physically confined within the institutions and values of The System, and I am watching humanity go down without a struggle. I am acutely aware of this and find it apoplectically, unspeakably unacceptable. I consider the development of a popularly intelligible, usable materialist dialectic to be essential to the creation of revolutionary paths out of capitalism into anarchism/socialism/communism, and so I view the malicious destruction of such a discussion to be an indirect attack on life, humanity, Marxism, and all else I value. I quite obsessively pursue the development of a viable revolutionary organizing theory and have no time for flame wars or debate for debate's sake. I'm not good at the latter, either.

CK, It's interesting and potentially quite valuable that your intellectual journey began in dialectics and moved from them to varieties of logic (and analytic Marxism?). You are thus well-situated intellectually to view and interpret life and society, except ....

Your and almost everyone else's understanding of the origin and nature of the materialist dialectic is wrong. Bertell Ollman provides the corrective for this, and his Dance of the Dialectic (2003) seems definitive. Here is what Ollman, now in his mid-70s and teaching a full load at NYU has to say about this in Dance, p. 5: "While several major interpreters of Marx, such as Georg Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, Karel Kosik, Lucien Goldmann, and Herbert Marcuse, appeared to recognize that Marx's rejection of Hegel's idealism did not include his philosophy of internal relations, none saw fit to build their interpretation of dialectics around it not use it as a basis for explaining Marx's unusual use of language. I did."

The new sciences of organizational relations I constantly reference then affirm the philosophy of internal relations' organization as modeling real world organization, and show that the the various scattered dialectical "laws" and categories represent actual living process and development. Thus philosophy has anticipated the science that confirms (and can activate) the philosophy. Well, Hegel and Marx were geniuses, and this new science captures the genius of life's organization.

You ask where I might find a specific statement from Marx outlining his understanding and employment of dialectics. Well, we all know there is no such statement--just hints here and there. But Marx didn't write much about communism either, did he?

If you will read Ollman, I believe you will find what Marx discovered within Hegelian "mysticism" and materialized and then employed throughout his life as his means of engaging life and society as the organic, systemic processes they certainly are. And then we can begin to bring this dialectic to life and praxis.

I believe we all agree that the dialectic in its present form, saddled by those clumsy "laws," is a largely unusable muddle that only a genius such as Marx could put to good use. Most will then agree that Marx employed the dialectic in writing Capital I. Then it becomes my intensely researched belief that the new science and Ollman's interpretation of Marx's materialist dialectic can bring Marxism to revolutionary life.

I'm intensely interested in revolutionary organizing theory, and I don't believe the fields you moved into have anything to say in this area. Am I wrong? After pulling life apart and examining it, does any field logic then put life back together as a living, systemic process? I can present the gist of a red-green materialist dialectic in the "two or three printer's sheets" to which Marx referred. Is there anything like this in logic or elsewhere?

These are genuine questions. I have never taken a college course in philosophy and struggle on my own to learn the lingo and engage. This is a strength as well as a weakness.

As for banning, I'm not in favor of it save for instances of flagrant flaming, racism, sexism, etc., and in cases where someone is clearly disrupting and obstructing discussion.

My red-green best.

Mr. Natural

12th March 2012, 22:17

Luis Henrique, Thanks for your questions. The "new sciences" of organizational relations to which I refer begin with evolution, which Marx and Engels found so significant (Yes, they also heatedly opposed Malthusian uses of it), and move from there to sciences that developed after their time. These are the new, Einsteinian physics, cosmology, cybernetics, chaos theory, and systems-complexity theory as explored at the Santa Fe Institute. I want to note here that these new sciences of organization have now attenuated, almost disappeared. I attribute this phenomenon to capitalism's mental and physical capture of humanity and its educational institutions and science.

Capitalism is a reductive system that chops the communities of life into commodities. As such a system, it is a product of reductive relations and manufactures and advances reductive science and scientists, and so organizational science is de-emphasized. Then there's the telling reality (it tells of capitalism's mental capture of humanity) that none of the brilliant systems theorists I engage ever engages the capitalist system. These systems theorists ignore their own system!!!

Fritjof Capra is a partial exception, for he has six pages on Marxism in The Turning Point, (1983), which you have read. However, Capra always ignores the reality of capitalism in his research and projects.

I have all of Capra's books and have read several of them over and over. The Turning Point is perhaps my least favorite, but I don't see how you determined: "Turning Point is completely idealistic; there Capra is by no means a materialist, much less a dialectical one. He is a holist, and believes in an unstructured, uncontradictory totality, that can only be spiritual, of course."

First of all, I believe in a human "spirituality" that emerges from bottom up, self-organized, communal relations. There is love, team spirit, etc. I won't mention nationalism. Oops.

Luis, Capra is a cutting-edge, brilliant scientist with wonderful personal character. He works with "mystical," unseen organizational relations, though, and gets no respect other than from many of the best scientific minds of our era. He sits down and converses with them, and they have no time for amateurs. His book, Uncommon Wisdom (1988), is a record of such personal conversations.

I simply cannot see where you find him to be a holist who believes in unstructured, uncontradictory totality, not even in Turning Point. He would be quite wrong if he believed this, of course. In fact, he defines a living system as a self-organizing, integrated whole that exists in dynamic interdependence with the living systems and physical forces of its environment. Capra and life are rife with dialectical contradictions, mediations, systems, etc., that emerge from material relations, and matter that emerges from organizational relations and processes.

In Marx, too, and in the philosophy of internal relations, relations are things and things are relations. Life and society are both things and relations in real life, too, and the process by which this comes about is dialectical. Thus there is the dialectical process of historical materialism.

Capra doesn't mention dialectics, but he discusses the revolutionary new scientific concept of self organization at great length. I don't know that any of the posters in this thread have encountered self-organization yet, but you are all definitely self-organized in dynamic interdependence with the rest of life, which is self-organized. $lim $weezy referred to a "motor force of history," and self-organization with others is the motor force of life. Self-organization also indicates the deeply communal, "democratic" nature of life.

My red-green, dialectical, Caprian best.

LuÃs Henrique

13th March 2012, 13:03

On the subject of idealism, a term that I was accused of using in an idiossincratic way in applying it to Wittgenstein, here is a good review, by Eric Loomis, of Ilham Dilman's Wittgenstein's Copernican Revolution: The Question of Linguistic Idealism. (http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23158-wittgenstein-s-copernican-revolution-the-question-of-linguistic-idealism/)

I agree with most points there (and no, it is not the source of my thoughts about Wittgenstein's idealism). A position that reduces the distinction between matter and mind to the "grammar" of language, as Wittgenstein does, cannot fail to be idealist, for such "grammar of language" is fundamentally a mental phenomenon.

And so, if I am wrong, I am certainly not alone in error.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

13th March 2012, 18:28

Final causes was the deterministic belief that all things aim at some end that is natural to them. Humans aim at a virtuous life for example. Peasants don't naturally aim at the harvest with some sort of anticipation. What you have given would be more akin to the efficient cause.

No, you are most certainly mistaken here. For Aristotle, the efficient cause of the harvest is the fact that the peasant sowed it; the final cause of the harvest is to feed the peasant and his family (or to be sold in the market, so that the peasant can buy other things).

This is evidently quite valid when referring to conscious human acts. Less so when talking about natural phenomena.

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

13th March 2012, 20:24

$lim $weezy, Grenzer, Kronsteen, Menocchio, Luis Henrique, ChristoferKoch, Others, I included all the names in recognition that we are beginning to set some standards around here for vigorous and positive discussion/debate. It was heartening to read that LH and CK have buried Wittgenstein's poker, and not in each other. There is too much radical intelligence and knowledge here to waste in the customary left site manner.

My IP was down all morning, and I've been catching up on my reading since it came back. That done, I want to briefly attempt to point again to the gist of my "project": life (and healthy societies) emerges from a pattern of organization that closely resembles the materialist dialectic, and this pattern is now known and can be employed to bring the materialist dialectic to popular awareness and praxis.

Luis Henrique wrote: "the efficient cause of the harvest is the fact that the peasant sowed it; the final cause of the harvest is to feed the peasant and his family .... This is evidently quite valid when referring to conscious acts, less so when talking about natural phenomena"

Let's take a quick look at "efficient causes" and "final causes" as seen by the new sciences of life's organization. The efficient cause, repeated by all living systems since, came from the pre-biotic emergence of life in which organic molecules in Earth's primordial atmosphere autocatlyzed (self-organized) into the first primitive living system, a protocell, some four billion years ago. This protocell (or protocells) was physically interdependent with its environment, from which it gained necessary energy, and evolved in chemical steps into the first true living system, a bacterium. This has been the efficient cause of all life since: self-organizing material systems that dynamically, interdependently, self-organize internally/externally. Life is a bootstrap of these self-organized living system that compose and create the life process and keep it going.
This scientific scenario is in agreement with the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations.

As for "final causes," the "purpose" of living systems is to keep themselves and the life process going: life is a bootstrap of these self-organizing material systems. I've offered the notation, "s-o/S-O" before, wherein a living system is intimately integrated with its environment of other such living systems (and physical forces), and these living relations generate and maintain the life process, represented by the slash.

The point? The self-organizing living systems of life have a universal pattern of organization that we can all learn and employ to create anarchist/socialist/communist revolutions and societies. Life has a universal pattern of organization that we who must design our communities in the pattern of life must learn.

We can now resurrect Marx and Engels and bring their materialist dialectic to life and praxis.

RaÃºl Duke

14th March 2012, 04:16

I don't know much...but here's my 2 cents.

I don't really know what dialectics is or how useful it is really. My philosophy department I've been in classes that mention "dialectics" as a relationship between 2 things ("Thesis, antithesis, synthesis") but doesn't go much deeper than that nor treat it as important to know.

I'm familiar with historical materialism both from the communist manifesto and my history classes (particularly on historical methods, etc). I'm not familiar with "dialectical materialism." The Marxist analysis/method of history is important to widen our understanding of history and has been recognized as such within historical academia.

On the accusation of mysticism, this is what I see: Within parties run through "democratic centralism" with a leadership, etc certain members, usually the leadership, have used "dialectical materialism" as a reason/excuse/etc to do certain actions (some which are detrimental) and/or to extend further control and expel other members (stating that they're not following the "right dialectical analysis") within the party.

In it of itself, dialectical materialism may be a valid thing. But in practice, I've heard of "dialectical materialism" used in an opportunistic/negative/"mystical" fashion.

Mr. Natural

14th March 2012, 17:58

Raul Duke, I appreciate comrades with open, critical minds such as yours.

Dialectics is a confusing mess at present, isn't it? My project is to employ the new sciences of organizational relations to bring the materialist dialectic to life and praxis.

As you haven't been "contaminated" by the ever-raging-but-go-nowhere debates over dialectics, you're in a good position to learn what Marx saw in Hegelian idealist dialectics and then materialized to become "the science of the general laws of the motion and development of nature, human society, and thought." (Anti-Duhring)

Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003) unpacks the dialectics debate clearly and conclusively. He shows how a young Marx engaged the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations, its abstraction process and various categories and laws, and thereby gained his understanding of life and society as the organic, systemic processes that they are.

Dialectics works with the invisible relations and processes of life and society, and this is where the charge of "mysticism" arises. For many people, the only believing comes from seeing "things." The anti-dialecticians camp is therefore full of mechanists, logicians, and empiricists.

The triad, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, provides the general sense of the dialectic, but is its most primitive expression, and I don't believe this triad was mentioned by Marx or Engels.

Here are some definitions of the materialist dialectic I believe are in line with Marx (and Engels).

"The world of independent and essentially dead 'things' has been relaced in our thinking by a world or processes in relations of mutual dependence. This is the first step in thinking dialectically." (Dance, p. 157) And: "The dialectical alternative is to start by taking the whole as given, so that the interconnections and changes that make up the whole are viewed as inseparable from what anything is, internal to its being, and therefore essential to a full understanding of it. In the history of ideas, this has been called the 'philosophy of internal relations'." (Dance, p. 156)

Scott Meikle "weds dialectics to the real essences or natures of things. Dialectics, according to Meikle, is concerned with grasping a whole in motion and uncovering the contradictions that constitute the moving principle of its development." (John Mepham ed Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Vol I, p. 2)

Richard Levins simply states, "Dialecticians take as the objects of our interest the processes in complex systems."

Helena Sheehan notes that Lenin, in his Philosophical Notebooks, "went into very great detail about the characteristics of the dialectical process, at one point listing sixteen elements of dialectics, although these could be summed up in three: (1) the thing itself considered in the totality of its relations and its development, (2) the internally contradictory tendencies in every phenomenon, and (3) the union of analysis and synthesis." (Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, p. 140)

Note that union of analysis and synthesis. Dialectics contains both, while anti-dialecticians tend to deny or ignore synthesis.

Raul, can you see that dialectics attempts to unveil the "life" of life and society? Life is created by and composed of self-organized things, and dialectics honors both the organization and the things.

The new sciences of organizational relations I obsessively promote then reveal the organizational relations of the "things" of life and society that the materialist dialectic at present only suggests. These new sciences can bring the materialist dialectic, Marxism, and anarchist, socialist, communist revolutions to life.

Betcha! My red-green best.

Strannik

14th March 2012, 18:51

I have lurked in Wittgenstein/DM debates on this over many years, my thoughts so far are following (I do not claim any of my beliefs are true).

Dialectics as used by Hegel is indeed mysticism. A hegelian creates an idealistic model in their mind (for example, Yin/Yang; thesis/antithesis/synthesis etc) that is supposed to explain the evolution of the entire reality: Life, Universe and Everything. Then they proceed to look for examples in outside world that fit their model and disregard everything that does not.

Dialectics as used by Marx, for example when he wrote Capital, seems to be something else. It is a method for analyzing (or "writing about") complex systems by creating dynamic, interrelated conceptual models, where each interacting concept is viewed like a process instead of a "thing".

Since Marx nowhere spells out his method of analysis, instead simply using it, many who want to understand him try to go and read about Hegel. And then many of them fall into the trap of mysticism, because marxist kind of ongoing analysis is kinda hard.

But it is true that dialectical materialism is the opposite of Hegel's dialectic. Idealist imagines an order and then goes looking for it from reality. Marx does the opposite - he looks at the world and tries to capture its evolving dynamic into a model of evolving, interacting concepts and processes. As such he is not necessarily the opponent of Wittgenstein. W said, as far as I know that philosophical concepts in language are bullshit, because they do not refer to anything in actual reality. Marxist analysis tries to create concepts that are evolving and fuzzy, at least.

I belive that a similar practice to Marx is contemporary organizational analysis, that tries to capture an evolving, living organization into a conceptual system to create software for them. Of course modern analysts don't know that.

Now, since the dialectical model has to be read from nature, the dialectical laws as they are usually listed, are pure idealistic mysticism. They treat the DM like a philosophy that explains the world, but at least to me it seems that DM is a method or tool for understanding the world.

Nevertheless these laws could be interpreted like general rules of dialectical analysis; something to keep in mind when doing this kind of thing. For example:
"interprenetation of opposites" - "do not exclude a priori any interaction between two classes".
"change of quantity into quality" - "objects can have different properties than their constituent parts"
And most important "law" - do not prescribe the nature and number of conceptual classes to any system; instead read them from the system.

However, I have certainly not finalized my thoughts in this area and all this could be a misunderstanding. :)

Mr. Natural

14th March 2012, 20:30

Strannik, Welcome to the thread. I'm intrigued by your statement, "I believe that a similar practice to Marx is contemporary organizational analysis, that tries to capture an evolving, living organization into a conceptual system..."

That sounds a lot like "my" red-green materialist dialectic and the red-green theory of life, community, and revolution I've derived from it. It is also quite similar to the purpose and accomplishment of Fritjof Capra's living systems theory presented in The Web of Life. This work successfully captures life's organizational relations--the relations leftists must reproduce in revolutionary processes and the realized human communities of the future.

How familiar are you with this "field" of living organization analysis? Can you say more? You were beginning to sing my song. Are you familiar with the Santa Fe Institute? And where or what is "NFB"?

I believe there can be an integration of the Marxist materialist dialectic and the new sciences of organization that will bring them both to life.

My red-green best.

Kronsteen

14th March 2012, 20:58

On the accusation of mysticism, this is what I see: Within parties run through "democratic centralism" with a leadership, etc certain members, usually the leadership, have used "dialectical materialism" as a reason/excuse/etc to do certain actions

This is certainly true. I can't count the number of u-turns and policy flip-flops justified on the grounds that 'it's dialectical, comrade'.

Whether or not there is a useful theory buried deep in dialectics, it's very useful for a party to have an official philosophy which everyone accepts but almost no one understands.

Dialectics is great for bullshitting the members, because it enables the leadership to analyse any situation in many diametrically opposed ways, and thus justify jumping between diametrically opposed policies. Without ever having to admit they were wrong.

The first time I saw this was at a conference after the crushing defeat of a strike. An aparachik stood up and lectured us about how every defeat was really the seed of a future victory - because of dialectics.

Kronsteen

14th March 2012, 21:18

Dialectics as used by Hegel is indeed mysticism. A hegelian creates an idealistic model in their mind (for example, Yin/Yang; thesis/antithesis/synthesis etc) that is supposed to explain the evolution of the entire reality: Life, Universe and Everything. Then they proceed to look for examples in outside world that fit their model and disregard everything that does not.

Absolutely. This is known in scientific circles as Confirmation Bias - selecting only the observations which fit the theory.

With dialectics - at least the mystical variety - this is easy, because the theory is so vague, its terms so elastic and undefined, that it can be made to fit probably any observation.

Since Marx nowhere spells out his method of analysis

GA Cohen - founder of the 'no bullshit' school of marxism - went through Marx's writings with a fine tooth comb, trying to extract his method. And eventually concluded...that Marx didn't have one.

That doesn't make Marx wrong, except in his belief that he had a unified method, but it does fit with the idea that marxism is not a theory but a project of political change - one that produces bits of disconnected theory when required.

Certainly in my 12 years of working with marxists, the 'marxist method' has been often mentioned...but in all this time, never defined.

Now, since the dialectical model has to be read from nature, the dialectical laws as they are usually listed, are pure idealistic mysticism.

Oddly enough, the first part of that paragraph is exactly what Engels says. Before he imposes his idealistic mysticism on nature :-).

They treat the DM like a philosophy that explains the world, but at least to me it seems that DM is a method or tool for understanding the world.

It's subtle distinction, but an important one. It's the difference between having a grand theory, and having a framework for building small theories.

Mr. Natural

15th March 2012, 16:10

Kronsteen, I owe you replies to some of the comments you have made. I have trouble keeping up with the conversations and responding, especially when there are internet problems.

I'll get to some of your other points later, after I respond to Luis Henrique's reference to Capra's "holism." The following statement by you caught my eye this morning, though: "GA Cohen--founder of the 'no bullshit' school of marxism--went through Marx's writings with a fine tooth comb, trying to extract his method. And eventually concluded...that Marx didn't have one."

Kronsteen, Bertell Ollman in Dance of the Dialectic very clearly outlines Marx's method--his dialectical method of apprehending life and society.

G A Cohen and the analytic "Marxists" take the life out of Marxism. Dialectics in their present form may be a muddle, but they are a muddle that expresses some living relations, at least.

I know little of analytic Marxism or the formal logic, linguistics analysis, etc, it rode in on. But isn't analytic "Marxism" considered by almost all Marxists to be as dead as Cohen, himself? This doesn't necessarily make it wrong, but ...

Isn't analytic Marxism just another left-liberal academic exercise? A detour from Marxism and revolutionary praxis? An attempt to nail life and Marxism down to precise steps and verbiage?

We need to learn to organize, Kronsteen. We need to learn to apply life's revolutionary pattern of organization to our human organizations, and that will be a "sloppy" process, as is life. We will employ our analytic powers to this process to make it as precise as possible, but our syntheses--the parties, programs, communities, revolutionary processes, etc. we create--will always be sloppily alive and interdependent with the rest of life.

I believe Stalin would have found much use for analytic Marxism, but Marx was a dialectician. My red-green best.

Kronsteen

15th March 2012, 17:06

Isn't analytic Marxism just another left-liberal academic exercise? A detour from Marxism and revolutionary praxis? An attempt to nail life and Marxism down to precise steps and verbiage?

It's an attempt to remove the verbiage, and thus the conceptual muddle that you talk about.

isn't analytic "Marxism" considered by almost all Marxists to be as dead as Cohen, himself?How many times have we been told that marxism itself is as dead as Marx? Yet it keeps coming back.

The term 'analytic marxism' can be understood in two ways.

1) An attempt to depoliticise marxism, to reduce it to a theory about economics and maybe the physical world, omitting any notion of political change, and especially change brought about by the working class.

2) An attempt to ground the political aspects of marxism in something more rigorous and scientific than 18th century German mysticism - the astrology, kabbalah, alchemy and christianity that I've already mentioned.

Orthodox marxists tend to conflate the two. Specifically, they resent the second sense, so make accusations about the first.

Incidentally, doesn't this definition make you an analytic marxist? You speak of a new science of self-organisation, underlying Marx's conclusions, and even guiding actions towards Marx's goals.

Now, there is an argument against the very project of grounding marxism in this way, and that's that to do so is an exercise in Foundationalism. Foundationalism is the notion that to justify you actions you need to have an rock solid theory based on abolutely unquestionable premises.

The wikipedia article on foundationalism is useful if you want to know more (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundationalism). But most marxists take the view that knowledge of ultimate reality is impossible, and irrelevant anyway. They say what we have and what we need is knowledge of what strategies work in practice - or if you prefer, praxis.

LuÃs Henrique

15th March 2012, 18:10

The term 'analytic marxism' can be understood in two ways.

1) An attempt to depoliticise marxism, to reduce it to a theory about economics and maybe the physical world, omitting any notion of political change, and especially change brought about by the working class.

2) An attempt to ground the political aspects of marxism in something more rigorous and scientific than 18th century German mysticism - the astrology, kabbalah, alchemy and christianity that I've already mentioned.

Well, then perhaps it would be necessary to discuss what authors belong to which camp. My impression is that Jerry Cohen belongs to 1) above; perhaps I am wrong.

Or perhaps there is a third possibility: that at least some of the analytical "Marxists" seek to reduce Marxism to a mere ethical movement, in which Marx's attempts at giving a scientific grounding to socialism are bogus, unnecessary, and misleading.

Also, the part on astrology, kabbalah, alchemy and christianity seems a huge strawman. As much as I dislike Engels' ontologisations, they are not based on any of these superstitions.

Orthodox marxists tend to conflate the two. Specifically, they resent the second sense, so make accusations about the first.Well, it looks pretty much like the behaviour of our local analytical Marxists here: say that "dialectics" is undefined, unclear, that nobody can explain it, etc, etc, etc. Then when somebody takes his time to explain dialectics at lenght, the posts remain unread, ignored, unnadressed, and discussion goes on on how Engels was so much mistaken. Perhaps analytical Marxists "resent" reasonable explanations of dialectics, and so make accusations about mystified dialectics?

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

15th March 2012, 18:24

Luis Henrique, Your comment, "[Capra] is a holist, and believes in an unstructured, uncontradictory totality ...," sent me back to begin yet another reading of The Web of Life, where Capra does, indeed, frequently use the term "holism." Capra's holism, though, arises from the structured, contradictory relations of life.

I'm trying to accomplish this umpteenth reading of Web through your eyes to see the problems you and others will have with it. Here's a big problem you and others need to learn to ignore when it surfaces: Capra, although essentially apolitical, is a big, fat liberal. His movie, "Mindwalk," is a liberal crime against radical sensibilities.

This liberalism is much too obvious in Web's first chapter, "Deep Ecology--A New Paradigm." I live in Judi Bari country and have described myself as a "Judi Barian deep ecologist," but my deep ecology is much deeper than Capra's politics.

We need to remember that Capra is a cutting-edge theoretical physicist and engage him there. He wrote Web to answer the old question, "What is life," and he successfully presents a "unified view of mind, matter, and life."

Just think about a "unified view of mind, matter, and life," Luis. Wouldn't such an accomplishment, if genuine, be radical almost beyond comprehension? And I assure you Capra achieves his goal, for I have relentlessly researched his science and followed its tracks wherever they led.

Capra's "holism" is his radical corrective to the dominant reductionist science (and philosophies) of parts and things. His holism, though, includes the parts. Parts make the whole, and the whole makes the parts. That's life, which is created by self-organizing material living systems (parts) that create "wholes" that are self-organizing parts of larger wholes that .... This is life's bootstrap of self-organizing living systems that keep themselves and the life process going, for which I make the notation, "s-o/S-O."

Here is Capra on the matter of holism. The new paradigm may be called a holistic worldview, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. It may also be called an ecological view, if the term "ecological" is used in a much broader and deeper sense than usual. Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies, we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical processes of nature." (p. 6)

Capra again: "The basic tension is one between the parts and the whole. The emphasis on the parts has been called mechanistic, reductionist, or atomistic; the emphasis on the whole holistic, organismic, or ecological. In twentieth-century science the holistic perspective has become known as 'systemic' and the way of thinking it implies as 'systems thinking'." (p. 17)

So Ollman, a lifelong Marxist, and Capra, a lifelong liberal, are quite different politically, although they wind up addressing the same problem of the organization of life and society. Capra is a scientist while Ollman is a political scientist, but if you put them together, I believe you will find a popular recipe for revolution.

My red-green best.

Kronsteen

15th March 2012, 18:32

My impression is that Jerry Cohen belongs to 1) above

I think he intended to be in the first camp, and slid gradually into the second.

Or perhaps there is a third possibility: that at least some of the analytical "Marxists" seek to reduce Marxism to a mere ethical movement, on which Marx's attempts at giving a scientific grounding to socialism are bogus, unnecessary, and misleading.

That's a good point, though I wouldn't call such people 'analytical marxists'. Maybe 'ethical marxists'.

If Lenin was right (and I think he was) that the three components of marxism are French socialism, English economics and German philosophy, then there is the inevitable question of which of these (if any) could be removed, or which could be replaced with something else, without undermining marxism.

Ethical marxists perhaps would want to keep only the French socialism. Among those of us who reject the hegalian aspects, Rosa Lichtenstein is for the removal of the philosophical component, I'd suggest that Cohen wanted to replace it with modern physics and, oddly, game theory.

Also, the part on astrology, kabbalah, alchemy and christianity seems a huge strawman. As much as I dislike Engels' ontologisations, they are not based on any of these superstitions.

It's complicated. These superstitions are certainly in Hegel - indeed, I don't think it's possible to understand any of Hegel without a basic knowledge of hermeticism and freemasonry.

Engels didn't subscribe to the superstitions themselves, but he did accept Hegel's view of a universe in contradictory self-development towards self awareness, and his view that political development is part of this process. And these views come directly from Hegel's attempt to bring all these and other superstitions together into one unified system.

You could say Engels accepted the faith while rejecting the theology, and built a new theology to support the old faith.

Well, it looks pretty much like the behaviour of our local analytical Marxists here: say that "dialectics" is undefined, unclear, that nobody can explain it, etc, etc, etc. Then when somebody takes his time to explain dialectics at lenght, the posts remain unread, ignored, unnadressed, and discussion goes on on how Engels was so much mistaken.

I've read a great number of explanations of dialectics over the years. The comprehensible ones were trivial and/or false. The others...well, they were incomprehensible.

You have to admit, the vast majority of dialecticians use the same source materials and the same examples over and over again - bags of sugar, balding heads, boiling water etc. Most of the explainers are like George Novack - uncritically quoting the same half dozen key texts as though that were sufficient proof.

LuÃs Henrique

16th March 2012, 00:22

I think he intended to be in the first camp, and slid gradually into the second.

Or you mean the opposite? On what grounds could we say that he got more radical over the years?

That's a good point, though I wouldn't call such people 'analytical marxists'. Maybe 'ethical marxists'.

If Lenin was right (and I think he was) that the three components of marxism are French socialism, English economics and German philosophy, then there is the inevitable question of which of these (if any) could be removed, or which could be replaced with something else, without undermining marxism.

Ethical marxists perhaps would want to keep only the French socialism. Among those of us who reject the hegalian aspects, Rosa Lichtenstein is for the removal of the philosophical component, I'd suggest that Cohen wanted to replace it with modern physics and, oddly, game theory.

I think you are wrong about "ethical Marxists". French socialism would be too problematic to them, as it would bring the idea that workers must liberate themselves, which precludes their favourite activity, that of preaching to the ruling classes in hopes it acts "rationally" against it's own interests. On the contrary, it is British political economy that provides a better foundation for "ethical Marxism", as it can expose the illogicalities of the capitalist mode of production without pointing out directions to the future. And that's how "ethical marxism" is always intimately linked with "science-only" Marxism.

As for your question, I think the answer is simple. None. Even if Lenin is wrong and "German philosophy" isn't an actual component of Marxism, there is necessarily a third element besides the other two, that cannot be removed without reducing Marxism to a more or less radical variant of bourgeois liberalism or petty bourgeois democratism.

If you are correctly characterising Cohen's positions, they are absurd. Physics, never mind how modern, cannot point to the inherent frailties of the capitalist mode of production, and neither can game theory. Indeed, game theory seems to me only valid in its own, very limited, scope. If you want to analyse chess, game theory is excellent. If you want to analyse war, or class struggle, or even soccer, it fails completely.

Concerning Ms. Lichtenstein's positions, I think you characterise them correctly. It is a huge delusion: "philosophical" postions cannot be circumvented; serious attempts at that will bring up some kind of infinite regression. Feebler attempts will be just philosophical positions masquerading as something else - as it is exactly the case of our local mudslinging champion.

It's complicated. These superstitions are certainly in Hegel - indeed, I don't think it's possible to understand any of Hegel without a basic knowledge of hermeticism and freemasonry.

Ah, but you have already slid a lot here, from astrology into hermeticism and freemasonry. Yes, there is no doubt that Hegel was a mystic, and that his mysticism is tied to the hermetic tradition. That was widely used by alchemists, no doubt, but I don't think it is fair to assume it directly implies alchemy or astrology; one could be a hermeticist without believing in either. Or without being a Christian, for what is worth (and, of course, kabbalah and Christianism are mutually exclusive). As for freemasonry, it was the typical form of secret revolutionary or semirevolutionary societies in the 18th century. Yes, it implies the idea of secret knowledge only accessible to initiates, and such secret knowledge most of times took the form of what Chesterton characterises as "great foolery".

Engels didn't subscribe to the superstitions themselves, but he did accept Hegel's view of a universe in contradictory self-development towards self awareness, and his view that political development is part of this process. And these views come directly from Hegel's attempt to bring all these and other superstitions together into one unified system.

I don't think this is a valid description. Hegel could not bring those superstitions into one unified system, and he knew that. He certainly knew that alchemy was outdated, that astrology was bogus, etc. His effort seems to go in a different way: to recast the hermetic tradition in a different, modernised fashion. To that end he needed a different kind of ingredient to cook together with mysticism: German idealist philosophy.

Engels does accept Hegel's view of a universe in contradictory self-development, but refuses Hegel's characterisation of the universe as the Spirit in movement; instead, he saw the universe as a completely material thing, its "evolution" being given not by reflexive thought about itself, but by natural laws.

You could say Engels accepted the faith while rejecting the theology, and built a new theology to support the old faith.

Perhaps. Like any of those simple formulas, it certainly can illuminate certain aspects of the issue. Like any other analogy, it will snap if overstretched.

I've read a great number of explanations of dialectics over the years. The comprehensible ones were trivial and/or false. The others...well, they were incomprehensible.

And I wasted my time here trying to give you and others an explanation that would be comprehensible and not trivial. Up to now, you have simply eluded any comment on it.

You have to admit, the vast majority of dialecticians use the same source materials and the same examples over and over again - bags of sugar, balding heads, boiling water etc. Most of the explainers are like George Novack - uncritically quoting the same half dozen key texts as though that were sufficient proof.

Listen, I am not a "dialectician" (and indeed I don't think the label has any use). I am a historian, I have a college training on methodology, that includes Marxist methodology. And Marxist methodology as I studied does not include Engels' platitudes about negation of negation; it includes a thorough characterisation of society as an object of the scientific disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology or politology.

So no, I don't have to admit anything. Perhaps in the Philosophy departments of American colleges people waste their time wondering about the Anti-Duhring. In History or Sociology departments of Brazilian universities such things aren't taken into account.

Luís Henrique

Kronsteen

16th March 2012, 06:25

Or you mean the opposite?

Er, yes. My mistake.

I think you are wrong about "ethical Marxists".I'm sure you know more about them than I do, but not all French socialists were dreamers or moralising finger waggers - some of the were physiocrats, after all. And plenty of English politicos were backward looking romantics.

Even if Lenin is wrong and "German philosophy" isn't an actual component of Marxism, there is necessarily a third element besides the other two, that cannot be removed without reducing Marxism to a more or less radical variant of bourgeois liberalism or petty bourgeois democratism.

This thread is a search for just that third componant. Assuming it does exist.

If you are correctly characterising Cohen's positions, they are absurd.

I'm reading Cohen's 'Karl Marx's Theory of History'. It's one of those books which is more useful for what it argues against than what it argues for.

I don't think it is fair to assume it directly implies alchemy or astrology; one could be a hermeticist without believing in either.True, but Hegel was the great system builder, and from what I've read, he was into everything going at the time. A voracious reader, but not judicious one.

kabbalah and Christianism are mutually exclusiveAre they? Tell that to the christians who construct prophecies using skip codes and anagrams of biblical passages.

Strictly speaking, christianity is incompatible with natural magic - potions, charms, protective garments etc. But that hasn't stopped christians using them over the centuries, especially when christianity was inadvertantly mixed with other religions by missionaries.

I don't think this is a valid description. Hegel could not bring those superstitions into one unified system, and he knew that.I'm just going to have to disagree with you on that. The hermetic tradition involved many incompatible strands, and George seemed to be interested in all of them.

His effort seems to go in a different way: to recast the hermetic tradition in a different, modernised fashion.I would say he was trying to incorporate the new sciences - and the new philosophy, especially Kant, and the new politics, especially the French Revolution - into the hermetic tradition. This meant changing both the tradition and the things incorporated, but I think his intention was to save hermeticism from what threatened it, and the choice of updating it was a strategy to do that.

Engels does accept Hegel's view of a universe in contradictory self-development, but refuses Hegel's characterisation of the universe as the Spirit in movement; instead, he saw the universe as a completely material thing, its "evolution" being given not by reflexive thought about itself, but by natural laws.The animistic language is still there - and even today we still use words like 'living' and 'vital' for ideas we like, and 'dead', 'static', 'dry' and 'wooden' for those we don't.

Hegel believed the process of thought and the process of universal (and political) change were of the same type. I don't think Engels made a clean break with that notion, instead smudging and fudging the issue.

Like any other analogy, it will snap if overstretched.As I have often said to my comrades when they're being pedantic, "It's an analogy with imprecisions. In other words, it's an analogy."

And I wasted my time here trying to give you and others an explanation that would be comprehensible and not trivial. Up to now, you have simply eluded any comment on it.What you call dialectics I call historical materialism. Specifically, historical materialism without what I call dialectics. Yes, words are confusing.

The system you've described seems to me eminently reasonable, and free from the mysticism we both dislike. It's just not what most marxists would call dialectical, so it's not included in my complaints about explanations of dialectics being incomprehensible.

So no, I don't have to admit anything. Perhaps in the Philosophy departments of American colleges people waste their time wondering about the Anti-Duhring. In History or Sociology departments of Brazilian universities such things aren't taken into account.I'm glad to hear it. Here in the philosophy departments of England, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Hegel all tend to blur into one another, because they're quoted, but not read.

LuÃs Henrique

16th March 2012, 12:11

Er, yes. My mistake.

I see. Do you know of any "analytical Marxists" that haven't slipped from camp 2) to camp 1)?

I'm sure you know more about them than I do, but not all French socialists were dreamers or moralising finger waggers - some of the were physiocrats, after all. And plenty of English politicos were backward looking romantics.

That would be part of my point. French socialism is based on class struggle.

This thread is a search for just that third componant. Assuming it does exist.

If it doesn't exist, there is no actual difference between Marx and his predecessors like Hodgskin or Thompson.

I'm reading Cohen's 'Karl Marx's Theory of History'. It's one of those books which is more useful for what it argues against than what it argues for.

So, "founder of the no-bullshit school of Marxism" is somewhat of an exaggeration, isn't it?

Are they? Tell that to the christians who construct prophecies using skip codes and anagrams of biblical passages.

Er, the kabbalah certainly uses such numerological techniques, but it cannot be reduced to them. It is an essentially Jewish school of mystic philosophy.

The animistic language is still there - and even today we still use words like 'living' and 'vital' for ideas we like, and 'dead', 'static', 'dry' and 'wooden' for those we don't.

The "animistic language" is still here, and it is not going to go away anytime soon. I don't know how Wittgenstein's own "philosophy of ordinary language" has been converted into "its opposite", ie, a normative set of rules that seek to ban the use of metaphors and abstract nouns, but I am pretty sure this is an unvalid development. The point of Wittgenstein - to the extent that he would have a valid point - would not be that we shouldn't use metaphors such as,

Marxism is a living tradition only when connected to class struggle.
You must be kidding.

But, on the contrary, that in ordinary language people use words like 'living' or 'must' in such contexts without confusing them with their non-metaphoric use, and that philosophers should follow suit.

Hegel believed the process of thought and the process of universal (and political) change were of the same type. I don't think Engels made a clean break with that notion, instead smudging and fudging the issue.

Yes, this is more or less my point. It is also Marx's criticism of Hegel in the Grundrisse.

What you call dialectics I call historical materialism. Specifically, historical materialism without what I call dialectics. Yes, words are confusing.

I am curious on why you call it "historical materialism" since for you materialism seems to be a metaphysic position.

The system you've described seems to me eminently reasonable, and free from the mysticism we both dislike. It's just not what most marxists would call dialectical, so it's not included in my complaints about explanations of dialectics being incomprehensible.

OK, thank you. So I suppose we can now agree that a reasonable, understandable, non-trivial, and not self-evidently false description of "dialectics" can be made, and that such description is coherent with what Karl Marx writes in the Grundrisse. Can we?

If so, then you complaint gets reduced to such version not being "what most Marxists would call dialectics", ie to it not being majoritary among Marxists. My experience with academic Marxists is the other way round; admittedly it is biased because my education put me in contact with Marxist sociology, economics, anthropology and, above all, history, but seldom with Marxist "philosophy" - if such thing exists.

My experience with Brazilian Marxist political organisations is mixed. Most of them do not care about dialectics one way or other; with some luck they apply a method of analysis that can be related to what Marx speaks of in the Grundrisse, usually heavily influenced from what use Lenin or Trotsky have made of it before them. With less luck, it gets so much distorted as to be completely unmaterialistic and/or antidialectical. Particularly there is a reformist trend to reduce analysis to a search of arguments to demonstrate the impossibility of radical action, and a mostly Trotskyist trend to reduce analysis to a complaint about the behaviour of other organisations.

Other political organisations did give importance to Engels/Plekhanov brand of "dialectics" - though usually via Stalinist vulgarisations such as that of Georges Politzer - and used such thing as some kind of ideological glue to keep the organisation united. They are as of 2012 basically extinct though.

I'm glad to hear it. Here in the philosophy departments of England, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Hegel all tend to blur into one another, because they're quoted, but not read.

And to what extent are Marxists, and specifically non-analytic Marxists, relevant in the philosophy departments of British universities, if at all?

As far as I know, there is an important academic tradition of British Marxist historians - Christopher Hill, Perry Anderson, E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, etc. From what I have read of them - mostly Anderson, and most recently Thompson - they don't seem to have any use for Engelsian "dialectics".

Luís Henrique

Strannik

16th March 2012, 17:26

That sounds a lot like "my" red-green materialist dialectic and the red-green theory of life, community, and revolution I've derived from it. It is also quite similar to the purpose and accomplishment of Fritjof Capra's living systems theory presented in The Web of Life. This work successfully captures life's organizational relations--the relations leftists must reproduce in revolutionary processes and the realized human communities of the future.

How familiar are you with this "field" of living organization analysis? Can you say more? You were beginning to sing my song. Are you familiar with the Santa Fe Institute? And where or what is "NFB"?

I believe there can be an integration of the Marxist materialist dialectic and the new sciences of organization that will bring them both to life.

I'm a postgraduate student of business information technology. Software developers who are tasked with building software for an organization face a problem quite similar to Marx - how do you create a conceptual model of an evolving, changing system?

As such they have developed tools or methodologies that often remind me of Marx. Establishing classes is one of the first steps of object-oriented software design. Zachman framework is a tool for thinking about the same organization from different perspectives - and Ollman claims that Marx uses similar multilevel analysis.

That does not mean, that method of Marx and modern system analysis are the same thing, but they are certainly related, I belive. There are too many similarities. One key difference is that software developers are limited by their business interests. They do not analyze living systems to find their problems, sometimes they try to cover them up in order to get the client's money.

I haven't heard about Capra before, I try to get his book somewhere so I could form an opinion. Nor have I heard about Santa Fe institute - but looks like they are doing very useful research for future socialist movements.

I live in former USSR and Marx is currently not exactly popular in universities.

Strannik

16th March 2012, 18:14

I'd say this about dialectical "laws". They make some sense to me when they are not taken as laws of the reality - ie that which is analyzed - but as rules that the analysts should follow themselves when creating the conceptual models.

For example "interpenetration of opposites" teaches the analyst to look for connections even among entities and classes that are seemingly completely unrelated. That does not mean that two random things have to be connected, but you should certainly not exclude such a possibility. So perhaps the laws of dialectics put the analyst into correct mindset for analysing the world?

It seems to me, that Wittgenstein was above all opposed to a situation, where someone believes that they have "figured it all out" and can now stop observing and interpreting the world. He belived, that we can approach the truth only when we keep at it constantly.

My understanding of marxist method is that the conceptual model resulting from it is so dynamic, that we are also forced to keep observing and updating our understanding of the world - otherwise we cannot be sure which point of the model is currently congruent with reality. As such marxist worldview offers us largest possible amount of certainity - we understand the general historical processes, for example, but we cannot know where in history we are located unless we keep going out and communicating with people and nature.

Mr. Natural

16th March 2012, 18:37

Strannik, Thanks much for your interesting reply. So you're in the former USSR? Your region might be chaotic, but at least things are happening. The US is a capitalist-captured political wasteland.

I got a huge laugh a few years ago when George W Bush met Putin for the first time and remarked something to the effect that he looked deeply into Putin's eyes and saw his soul. Damn, I've seen some pictures of your current despot and always thought he had the unmistakable eyes of a KGB colonel.

I am a complete klutz on computers, but I know that software can employ organizational rules. Christopher Langton is the "father" of Artificial Life, which uses computers to mimic and evolve organizational relations. His is the "weak form" of AL, which searches for underlying relations and is quite opposed to the "strong" AL, which tries to create life. Langton's bottom-up AL is also the polar opposite of AI (artificial intelligence), which is a top-down operation.

Here is the founding credo of Langton's AL: "Life is not a property of matter per se, but the organization of that matter."

Langton was fired from the Santa Fe Institute, the center for studying the organization of complexity, in 1998 for reasons of which I'm not aware. Probably he was still the ultra-creative "loose cannon" when SFI went into conservative decline in the mid-1990s.

There are two terrific books on the SFI that are clearly written and were quite popular. They are Complexity: The Emerging Science at the edge of Order and Chaos (1992), by M. Mitchell Waldrop; and Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos (1999), by Roger Lewin. I love these books for they gave me an idea of the pervasive organizational liveliness underlying the "things" of life.

The process of life is created by and composed of self-organizing material systems, and Ollman shows how Hegelian philosophy, Marx's materialist revision of Hegel, and the materialist dialectic uncannily capture life and society as organic, systemic processes. Capra's triangle then models life's organizational, relational genius.

Yes, Ollman reveals how Marx employed vantage points and levels of generality in the systems he abstracts for study. I am very pleasantly surprised you have encountered Ollman, by the way. Most Revlefters are doing their best to avoid him--and therefore succeed in avoiding Marx's materialist dialectic.

I am slowly getting into the history of the Russian Revolution and the USSR. Can you recommend a "best" political-psychological biography of Lenin?

I'm waiting for a good discussion of Machism, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, et al at Revleft. Is there a book here you could recommend?

My red-green best.

Mr. Natural

17th March 2012, 17:51

Strannik, Your second post came up after I replied to your first. I'd like to comment on your statement, "I'd say this about dialectical 'laws.' They make some sense to me when they are not taken as laws of the reality--ie that which is analyzed--but as rules that the analyst should follow themselves when creating the conceptual model."

I will suggest that dialectical "laws" are useful in the manner you describe because they model real, living relations. These relations are illuminated and confirmed by the new sciences of organizational relations.

This new science is absent in Ollman, and Capra's Web of Life has no overt Marxism. So here is an example of the red-green synthesis I am promoting. Here is Capra unintentionally remarking scientifically on the dialectical law of the transformation of quantity into quality. Note the Bogdanov, too.

"[Bogdanov] emphasizes in particular that the tension between crisis and transformation is central to the formation of complex systems. Foreshadowing the work of Ilya Prigogine, Bogdanov shows how organizational crisis manifests itself as a breakdown of the existing systemic balance and at the same time represents an organizational transition to a new state of balance."

So, Strannik, you are ever so correct when you muse, "so perhaps the laws of dialectics put the analyst into the correct mindset for analysing the world?" Your insight is important, and its correctness comes from the similarity of dialectical laws and natural laws, as revealed by the new science.

I may be alone at Revleft in attempting to use the materialist dialectic in the manner employed and envisioned by Marx and Engels. Do you have any references, Strannik, to any other such persons? I would like to connect with them; they will be lonely, too.

My red-green best.

Kronsteen

18th March 2012, 02:13

I'd say this about dialectical "laws". They make some sense to me when they are not taken as laws of the reality - ie that which is analyzed - but as rules that the analysts should follow themselves when creating the conceptual models.

That sounds good, but how does it differ from just having a larger, vaguer theory?

If you have a rule that your conceptual model of a part of the world should in some way exhibit 'contradictions', 'opposites' and 'transformations', how is that not theory about which other theories are likely to be true, or useful?

I will suggest that dialectical "laws" are useful in the manner you describe because they model real, living relations. These relations are illuminated and confirmed by the new sciences of organizational relations.

If the laws model something real, that's just a way of saying they're true - at least according to the marxist notion of 'proof by practice', which is what epistemologists outside the marxist tradition know as philosophical 'pragmatism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism)'.

Kronsteen

18th March 2012, 02:46

If it doesn't exist, there is no actual difference between Marx and his predecessors like Hodgskin or Thompson.

I don't know anything about Thompson. I don't recall Hodgskin or Robert Owen mentioning working-class revolution. That, I would suggest, is the most important difference between Marx and the socialists before him.

I don't know how Wittgenstein's own "philosophy of ordinary language" has been converted into "its opposite"

Why do you think I'm a follower of Wittgenstein? Not that in either of his periods he railed against metaphorical or exaggerated language. Non-propositional language in his early work, yes. But much of the blue and brown books is taken up with questions of why some metaphors are common and others are not.

I am curious on why you call it "historical materialism" since for you materialism seems to be a metaphysic position.

Do you have a proof that the world is material? Specifically, do you have one that doesn't presuppose materialism? And a particular epistemic model, which doesn't presuppose itself? What would constitute evidence against this proof? What exactly do you mean by 'material' anyway?

Yes, obviously the statement 'the world is material as opposed to mental, spiritual, linguistic or anything else' is a metaphysical one. It's just that people who think they have no metaphysical beliefs simply have beliefs which they don't call metaphysical.

OK, thank you. So I suppose we can now agree that a reasonable, understandable, non-trivial, and not self-evidently false description of "dialectics" can be made

Certainly it is possible to propose such a theory, and call it 'dialectics'. Whether or not it's identical with Marx's position is another matter.

and that such description is coherent with what Karl Marx writes in the Grundrisse. Can we?

I'll let you know when I've finished reading it.

a mostly Trotskyist trend to reduce analysis to a complaint about the behaviour of other organisations.

Ah, you have met the IST! Yes, my beloved comrades do love to accuse everyone else of being sectarian.

And to what extent are Marxists, and specifically non-analytic Marxists, relevant in the philosophy departments of British universities, if at all?

There's a few old activists still floating around. But they have much more influence as activists than as theorists.

there is an important academic tradition of British Marxist historians - Christopher Hill, Perry Anderson, E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, etc. From what I have read of them - mostly Anderson, and most recently Thompson - they don't seem to have any use for Engelsian "dialectics".

EP Thompson's the one I've read and...yes, like most of the best marxist writers, he has no interest in the official philosophy.

LuÃs Henrique

18th March 2012, 13:58

I don't know anything about Thompson. I don't recall Hodgskin or Robert Owen mentioning working-class revolution. That, I would suggest, is the most important difference between Marx and the socialists before him.

And where does Karl Marx takes his idea of a working class revolution?

Why do you think I'm a follower of Wittgenstein? Not that in either of his periods he railed against metaphorical or exaggerated language. Non-propositional language in his early work, yes. But much of the blue and brown books is taken up with questions of why some metaphors are common and others are not.I don't presume that you are a "follower of Wittgenstein"; I presume that much of you criticism of Engelsian dialectics is taken from Ms. Lichtenstein, who in turn claims to have grounded it in Wittgenstein.

Do you have a proof that the world is material?No, for it is impossible.

Specifically, do you have one that doesn't presuppose materialism?Even less.

And a particular epistemic model, which doesn't presuppose itself?No, it is also impossible.

See, here is exactly the problem. Any epistemic model will be either incomplete, or it will assume itself. Those issues would belong to what Wittgenstein would have called "bedrock". And so, what I am saying is that some kind of "foundationalism" is unavoidable. And that is why ChristopherKoch is wrong in presuming to have no "philosophical positions": you can only understand the world through epistemic models, and epistemic models pressupose philosophical positions. Now, I do prefer a kind of materialist "foundation"; others prefer idealist "foundations", as Wittgenstein. I also don't think that actually refusing any "foundation" is possible without solipsism, so that trying to do it while denying solipsism will lead to naïve positions, that assume some kind of "foundation" without realising it.

What would constitute evidence against this proof?Again, this is impossible.

What exactly do you mean by 'material' anyway?That everything that exists is made, in a sence or other, of matter, patterned in space and time.

Yes, obviously the statement 'the world is material as opposed to mental, spiritual, linguistic or anything else' is a metaphysical one.It is a philosophical belief. You make the words 'philosophical' and 'metaphysical' synonims (following Ms. Lichtenstein, who takes this from Wittgenstein). I don't accept this, and I don't use these words as synonims (following Marx).

Certainly it is possible to propose such a theory, and call it 'dialectics'. Whether or not it's identical with Marx's position is another matter.So let's stop the irrational, knee-jerk reaction to the word.

Ah, you have met the IST! Yes, my beloved comrades do love to accuse everyone else of being sectarian.I don't think so - who are the IST in Brazil? I have met Lambertists (Organisation Socialiste Internationaliste), Morenists (International Leninist Tendency), Posadists, and Altamirists; they have the common trait of substituting the religious belief that the world is ready for revolution since 1938, when "the productive forces have stopped growth" for a materialist analysis. I have also met Mandelists, who have an altogether different set of problems, but not this particular one.

I don't think any of these cults have much to do with "dialectics of nature" anyway.

There's a few old activists still floating around. But they have much more influence as activists than as theorists.So, in short, the Engelsian brand of "dialectics" isn't that much important in British academic Marxism - is it that?

EP Thompson's the one I've read and...yes, like most of the best marxist writers, he has no interest in the official philosophy.And he alone is probably more important than all of the "few old activists still floating around" you mention - or isn't he?

If I may suggest you something, I think you would have a lot of pleasure reading Perry Anderson - particularly the Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Outlines of the Absolutist State. Solid Marxist history, with actually "no bullshit" - either of the Hegelian-Engelsian brand, or of the analytic variety you are finding in Cohen.

Luís Henrique

Kronsteen

18th March 2012, 15:39

And where does Karl Marx takes his idea of a working class revolution?

That's a very good question. My party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Workers_Party_%28UK%29) claims he got it from meeting the working class. I imagine the French Revolution had a role in demonstrating the potential role of the working class.

I presume that much of you criticism of Engelsian dialectics is taken from Ms. Lichtenstein

Actually no. I've had reservations about the 'dialectical logic' and 'marxist philosophy' of the UK-SWP since I joined it in 2001. In teen years I was impressed with both the Wittgensteins, and Rosa's site was the first major resource I found for anti-dialectics.

But I don't agree with him or her that there are no genuine philosophical problems. And I don't agree that Engelsian principles are always false or meaningless - just that when they're true, they're highly mystified trivialities.

what I am saying is that some kind of "foundationalism" is unavoidable

I agree. Marxists I've spoken with about this claim that marxism avoids the search for a bedrock or foundation by treating the material world, the sociality of mankind, and labour as the basis of consciousness...as self-evident.

In other words, they have their foundation, and they regard anyone who questions it as infected with bourgeois ideology. Apparently after the revolution everyone see the world clearly enough to see why it's made of matter.

You make the words 'philosophical' and 'metaphysical' synonims

No. Metaphysics fits entirely inside philosophy, so every metaphysical question is a philosophical question, but not vice versa.

I don't know how it is in Brazil, but in the UK (and I think in Germany), the influence of the Logical Positivists is still felt. Not that most of their ideas are accepted or even known, but their habit of referring to anything they don't like or can't understand as 'metaphysics'.

Even the marxists have picked up this habit. Which is odd, because they also use 'positivist' as an insult - again without knowing what it means.

let's stop the irrational, knee-jerk reaction to the word [dialectics].

Plato had a dialectic - socratic questioning. Descartes had a dialectic - radical doubt. Kant has antinomic thinking and reduction to categories. All these I think are very valuable tools.

But on this thread we're talking about the worthless dialectic of Engels, and how it gets mistaken for the useful but mysterious dialectic of Marx.

I have no objection to the word - only to the Engelsian babble it denotes to almost all marxists.

who are the IST in Brazil

The IST (International Socialist Tendency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Socialist_Tendency)) are a loose alliance of broadly Trotskyist groups. In North America the IST group is called the IS. In Brazil it's Revolutas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutas).

Posadists

The ones who wanted to bring about socialism by starting a nuclear war? One of my favourite insane ideas.

the Engelsian brand of "dialectics" isn't that much important in British academic Marxism

Yes. I think it's much more important to the theorists kept by activist groups. Every group needs a few intellectuals to give the impression that there's some deep thinking going into policies.

I think you would have a lot of pleasure reading Perry Anderson

Thank you, I'll have a look.

LuÃs Henrique

18th March 2012, 17:37

That's a very good question. My party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Workers_Party_%28UK%29) claims he got it from meeting the working class. I imagine the French Revolution had a role in demonstrating the potential role of the working class.

That's a good approach, one perhaps that would improve the theories of most leftist organisations. However, many other people were in contact with the working class at the time (Hodgskin, Thompson and Owen being obvious examples), and haven't come with the same conclusions as Marx.

Actually no. I've had reservations about the 'dialectical logic' and 'marxist philosophy' of the UK-SWP since I joined it in 2001. In teen years I was impressed with both the Wittgensteins, and Rosa's site was the first major resource I found for anti-dialectics.

I am coming to wonder whether this thing isn't a SWP problem, unduly inflated into a problem of the whole left.

I agree. Marxists I've spoken with about this claim that marxism avoids the search for a bedrock or foundation by treating the material world, the sociality of mankind, and labour as the basis of consciousness...as self-evident.

Yes, I think they do that... and that they are right in doing so.

In other words, they have their foundation, and they regard anyone who questions it as infected with bourgeois ideology. Apparently after the revolution everyone see the world clearly enough to see why it's made of matter.

I think the alternative foundations indeed are more fitting to the defence of bourgeois society and privileges; I don't think all people who adhere to them take such consequences. Incoherence plays a huge role in the thinking of the immense majority of people - and I don't think this is a major problem or even a bad thing at all.

I dislike going into much depth in discussing how people will behave in a post-revolutionary society. The whole basis of society will be different, so our own guesses, biased by our belonging to a capitalist society and by our need to fight against it, are quite probably wrong. That said, it seems to me that bourgeois relations of production not existing any more, ideological constructs that justify them are going to become obsolete, and fade into non-existence. I think probably most of idealist philosophy, linguistic idealism included, will go that way. I don't think this is a valid reason to be a revolutionary, nor that the possibility that it wouldn't happen - and certainly it is a possibility - should dishearten anyone from the path of revolution.

No. Metaphysics fits entirely inside philosophy, so every metaphysical question is a philosophical question, but not vice versa.

OK; thence our disagreement is a little bit different: you think that the disjunction between materialism and idealism is part of those problems that qualify as "metaphysical"; I don't believe that.

I don't know how it is in Brazil, but in the UK (and I think in Germany), the influence of the Logical Positivists is still felt. Not that most of their ideas are accepted or even known, but their habit of referring to anything they don't like or can't understand as 'metaphysics'.

That's something they take from Comte, I believe. They certainly exist in Brazil, but their influence is strictly academic, and, I believe, quite restricted to Philosophy departments. I don't think anyone gives a second thought on them in History, Sociology, Anthropology, or Linguistic departments.

Even the marxists have picked up this habit. Which is odd, because they also use 'positivist' as an insult - again without knowing what it means.

I think Marxists refer to a whole different set of things when using the word 'metaphysics' - not the things they don't like or don't understand (and, even if so, the things Marxists don't like or understand are different from the things positivists don't like or understand).

I certainly don't use "positivist" as an empty insult. It has a concrete meaning for me, denoting a particular school of thought (or, more precisely, a set of different but related schools in different academic departments - a positivist historian is very unlikely to be a Logical Positivist, and positivist philosopher is unlikely to be a Comtian Positivist, which is more likely what a Historian would be). But those schools do have a characteristic methodological approach, which I deem wrong and anti-scientific, and I have no qualms on calling people positivists when they adhere to such approach or its consequences.

Plato had a dialectic - socratic questioning. Descartes had a dialectic - radical doubt. Kant has antinomic thinking and reduction to categories. All these I think are very valuable tools.

But on this thread we're talking about the worthless dialectic of Engels, and how it gets mistaken for the useful but mysterious dialectic of Marx.

The title of this thread is "The materialist dialectic as mysticism", so I don't think it is about the "worthless dialectics of Engels", which quite certainly isn't materialist at all. I also don't see how Marx's dialectics is "mysterious", except for those who don't want it to exist.
I have no objection to the word - only to the Engelsian babble it denotes to almost all marxists.

I have to disagree. I don't think it has such meaning for "almost all marxists". I don't think it is a problem to most Marxist organisations that I know - including those that have other, perhaps even worse, problems.

The IST (International Socialist Tendency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Socialist_Tendency)) are a loose alliance of broadly Trotskyist groups. In North America the IST group is called the IS. In Brazil it's Revolutas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutas).

I see. It is a small tendency, within an equally small party, and apparently not noticeable by either an outstanding theoretical contribution or a particularly insane set of ideas. Which is not a problem in itself, but would explain why I have never noticed their existence (just as they most likely haven't noticed the existence of my own organisation, which is probably smaller).

Now if I had noticed them, I would probably still not have been impacted by their beliefs on the subject of Engelsian dialectics. They would have appeared to me as an organisation holding precise (or imprecise) political positions, supporting a particular line in the unionist, or students', or peasant's, or neighbourhood movements, different from the majority in the PSOL in some points but not others, closer to or more different from the PT, or the PT's left, or my own organisation's positions, etc. I very much doubt that I would notice their stand on dialectics if I didn't seat with them in a pub to drink some beer, and in any case would probably believe such position a mere apolitical appendix of their general position. Unless they woud publicly speak on the actual issues by referring to dialectics (we should go on strike because of dialectics, or we should oppose the PT's government because of dialectics, etc.) I doubt very much they do this, including because this would probably make them quite a joke in the Brazilian left - not as much as the Posadists and their intergallactic socialism, maybe, but probably more than the Sparts and their theories about how we should have defended the Soviet Union in the past. And in that case I would probably already heard of them.

So, I think, as I hinted above, that this may be an internal problem of the IST, or perhaps even just of the SWP.

The SWP is a comparatively big leftist organisation, which probably sparks much tension in maintaining their unity, as more people certainly means more different ideas.

It is also a Trotskyist organisation, which probably means even more tensions, as it is, I suppose, an organisation (as you hint at with your comment that I probably know their Brazilian sister organisation) structured around the belief that capitalist contradictions have already been stretched to the extreme (and for decades), while the darned revolution stubbornly insists in not happening.

And so perhaps the Engelsian dialectics have a role in keeping these tensions from spliting the organisation. And if so, they (the dialectics) are maybe seen by some more independent-minded members as an oppresive straight-jacket against dissent, and mistaken for the cause of the restriction of internal democracy, instead of its use being more correctly analysed as a consequence of such problem.

Yes. I think it's much more important to the theorists kept by activist groups. Every group needs a few intellectuals to give the impression that there's some deep thinking going into policies.

Indeed. In some cases, we would have to wonder, there may even actually be some deep thinking going into policies. Or not?

Thank you, I'll have a look.

I am quite certain that you won't be disgruntled.

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

18th March 2012, 19:04

Kronsteen

18th March 2012, 19:30

I've been on left sites for almost a year now, and have yet to run into another dialectical materialist of the Engelsian "dialectics of nature" variety.

There isn't a dialectics group - though there's an inactive anti-dialectics group (http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=63).

If Mr Henrique is right in his last post - and I've a nasty feeling he is - then you might find some 'dialectics of nature' people in the trotskyist group (http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=13), or the ISO group (http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=162).

Apart from that, try searching threads for the key word 'dialectics', and search out those who argue against the poster Rosa Lichtenstein.

Just be warned, you're into the idea of a 'new science' - a lot of dialectics fans are decidedly anti-science in their outlook. Some view marxism as a finished and complete science - indeed, the only genuine science. Others just hate 'the scientific outlook' as the basis of technology and industry, and thus the basis of industrial capitalism.

LuÃs Henrique

18th March 2012, 20:40

Kronsteen, Luis Henrique, Others, You two are having a lot of fun and have considerable knowledge in areas where I have considerable ignorance. I'm learning from you. Just the same, your discussions aren't goal-oriented, and I'm a revolutionary organizing theorist.

Could you two help me out? I've been on left sites for almost a year now, and have yet to run into another dialectical materialist of the Engelsian "dialectics of nature" variety. Do you know of any other such materialist dialecticians? I am desperately interested in finding any such red-green Marxists and will go to considerable lengths to communicate with them.

C'mon, comrades, surely you know of other comrades who are as deluded as myself. I'm immersed in a dying society and surrounded by stooges of The System. I need some people with whom I can conspire! Surely you know of a couple of such persons?? Might there even be some sort of relevant organization?

My red-green but idle best.

I fear that other "dialectic materialists of the Engelsian variety" will be a disconnected bunch of people with widely varying and incompatible politics, that you wouldn't be able to put together without a lot of intestine strife. Because one cannot coherently derive a political line from general "philosophical" points like those Engels makes in his "Dialectics of Nature" and "Anti-Duhring". Conversely, I would say that any political organisation working on building working class politics will have people of several - and incompatible - philosophical views.

In other words, I am saying that politics and philosophy don't walk hand in hand. For my part, I don't work for philosophical unity, I work for political unity - this being perhaps the biggest reason I dislike those who want to impose their "philosophical" sectarianism unto others, like Ms. Lichtenstein. And so, while I am not unwilling to take part in philosophical discussions, I do it mostly for the sake of fighting such sectarian tendencies, not for the sake of winning other people for my own philosophical approach.

You seem to be interested in what you call "new sciences", and you often quote two names in relation to these "new sciences": Capra and Prigogine. I have read little of Capra, as you know; what he has to say seems to me completely incompatible with Marxism - and indeed with any actual pro-working class position - be it influenced by Engels "dialectics of nature" or not. Prigogine is a much better and more interesting writer (or so he is when he cooperates with Isabelle Stengers); The New Alliance is an excellent book - on philosophy and science; I don't think anyone could extract a political line from it, beyond a confirmation that the ordinary physicist attitude of contempt versus all other sciences is very invalid, and so are, consequently, the several attempts to ground other sciences into Physics' methods and theories, and attempts to ground politics on such mistaken epystemologies.

What else are "new sciences"? System theory? Chaos theory? Goedel's theorem? (Have you read Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach? It is a much better approach than Capra's.) Perhaps you should post a little bit more in the Science and Environment forum, and raise questions about those scientific approaches there?

Or perhaps your best take could be to approach the actual leftist organisations with a critique of their organisational praxis? (that can be a painful experience, mind it.)

Sorry if that doesn't help; but, "immersed in a dying society and surrounded by stooges of The System", as you put it, I don't feel that the way out can be anything else but political, and so I have struggled to build political unity among workers.

ETA: E.P. Thompson's (whom I mentioned above in discussing with Kronsteen) The Making of the English Working Class discusses organisational forms of the early worker's movement in England. The debates within the International between Bakuninists and Marxists are, in part at least, on organisational issues; Hal Draper gives an acute account of it from the Marxist perspective in The Two Souls of Socialism (http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/index.htm). Also of interest, perhaps, is the organisational aspect of the debate between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, of which What is to Be Done is, of course, the classic Leninist Book. A different approach, if I may quote myself, is here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=620069&postcount=162).

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

19th March 2012, 17:00

Kronsteen, Luis Henrique, Thanks for your generous replies. I truly appreciate them. However, there was little real information, for I truly appear to be alone in employing the "new science" to breathe life and praxis into the materialist dialectic.

Luis, the new sciences to which I constantly refer all work with the organization of matter. Matter has self-organized into the life process on Earth. Life is a process created by and composed of self-organizing material systems such as yourself or your heart or your family or political party. Those last two material systems are of human construct and must be organized in the pattern by which matter comes to life. The first two systems enjoy what I term "ecological mind': they are automatically intregated into life, whereas humans must achieve this organization and integration consciously.

These new sciences of organization, as I term them, began with evolution and continued through the new physics and cosmology into cybernetics, chaos theory, and the culmination of this--systems-complexity science.

IMO, Capra's triangle is a transcendently radical, revolutionary mental tool. Please do not underestimate Capra; he is a cutting-edge theoretical physcist and philosopher of science. You noted approval of Prigogine, Luis, and Capra thanks Prigogine in the "Acknowledgments" in The Web of Life for "two inspiring conversations during the early 1980s about his theory of dissipative structures."

Luis, Ilya Prigogine only conversed with a few radical scientists he respected--scientists who were not hung up in reductionist insults to life and its organization.

My red-green thanks.

Strannik

20th March 2012, 16:44

If you have a rule that your conceptual model of a part of the world should in some way exhibit 'contradictions', 'opposites' and 'transformations', how is that not theory about which other theories are likely to be true, or useful?

It is - it's a theory about theories. And if applied correctly, it gives us a theory about actual world that admits that it is nothing more than a conceptual model in constant need of observations and updates. I believe that the "contradictions", "opposites" and "transformations" orginate from hegelian thought. They try to prescribe to reality what kind of fuzzyness it can contain and come to a conclusion, that apparent chaos "out there" is merely an illusion. Perhaps Marx would have simply said that no idea or concept we create in our minds can be treated like perfect, isolated, finished unit. A theory that applies its concepts in such manner is less likely to be true and useful.

IF I'm correct, then Dialectical Materialism as applied by Marx leads in practice to a similar conclusion like Wittgensteins thought. Wittgenstein said (if I understand correctly) that philosophical concepts are useless, because they refer to things that are not measurable (or simply do not exist). No point arguing about them. Marx says then, that you can use philosophical concepts provided that you are constantly prepared to test their momentary validity in practice. Because they refer to fuzzy and flowing processes in the real world.

But I'd like to point out that I'm under no illusion that I'm the smartest guy in this thread.

Strannik

20th March 2012, 17:04

I will suggest that dialectical "laws" are useful in the manner you describe because they model real, living relations. These relations are illuminated and confirmed by the new sciences of organizational relations.

This new science is absent in Ollman, and Capra's Web of Life has no overt Marxism. So here is an example of the red-green synthesis I am promoting. Here is Capra unintentionally remarking scientifically on the dialectical law of the transformation of quantity into quality. Note the Bogdanov, too.

"[Bogdanov] emphasizes in particular that the tension between crisis and transformation is central to the formation of complex systems. Foreshadowing the work of Ilya Prigogine, Bogdanov shows how organizational crisis manifests itself as a breakdown of the existing systemic balance and at the same time represents an organizational transition to a new state of balance."

So, Strannik, you are ever so correct when you muse, "so perhaps the laws of dialectics put the analyst into the correct mindset for analysing the world?" Your insight is important, and its correctness comes from the similarity of dialectical laws and natural laws, as revealed by the new science.

I came to Marx about ten years ago with the intention to find out what was wrong with his theory. Why did USSR fail so miserably?

I think, that then I held similar beliefs to yours. I tried to develop some kind of "thermodynamic marxism/materialism" - if I understand you correctly, you refer with "new science" to Chaos theory/thermodynamics.

I also had this idea, that thermodynamics and dialectics can be unified and I noted similarities between "bifurcation points" in TD and revolutionary development/quantity-quality changes in DM.

I have abandoned this project for two reasons.

1) Even if DM and chaos theory/new sciences can be synthesized into some predictive "thermodynamics of history", I'm simply not smart enough to do this. If it is possible, it would certainly be very useful. I can't exclude that it is possible - we are after all a complex natural systems covered by natural laws. But I'm not able to understand society, physics and math on this level :)

2) Also, I don't think that society actually IS so complex. LIFE is a natural process, but society is more like a conceptual model. We dream up rules, "gods", "demons" and try do live as if they were real as long as possible.

For this reason I believe at the moment, that the "physics of history" is not possible. Life and physics influence social concepts, but they are changed according to some different mechanic - for example dialectics. But this social dialectic is not the source of natural processes, it is their result. "As above, so below" is not true. Society is a conceptual abstraction, the best we can hope for is that it is dynamic enough to adapt itself to changing conditions.

PS. the best book I have read on Russian revolution, when it comes to facts, is "Bolsheviks in power" by Rabinovich. When it comes to theory, marxists.org is the place to be. :)

Lenin was so mythologized in USSR that the actual man was forgotten long ago. Trotsky did not exist in USSR, so the only leader still remembered is Stalin.

Mr. Natural

21st March 2012, 19:58

Strannik, Thanks much for your post. I'll get to it first tomorrow and reply in some detail.

I did want to note the difference between "thermodynamic theories" and the living systems theory I employ and relate to Marx's and Engels' materialist dialectic.

The second law of thermodynamics establishes that closed systems run down. They lose their energized connections and "die." Life, however, consists of self-organizing material systems that are open to their environment. They take in the energy and matter and maintain the external relations necessary to their being, while they discharge the "waste" that is essential to the being of others.

These living systems manifest a natural paradox: they are internally self-organized but dynamically interdependent with the rest of life. The internal self-organization of a living system determines which environmental relations and signals it will recognize and how it will behave in response. The environment thus triggers reactions, but a living system's self-organization determines which triggers it will recognize and how it will respond. Thus a bacterium might move toward sugar but avoid vinegar.

Kick a dog. The dog's response will be determined by its self-organization: its breed and individual history. The kick triggers, and the dog's self-organization responds.

Life has a universal patterned process/processive pattern. All of life consists of these self-organized material systems existing in dynamic interdendence with each other and their physical environment, and Capra's triangle models the universal pattern of organization of these living systems.

This triangle has the potential to become the popular revolutionary mental tool we have always needed. Marxism has historically been unable to organize successfully, but the new sciences of organization are now available--and unused and usually shunned.

I noted in another post today that these left sites reject the materialist dialectic as envisioned and employed by Marx and Engels, and ignore the revolutionary new science(s) of organization. Then I added that worst of all is that almost no one is interested in learning radical new tricks.

That life is composed of self-organizing living systems is fact. It is also fact that I'm the only person on these sites attempting to discuss the radical, revolutionary, transcendent concept of self-organization.

I'm not the smartest comrade on these sites either, Strannik. But I have Capra's triangle, and the triangle models life's genius. We can all become revolutionary geniuses of life and revolution, but to do so we must open our minds to the new sciences of living organization.

Erich Fromm: "Perception of the truth is not primarily a matter of intelligence, but of character."

My red(Marxist)-green(new scientific) best.

Mr. Natural

22nd March 2012, 16:54

Strannik, Thanks again for your fertile post. Let me quickly note that I do not have a background in science and have never taken a college course in science, philosophy, Marxism, political science, etc., which is both a strength and a weakness. I'm an autodidact, and have cultivated a radical political, psychological, and intellectual integrity and a thirst for deep understanding leading to praxis.

I don't believe Marxism failed in the fSU, but encountered impossible conditions and was effectively stillborn. My impression is that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were almost supernaturally able to initiate a revolution that was doomed to fail. This set up a situation in which a cunning Stalin was able to become the mob boss of his ruined neighborhood. But I'm a learner here.

Your recommendation of Rabinowitch's The Bolsheviks In Power was spot on. I ordered it along with The Bolsheviks Come To Power several months ago, but have only received the latter so far. Rabinowitch does an amazing job of bringing the time and events to life.

Yes, it is hard to get a handle on Lenin. There's an important book to be written here. My impression of Lenin is that he was a brilliant, dedicated, conscientious Marxist revolutionary. I find him of value in philosphical and dialectical matters, too. But I'm just learning ...

You mentioned the similarity of bifurcation points to the dialectical law of quantity into quality. I would add phase transitions to bifurcation points and--most important--I would include the major cosmic, living phenomenon of emergence. It then becomes way past shocking that neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory excludes both emergence and self-organization. This is so clearly wrong! So we no longer worship God but genes??? Life emerges from the self-organization of matter!!! Life is a materialist dialectic!!!!!! (I'm getting revved up)

Strannik, "the synthesis of DM and chaos theory/new science" has been accomplished and portrayed by a simple mental tool that is potentially available to all: it is Capra's triangle.

When you wrote that you don't find society that complex, Strannik, were you alluding to its underlying relations? They are truly "simple," for they can be portrayed by Capra's triangle. However, they create the what I see as the great complexities of life and society. Here is a "new scientific" take on this from the Nobel laureate, Murray Gell-Mann, a major figure at the Santa Fe Institute (the center of systems-complexity research): "Life [thus society] is surface complexity arising out of deep simplicity."

Capra's triangle and the Marxist materialist dialectic attempt to engage this deep simplicity of life and society. The Hegelian/Marxist/Engelsian dialectic comes amazingly close to life's overall organizational relations, and this "philosophical dialectic" is now confirmed in its general relations by the "scientific dialectic" that is Capra's triangle.

Capra's triangle offers the genius of life to we who must become geniuses of life, and life's organizational genius is profoundly simple: it is the deep organizational simplicity that generates the surface complexity.

My red-green best.

Strannik

26th March 2012, 17:23

Sorry for my delayed answer. Lots of work.

I don't think anymore either that Marx failed in USSR. It's just what I thought initially when I got into this marxism thing. :)

My personal belief is that Lenin & Co were greatly helped by universal loathing that the majority of people felt for the old ideals because of the World War. My impression is that outside the major cities the support for (or understanding of) the Revolution was never that great, but everyone was certain that they did not want to die for the King and Country anymore.

My understanding is also that Stalin was the product of siege camp mentality under which the USSR continued its existence. A truly revolutionary society should be on the offensive, not defensive. Closed systems die out.

On society: what I meant was that its a simplified set of rules how to get by in a particular biological and technological environment. Actual, material society might be immensely complex, but our understanding of it is not. And I was thinking that this is what causes the historical "development through contradiction" - as people we try to either cling to a model that has proven itself OR reject it completely when we think its no longer valid.

I think I need to read Capra's book (Web of Life) before I can form an opinion on his systems theory. Going to order it as soon as possible.

Mr. Natural

26th March 2012, 21:19

Strannik, Thanks much for your continued engagement. Take your time. It appears you have a life to live, while my "life" at present consists of sending posts into what is usually the great emptiness of the internet in the morning and taking my dog on long walks in the afternoon. It's not a bad gig if you just like to hang out, but I'm a red-green revolutionary ...

You mentioned previously working on a thermodynamic approach to life, dialectics, and revolution. The living systems that create and compose the life process overcome the second law of thermodynamics. Here is Capra on thermodynamics and Prigogine's countering dissipative structures, which take in energy and dissipate waste and thereby keep themselves and the life process going: (Web p. 189)

"The second law of thermodynamics means that any closed system will tend toward the state of maximum probability, which is a state of maximum disorder. Mathematically this state can be defined as the attractor state of thermal equilibrium....
"Classical thermodynamics, then, is appropriate to describe phenomena at equilibrium or close to equilibriuim. Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures, by contrast, applies to thermodynamic phenomena far from equilibrium, where molecules are not in random motion but are interlinked through multiple feedback loops, described by nonlinear equations ... A dissipative structure maintains itself far from equilibrium and may even move farther and farther away from it through a series of bifurcations.
"At the bifurcation points, states of higher order may emerge spontaneously. However, this does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics. The total entropy of the system keeps increasing, but this increase in entropy is not a uniform increase in disorder. In the living world order and disorder are always created simultaneously.
"According to Prigogine, dissipative structures are islands of order in a sea of disorder, maintaining and even increasing their order at the expense of greater disorder in the environment. For example, living organisms take in ordered structures (food) from their environment, use them as resources for their metabolism, and dissipate structures of lower order (waste). In this way order 'floats in disorder', as Prigogine puts it, while the overall entropy keeps increasing in accordance with the second law."

Strannik, please notice how clearly Capra writes. His topics are deep and profound, but he presents them in a manner persons such as myself can understand (but only with much study).

Prigogine isn't Capra's final word on living systems, either. This comes from Maturana and Varela and their theory of autopoiesis, which is extensively discusses in Web.

I've given perhaps ten copies of Webto others over the years and am staring at a brand new copy as I type this. Damn! I sure wish I could hand it to you!

My red-green best.

MEGAMANTROTSKY

26th March 2012, 21:32

I apologize in advance, because I did not read all ten pages of this thread. But I do have a concern about the dialectical method. This concern need not be overstated, for I do not reject dialectics. But I believe there are some major gaps in the explanations, even from some of the best thinkers in the Marxist armory. Trotsky fought for the dialectic but unfortunately he did not leave us very much besides half of one essay on the subject. Marx is even harder to understand in that regard. Engels is a bit better, but since his Dialectics of Nature book was unfinished, I don't know if we can fully rely on it to further our understanding.

That having been said, it seems as though I will have to learn it the hard way. I do not object to this, but I wouldn't have so much of a problem with it if I knew what I was looking for.

Kronsteen

28th March 2012, 05:43

Trotsky fought for the dialectic but unfortunately he did not leave us very much besides half of one essay on the subject. Marx is even harder to understand in that regard. Engels is a bit better, but since his Dialectics of Nature book was unfinished, I don't know if we can fully rely on it to further our understanding.

The scarcity of founding texts is itself indicative, as is their poorness in comparison with the non-philosophical works of the same authors.

What sources do we have from the great marxist thinkers on dialectics? From memory:

Marx: The preface to the 2nd edition of Capital, Theses on Feuerbach
Engels: Anti-Duhring, the half finished 'Dialectics of Nature'
Lenin: 'The three components of Marxism', Conspectus of Hegel, Notebooks, Empiriocriticism
Trotsky: 'ABC of Dialectics'.
Mao': 'On Contradiction' and 'On Dialectics'.

The list could be expanded with such works as Althusser's 'Contradiction and Overdetermination', or the introductions to dialectics of George Novack or Stalin. There are also modern works like Rees's 'Algebra of Revolution', Ollman's 'Dance of the Dialectic' or Ted Grant's 'Reason in Revolt'.

But I don't think these add anything useful to the canon. Indeed, Grant's misunderstandings of science are embarrassing even to his followers. I find Rees superficial and bombastic, and Ollman vague and slippery.

So the first question is: Why is there so little primary material on dialectics? If, as Lenin argues, Marxism stands on three pillars - French Socialism, English Economics and German Philosophy - why did the giants of socialism almost ignore the third pillar?

From Engels there's one and a half books. But from Marx we get two pages of aphoristic notes, and some general allusions. Trotsky wrote of the importance of dialectics, but never explained why it was important, or really what it was - besides some rhetoric taken from Lenin. From Luxemburg we get...nothing at all, to my knowledge. Lenin repeats Plekhanov, who simplifies Engels.

Which leads to the second question: Given how good these people's other work was, why is their writing on dialectics so bad?

Engels tries to show that science and mathematics proves dialectics - but he gets both bizarrely wrong.

He asserts that in the equation 1+1=2, the two 1s are 'in contradiction'. He thinks evaporation only occurs at boiling point, and uses this misunderstanding to 'prove' that all change happens suddenly at thresholds. The most famous example of dialectical change...is actually a counter example.

Plekhanov follows Hegel in stating that one model of change in ideas - the extension of theories to account for observational anomalies - must be (a) the only way that ideas change and (b) also the way reality itself changes. Yes, it's a form of idealism.

Lenin repeats him, then defines 'matter' as 'the stuff of reality' and uses this to prove that...'reality is what is made of matter'. Before declaring that human sense organs put us in direct contact with reality, even when they're in error.

Now, it may be that these men were all great political leaders...who happened to share the delusion that they were also great philosophers. It's hardly unknown.

But if so, they'd also have the share the delusion that their political work was part of a much larger universal process, described in the philosophy. That's also hardly unknown - but mainly among insane cult leaders, not towering intellects and genuine revolutionaries.

Perhaps Luís Henrique is right, and only a few modern tendencies care about the third pillar of marxism, because marxism really only stands on two pillars.

And perhaps the philosophical works were minor distractions to their authors who dabbled in philosophy and tried to connect it tenuously to their real work, which was political. If so, they'd be surprised to find their modern followers trying to build the politics on the philosophy.

Let's hope so, because if dialectics fans are right, marxism is built on a vacuum.

LuÃs Henrique

28th March 2012, 15:25

The scarcity of founding texts is itself indicative, as is their poorness in comparison with the non-philosophical works of the same authors.

What sources do we have from the great marxist thinkers on dialectics? From memory:

Marx: The preface to the 2nd edition of Capital, Theses on Feuerbach
Engels: Anti-Duhring, the half finished 'Dialectics of Nature'
Lenin: 'The three components of Marxism', Conspectus of Hegel, Notebooks, Empiriocriticism
Trotsky: 'ABC of Dialectics'.
Mao': 'On Contradiction' and 'On Dialectics'.

Marx:

many letters, especially to Engels and to Kuggelmann
a chapter in the Grundrisse
a few youth works, namely the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, The German Ideology, and The Holy Family.

Perhaps Luís Henrique is right, and only a few modern tendencies care about the third pillar of marxism, because marxism really only stands on two pillars.Well, I have never said anything like that. On the contrary, I have explicitly said that Marx cannot be reduced to Ricardo; and if I haven't, let me say it now: Marx cannot be reduced to Babeuf or Flora Tristán either, nor to any combination between Ricardo and Tristán; if he could, he would be Hodgskin, or little more.

Let's hope so, because if dialectics fans are right, marxism is built on a vacuum.I reject the phrase "dialectics fans"; I think it is typical of dishonest and unintelligent political debate.

Marxism is built upon a method, not upon an Ontology. And, as Marx puts quite sharply, all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

Such method cannot be reduced to Hume, Ricardo, Voltaire, Rousseau, in a word, to any of his bourgeois predecessors, be it in the field of philosophy or in the field of economics. No more it can be reduced to any of his socialist predecessor, be them utopic, like Owen, Fourier, Cabet, or not utopic, like Babeuf, Hébert, Tristán. And yes, it is a method he derived from Hegel - though, of course, his appropriation of Hegel's method, is a critical one, appropriation and rejection in the same movement.

Anselm Jappe writes this (all emphases are mine):

... to Marx, "value" is not identical to "price". Value has no empyrical existence and is not possible to measure in particular cases, for the effective relations are infinitely more complex than our elementary examples - for instance, in the value of each commodity the value of other commodities that were necessary for production are almost always implied. In the composition of price, distinct from value, supply and demand take part, besides other factors. However, prices always gravitate around values, that in last instance do determine prices. The superficial reality of prices "shrouds, like a veil" the fundamental reality of values, without invalidating it at all, though. Modern bourgeois economic science deals exclusively with prices, and consequently with a mere phenomenic form; to such science, the category of value is useless philosophical speculation about a hypothetic "thing in itself".

And while I may disagree with much of Jappe, and while the above has nothing to do with Engels/Plekhanov/Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin/Mao/Politzer/whomever's Ontologies, here Jappe is being unimpeachably Marxist, and his sharp observation about the bourgeois "science" of economics points directly to the central issue; from there it is only necessary to proceed to demonstrate that, conversely, considering "the category of value" as "useless philosophical speculation about a hypothetic 'thing in itself'" entails the acritical acceptation of the categories of bourgeois economic life as a-historical, ontologically necessary, elemental forms of human life, and consequently the rejection of the possibility of any revolutionary change and the religious worship of capital and its avatar, money.

If Marxism indeed has only two pillars, it falls, and we would be do best in going to the market to make money for ourselves, instead of uselessly trying to fight the absolute nature of the world.

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

28th March 2012, 15:59

MEGAMANTROTSKY, Welcome to the fray. You're showing me that open mind that is in such short supply in this era of the stagnation and passivity of the left, and I'm most appreciative. You will find that the comrades in this thread are bright and knowledgable and that we conduct ourselves in a comradely manner, despite our deep current differences concerning dialectics.

I'm the guy who loves the materialist dialectic and claims to be able to bring it to life and praxis. Let's make this "easy" for you. Just read Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003), the cap to Ollman's lifelong immersion in the orgin and nature of the materialist dialectic as understood and employed by Marx.

Kronsteen finds Ollman "vague and slippery," but I believe he is just balking at engaging the "vague and slippery" relations of life and society. The materialist dialectic understands "nature, human society, and thought" as organic, systemic processes, which they are, and organic, systemic processes must be viewed in their dynamic interdependence--the interrelations that frustrate those who want precision in their politics and philosophy. But life is both precise and "vague and slippery": it consists of things and their interrelations.

Ollman will conclusively show you, I believe, that a very young Marx encountered Hegel and the philosophy of internal relations and its abstraction process and dialectical "laws," and had his mind blown wide open to the living relations of "nature, human society, and thought." Ollman then shows the steps Marx employed in focusing this dialectic on his various subjects.

Ollman is unique, and I believe he is uniquely correct. A lifelong Marxist, he is in his mid-70s now and teaching at NYU. Paul Sweezy referred to him as "this country's leading authority on dialectics and Marx's method."

I would go further and say that Ollman is the living person who correctly understands Marx's materialist dialectic and his use of it. Before Ollman there was Engels.

I'm looking forward to your participation. My red-green best.

JustMovement

28th March 2012, 16:01

I have followed this thread with some interest.

It seems to me that the central questions revolve around what was Marx's methodology. It seems to me that the methodology of the physical science's are useless when it comes to describing the organization of society. Physics has this incredibly explanatory and predictive power, and so it is tempting to expand it to other 'levels of organization.' But while reductionism makes a lot of sense for physics, for example, it does not work for a description of society.

Perhaps this analogy muddles the waters more than it clears anything, but it seems to me that that the empirical method applied to society is akin to reducing the study of the brain to merely the firing of neurons. Of course the brain is ultimately physical, but thought in some way supervenes onto this physical organization, and we can understand the human mind both as a sequence of neurons lighting up, and as ideas, emotions, and sensation (red, anxiety, logical thought, etc.)

I agree with Luis Henrique that if dialectics is really related to Marx (and I have not read enough Marx to know if it is), then surely it is a methodology, a more appropriate way to study society in contrast to the ones before. However as the example of value illustrates, it seems to beg ontological questions.

Price fluctuates around value, right? Value is somehow more fundamental than price, and price is the destorted phenomenal expression of value? If we can only know value through price, then in what sense does value exist? What is the ontology of value?

Mr. Natural

28th March 2012, 16:59

JustMovement

28th March 2012, 17:18

One might even say that the thread is moving forward in a rather............................................ ...........dialectical manner (:p:p:p:p:p:p)

LuÃs Henrique

28th March 2012, 17:51

It seems to me that the central questions revolve around what was Marx's methodology. It seems to me that the methodology of the physical science's are useless when it comes to describing the organization of society. Physics has this incredibly explanatory and predictive power, and so it is tempting to expand it to other 'levels of organization.' But while reductionism makes a lot of sense for physics, for example, it does not work for a description of society.

Yes, I would agree with that.

Perhaps this analogy muddles the waters more than it clears anything, but it seems to me that that the empirical method applied to society is akin to reducing the study of the brain to merely the firing of neurons. Of course the brain is ultimately physical, but thought in some way supervenes onto this physical organization, and we can understand the human mind both as a sequence of neurons lighting up, and as ideas, emotions, and sensation (red, anxiety, logical thought, etc.)

Indeed. I would say that a proper scientific approach would have to deal with the notion of levels. One can certainly say that Mycrosoft Excel is a row of 1s and 0s in magnetic media, but that doesn't tell us much about how Mycrosoft Excel works, what is it for, whether it is a good worksheet manipulator, etc.

I agree with Luis Henrique that if dialectics is really related to Marx (and I have not read enough Marx to know if it is), then surely it is a methodology, a more appropriate way to study society in contrast to the ones before. However as the example of value illustrates, it seems to beg ontological questions.

Well, yes. Designing a method for investigating a particular reality involves at least some guesses about what exactly you are investigating.

Price fluctuates around value, right? Value is somehow more fundamental than price, and price is the destorted phenomenal expression of value? If we can only know value through price, then in what sense does value exist? What is the ontology of value?

As Jappe says, it has no "empyrical" existence. So any ontology that denies the existence of anything that isn't empyrical must deny the existence of value. But, as value is a fundamental concept for Marxism, it follow that any empyricist Ontology must reject Marxism as some kind of "philosophical gobbledidock", if I may use such a phrase. And, conversely, any actual Marxist ontology must assert the existence of at least one non-empyrical entity, namely value, and so is incompatible with empyrism.

(This, I think, is the reason G.A. "Jerry" Cohen slipped, as Kronsteen says, from "an attempt to ground the political aspects of marxism in something more rigorous and scientific than 18th century German mysticism" into "an attempt to depoliticise marxism, to reduce it to a theory about economics and maybe the physical world, omitting any notion of political change, and especially change brought about by the working class". Given the methodology he choose, he would have to reject the core basis of Marxism, and consequently its conclusions as well.)

If we can only know value through price, then in what sense does value exist?

We do know some things only through their superficial, phenomenic appearance. For instance, we only know of many subatomic particles due to the traces of their interaction with other particles. We have never seen them; we infer their existence from the effects they have in other things.

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

28th March 2012, 18:07

Yes, JustMovement, this discussion is progressing in an organic, systemic process, with many "contradictions."

I'm enthused that you so casually grasp dialectics. I wouldn't have been able to make your observation two years ago, but I've been to dialectics school since.

I did want to make the point that dialectical contradictions are contradictions in relations, and are not the hard and fast contradictions between "things" as usually presented in formal logic.

Here is what my main man, Bertell Ollman, has to say about Marx's dialectical contradictions. Ollman notes that contradiction is the most important relation in Marx's dialectic, and writes: "Contradiction is understood here as the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation, which is to say between elements that are also dependent on each other. What is remarked as differences are based ... on certain conditions, and these conditions are constantly changing. Hence, differences are changing; and given how each difference serves as part of the appearance and/or functoning of others, grasped as relations, how one changes affects all. consequently, their paths of development do not only intersect in mutually supportive ways but are constantly blocking, undermining, otherwise interfering with, and in due course transforming one another." (Dance of the Dialectic (2003), p.17

JustMovement

28th March 2012, 18:07

But then in what sense does value exist? Clearly it cannot be reduced to price in this sense: value is the unrealised average of price that changes through time- because rather, if I have understood correctly, value precedes price, and it is price that is explained in terms of value. The subatomic particle analogy does not seem to be helpful, because, although we cannot observe them directly,they do seem to exist in space is some kind of concrete sense (leaving aside quantum physics).

Is value perhaps that relation that binds prices to labour time? In which case it can be a correlation between two quantities, which is never perfectly expressed? And how does this in turn relate to dialectics?

JustMovement

28th March 2012, 18:19

Mr. Natural, the way I understand Marx s use of the word contradictions seems to be in line with Ollmans, how basically the constituting elements of capitalism are also in an antagonistic relationship, so that for example the capitalist needs the worker, even though the workers interests are opposite his own. Or to use another example, the capitalist seeks to expand his capital, to acquire more profit, but that the continuing search for more profit (and the accumulation of capital) eventually slows down the rate of the accumulation of capital and leads to declining profits.

Mr. Natural

28th March 2012, 18:31

JustMovement, I missed your first post, to which this is a reply. Lots of energy in this thread today.

I largely agree with your observation, "The methods of the physical sciences are useless when it comes to describing the organization of society." Yes, JustMovement, the "just movement" is to the new life sciences of organization. That's where I am, and these new sciences give life to the materialist dialectic.

The reductionism you reject reduces life to a collection of separate things. This is a "dead reductionism." The "reductionist" organizational relations I employ provide life to nature's "things." Thus mind emerges from the organization of the firing of the brain's neurons. This is "living reductionism" in action.

The materialist dialectic as understood and employed by Marx (and Engels) arises from the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations, and these relations and their dialectical laws are now illuminated and confirmed by the new sciences of organization. As I've noted before, this is an amazing example of philosophy anticipating the science that confirms the philosophy.

Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003) gets the dialectics right, and Fritjof Capra's Web of Life provides the science. I'm advocating a red-green revolutionary marriage of these two works.

Good to have you aboard. Now I have several valuable Luis Henrique posts to read, re-read, and respond to. My red-green best.

LuÃs Henrique

28th March 2012, 18:54

But then in what sense does value exist?

As a social force that determines the acceptable exchange rate between different commodities, and in turn is determined by the relation between the abstract labour embodied in each commodity.

Clearly it cannot be reduced to price in this sense: value is the unrealised average of price that changes through time- because rather, if I have understood correctly, value precedes price, and it is price that is explained in terms of value.Indeed. Value is the relation between the amount of abstract labour that it takes to produce different commodities. Price is merely the expression of such value in terms of a particular commodity that is used as an equivalent; and it is never a direct, linear expression of value, because other factors - especially supply and demand - interfere.

Of course, one could try to account for the total abstract labour embodied into a particular commodity. But since most commodities demand in turn other commodities as part of their process of production, this is not the same as simply measuring the time workers take to make the commodity in question. For instance, if I want to know how much abstract labour it takes to produce a knife, I must take into account not only the time it takes for the blacksmith to hammer the metal into the form of a knife, but also the time it took for smelters to smelt the iron out of the ore, the time it took for miners to extract the ore, etc. This means that such an account would be exceedingly difficult and complicated.

Because of this, the easiest way to assess value is through prices; prices are like a symptom of value, so to say.

The subatomic particle analogy does not seem to be helpful, because, although we cannot observe them directly,they do seem to exist in space is some kind of concrete sense (leaving aside quantum physics).
Yes, it is far from being a perfect analogy; it is more an example of how we know things that are not immediately apparent, through the indirect imprints they leave in what we can see.

Is value perhaps that relation that binds prices to labour time? In which case it can be a correlation between two quantities, which is never perfectly expressed? And how does this in turn relate to dialectics?I think that is what is value is - a relation between the labour time embodied into different commodities.

One way to think about the dialectical nature of commodities is to consider their dual nature. To be a commodity, something needs to have a use value: it needs to be useful in some way to at least some people. Something completely useless is not a commodity: shit, for instance. On the other hand, to be a commodity, something needs to have a value: to be the product of human labour. Something that does not demand production cannot be a commodity: air, for instance.

But those two qualities of a commodity are, in a sence, mutually exclusive. If I intend for a hammer to be a tool for my own use, then its value disappears: it is not for sell, it is not a commodity. Conversely, if I intend to sell the hammer for a profit, then it has to be useless to me as a tool (otherwise I would not sell it). So at any instance that a hammer has a value, it is use-value is only potential; at any instance that a hammer has a use-value, it is its value that is merely potential. And so, the commodity must have a history: it is produced as a commodity, in order to be sold for a profit. But at the moment it is realised as a commodity, ie, at the moment it is sold, it immediately loses the quality of being a commodity, and becomes something else - a tool in the case of a hammer, food in the case of a meal, etc. If, on the contrary, it is never sold, it remains a potential value for ever - until its destruction, for instance - without ever realising itself.

Luís Henrique

JustMovement

28th March 2012, 19:20

Alright I understand know how labour is the ratio of abstract labour between different commodities, while price is the real ratio at which they are exchanged. The dialectical nature of the commodity is due to the fact that it on the one hand produced for exchange, and for the producer it lacks use-value, however the only reason the exchange can take place is because it has a potential use-value in the first place.

This has the bizzare effect whereby the exchange of the commodity takes precedence and controls the production of the commodity, as opposed to the more fundamental use-value; or something to that effect?

However I am still puzzled at how to pin down the use of dialectics in Marx in a wider sense. Here it seems that it is the nature of the commodity that is dialectical, not the method of investigation.

By the way than you for taking the time to address these points.

Mr. Natural

28th March 2012, 20:52

JustMovement, Luis Henrique, I want to engage and learn from your discussion of value, as I'm weak here, but I'm tired and this is a tough subject, so I'll wait until tomorrow.

I did want to make one point as regards dialectics. Nature has a "methodology": its organization. I'm saying that the same methodological dialectic/organizational dialectic underlies "nature, human society, and thought."

I'm saying, as JustMovement implied earlier, that there seems to be or should be some link between ontology and methodology. I'm saying that the methodology of the dialectic arises from ontology--from real natural relations philosophically grasped by Hegel. I'm saying that nature's "methodology"--its organization--is also the "organizational methodology" of revolutionary processes and communism.

Kronsteen

28th March 2012, 23:27

Kronsteen, The relative scarcity of founding texts on the nature and use of the materialist dialectic is largely due to the scarcity of the science(s) of materialist, dialectical relations in Marx's and Engels' day. They only had evolution to work with, but they gave it a good working over.

That is simply not true. The second half of the 1800s, when Marx and Engels were writing, was the time of great leaps forward in understanding of electricity and magnetism, geology, astronomy, physics and mathematics - to name only the areas that Engels talks about.

As for Engels' scientific errors, here are Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in their dedication of The Dialectical Biologist to him: "To Frederick Engels, who got it wrong a lot of the time but who got it right where it counted."And where exactly did he get it right? Where is this place where it counted? Let's look at something Engels got wrong, and ask in what way he was in some larger way right.

I was recently asked to consult on a booklet on 'philosophy for revolutionaries'. One of the questions was on this passage from Engels:

We have already noted that one of the basic principles of higher mathematics is the contradiction that in certain circumstances straight lines and curves may be the same. It also gets up this other contradiction: that lines which intersect each other before our eyes nevertheless, only five or six centimetres from their point of intersection, can be shown to be parallel, that is, that they will never meet even if extended to infinity. And yet, working with these and with even far greater contradictions, it attains results which are not only correct but also quite unattainable for lower mathematics.

But even lower mathematics teems with contradictions. It is for example a contradiction that a root of A should be a power of A, and yet A1/2 = square root of A. It is a contradiction that a negative quantity should be the square of anything, for every negative quantity multiplied by itself gives a positive square. The square root of minus one is therefore not only a contradiction, but even an absurd contradiction, a real absurdity. And yet square root of minus one is in many cases a necessary result of correct mathematical operations. Furthermore, where would mathematics — lower or higher — be, if it were prohibited from operation with square root of minus one?

In its operations with variable quantities mathematics itself enters the field of dialectics, and it is significant that it was a dialectical philosopher, Descartes, who introduced this advance. The relation between the mathematics of variable and the mathematics of constant quantities is in general the same as the relation of dialectical to metaphysical thought. But this does not prevent the great mass of mathematicians from recognising dialectics only in the sphere of mathematics, and a good many of them from continuing to work in the old, limited, metaphysical way with methods that were obtained dialectically.

This was my initial response, with a few updating annotations in square brackets:

"We have already noted that one of the basic principles of higher mathematics is the contradiction that in certain circumstances straight lines and curves may be the same."

Here he's referring to the way calculus can either approximate a curve as an indefinite but very large finite number of straight lines, or describe an ideal curve as an infinity of straight lines.

This doesn't make straight lines and curves 'the same'. It makes curved lines a subset of *concatenations* of angles between straight lines.

One may as well say that because one can describe a human population as a collection of inter-related individuals, a lone person and a society are 'the same'.

There is in fact another way, first seriously explored in the 1920s, in which the difference between straight and curved lines can be blurred. By drawing two dimensional shapes on the surfaces of three dimensional shapes - usually spheres - all lines which are straight on a flat surface become curved when 'wrapped' around a 3D shape. The rules about flat angles obviously change when you do this, but they're equally consistent.

"It also gets up this other contradiction: that lines which intersect each other before our eyes nevertheless, only five or six centimetres from their point of intersection, can be shown to be parallel, that is, that they will never meet even if extended to infinity."

I have no idea what Engels means by this.

[The three other consultees were also baffled.]

If he's expanding on the previous point, to the effect that two *curved* and intersecting lines, being made up of straight lines, may well contain two straight lines which are parallel, then this is hardly the separate point he claims.

If he's talking about two *straight* lines intersecting, then perhaps he's treating them as curves with a curveture equal to zero - rather like defining voluntary work as paid work where the pay is £00.00 per hour, as modern Jobcentres do. If so, then the only way for them to be parallel *and* intersecting is if they're infinitely long, *and* no curveture is ever exactly equal to zero - "a finer balance will always find a difference", as he says in the passage about weighing sugar bags.

When he says 'before our eyes' and 'five or six centimetres', he seems to have something concrete and familiar in mind, but I can't guess what.

"It is for example a contradiction that a root of A should be a power of A, and yet A^(1/2) = square root of A. It is a contradiction that a negative quantity should be the square of anything, for every negative quantity multiplied by itself gives a positive square."

This is a very dense passage, and rather confused.

Engels says "It is a contradiction that a negative quantity should be the square of anything", which is true, in so far as there are no negative numbers which are the products of squaring operations. There are however negative numbers which are the products of *square-root* operations.

-2^2 = 4 -- as he says "every negative quantity multiplied by itself gives a positive square". The reverse operation, square root of 4 - 4*^(1/2) - gives *two* equally true answers. Namely 2 and -2. When we talk about "the" square root, we generally mean the positive one. The way he phrases it, it's unclear whether he's aware of this.

If Engels is trying to prove that negative squares must exist because they're contradictory (in some sense), then his proof fails because he's only asserting the existence of positive squares of negative numbers, which is true but doesn't prove the converse.

If he's trying to prove negative squares don't exist, then he's right - but it doesn't relate their non-existence to their 'contradictory' nature. Everywhere else he says reality is contradictory - here he would be saying something's unreal because it's contradictory.

It may be that Engels meant to say "It is a contradiction that a negative quantity should be the square *root* of anything (positive)", which would make sense if he's making the common novice mistake of reasoning that, because -2^2=4, then 4^(1/2)=-2, but not also 4^(1/2)=2.

Yet another possibility is that he's treating square roots as a type of square - specifically, squares with reciprocal indices. This is certainly valid, but doesn't prove anything, least of all that anything is 'contradictory'.

In the first sentence he writes, "A^(1/2) = square root of A", which is tautologically true as he's just expressed the square root operation, or the result *of* a square root operation, in two different ways. It's like saying "the morning star is the evening star", and it's what philosophers would now call a confusion between sense and reference.

If, only the other hand, he's using "A^(1/2)" to refer to the operation, and "square root of A" to refer to the result, then it makes sense, but it does nothing to show why it's "a contradiction that a root of A should be a power of A".

He goes on to say: "And yet square root of minus one is in many cases a necessary result of correct mathematical operations."

Is is true that the square root of minus one is the final line of some mathematical proofs. But only proofs of operations which are done using the square root of minus one.

[A mathematician pointed out that what I say here is not absolutely always true, but agrees that Engels is simply wrong in this sentence]

Finally he says: "Furthermore, where would mathematics — lower or higher — be, if it were prohibited from operation with square root of minus one?"

Lower mathematics never uses the square root of minus one. It's found only in mathematics that takes place on a two dimensional plane, as opposed to the familiar number line. As an argument, it's a major gaffe, so lets treat it as a minor gaffe of rhetoric.

[A professional mathematician who was also asked to consult pointed out that the division of mathematics into higher and lower is merely a pedagogical convenience. They're right of course.]

If you want my opinion, Engels was simply in over his head and too proud to admit it. He obviously feels the need to include mathematics in his system, but his understanding of calculus, imaginary numbers, irrationals and even indices is hazy and confused.

The mystery is that Marx, being the mathematician of the duo, should have corrected at least the major problems when Engels read him the entire manuscript - which would have taken several weeks.

None of this means that mathematics can't be shown to be dialectical. Just that Engels didn't do it.So, in case all that was too TL;DR, Engels talks airily about mathematics which was well established in his day as though he were an expert...and every time he goes into specifics, he makes an elementary blunder.

You can call this 'Engels bashing' if you like, but that doesn't stop it being true. And this is just three paragraphs of a much larger work.
The Dialectics of Nature was on the right scientific, dialectical track, but was ahead of the needed science and way ahead of its times.So he was wrong in most of the specifics, wrong in a lot of the generalities, but somehow right in...the greater generalities.

Its time is now. How about reading Ollman again--this time to learn from him and not reject him out of hand?Christians tell me I should try reading the bible one more time, in the hope that this time it'll make sense.

If you have some passage of Ollman in mind that is for you crystal clear and cuts to the heart of Engelsian dialectics...post it so we can all see. I for one would love to see a clear example.

the new science(s) of organizationMr Natural, if you have a new idea, describe it. In detail, with lots of examples. No matter how many times you only refer to it, the idea won't get any clearer without that.

Red 7

28th March 2012, 23:46

I would say Marxism is almost anti-ontological, in that it goes beyond the traditional formations (it's really a set of ideas that are post ontological and post metaphysical - the beginning of scientific practice proper). Marxist ontology IS methodology... nature's organisation and categories, truth and being etc, are essentially practical questions. Beyond action and performance there lies nothing. Otherwise, we would be quite restricted to the rigid intellectual paradigms of the bourgeois and their linear liberal ideas of 'progress' - which imprisoned within, there can be little hope for a revolution. Marxism is essentially a critical, theory-building, and dialectical methodology. For me there's no other way to slice it, and any 'Marxist' who fails to engage with Marx's own fluxive, historical, yet entirely holistic mode of thought (of which should rightly be described as dialectical), in my mind, brings to the forefront one of his greatest and most poignant comments - "If anything is certain, then it is that I am not a Marxist". I feel similarly distressed at some of the 'anti-dialectic' comments seen here. As mentioned, if you in fact read and engage with Marx's texts... The German Ideology, his theses of Feuerbach and other earlier works - he is an unashamed Hegelian and a proponent of the dialectic method, and no rabid chatter of "two Marxs" or his "playful rhetoric" can draw a line through those great formative years.

"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice."

I don't think dialectics can really said to arise out from nature... at least as far as you exclude nature's own formulation of man and human consciousness. There's nothing to 'discover', stumble upon, or extract from the external world, except through constant engagement with it - except through practical action, which may bring forth a clearer consciousness. I think that's why the only ontological aspects you can really attribute to Marxism, is within the methodology itself.

I think Luis Henrique's latest post on Value quite powerfully illustrates how Marxist ideas are entirely impossible to understand without the use of dialectics. There really isn't a set of rigid categories of 'being' which can be pinned down when describing a historical process like capitalism, when trying to understand commodities etc - which is why I think the entire school of analytic "no bullshit" (and if it's dialectics that are "bullshit", then Marx of course was the biggest bullshitter of them all) Marxism mentioned earlier on in the thread... as well as Rosa Lichtenstein's own bizarre anti-dialectic rants, distance themselves so entirely from a full-picture Marxist perspective. One which includes political economy, surplus value etc. They have no answer here, which is nothing but wholly expected - as their 'Marxist' projects amount to nothing more than hollow theatrics and sophistic sidesteps.

Of course - there's plenty of work to be done in describing and developing Marx's dialectical method. I look forward to its humble development here.

Red 7

29th March 2012, 00:42

That is simply not true. The second half of the 1800s, when Marx and Engels were writing, was the time of great leaps forward in understanding of electricity and magnetism, geology, astronomy, physics and mathematics - to name only the areas that Engels talks about.

And where exactly did he get it right? Where is this place where it counted? Let's look at something Engels got wrong, and ask in what way he was in some larger way right.

Whilst I'm sure Engels made a number of blunders in his appropriation of mathematics and scientific examples in his attempt to illustrate dialectical relations - I think Natural is right in saying there WAS a lack of dynamic material sciences at Engel's time of writing (and I'd probably go on to argue... that this lack still very much remains with us today). I would also say his foray in mathematics, was a sort of failed attempt to try and win over those unused to thinking dialectically, but is still a fascinating read (have you read Marx's doctoral dissertation? He also employs the concept of geometric 'lines', this time to describe the work of the greek philosopher Epicurus. Regardless - he comes to the conclusion that all lines are curved and tend towards declination - an idea of which he argues is paramount for motion and change in the world. You won't get any of that in the abstract orthodoxy of 'mathematics' today - namely because the mathematicians are ultra-conservative in their deployment of concepts and completely non-critical to the few concepts of which they do have, inherited through custom, and that lie as rotting axioms at the bottom of their entire system. And so they tend to bury their heads in the sand and work strictly within the preconceived confines of their comfy mathematical house).

In what respects are your examples 'dynamic'? The advances made there were all fairly traditional scientific expositions. Pioneering and important work of course, but how was electricity for example 'worked out' during the 1800s, and what could Engels (and Marxists) really draw from it? Sets of laws and a conceptual framework were erected, yet even today scientific practice has failed spectacularly in linking electromagnetism with wider cosmological phenomenon.

It's this whole paradigm of which Engels seeks to distance himself and take to task. 'Scientists' today are too busy dicking about in twelve dimensions, performing mathematical gymnastics, and arguing over time-travel - exercises of which, may be fun and produce good sci-fi, but are wholly absurd and nonsensical. Scientific sophism. And as a Marxist you have to ask why... paradigms were brilliantly shaken by Einstein, yet even his work remained fairly entrenched in a rigid orthodoxy, not so much in his use of mathematical tools, but his general conceptual apparatus (his ideas on 'space' and 'time' particularly, were nowhere near critical enough).

If Engels got it 'right' anywhere in his dialectical descriptions - it was in his deployment of the "big picture", and his many attempts at detailed and interesting descriptions that tried to work in aspects of human relations, which are so fundamental to Marxism, with the natural sciences. That's why a comparison with Darwin is the only real one you can make during the 19th (and even 20th) Century - his is the only scientific exposition which is at all historical, and doesn't rely on ancient reductionism. Engel's dialectics of nature is indeed quirky, and mistake-prone in the details, but it is its unorthodoxy and critical transformation of many of science's basic conceptual frameworks - space, time, motion energy, relations etc, which in my mind makes it an extremely important, and unique read - and, as Natural accurately described - ahead of its time.

Kronsteen

29th March 2012, 02:06

You won't get any of that in the abstract orthodoxy of 'mathematics' today - namely because the mathematicians are ultra-conservative in their deployment of concepts and completely non-critical to the few concepts of which they do have, inherited through custom, and that lie as rotting axioms at the bottom of their entire system. And so they tend to bury their heads in the sand and work strictly within the preconceived confines of their comfy mathematical house.

Yeah yeah yeah, the experts are all stupid and marxists have a better science than the scientists. Because although they don't know anything about it, they've got a special magic formula that explains everything. And the cool thing about the formula is: it's so simple and obvious that everyone understands it already...er, except the experts.

You sound exactly like a scientologist, about how there's a global conspiracy of everyone with an education to remain ignorant. Because it helps them stay powerful, somehow.

even today scientific practice has failed spectacularly in linking electromagnetism with wider cosmological phenomenon.

Congratulations, you've badly misremembered something you once read in an introductory textbook about gravity and the big bang theory. And you're trying to come across as an authority, using handwaving generalisations. Which you hope no one's knowldgeable enough to see through.

Engels did exactly the same thing. It didn't work then either.

'Scientists' today are too busy dicking about in twelve dimensions

And again. Same sneering tone, same use of pop-sci details to sound like you know what you're talking about.

the "big picture"

A true big picture made up of false small pictures, illustrated with examples that don't work.

You seem to think you can understand the details of the world by first theorising the entire universe. We have a word for this: Idealism.

ancient reductionism.

Oh look, a strawman.

People accuse marxism of being a cult, with its own pseudoscience. We try to assure them that no, we don't worship our founders, we look to the real world for answers, and we don't use baffling bullshit to excuse our failures.

Then they get a look at our philosophy, and the game's up.

Red 7

29th March 2012, 04:09

Yeah yeah yeah, the experts are all stupid and marxists have a better science than the scientists. Because although they don't know anything about it, they've got a special magic formula that explains everything. And the cool thing about the formula is: it's so simple and obvious that everyone understands it already...er, except the experts.

You sound exactly like a scientologist, about how there's a global conspiracy of everyone with an education to remain ignorant. Because it helps them stay powerful, somehow.

Well - this is a somewhat sudden, unexpected and vacuous attack, from someone who obviously took little from what I bothered to write, and understood even less. In honesty, having read through the entire thread, I suppose it's not entirely unexpected.

I'll begin by saying that I don't believe there's an all-encompassing 'theory of everything' (I'll leave that to the Superstring theorists) - I do think Marxism has the potential to shed important light upon the world though, and is larger in scope than a lot of other understandings of the world. And Marxism IS a science (a socio-historical one), it's a scientific understanding of the world, and the fact you so vehemently distinguish between the two and place them in different camps simply shows you up for the petty liberal-thinker that you really are (you can dress a monkey up, etc).

Also, I wasn't attacking the experts, or "science", as if such a complete category can exist. I'm merely being critical of some aspects of 'current' science and scientific practice - obviously you fail to grasp the difference between the two. There's also nothing 'conspiracy theorist' about any of what I've said. It's simple criticism of an obvious and very historical false consciousness and an ideological paradigm that proper Marxists should happily challenge and seek to understand. Most of the science today is only 'true' in that it is practiced and acted upon. Historically, that wasn't always the case, just as in the future a lot of our theories and models will be thrown into the trash heap, and new (hopefully more sensible, rigorous and reasoned ones) will be built in their place. I very much doubt this will happen under capitalism, of course.

So, nothing I've said is particularly offbeat or conspiracist - I'm not quite sure why you would damn it so. Well, that's a lie. I know exactly why you're so 'anti-dialectic' and blindly defensive in the face of a little criticism - it stems from the fact you're some kind of obnoxious two-bit pseudo-socialist, who needs to go back and read his Marx, as well as get knocked around the head with some Engels. Might I suggest one of the many 'introductory textbooks' on them?

Congratulations, you've badly misremembered something you once read in an introductory textbook about gravity and the big bang theory. And you're trying to come across as an authority, using handwaving generalisations. Which you hope no one's knowldgeable enough to see through.

What exactly does electromagnetism have to do with gravity or the big bang theory? At least that's what most working scientists would ask - maybe that's a point! If you're knowledgeable enough to see through me, at least get your concepts straight, and bring a little more substance to the table. It seems you could do with picking up a a few introductory textbooks yourself. And, if there's been any handwaving here, it has come directly from you - attempting to shout and abuse your way through an argument, without the leverage of providing substantial content. Or even a noteworthy thought.

Engels did exactly the same thing. It didn't work then either.

I'm appreciative of the comparison. I don't think I've ever been held in such high esteem.

And again. Same sneering tone, same use of pop-sci details to sound like you know what you're talking about.

A true big picture made up of false small pictures, illustrated with examples that don't work.

You seem to think you can understand the details of the world by first theorising the entire universe. We have a word for this: Idealism.

First - go and look up the word Idealism in an online dictionary. I've noticed throughout this thread that you continually use words in completely unclear ways, and completely counter to their actual meaning and definitions. Like I said earlier, I don't have a theory of the entire universe - and neither do the 'scientists'. If I'm spouting pop-science, then that's exactly where Physics and Cosmology is today.

Engels also doesn't propose a theory of everything. He simply proposes a general and stimulating way of looking at the world differently, that is right in as many places as it is wrong. Cherry picking examples where he wasn't quite clear enough, or got a few numbers wrong, doesn't make him any less right where it counts. You could deconstruct practically anyone in such terms. Also, save us any more of those useless snippets too - I've trawled through the anti-dialectics website before, through the micro-deconstructions of a line of Engels here and a line of Lenin there, and understood there's little to be gained with engaging with fanatics who have entirely static paradigms, set in stone, and of which are utterly incommensurable with any kind of Marxism (forget the self-labeling).

Oh look, a strawman.

You would certainly know one when you see one.

People accuse marxism of being a cult, with its own pseudoscience. We try to assure them that no, we don't worship our founders, we look to the real world for answers, and we don't use baffling bullshit to excuse our failures.

Then they get a look at our philosophy, and the game's up.

You've shown nothing but a complete lack and ignorance in this thread when it comes to philosophy. You think materialism is a metaphysical position (let me give you some help here - 'meta' is a big Greek word meaning beyond... as in... beyond physics. Beyond what is material, i.e. the plane of which materialist philosophy conducts itself). I suppose this impotency of yours explains your ridiculous project of getting rid of the 'philosophy' of Marx. Maybe you should just save your time on the "bullshit" and start reading those texts more in line with your own ideas.

So, you don't know what metaphysics is, and the same goes for Idealism. And who exactly accuses Marxism of being a cult anyway? Or being pseudoscience? I'm assuming the same bourgeois and liberal orthodoxy you align yourself with. I don't need to hand out assurances to people like that, Marxism is a theory of the world built from very real, and very apparent, material relations - very much in discordance with the sort of top-down imposition that mathematics, for example, has played in science and physics in the last two centuries. Of which reality is quite literally, as if by using magic formulas, constructed through tools of abstract human reasoning.

Kronsteen

29th March 2012, 05:58

Also, I wasn't attacking the experts, or "science", as if such a complete category can exist. I'm merely being critical of some aspects of 'current' science and scientific practice

Oh is that why you put the word 'scientists' in scare quotes, and sneered this about them:

You won't get any of that in the abstract orthodoxy of 'mathematics' today - namely because the mathematicians are ultra-conservative in their deployment of concepts and completely non-critical to the few concepts of which they do have, inherited through custom, and that lie as rotting axioms at the bottom of their entire systemMoving on...

I know exactly why you're so 'anti-dialectic' and blindly defensive in the face of a little criticism - it stems from the fact you're some kind of obnoxious two-bit pseudo-socialist, who needs to go back and read his MarxIt must be nice to magically know a person's entire history from reading a few words.

In fact, I was a loyal activist for over ten years. Then I read Marx, Engels and Lenin. It's an eye opening experience to realise the figures you've heard spoken about with such admiration can write such drivel.

The odd thing is, they only wrote drivel when they were writing about dialectics, and they were only consistantly unclear in those same texts. Marx in his mathematical manuscripts, Engels in Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature, Lenin in Empiriocriticism and the Conspectus.

I soon found my tendency was very good at talking about the need to avoid doctrinaire thinking. But apparently it's more important to stand together than to ask what you're standing for.

What exactly does electromagnetism have to do with gravity or the big bang theory? At least that's what most working scientists would ask - maybe that's a point!It was. And you missed it.

First - go and look up the word Idealism in an online dictionary.Idealism is regarding the concrete as an imperfect copy of the abstract, and the specific as an imperfect copy of the general. Materialism involves building from the specific and concrete to the general and abstract.

Which means if your experiments fail to match your theory, or your examples fail to illustrate the intended principle, then the theory or principle is wrong.

So what are we doing if we insist that, although all the specifics fail, the big picture still holds? We're judging the specifics to fail because they don't concur with the big picture, which we've already decided is right.

That is idealism.

I don't have a theory of the entire universeDoes all change occur as the result of internal self-contradiction?

Is the world composed not of things but of forces in systems?

Is the pattern of progress in a person's thoughts identical with the pattern of progression in the culture of a nation, the movement of the world towards socialism, and the movement of the universe towards its end?

If your answer is 'No' or 'That's gibberish', you are an anti-dialectical marxist, and therefore by the definition of the majority of marxists, not a marxist at all.

If your answer is 'Yes, then you have a theory of the entire universe.

Engels also doesn't propose a theory of everything. He simply proposes a general and stimulating way of looking at the world differentlyThis is the model of dialectics as heuristic, as opposed to dialectics as theory.

There's plenty of good marxists who hold to it, including on this thread. It's just completely counter to what Engels (and Lenin) actually wrote. So if you want to justify your view, you have to willfully misread them.

that is right in as many places as it is wrong. Cherry picking examples where he wasn't quite clear enough, or got a few numbers wrong, doesn't make him any less right where it counts.Engels didn't get a few numbers wrong. He completely misunderstood founding concepts. For instance, in the discussion of algebra, he credited Descartes with having discovered 'varying quantities'.

He's talking about variables, but variables don't vary in the sense of changing quantity from one line of a calculation to the next.

As for his ideas on calculus, imaginary numbers and the value of pi, he wrote that calculus is a slight of hand trick, imaginary numbers are by definition impossible...and that irrational values like pi can't exist because all quantities are definite. Even when they're also contradictory and indefinite.

You may say he was just expressing himself sloppily, and we should correct for that when reading it. But if so, why is it all the big names always write sloppily on this one subject, and no other?

You might counter that such concepts weren't clearly formulated by the mathematicians of the time. But that's just not true - Engels' objections were 50 years out of date as well as false.

Also, Descates discovered them? I didn't know Descartes was an Arab in the middle ages.

I've trawled through the anti-dialectics website beforeWhy are you assuming I'm a follower of Ms Lichtenstein? I think she's useful, but I don't think her Wittgensteinianism is helpful. Unless you think everyone who rejects one theory must be united under another?

You think materialism is a metaphysical position (let me give you some help here - 'meta' is a big Greek word meaning beyond... as in... beyond physics. Beyond what is material, i.e. the plane of which materialist philosophy conducts itself).It can also mean 'in opposition to', as in 'Metaphrastics'.

The word metaphysics comes from the title given to one of Aristotle's titleless books, and means in context "The book following the book on physics". You're confusing etymology with semantics...and getting the etymology wrong.

Fortunately there is a sense in which 'metaphysics' does mean 'beyond physics', but physics (in this sense) is not the study of the material, but of empirical phenomena. Whether the ultimate reality behind the phenomena is material or not is a different matter.

It might help to clear things in your head if you ask whether idealism is a metaphysical position.

And who exactly accuses Marxism of being a cult anyway?

Quite a lot of those who've left the various closed and slightly mad marxist groups that are cults.

I'm assuming the same bourgeois and liberal orthodoxy you align yourself with.Citation desperately needed.

Unless you're just trying to call me a rude name, in which case...it's a bit pathetic.

I don't need to hand out assurances to people like that

You live in a world where most people don't consider it strange to be a marxist?

Red 7

29th March 2012, 14:30

Oh is that why you put the word 'scientists' in scare quotes, and sneered this about them:

They're in what I call 'quotation marks', simply because a scientist and a mathematician seem to be defined more by their label today, as opposed to what they actually do. If you didn't notice, I also used quotes around the word dialectic at points. If it confuses you so much - I'll refrain from using them in the future. Atleast it's nice to hear a reply from you that isn't entirely flat, hate-filled and content-less. I find it's always better to find a nice blend between the two!

It must be nice to magically know a person's entire history from reading a few words.

In fact, I was a loyal activist for over ten years. Then I read Marx, Engels and Lenin. It's an eye opening experience to realise the figures you've heard spoken about with such admiration can write such drivel.

The odd thing is, they only wrote drivel when they were writing about dialectics, and they were only consistantly unclear in those same texts. Marx in his mathematical manuscripts, Engels in Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature, Lenin in Empiriocriticism and the Conspectus.

I don't pretend to know your entire history. I just find that when something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck etc - it probably is one. And to me, you are clearly not a Marxist, and you clearly don't wish to properly engage with any of the seminal texts.

How about picking up a copy of Capital... instead of ranting about Anti-Duhring? The former is abundantly more dialectical than the latter. Do you think Marx's idea of the commodity is slippery too, and his ideas on value and surplus value 'bullshit drivel' just because the concepts aren't safely hammered down into strict categories, but seem to dance around each other and are entirely historically-dependent?

Also, there's a brilliant book by an American academic, Fredric Jameson, called "Valances of the Dialectic". It goes through the entire history of dialectics, and reacts to all the attempts to impose the method on nature (something which I don't strongly advocate). He does it much more clearly than most, and without branding the ideas 'nonsense!' and brushing them quickly under the carpet like an ignoramus.

It was. And you missed it.

Sorry, I don't quite follow here. What did I miss, apart from post-quantum mechanic physicists squashing electromagnetism down into its own neat dimension, in an attempt to account for it that way?

Idealism is regarding the concrete as an imperfect copy of the abstract, and the specific as an imperfect copy of the general. Materialism involves building from the specific and concrete to the general and abstract.

I enjoyed reading this sentence immensely! It appears you do have a few philosophical bones in your body, yet by your own anti-dialectic standards, I would be inclined to accuse you of talking bullshit here! I won't of course, I just feel it's quite a dialectical contribution coming from you.

Which means if your experiments fail to match your theory, or your examples fail to illustrate the intended principle, then the theory or principle is wrong.

So what are we doing if we insist that, although all the specifics fail, the big picture still holds? We're judging the specifics to fail because they don't concur with the big picture, which we've already decided is right.

That is idealism.

Marxism isn't simply a bottom-up theory. It works both ways. Engels had a general structure in his mind, and he got there with honesty, and by looking at the world around him. His earlier works, which are I think his best, clearly show this. Of course, then he went off into the un-concrete, in an attempt to build and strengthen the encompassing system - we can argue that he failed here, that I don't have a problem with - but to say the entire thing was a failure simply because some of its constituent parts were wrong or ill-informed is a grossly unfair leap to make. The very fact he is the co-founder of Marxism, in my mind, speaks volumes in terms of his knowledge and ability to grasp the wider issues and the big picture.

I'd quite happily argue that Engels' idea of the universe, one which was predicated on a dialectical methodology, was ultimately more intuitive, rational and understood than the orthodox science of today... which still argues over whether the universe is infinite or not, and how many spatial dimensions things might be made up of. Working entirely from the abstract of course! Marx and Engels' looked at the world rigorously, something bourgeois scientists locked within underground labs, entirely apolitical and historically-retarded, have not bothered to do. So yes, I do believe Marx's view of the world was more thorough and generally knowledgeable than the bizarre abstract beasts concocted by modern scientists. That's why historical materialism and a dialectic methodology (and I definitely don't think you can have one without the other) still appear convincing today, whilst scientific narratives have moved far off and away from life, society, the concrete, and even where they were a century ago in terms of cosmology and physics.

Does all change occur as the result of internal self-contradiction?

Is the world composed not of things but of forces in systems?

Is the pattern of progress in a person's thoughts identical with the pattern of progression in the culture of a nation, the movement of the world towards socialism, and the movement of the universe towards its end?

If your answer is 'No' or 'That's gibberish', you are an anti-dialectical marxist, and therefore by the definition of the majority of marxists, not a marxist at all.

Ah, I see you've been reading Schopenhauer's The Art of Always Being Right! If A = B, then it must be C!

The fact is all three of your statements are ridiculous, and indeed gibberish, but only under the false forms of which you yourself have built. I don't think I've ever heard of such thing as an 'internal self-contradiction'. You're conflating different concepts, which only goes to show that you're not interested in engaging with dialectical ideas.

Dialectical contradiction is simply an expression of motion - two objects coming into contact with each other and mutually growing or forming new objects through their interaction. It's quite a simple and elegant exposition of motion, and to me appears quite conceptually strong.

Another word you seem to have an issue with is self-movement. If there was no self-movement in an object (a concept of which is quite understandable from a human perspective - place one foot in front of the other, and repeat etc) then two objects would never meet and interact with one another, and this bases itself upon a world that is always made up of constituent parts (i.e. it is not reducible or atomistic).

Time is but an abstraction of this movement, and there is also no co-ordinate point Space (or absolute vacuum) of which matter moves in - these two concepts alone account for many a physical 'fact' today. You can see a dialectical view of the world is vastly different to the stuff of bourgeoisie science. And it's entirely a conceptual game. Things are either self-static, atomistic Lego blocks to be discovered and then categorized by humans, or, which I would say is only increasingly becoming apparent, objects are constantly in flux, dynamic, infinitely indivisible, dialectical etc.

In response to your final caricature point - about a persons thoughts being identical with the movement of the world. I think as Marxists we are entirely anti-determinism, in so far as it - like the division between mind and body, subject and object - is a bad question. A person is 'part' of his culture/nation, the movement of the world, and yes, even a potential march towards socialism - so yes, he is very much determined by the interplay between these. If he was not, then it would be quite mystical.

Dialectics is also heuristic, although not in the traditional sense, in that it attempts to work through problems and is a mode of consciousness, and way of thinking about the world, which comes into being through the many interactions and multiple relations in life. I'm not sure how that is opposed to a dialectics as 'theory', of which I will mention most philosophy is today (after Marxism essentially slayed the mystical beast of methaphysics and idealism). Everything since in the 20th Century is theory - structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis etc (the one exception probably being phenomenology, which all along worked at the very edge of the demise of methaphysics. That and bourgeoisie science).

Engels didn't get a few numbers wrong. He completely misunderstood founding concepts. For instance, in the discussion of algebra, he credited Descartes with having discovered 'varying quantities'.

He's talking about variables, but variables don't vary in the sense of changing quantity from one line of a calculation to the next.

As for his ideas on calculus, imaginary numbers and the value of pi, he wrote that calculus is a slight of hand trick, imaginary numbers are by definition impossible...and that irrational values like pi can't exist because all quantities are definite. Even when they're also contradictory and indefinite.

I think you're again thinking far too abstractly, and not conceptually enough. Engels was a political theorist and philosopher, not a mathematician. He was being critical of an established abstract tool, not working strictly within its boundaries. Something which formal logicians and those with too much 'common sense' also struggle to comprehend within Hegel. Descartes also worked conceptually, he linked algebra to geometry - and that is what Engels correctly contributed to him. The notion of yours that Engels got the fundamental 'founding concepts' wrong, just goes to show how doctrinaire you yourself are, and how completely lacking you are when it comes to imagination.

Tell me - you said you'd been politically active for 15 years - have you stopped now? I'm starting to assume you've given up the fight. You and Rosa Lichtenstein both appear like disillusioned grumps, who never 'fit' into any of the political groups of Britain (those nasty cults!) and so have instead turned to rebel against your own ideas. Now that's an internal contradiction if I've ever seen one.

You may say he was just expressing himself sloppily, and we should correct for that when reading it. But if so, why is it all the big names always write sloppily on this one subject, and no other?

You might counter that such concepts weren't clearly formulated by the mathematicians of the time. But that's just not true - Engels' objections were 50 years out of date as well as false.

By your definition, Engels was never in 'date'. I'd be more than happy to concede to this point. Engels was not a mathematician, and he criticised the orthodox. Did he get it right all the time? No. Was it always effective? No. Should we criticise Engels? Yes. But certainty not from the narrow, historically-particular perspective of established science and scientific practice. Also, the big names don't always write sloppily on dialectics. It's simply a matter of you failing to understand or comprehend their writings on these particular subjects.

It's the same criticism people throw at Hegel - it's nonsense, it makes no sense, its obscurantism. Yet many people claimed to understand his logic perfectly fine, Marx included. Your criticisms of Engels and dialectics in general is from within a very finite box - something that can't be said of my own Marxist criticisms of orthodox science, the abstractness of mathematics, neoclassical economics etc. I understand them all very well, and there are even uses in their application, but you have to be critical from outside as well as within. Alternatively, you're criticisms come across as somewhat fanatical and mono-tone. You're in your paradigm - and you aren't coming out.

Why are you assuming I'm a follower of Ms Lichtenstein? I think she's useful, but I don't think her Wittgensteinianism is helpful. Unless you think everyone who rejects one theory must be united under another?

I assumed so because you use the same type of generalised deconstructive methods. Picking apart each word, each of which you fail to understand on their own terms, and then branding the entire thing 'meaningless' nonsense. Rosa Lichtenstein is akin to the pied piper, a complete non-entity who cannot make their work to publish, to the academy or even to political affiliation, but instead chirps a melodramatic tune to call the vermin into line. I for one am entirely grateful, as evidently, it sorts the wheat from the chaff.

It can also mean 'in opposition to', as in 'Metaphrastics'.

The word metaphysics comes from the title given to one of Aristotle's titleless books, and means in context "The book following the book on physics". You're confusing etymology with semantics...and getting the etymology wrong.

Fortunately there is a sense in which 'metaphysics' does mean 'beyond physics', but physics (in this sense) is not the study of the material, but of empirical phenomena. Whether the ultimate reality behind the phenomena is material or not is a different matter.

Idealism is a metaphysical position, as it distances ideas and the realm of the mind from physical reality, and attempts to work entirely beyond it. That was Aristotle's blunder, of which I'd be inclined to let slip due to the historical constraints, if it wasn't for the abundance of ancient Greek materialists who even at the time understood the universe more clearly than he. Materialism completely collapses the gap, and understands that there isn't a division, and that all that exists is the physical, only in different qualities. There is by definition, nothing beyond that, and utterly no need to distinguish so abstractly. There is no need to use the word metaphysics as a Marxist. Physics alone will suffice.

JustMovement

29th March 2012, 14:42

So before I give my take on the use of dialectics outside of marxism, I thought I would give some cursory thought on some of the aspects that distinguish Marx's approach from other thinkers.

First of all let's recognize the scale of the problem: the social scientist, or the revolutionary, is confronted with this enormously complex body of customs, laws, physical equipment, people, etc. etc. that he has to make sense of. We call this society. The approach borrowed from the physical science's is to take the smallest element of it, the social atom so to speak, find the basic laws, and build up from there. From this we get the idea that what fundamentally determines price is the preference of the individual, because after all at its most basic level exchange is a voluntary agreement between two people.

Marx does several things differently. Society is constituted by individuals, these indviduals working in the framework of capitalism. A great many individuals all seeking to make money through production and exchange, seemingly freely, are in turn controlled by forces that they do not comprehend. There is thus a reflexive element to it, the laws arise from individuals 'freely' interacting, but this free interaction is in fact determined by these laws. From what I understand this is one dialectical element of Marx's theory. The dialectic then is not some statement about the fundamental nature of society, although the analysis that results might be, but is his way of relating categories to each other (method). Other things that set Marx apart might be: his historisation of capitalism: capitalism emerges from a preceding system and is itself limited in time, not eternal but evolving; scope of analysis: classical economics just looks at exchange, Marx looks at production as well, and ties these two together; the hidden political aspect: behind the facade of capitalist 'neutrality' there lies a structure that strips some people of the fruits of their labour and transfers it to other people, all under the guise of being voluntary; contradictions: there are antagonisms within capitalism that at the same time both are necessary for its advancement and build up and leads to its destabilization.

I think that is a fair, very brief summary of the way Marx takes his subject and treats it differently from others. From this brief summary we can already see the vasteness of his undertaking. But why then do we have to further complicate matters? We have seen that what works for physics does not necessarily work for society. Why then does what works for society have to work for physics? To say that it is dialectics all the way down seems like an unwarranted leap. Especially when for Marx dialecitcs is not even some underlying principle of society, but an analytical tool, like reductionism. Making dialectics an ontology is unnecessary for correct revolutionary theory and practice, even if it is correct from a scientific point of view, something I won't comment on because I have not done my reading :p.

That being said, systems theory, cybernetics, ecology, are all fascinating subjects. I think that the physical scientific approach unduly infects other branches of science, for example psychology. To Mr. Natural in particular I recommend Dreyfus' critique of AI: "What Computers Can't Do", absolutely rigorous from a scientific and philosophical perspective, who takes on the AI theorists that seek to reduce intelligence to symbolic manipulation.

LuÃs Henrique

29th March 2012, 17:25

I recommend Dreyfus' critique of AI: "What Computers Can't Do",

Haven't found it in the internet, but this paper, Can computers think like humans (http://home.student.utwente.nl/h.schotman/pdf/TwenteStudentReview%20Computers.pdf), by Setargew Kenaw Fantaw, that refers to it, seems quite to the point. I would particularly underline this:

The third feature we need to consider is context-dependent ambiguity reduction. This means the human brain, unlike computers, interprets things on the basis of information that the context of perception provides. When using language or performing any task, we do it within a context. When we hear a certain sentence, we capture its meaning because it is uttered in certain context. Otherwise, were we to hear them free of any context there would always be ambiguities. Sentences are heard
in the appropriate way because the context organizes the perception; and since sentences are not perceived except in context they are always perceived with the narrow range of meanings the context confers.

(all emphases mine)

Which reinforces what I have written in the other thread:

To take Wittgenstein's insight of "language games" seriously, the problem with logic classes is that they completely remove "propositions" from any actual context.

I don't think "X is tall" where X is the name of a human being is a common kind of sentence in common discourse. It seems ackward in any living context that I can imagine. Of course, sentences such as, "Phil is the tallest of them", "Phil is taller than Mark", "The suspect is a tall man", "Phil is tall for his age", etc., are common sentences, and they may imply the idea that Phil is tall. But a sentence like "Phil is tall" seems to only belong in two not too "ordinary" "language games": the one that is played in English language classes for foreigners, and the one that is played in Logic classes.

Again, if we stick with Wittgenstein, there is a problem with the game that is played in Logic classes: it mistakenly assumes that removing sentences from their usual context, or "language games" is a neutral operation, that has no effect on their meaning.

If Wittgenstein is right, such assumption is not only false, but it accounts for many of the problems with philosophy. If he is right, Logic classes are like a kind of morgue for sentences, where they are subjected to procedures that are analogue to forensic anatomy procedures. But while coroners understand that they are analysing corpses, not living people, logicians fail to make the distinction.

Or you could think of Wittgenstein's insight as the linguistic equivalent to quantum physics: when you observe a sentence, just like when you observe a particle, observation itself affects the observed item (but this in turn requires a much more careful use of words than his "look how words are used").

(From the Wikipedia article about Dreyfus, this quote by Pamela McCorduck, referring to Dreyfus:

His derisiveness has been so provoking that he has estranged anyone he might have enlightened.

I hope I don't have to explain why I smiled at it...)

Luís Henrique

Mr. Natural

29th March 2012, 17:46

JustMovement, Others, I re-read the last two pages of this thread, and need to acknowledge the great intelligence and knowledge being offered by the various posters. Red 7 obviously has much to contribute. I am often left behind in these discussions, and am doing a lot of catch-up learning.

As regards value, the red-green theory of the organization of life, community, and revolution I'm advancing would be developed to include nature's as well as humanity's labors. Life is an "economic system." All living systems engage their environment to produce the means for their existence, and "man is a part of nature." (Marx)

The ecosocialists engage nature's "economic labors," but do so economistically, and thereby take the life out of their theory. They do not discuss nature's organizational relations, but view ecological relations and nature as a critical economic category. Joel Kovel, whose Enemy of Nature (2002) I like a lot, clumsily, polysylabically, and unsuccessfully attempts to dismiss a natural materialist dialectic on page 140 of this work, and ecosocialism for these and other reasons is unnaturally stale and sterile.

JustMovement, I'm anything but an advocate of AI and computer "intelligence," although the development of high speed computers was essential to the development of the systems-complexity science I love. These new computers can crunch unbelievable amounts of numbers and can thereby solve the complex non-linear equations characteristic of the abstract, complex relations and organization of life.

AI is a top-down concept while life emerges from the bottom up. Capitalism will use/is using AI to imprison humanity within The System. Here is Capra on computer "intelligence":
"Recent developments in cognitive science have made it clear that human intelligence is utterly different from machine, or 'artificial', intelligence. The human nervous system does not process any information (in the sense of discrete elements existing readymade in the outside world, to be picked up by the cognitive system), but interacts with the environment by continually modulating its structure. Moreover, neuroscientists have discovered strong evidence that human intelligence, human memory, and human decisions are never completely rational but are always colored by emotions." (Web Of Life, p. 68)

The human brain, as is true for all living systems, self-organizes from the bottom up but creates "higher" levels of organization as complexity increases. Here is Doyne Farmer, a major figure at the Santa Fe Institute: "Evolution thrives in systems with a bottom-up organization, which gives rise to flexibility. But at the same time, evolution has to channel the bottom-up approach in a way that doesn't destroy the organization. There has to be a hierarchy of control--with information flowing from the bottom up as well as from the top down." (Complexity, Waldrop, p. 295)

All life consists of self-organizing materials systems existing in dynamic interdependence with each other and their physical environment. Christopher Langton, the founder of the weak form of Artificial Life, gets this right: "Life is not the property of matter per se, but the organization of that matter." (Complexity, p. 277) Langton's "weak" AL looks for the relations and "rules" underlying the self-organization of matter into life, while "strong" AL attempts to create life and therefore joins AI as a major threat to humanity under capitalism.

Life has a universal pattern of organization that people must learn and employ if humanity is to continue. Capra's triangle models this organization, which is similar to the form and organization of the materialist dialectic, and makes it available to popular understanding and praxis.

The very best from the red-green living organization that is me.

Anarpest

29th March 2012, 18:08

Wasn't Wittgenstein quite critical of logic at times? Eg.
'Mathematical logic has completely deformed the thinking of mathematicians and of philosophers, by setting up a superficial interpretation of the forms of our everyday language as an analysis of the structures of facts. Of course in this it has only continued to build on the Aristotelian logic.'
'But you can't allow a contradiction to stand! - Why not? We do sometimes use this form in our talk, of course not often - but one could imagine a technique of language in which it was a regular instrument.

'It might for example be said of an object in motion that it existed and did not exist in this place; change might be expressed by means of a contradiction.' Both from 'Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics.'

Kronsteen

30th March 2012, 00:56

They're in what I call 'quotation marks', simply because a scientist and a mathematician seem to be defined more by their label today, as opposed to what they actually do.

Quotation marks, whether single or double, are usually reckoned to have four uses. When performing the function you describe they're called Scare Quotes. When the suggestion is of sarcasm - as in 'so-called scientists' - they're called Sneer Quotes. In practice, the two overlap.

you are clearly not a Marxist, and you clearly don't wish to properly engage with any of the seminal texts.Ah, is that why I'm the one citing the seminal texts. And engaging with them.

How about picking up a copy of Capital... instead of ranting about Anti-Duhring?Anti-Duhring is the book on dialectics. Capital is the book on capital. The subject under discussion is dialectics, not capital.

The former is abundantly more dialectical than the latter.Examples please.

Do you think Marx's idea of the commodity is slippery too, and his ideas on value and surplus value 'bullshit drivel'Please quote the passage where I even hinted at anything like that.

just because the concepts aren't safely hammered down into strict categories, but seem to dance around each otherThat is the usual excuse marxists use for sloppy thinking. If everything is a bit like everything else, and everything relates in some way to everything else, anything can be anything.

Fredric Jameson, called "Valances of the Dialectic".I'll take that as a research recommendation. He has to be better than Lezek.

I enjoyed reading this sentence immensely!Enough to respond to its content?

Marxism isn't simply a bottom-up theory. It works both ways.If it doesn't work one way, you try it the other. It's a form of data-fitting.

the orthodox science of today... which still argues over whether the universe is infinite or not, and how many spatial dimensions things might be made up of. Working entirely from the abstract of course!If this image you have of subatomic physics were correct - working from abstractions to more abstractions - it could not have been used in the design of the chip in the computer you used to make the comment.

Your characterisation is therefore self-refuting.

bourgeois scientists locked within underground labsSpeaking as a James Bond villain, you have been watching too many James Bond movies, with mad scientists plotting to take over the world.

The fact is all three of your statements are ridiculous, and indeed gibberish, but only under the false forms of which you yourself have built. I don't think I've ever heard of such thing as an 'internal self-contradiction'.It's one of the founding principles of dialectics, and a term used repeatedly by both Marx and Engels.

You seem to be defending a theory you've never read.

Dialectical contradiction is simply an expression of motion - two objects coming into contact with each other and mutually growing or forming new objects through their interaction. It's quite a simple and elegant exposition of motion, and to me appears quite conceptually strong.You've just conflated two different concepts in dialectics - motion as doubling, and synthesis.

Another word you seem to have an issue with is self-movement. If there was no self-movement in an object [...] then two objects would never meet and interact with one another, and this bases itself upon a world that is always made up of constituent parts (i.e. it is not reducible or atomistic).
Time is but an abstraction of this movement, and there is also no co-ordinate point Space (or absolute vacuum) of which matter moves in - these two concepts alone account for many a physical 'fact' today.It's like you've put Engel's phrases into a Chomsky-grammar text generator and pasted the result. All the familiar terms are there, but mashed into word soup.

your final caricature point - about a persons thoughts being identical with the movement of the world.It's a central notion in Hegel, taken directly by Plekhanov, and repeated by Lenin, then Trotsky. Why didn't you know that?

Marxism essentially slayed the mystical beast of methaphysics and idealism.You're using these words as they were used by exactly one school of philosophers. The Logical Positivists. Interesting.

Everything since in the 20th Century is theory - structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis etc (the one exception probably being phenomenologyNone of these are 'since' the 20th century.

Engels was a political theorist and philosopher, not a mathematician. He was being critical of an established abstract tool, not working strictly within its boundaries.He was yet another non-scientist trying to berate scientists for not being scientific enough. According to his eccentric definition of 'science'. Which he took from a christian mystic who also badly misunderstood the concepts he was critiqueing.

Criticise science, fine. But first understand what you're criticising. Instead of waving around words you've picked up from popular introductions.

Idealism is a metaphysical positionYes, it is, because it posits a level of reality which is more fundamental than what is observable, and is therefore only inferrable.

That is why materialism is also metaphysical.

It also makes the idealism/materialism debate completely irrelevant to marxism as a project for political change. Marxism doesn't need a theory of ultimate reality for the same reason a cookery book doesn't need one.

The question then becomes: Why do marxists feel the need for one?

There is no need to use the word metaphysics as a Marxist. Physics alone will suffice.But only physics that you deem sufficiently 'materialist'.

Red 7

30th March 2012, 03:26

I evidently don't frequent discussion forums enough, as your comments on the uses of quotation marks went over my head like dialectics go over yours.

You're not engaging with any texts, you're deconstructing them from a comfortable vantage point - with no interest in the meaning or the content. It's as pointless of a venture as If I picked up a copy of Mein Kampf and attempted to 'engage' with it. Just be forthcoming about it - you're not interested in dialectics, in fact it's utterly irreconcilable with your views and way of thinking. I'd also like to point out that Anti-Duhring is a book about science... and Eugen Duhring, funnily enough. You keep trying to formulate dialectics as a kind of all encompassing system (perhaps in acknowledgement of Hegel)... but it's not. It's a kind of logic, a way of abstracting and thinking about thing.

Also, Marx's Capital is littered with dialectical thought (find me a single reading of the text that doesn't entirely rely upon a dialectical methodology or employ a dialectical way of thinking about the different concepts and their relations) - from the very beginning he talks about the Commodity, a concept of which makes little sense except when in motion (via exchanges) and in contradiction (with use values), and he moves from one concept to the next - without ever finding a center or a foundation.

The interaction between exchange and production, the transformation of C-M-C into M-C-M, reification, value and valorisation etc. Try and give me a non-dialectical description of any of these ideas, I guarantee you that the whole thing would collapse before you could begin. This is exactly why anti-dialectic doctrinaires stick to what they're good at, far away from Marxist science (whether the economic, historical or philosophical), 'exposing' the inconsistencies and slipperiness upon the very safe ledges that Marx and Engels attempted to obliterate.

As an example for those interested, in what Marx referred to as 'superstructure', it is evident that these social structures consisted both of material elements in the form of the forces of production (the economic base which went to constitute it) as well as being tied up with wider interactions within the relations of production - class, property etc - so how would you describe such a structure? It is simultaneously a system (one which is quite apparent in the everyday lives of humans) as well as a complex set of inter-relations (between people), each constitutes the other. They form an interactive bond, and they quite often fold in upon themselves, very much beyond any limited or individual shell. It can neither explained by being built from the bottom up, or divided down into smaller constituent parts from above, for these are atomistic methods that fail to account for such intricate interactions. It is exactly here that contradiction arises. In this case, between the superstructures material reliance on exploitation and the extraction of surplus value from workers - and its normative activity seen in it attempts to ideologically perpetuate and reproduce itself. In a sense, it's similar to the classic master-slave relation.

If this image you have of subatomic physics were correct - working from abstractions to more abstractions - it could not have been used in the design of the chip in the computer you used to make the comment

This is getting a little tiresome now. You keep saying how all I've read are introductory guides to science, yet you can't keep up when I mention the specifics. What exactly is there in a particle physicists cosmological framework or their TOEs that helped design the chip in my computer? Nothing.

It's one of the founding principles of dialectics, and a term used repeatedly by both Marx and Engels.

No it's not. For one, you have no clue of what dialectics even means - how could you, nobody knows. Joke aside, please find me an instance where ... anyone ... mentions "internal self-contradiction" together in conjunction like that. I've never heard any mention of it. Self-movement - yes, internal contradictions - yes. Internal self-contradiction - complete bollocks.

It's a central notion in Hegel, taken directly by Plekhanov, and repeated by Lenin, then Trotsky.

No it's not - it's a crude caricature. Just like the rest of your mock-tone gibberish.

None of these are 'since' the 20th century.

I can't work out if you're exaggerating a grammatical error that wasn't there in the first place, or just utterly clueless.

He was yet another non-scientist trying to berate scientists for not being scientific enough. According to his eccentric definition of 'science'. Which he took from a christian mystic who also badly misunderstood the concepts he was critiqueing.

You don't have to be a scientist to criticise scientific practice, just like you don't need to be a capitalist to criticise capitalism. I think both Engels and Hegel knew exactly what they were critiquing, although they might not have known every finite detail, they had more than the necessary knowledge to make noteworthy attempts.

Yes, it is, because it posits a level of reality which is more fundamental than what is observable, and is therefore only inferrable.

That is why materialism is also metaphysical.

Materialism doesn't posit anything. It simply collapses a distinguished gap, and distances itself from mystical nonsense (metaphysics). If there's something beyond observation, then it's beyond observation. If something can't be inferred, then it can't be inferred. You're refutation of the bleeding obvious has the exact qualities of a theist insisting atheists have to make the very same leap of faith, and that their position is as declarative as the mystical one. This is such a bullshit red herring.

It also makes the idealism/materialism debate completely irrelevant to marxism as a project for political change. Marxism doesn't need a theory of ultimate reality for the same reason a cookery book doesn't need one.

For political change you need some sort of theory, otherwise there's nothing to go off of. Not sure where the 'ultimate' has come from. Like I've mentioned before - that's something the particle physicists are more interested in.

Kronsteen

30th March 2012, 06:15

Just be forthcoming about it - you're not interested in dialectics

Yes, obviously I'm spending all this time reading and writing about it because I'm completely uninterested. Because that's how disinterest works.

In reality, I'm interested in marxism, and in philosophy. So it would be quite surprising to be uninterested in dialectics - which means actually thinking about it, instead of adopting it as an article of faith.

It's a kind of logic, a way of abstracting and thinking about thing.

Floor wax and aphrodisac.

Also, Marx's Capital is littered with dialectical thought (find me a single reading of the text that doesn't entirely rely upon a dialectical methodology or employ a dialectical way of thinking about the different concepts and their relations) - from the very beginning he talks about the Commodity, a concept of which makes little sense except when in motion (via exchanges) and in contradiction (with use values), and he moves from one concept to the next - without ever finding a center or a foundation.

You have just demonstrated one of the main problems of dialectics.

When discussing probably any issue at all, there will be change of some kind involved. A switch between binary states, or a gradual morphing with lots of ambiguous intermediate stages, a process starting or finishing, a change of place or ownership, even a dynamic equlibrium.

Which enables dialecticians to point to all these different phenomena and exclaim: Look! Motion! No one else can see it but we can because we're enlightened!

Another thing you get in probably every issue is...more than one thing involved. A factory containing workers with different beliefs, an atom with electrostrong and electroweak forces, an event with more than one cause, and so on.

Which enables dialcecticians to point and exclaim: Look! Contradiction! No one else can see it but we can because we're enlightened!

Any and every kind of change is bundled together under one incredibly vague term, and any situation which in any way has componant parts - in other words, any situation at all - is collected under another.

This is the worst kind of philosophy - folding vast variety into a few uselessly vague terms, and pretending to have somehow thereby explained the variety.

They then perform a little trick. Your example of the commodity is a good one. When Marx, like every other economist, talks about production, distribution, transactions etc., he's being 'dialectical' because he's mentioning that a change has occured. But when any non-marxist economist mentions the same change, they're being undialectical because there's a different change going on in the process, a change which they don't emphasise.

Okay, you say dialectics isn't a grand theory, it's a heuristic.

If so it has to be the vaguest, most useless heuristic ever. Allowing as it does any lesson to be learned from any experience.

Materialism doesn't posit anything.

It posits that the mind is a function of the brain, that platonic universals don't exist, that solipsism is false, and that voluntarism doesn't work.

If it didn't posit anything, there'd be no point in calling yourself a materialist. And yet you do. Odd, that.

It simply collapses a distinguished gap, and distances itself from mystical nonsense (metaphysics).

There you go again, ruining a useful word like 'metaphysics' by reducing it to an insult.

If there's something beyond observation, then it's beyond observation. If something can't be inferred, then it can't be inferred. You're refutation of the bleeding obvious has the exact qualities of a theist insisting atheists have to make the very same leap of faith

You are confusing inferrence with deduction, and faith with belief. And you need to check the meaning of 'refutation'.

And the word is 'your', by the way.

For political change you need some sort of theory, otherwise there's nothing to go off of.

What happened to dialectical relationships and mutual interdependencies? What happened to being top-down and bottom-up? Does that not apply to theory and practice? Or do you only forget to be dialectical when convenient?

CommunityBeliever

30th March 2012, 12:31

The square function can be decomposed into at least three components:

Natural part:
The natural part takes any natural number and it multiplies it by itself to create a square configuration like so:

http://www.learner.org/courses/learningmath/algebra/images/session7/7c1_square.gif

Fractional part:
The fractional part takes in a fraction and outputs a smaller fraction:

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg831/scaled.php?server=831&filename=msp6091a1009f98d5f88c70.gif&res=medium

Angular part:
Unlike the natural and fractional parts, the angular part is not a permutation. Instead the angular part is a bijection from angles in the interval [0°, 180°] to angles in the interval [0°, 360°].

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Unit_circle_angles_color.svg/300px-Unit_circle_angles_color.svg.png

It is a contradiction that a negative quantity should be the square of anything, for every negative quantity multiplied by itself gives a positive square. The square root of minus one is therefore not only a contradiction, but even an absurd contradiction, a real absurdity. The square root of minus one is no more an "absurd contradiction" then the square root of 25, the square root of 1/2, or any other square root. As I described above there are different parts of the square function and these lead to different types of square roots.

Furthermore, where would mathematics — lower or higher — be, if it were prohibited from operation with square root of minus one?Complex numbers allow us to factor all polynomials. For example using complex numbers the polynomial x^2+2x+2 can be factored into (x+1+i)(x+1-i). This means that in ℂ any polynomial can be represented as a coefficient list or a root multiset. This has applications throughout mathematics, for example, this allows us to solve any linear homogeneous ODE with constant coefficients in terms of its characteristic equation.

There are non-analytic smooth real functions. On the other hand, all holomorphic complex functions are analytic. This is another considerable advantage of complex analysis.

You won't get any of that in the abstract orthodoxy of 'mathematics' today - namely because the mathematicians are ultra-conservative in their deployment of concepts and completely non-critical to the few concepts of which they do have, inherited through custom, and that lie as rotting axioms at the bottom of their entire system. And so they tend to bury their heads in the sand and work strictly within the preconceived confines of their comfy mathematical house

I am currently building a comfy mathematical house (a computer algebra system) using Lisp. The elements of the "abstract orthodoxy" of mathematics such as category theory, algebraic number theory, linear algebra, ring theory, and group theory have been invaluable for me so far.

However, if you have any alternative mathematical theories I am interested in hearing about them. If your alternative theories have a valid use then I will spread the word and I will personally work to put these theories into practice. Unfortunately, I doubt you actually have any alternative theories.

Physical science:

You can see a dialectical view of the world is vastly different to the stuff of bourgeoisie science.Mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, biology, ecology, and other formal and physical sciences are all hard sciences. These hard sciences are based upon quantifiable empirical data so they should not be denounced as "bourgeoisie."

I highly doubt that you have any useful alternative theories in the hard sciences but if you do I would love to hear about them. Dialectical thought doesn't seem to pose an alternative to "bourgeoisie science."

Sets of laws and a conceptual framework were erected, yet even today scientific practice has failed spectacularly in linking electromagnetism with wider cosmological phenomenon.

What "wider cosmological phenomena" are you referring to here and do you have an alternative theory which links said phenomena to electromagnetism?

'Scientists' today are too busy dicking about in twelve dimensions, performing mathematical gymnastics, and arguing over time-travel - exercises of which, may be fun and produce good sci-fi, but are wholly absurd and nonsensical.

The square function I described to you before is reversible with the square root function. Similarly, some physicists believe that all physical laws are reversible because we haven't found any one way functions in the universe. As such complete data recovery and even the revival of the dead may be a possibility some day. On the other hand, the question of rather or not actual time travel is possible is still an open discussion and it definitely makes for good sci-fi. For example, in the recent Star Trek film Spock meets with his future self who travelled back in time. Do you get your understanding of science from sci-fi?

I assure you that outside of the sci-fi world, and in the realm of actual hard sciences time travel isn't a big issue. As for "mathematical gymnastics" refer back to my previous discussion on mathematics where I mentioned that modern mathematics is invaluable.

Social science:

It seems to me that the methodology of the physical science's are useless when it comes to describing the organization of society. Physics has this incredibly explanatory and predictive power, and so it is tempting to expand it to other 'levels of organization.' But while reductionism makes a lot of sense for physics, for example, it does not work for a description of society. Natural science explains a wide range of physical phenomena in varying levels of organization from atoms, to molecules, to planets, to solar systems, to galaxies, all the way up to the entire universe itself. On some planets (such as Earth) life emerged from complex chemistry and through the process of evolution by natural selection lifeforms adapted to their natural environment. For example, cactuses are adapted to the desert and coniferous forests are adapted to the taiga. All of these lifeforms are driven by their natural environment which in turn can be explained by the laws of physics. Even primitive hunter gatherer societies were dependent upon the natural climate.

However, the emergence of civilisation 10,000 years ago changed everything. We are no longer dependent upon the natural climate, the climate is dependent upon us, and as we are now seeing with global warming this is sometimes to our own detriment. We are now dominated by the artificial rather then the natural. As such we need social science rather then natural science to explain modern society.

How about picking up a copy of Capital... instead of ranting about Anti-Duhring? The former is abundantly more dialectical than the latter. Do you think Marx's idea of the commodity is slippery too, and his ideas on value and surplus value 'bullshit drivel' just because the concepts aren't safely hammered down into strict categories, but seem to dance around each other and are entirely historically-dependent?

The theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explain the class societies which emerged around 10,000 years ago and which will be abolished with the emergence of world communism. Marx's idea of the commodity, his ideas of value and surplus value, and other ideas related to class society are all valid. Beyond the realm of class society, his ideas do not hold weight. Neither Marx nor Engels ever produced any considerable contributions to the natural sciences.

And Marxism IS a science (a socio-historical one), it's a scientific understanding of the world, and the fact you so vehemently distinguish between the two and place them in different camps simply shows you up for the petty liberal-thinker that you really are (you can dress a monkey up, etc).

To say that Marxism is a science is definitely giving one person (Karl Marx) way too much credit. Marx had a pretty good critique and analysis of class based society but his analysis wasn't divinely inspired so it wasn't without some flaws.

Technology

Historically, that wasn't always the case, just as in the future a lot of our theories and models will be thrown into the trash heap, and new (hopefully more sensible, rigorous and reasoned ones) will be built in their place. I very much doubt this will happen under capitalism, of course.

Why do you think that? Updating technologies comes at a significant cost, which is why we are left with outdated and inefficient technologies in capitalist society. On the other hand, throwing out and replacing scientific theories is a simple mental act. The minimal cost of updating scientific theories has allowed us to accumulate a vast scientific knowledge. It is in spite of this vast knowledge that our technologies remain flawed. For example, we have known for several decades how to build efficient computer systems, yet we are stuck with stupid C-machines and unfriendly user interfaces.

Recent developments in cognitive science have made it clear that human intelligence is utterly different from machine, or 'artificial', intelligence.

The principles of cognitive science effectively demonstrate the incompatibility of human cognition with the Von Neumann architecture and the modern C-machines that are based upon it. On the other hand other architectures that are much more conducive to AI were implemented before the AI winter. The development of intelligent alternative machine architectures and computer hardware will inevitably lead to the emergence of strong AI. However, this probably won't happen in capitalist society because capitalism suppresses technological development.

Red 7

30th March 2012, 15:52

CommunityBeliever - I do not think all of science is useless and should be chucked out, that would be ridiculous... and make me a Luddite. I've never said anything of the kind. I gave a few criticisms of how mathematics might be used to create complex theories of everything... as in string and M-theory etc, which are conceptually all over the place, and often quite ridiculous, with no empirical evidence. But, ultimately I am interested in science and mathematics, yet worried that its development under capitalism has made it quite conceptually conservative. I'm not much of a mathematician... and definitely don't refute the logic or many centuries of development in it as an abstract tool to help understand the world. My use of the phrase bourgeois science related specifically to the flawed industrial practices, the methods of teaching science in the academy, and also the wider world views many scientists under capitalism hold. It's wholly an issue of application.

So nothing is to say scientific inquiry is useless, or the hard sciences you mention have not made huge leaps in solving practical problems etc. I can't say I have any alternate theories for you... but I might advise you just to think outside of the box, and good luck with your projects.

Also I'd just like to add - I'm as massive sci-fi fan, but no, I certainly don't get all my scientific knowledge from here. I read widely, and time travel is something which comes up time and time again in real discussions of modern physics.

I also think it's a little narrow and reductive to place Marx and Engels specifically into the realm of 'class society' and say they had no understanding beyond that, specifically when understanding the natural sciences. I understand people like to put ideas in boxes, collect butterflies, and categorise etc - but I personally feel it's extremely unhelpful. Evolution and biology is limited in explaining human societies, and Marxism is an excellent scientific method of looking at societal states, culture, human beings and their development through history.

On technology: Well its a simple ideological case really. Ideas will change when social conditions transform and the mode of production changes. Right now scientific conditions are tight and regulated by vast superstructural networks. For one - the working class aren't involved. In my opinion, that's a big negative, and their inclusion, and the revolution to come, will violently shake the scientific landscape (in a good way).

To Kronsteen:

And you need to check the meaning of 'refutation'.

And the word is 'your', by the way.I think refutation is fine. But I'm a little sad to see you so focused on grammatical errors. I have spotted numerous of yours in the process of reading/quoting you, but I don't feel it adds anything to our discussion.

Bourgeois economics begin with a few founding axioms, and then proceed to build complex mathematical models, stuck in time, on top of those.

And on your interest in dialectics, it seems to exclusively stem from fanaticism and disgust. I can't make out anything of yours, except that you hate the use of the word, and the specialist lingo involved in certain descriptive passages. I don't think there's much substance in our disagreements, and we seem to just be talking over each other, so I'll just keep it short.

Kronsteen

30th March 2012, 17:29

I'm a little sad to see you so focused on grammatical errors. [...]

And on your interest in dialectics, it seems to exclusively stem from fanaticism and disgust. I can't make out anything of yours, except that you hate the use of the word, and the specialist lingo involved in certain descriptive passages. I don't think there's much substance in our disagreements

I mentioned one semantic error and one lexical mistake amongst a load of major points which you simply ignore. From which you conclude that I'm focusing on grammar. Which makes it another word you need to look up.

Interesting that you now admit you don't understand the points I'm making. But you're somehow sure they're wrong anyway.

Rusty Shackleford

30th March 2012, 17:41

Mr. Natural

30th March 2012, 17:51

CommunityBeliever, Welcome to the quilt we're threading. I'm going to quickly get in over my head in your fields of expertise, as you know much. However, as I'm already drowning in a sea of capitalist values, institutions, and people, and as we're both old farts who should be inclined to be comradely with each other, I'll take my chances.

In your response to my rejection of computer intelligence as representing human intelligence, you remarked of an "AI winter." That's interesting, for I find there has been an AL winter, a SFI winter, a systems-complexity science winter; indeed, there has been a freeze for all of the new sciences of organization, as applied to human society.

I trace these wintry intellectual climate changes to the relentless progression of the capitalist system. Life values are opposed to capitalist values, and thus The System would tend to ignore and/or reject sciences of life. None of the living systems theorists I engage has ever understood, even recognized the capitalist system, and that the world's top systems scientists habitually ignore The System is a prominent sign of capitalism's triumph--as a system.

I shudder at the thought of a strong AI being developed within capitalism.

Now I'll get into water that is perhaps over my head. My sense of Red 7's objections to current mathematicians who exist in the "confines of their comfy mathematics houses" might be illustrated by the following passage from M. Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity, p. 140. The highly interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute had organized an economics conference in which the other scientists, all mathematicians of sorts, were dazzled but unimpressed with the mathematical wizardry of the economists.
"As the axioms and theorems and proofs marched across the overhead projection screen, the physicists could only be awestruck at their counterparts' mathematical prowess--awestruck and appalled.... 'They were almost too good', says one young physicist, who remembers shaking his head in disbelief. 'It seemed as though they were dazzling themselves with fancy mathematics, until they really couldn't see the forest for the trees. So much time was being spent on trying to absorb the mathematics that I thought they often weren't looking at what the models were for, and what they did, and whether the underlying assumptions were any good. In a lot of cases, what was required was just some common sense. Maybe if they all had lower IQs, they'd have been making some better models.'"

In other words, the economists had constructed a virtual world of math in which they were thinking and living. String theory seems to be the ultimate such wandering from reality.

I'm definitely not a scientist. However, I cannot agree that biology and ecology are "hard sciences." I think of them as "soft" sciences of life's organizational relations. I look for the organization of the stuff of life and apply it to human organization.

I also cannot agree with a primal evolutionary scenario in which life emerged as a product of natural selection. The pre-biological evolutionary tale that seems correct to me has "life" (protocells) emerging from the self-organization (autocatalysis) of matter into systems that then became units of their own natural selection in company with physical environmental forces. The life process, as I understand it, is a bootstrap of these living systems interacting with each other and their environment.

All living systems self-organize in dynamic interdependence with their surround, and a notation I have developed for this living bootstrap is "s-o/S-O," wherein the capitalized S-O is also natural selection. The slash then represents the emergence of the life process through this bootstrap of self-organizing, material, living systems.

Have you read Capra's Web of Life, ComradeBeliever? If so, I'd really appreciate your conscientious, scientific appraisal of it.

I read your "about me" and the two brief links from your post. In your bio, you wrote, "After 1,000 posts I think I am ready to retire from posting on revleft."

Bullshit! Let's make our posts really worthwhile and develop paths out of capitalism into a realized human future.

My red-green best.

Thirsty Crow

30th March 2012, 17:53

from my own understanding, the dialectical method is really best suited for social science and not material science. but, matter in some ways operates along the same lines and so dialectics can also attempt to explain material motion as well.

but like i said, i feel its better suited for the larger scale explanations of things. society, or maybe universal motion.

and no, this is not the PSL line on the dialectic, its just my understanding.
And how exactly is the object of social sciences' investigation ideal (I'm asking this since you imply that social sciences are in opposition to "material sciences" woith regard to their respective relationships with the dialectic)? In fact, let me right here state that this is a rhetorical question - here you're practically denying the possibility and viability of a materialist inquiry into the dynamics of social formations which effectively means that thinking about society is necessarily confined to idealism of one form or another. The huge problem with this take is that you also disregard the fact that social practice, human practice, is material as well (since our actions are msot definitely not the products of the contardictory self-development of the Absolute Idea, the Universal Mind or whichver rubbish).

And I would just love to see how this dialectic can account for "the unversal motion" (on the other hand, Marx for instance always insisted on the so called differentia specifica of processes and things - their specific characteristics that condition their very function, you might also say, nature - as opposed to vague generalities which do not explain anything but merely constitute tautologies, and I think the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right is a very important text in this regard).

Kronsteen

30th March 2012, 17:56

from my own understanding, the dialectical method is really best suited for social science and not material science.

There is the position that there are two dialectics - one for society and one for nature.

There's another position that there is only a dialectic of society, which certain marxists inadvisably tried to project onto the world of physics.

but, matter in some ways operates along the same lines and so dialectics can also attempt to explain material motion as well. How can it do this? There are the famous lines about 'particles in motion', and references to Zeno's paradoxes, but how do you see motion in matter explained (or just described) dialectically?

and no, this is not the PSL line on the dialectic, its just my understanding.Doubting the line of one's own tendency is generally the best place to start.

Mr. Natural

30th March 2012, 18:10

Rusty Shackleford, Welcome to the show, bro! You wrote, "the dialectical method is really best suited for social science and not material science, but matter in some ways operates along the same lines and so dialectics can also attempt to explain material motion as well."

I'd like to turn your dialectics on their head (I believe some guy did something similar previously), and use the new sciences of the organization of matter into living systems to illuminate and develop philosophical dialectics. Hegel's and Marx's and Engels' genius enabled them to understand "nature, human society, and thought" as organic, systemic processes--the process of life. This is completely in accord with the new scientific understanding of life and its organization.

So I'm proposing we engage these new sciences and develop the materialist dialectic--the life of Marxism--into a popularly intelligible form that enables praxis.

Life has an organization that we who must consciously organize our lives must follow.

My red-green best.

u.s.red

30th March 2012, 22:48

The square root of minus one is no more an "absurd contradiction" then the square root of 25, the square root of 1/2, or any other square root.

It may not be an absurd contradiction, but the only way modern mathematics can describe it is an "imaginary" number. Why can't this be described as a dialectic of a real number and an imaginary or unreal number.

However, this probably won't happen in capitalist society because capitalism suppresses technological development.

One of the fundamental arguments of Marx was that capitalism cannot exist without technological development. The capitalist is constantly forced, by competition, to introduce new technology. The computer is a good example. He can make things cheaper and he can also throw people out of work.

Kronsteen

31st March 2012, 01:23

It may not be an absurd contradiction, but the only way modern mathematics can describe it is an "imaginary" number. Why can't this be described as a dialectic of a real number and an imaginary or unreal number.

Because that's just talking about two aspects of one thing and declaring them to be 'in contradiction'. It has no more explanatory power than saying the length and the height of a wooden box are at war with each other.

What Engels meant by an 'absurd' contradiction is extremely unclear. He thought imaginary numbers couldn't exist because his definition of 'number' was of numbers in one dimension. Though he presumably had no trouble with cartesian co-ordinates on maps - being into military history, as he was.

But why this contradiction should for him show that something can't exist, while a different contradiction should be an integral part of something's real nature, he never explained.

capitalism suppresses technological development. One of the fundamental arguments of Marx was that capitalism cannot exist without technological development.This is appropriate to a discussion of the dialectic, because this is one of the ways in which the dialectical image of society is true. Not detailed enough to be useful in making predictions, and certainly not distinctively marxist, but true.

Capitalism relies on technology, so it has to promote technological development, so it has to promote the rigorous scientific thinking behind developing technology.

Capitalism is threatened by rigorous thinking, because one result of rigorous thinking about capitalism is marxism, so it tries to limit it. It's like a person who needs a drug to live, but is poisoned by the same drug.

Capitalism needs the creativity and knowledge of scientists and engineers, as it needs creativity and expertise in skilled workers - but it can't afford to trust a skilled, independent workforce.

This is a way in which talk of interpenetration of opposites, contradictory forces and things becoming what they oppose is a mystification of a straightforward and true idea. You could call it the rational kernel hidden in the mystical shell of dialectics.

It's not applicable to everything, it's no guide to action, and it's hopelessly vague, but it is trivially true. Which makes it quite a small kernel.

As to why so many marxists prefer the mystified versions of explanations like this...that's a question for the psychologists.

u.s.red

31st March 2012, 01:36

Capitalism relies on technology, so it has to promote technological development, so it has to promote the rigorous scientific thinking behind developing technology.

As long as the rigorous thinking is limited to technology then everything is safe for capitalism. Once rigorous thinking is applied to say, sociology, economics, history, etc., then capitalism imposes the limits of, I think, propaganda and social control. If an economist begins to think critically then she is ejected from the university system and is universally ignored.

Rusty Shackleford

31st March 2012, 09:08

There is the position that there are two dialectics - one for society and one for nature.

There's another position that there is only a dialectic of society, which certain marxists inadvisably tried to project onto the world of physics.

How can it do this? There are the famous lines about 'particles in motion', and references to Zeno's paradoxes, but how do you see motion in matter explained (or just described) dialectically?

Doubting the line of one's own tendency is generally the best place to start.

Im still studying dialectics and trying to comprehend the process.

And how exactly is the object of social sciences' investigation ideal (I'm asking this since you imply that social sciences are in opposition to "material sciences" woith regard to their respective relationships with the dialectic)? In fact, let me right here state that this is a rhetorical question - here you're practically denying the possibility and viability of a materialist inquiry into the dynamics of social formations which effectively means that thinking about society is necessarily confined to idealism of one form or another. The huge problem with this take is that you also disregard the fact that social practice, human practice, is material as well (since our actions are msot definitely not the products of the contardictory self-development of the Absolute Idea, the Universal Mind or whichver rubbish).

And I would just love to see how this dialectic can account for "the unversal motion" (on the other hand, Marx for instance always insisted on the so called differentia specifica of processes and things - their specific characteristics that condition their very function, you might also say, nature - as opposed to vague generalities which do not explain anything but merely constitute tautologies, and I think the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right is a very important text in this regard).

im shortening dialectical materialism to just dialectics. im not referring to Hegel's dialectics.

and, as i said, im still studying the concept. albeit very slowly since im working over 40 hrs a week and have little time for reading.

LuÃs Henrique

2nd April 2012, 18:19

On the subject of mathematics, it seems that Engels really got everything wrong.

There is no movement or change in mathematics, other than a movement in our ideas. 1+1 "isn't" equal 2. 'Two' is merely a different name we give to 1+1. Addition, subtraction, etc., are called "operations", which give some people the impression that we "do" something to numbers when calculating. But it isn't true; calculation is a mere practical scheme to translate a mathematical "word" into other.

Where it could be argued that a dialectical movement occurs, regarding mathematics, is in the history of mathematics.

For instance, the concept of number departs from counting. Whence we realise that we can operate with numbers by addition and subtraction, we can make an enormous variety of calculations, all of which remain coherent and retain their properties (3+4 = 4+3, etc.) But if we try to subtract a bigger number from a smaller one, we arrive to a result that cannot be used in counting (ie, that is not a natural number). 3-4 would thence be a non-number, contrary to 4-3. This of course isn't a contradiction between 3 and 4, or between 4-3 and 3-4, or whatever. It could however be called a contradiction within such a simple arithmetic system, in that the result of the same operation (subtraction) is sometimes a number, and sometimes not a number. Transcending such contradiction implies extending the concept of number beyond natural numbers, to arrive at integers (negating the impossibility, or negating the negation, if we are to stick to such phrase). From this point, addition and subtraction cease to be different arithmetic operations, with subtraction becoming merely a particular case of addition ("unity of opposites", some may say) - and the appliable properties remain consistent (3+[-4] = [-4]+3). Similar reasonings lead to rational numbers through division, and to real and complex numbers through raditiation.

However this reasoning is objectionable, for there is no real contradiction, as defined before, within the sucessive and increasingly inclusive arithmetic systems. There is no internal push to the sucessive transformations, all of which come from without.

Luís Henrique

Strannik

19th April 2012, 18:00

There hasn't long been a post in this thread, but I think that this is an important and interesting one.

I have in the meantime acquired Capra's book and I'm halfway through. :) I do believe that it is a useful read for any leftist, whether they agree with it or not. Lenin, however, was very much opposed to ideas that Capra promotes and their usefulness for revolutionary theory - just do a search on Bogdanov and Lenin on marxists.org. It seems he was very critical of theories that attacked certainty of objective knowledge - which is understandable for someone who has to wage a war.

In essence the question is whether the general systems theory could replace dialectics as the philosophy of Marxism - or even, whether dialectical materialism of Marx hasn't always been a type of general systems theory.

As for now, I have to finish Capra's book as well as Lenin's criticism of bogdanovism. :)

Mr. Natural

20th April 2012, 20:11

Comrade Strannik, Many thanks for your post and interest in Capra's living systems theory, which is based in the new sciences of the self-organization of matter into the living systems that compose and create the life process on Earth.

Your brief post was full of important points, most of which I will reply to tomorrow. I just want to make a couple of what I believe are very important comments today before dog and I head for our afternoon hike and I do some brainstorming on "our" overall project. I hope you will consider this to be a mutual project in which we challenge the hell out of each other in our common pursuit of organizational relations and a viable revolutionary organizing theory.

My first observation is that I believe you are only the second Marxist to conscientiously engage Capra and the new science(s) of organization. This is very exciting to me, for I have been absolutely alone in my twelve-year obsession to bring life's organization to the revolutionary organizing process and the anarchist/communist society to come. I know I'm onto something of the greatest importance to the left, and my inability to get anyone to even take a look has been beyond frustrating. I'm not pushing my ego, but communist revolution, and I really believe "Capra's triangle" makes a bottom-up, communist revolution possible.

So we're both red pioneers of organization in a left that cannot organize.

My second comment has to do with Capra's triangle. My research tells me such a thing had never even been contemplated previously; Bogdanov's tektology, as Capra explains, came the closest to a science of organization, and not even Bogdanov thought there might be a universal pattern of organization of life. But there is, and it is modeled by the triangle, and the triangle's organization is remarkably similar to the concept and processes of the materialist dialectic.

Human beings are self-organized material systems, and must follow the same basic "laws of life" as do the rest of life's self-organizing material systems. Humans, though, must consciously follow life's organization and haven't known how. whereas the rest of life enjoys an automatic ecological integration.

Chapter 7, "A New Synthesis," first presents the triangle. It is that triadic Pattern/Structure/Process formulation. Capra then draws the actual figure of a triangle in his less-valuable follow-up book, The Hidden Connections. I have been using this triangle for a dozen years now, and it works!

The triangle recognizes that all life consists of self-organizing material systems, the base unit of which is the cell. All of these living systems exist in a network pattern of organization that is seamlessly wed to what they do--their life activity. So the simple formula the triangle offers to create a living system--a living community--is to organize the matter (people and tools) in the network pattern that best merges the stuff with what it does (life activity). This boggles everyone's mind (that damned paradigm shift in consciousness), but it's quite simple and we do it all the time. We organize classrooms, families, sports teams, farmers' markets, etc., as network-patterned communities, but we do not realize that is what we are doing and we do not have the triangle to provide us with awareness of the organization of life and a recipe for community.

I believe Capra's triangle offers all of us the means to come together with others and create forms of revolutionary community. This triangle and Capra and the science, though, are rooted in material relations and are ultimately opposed to Machism and Bogdanov's interpretations, which are a form of scientific idealism. Machism, in reaction to the vulgar reductionist science of the era, saw physical objects as arising from sensations. Mach thus brought "life" to the dead things of the predominant science, but he sacrificed their materiality.

I hope this hasn't been too wordy. My red-green very best.

Kronsteen

20th April 2012, 23:16

Over on the ******* forums, there are two articles on dialectics.

One's by Amadeo Bordiga (http://www.red-marx.com/on-the-dialectic-by-amadeo-bordiga-t489.html), and though I don't agree with him, it is a lot clearer than most introductions to dialectics - especially his notion of 'negation of the negation'.

The other is by 'Miguel' who also posts here (http://www.red-marx.com/recent-advances-in-marxian-dialectics-t509.html). It's a veritable masterclass in how to pretend the stunningly obvious is both a great insight, and a uniquely marxist one.

EDIT: RevLeft is censoring the names of other revolutionary left forums?! Now that's sectarian.

Strannik

21st April 2012, 08:39

Lenin's criticism of Mach, if I remember correctly, was that Mach forgets that our sensations are caused by objective reality. His criticism of Bogdanov seems to be, that he tries explain reality on all levels with a same set of rules while Lenin's position is, that human consciousness reflects reality, but follows different rules in its development.

My first doubt on Capra is similar. I agree that all nonlinear systems can be explained by a similar set of rules, but social consciousness, the realm of politics and economy - seems to be an ideological simplification of reality. Ideological systems try to construct a linear model for living in nonlinear nature, which is why they periodically end up in crises. And Lenin was simply pragmatical - linearity of social consciousness is something you have to consider when you want to do politics.

I'm sorry if I'm unclear but this is written out of the blue. I haven't even reached the Synthesis part of Capra's book, I'm at the chapter on complex numbers.

By the way, have you read Castells? He's a theoretic on network society who might have something valuable to add :)

Stadtsmasher

21st April 2012, 09:23

Fascinating thread.

"Mysticism" itself is a misused word in many cases; I'm not sure it is applicable to concepts like the dialectic. It's a bit too fuzzy of a term itself, which is ironic because it implies a criticism of fuzziness... :)

I would say the dialectic is more of a heuristic (i.e., "rule of thumb") concept than the iron law that classical Marxism posits. Dialectic patterns are certainly observable, but that doesn't mean it is a mechanistic/determanistic stratitjacket "law of nature."

Strannik

21st April 2012, 17:14

I guess it's true. I have always understood mysticism to mean that we claim the existence of natural concepts that do not really exist or that we claim knowledge that we do not really possess. But it is a bit fuzzy term.

The problem with discussions on dialectics is that reality has many levels that are maybe related but not necessarily similar. Dialectics means different things to different people. For Hegel, as far as I'm able to understand, it was an universal set of rules explaining everything in existence. For Lenin, I think, dialectics described the human social progression - how actual material changes reflected in collective consciousness. For Marx dialectics might have referred to a methodology for creating and analyzing concepts.

Its all unbelievably confusing, but I think it needs to be discussed, for I do not believe that capitalism can be surpassed using bourgeois concepts and bourgeois thinking. For example, bourgeois economic theory from liberals to keinsialists is fundamentally linear and mechanistic (and does not make sense if one rejects that mechanical linearity). As is the bourgeois concept of individuality, etc.

And systemic approach is interesting, because this is certainly one of the things that bourgeoise does not do - you can't claim a cosmic right to become as rich as you want and have a systemic approach to world.

Kronsteen

21st April 2012, 17:16

I would say the dialectic is more of a heuristic (i.e., "rule of thumb") concept than the iron law that classical Marxism posits.

It's a fair point but there's two issues.

The first is that redefining a theory as a heuristic can be a last ditch attempt to save the theory.

In conversation with dialecticians, I've often seen them change tack late in the debate after being unable to overcome objections to the theory, and start arguing that it isn't a theory after all but a set of recommendations.

Their hope is that I'll accept their redefinition, after which they can quietly switch back to dialectics as a theory. It's a debating tactic.

The second problem is that the heuristic model of dialectics ultimately has the same problem as the 'theory of everything' model.

A heuristic is a set of guidelines or suggestions, both for the kind of questions a researcher should ask, and the kind of answers they should expect to receive.

Thus it doesn't commit the researcher to believe that everything has an opposite with which can in some way fuse in the future, nor that any pair of diametrically opposed descriptions must both be true.

Rather it directs the researcher to look for forces pushing in opposite directions, to emphasise common underlying features between apparently incompatible descriptions.

The problem with dialectics as a TOE is that when the mystifying language has been cleared away, what remains are either platitudes so vague as to be worthless, or obvious falsehoods.

The corresponding problem with dialectics as a heuristic is that the guidelines are either so vague and flexible that they don't guide us anywhere, or they guide us in disastrous directions.

Mr. Natural

21st April 2012, 17:43

Kronsteen, You are always fun and often informative. Thanks for the links. I hadn't realized Miguel's thread at ScarletMarx had finally been engaged, and now I will have to do some tough reading.

I agree with you that Revleft's censorship of "rival" sites is out of order. I think of it as childish. Come on, Revleft, clean this up!

I want to quote your summation the negation of the negation from the Bordiga essay, for it clearly presents this dialectical "law" in the manner in which I believe Marx and Engels apprehended it. You wrote the negation of the negation is a "dual sense of destruction and transformation--destroying a previous state by transforming it into a new one ... which is later destroyed by transforming into a third state."

Excellent! And from an anti-dialectician! So you get the "words" (laws) of the dialectic right, but you disdain the syntax (organizational relations) that organizes the words into a meaningful system.

Marx and Engels and the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations from which Marx derived the materialist dialectic see life and society as organic, systemic processes. The dialectical law of the negation of the negation then represents a major relational movement that takes place in living, systemic processes.

The "mysticism" attributed to dialectics refers to the unseen organizational relations of life--those relations whose "laws" of motion and development you recognize.

You didn't mention that Rosa L is continually posting on anti-dialectics on "Redforum." This means I can't post there, for she will troll and destroy any pro-dialectics threads and posts in her usual manner.

You're my kind of anti-dialectician, Kronsteen. You are principled and contribute to the discussion, and you force me to more deeply engage my own views.

My red-green best.

Mr. Natural

21st April 2012, 18:39

Strannik, I will have to reply to you piecemeal in a couple of posts, for you raise so many deep points.

I just re-read Web of Life for the umpteenth time. This is my habit, for I need to deeply engage and thereby "digest" organizational relations to keep them alive in my mind. I've now written more in my copy of Web than Capra. Again: we see the "things" of life but are blind to their critical underlying relations.

Now I'm halfway through Humberto Maturana's and Francisco Varela's Tree of Knowledge (1987), which discusses their theory of autopoiesis as related to consciousness. Autopoiesis and self-organization are almost identical twins, and I thoroughly engage Tree systematically in a Web-Tree-Self-Producing Systems cycle.

The latter reference is to John Minger's Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis (1995), in which the author thoroughly investigates and ulltimately affirms the concept of autopoiesis (self-making).

So I work constantly and hard to maintain an "organizational vision," and I believe I am correct in stating the human species must learn to "see" and organize in life's universal pattern of organization, and that this will constitute a paradigm shift in human consciousness that could result in a human renaissance and communism.

I have thoroughly worked out the most difficult passages of the Maturana/Varela consciousness presentation I first saw in Web, and there will be much on this later, for it is critical. However, I skipped the chapter on the mathematics of complexity in which you are currently laboring, Strannik. I don't have your mathematical vision, and couldn't "get it." We all have skills; put a bunch of us together and we can compile a complete vision of reality.

You mentioned Castells. Capra's follow-up to Web, The Hidden Connections, discusses Castells at some length. I find him to be "left-liberal," but you might be seeing more. Capra also is fond of Habermas, whom I experience as a left-liberal philosophical muddle.

I want to respond to something you wrote several posts ago: "In essence the question is whether the general systems theory could replace dialectics as the philosophy of Marxism--or even, whether the dialectical materialism of Marx hasn't always been a type of general systems theory."

My general reply is that general systems theory/Capra's triangle/the materialist dialectic need to inform each other and merge. But here is a question I've been unable to answer: Capra's triangle focuses on life's organization, while the materialist dialectic emphasizes the motion and development that emerges from the organization of life. Obviously, the organization of the life process and its motion and development are a unity, but is this "whole picture" properly termed a "dialectic"?

Might we be looking at something entirely new here--something along the lines of a major paradigm shift in consciousness? Human consciousness is a partial consciousness that cannot readily see organization, and I believe Capra's triangle bridges this "consciousness break."

So my answer to your observation is that general systems theory, Capra's triangle, and the materialist dialectic are a yet-unformed unity, and that, yes, the dialectical materialism of Marx has always been a type of general systems theory, but incomplete. Capra's triangle, as I use it, informs and embodies life's organization into a form regular people can learn to "see" and use.

All for the moment. My red-green best.