Materialism

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Can somebody in an easy-way explain dialectical and historical- materialism?

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Anyone?

[Prinskaj]

To give a really brief, and slightly oversimplified answer:
The belief the material conditions dictate history, not ideas or individuals.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

What do you mean with material conditions?

[Prinskaj]

What do you mean with material conditions? Well, basically everything that exists in the physical world, again slightly oversimplified.

[Jimmie Higgins]

In specifically Marxist terms historical-materialism means seeing the conflicts between classes as the motor of social change, rather than "new ideas" or heroic individual personalities. This non-materialist, idealist, view of history is most common in our societies generally: the French Revolution wasn't about a conflict between a society based around the aristocracy and feudal interests and an emerging class who needed a different kind of social arrangement, in this view - instead, an idealist reading of the French Revolution is that people (specifically enlightenment philosophers) came up with ideas of liberty and rule of law out of the own heads which then created a clash of different views about how society should function. There's a kernal of truth in this, but it's a shallow observation (in terms of depth, not vanity :lol:) - true these ideas played a role, but why did Russoe or Locke or Paine come up with these ideas then and why did they find such a receptive audience at this point? To me the answer is that these ideas weren't some that just came from nowhere as if feudalism existed for so long because people were just too dim to think of these concepts, but because these ideas reflected the needs of people who didn't want or need ridged feudal hierarchies and irrational beliefs, they needed exact measurements, technology that could save labor, rule of law so that trade could be done more smoothly, individual mobility rather than birth-determined castes, and free laborers not tied to any feudal or common lands, but in need of money for rent and food and therefore open to wage-labor.

Worse than this kind of idealism is the "great-man" version of history where particularly "great" individuals create ideas or do things that "make history". In this view WWII happened because Hitler was crazy or the Russian Revolution happened simply because Lenin was a genius (or crazy according to capitalists :lol:).

[Jimmie Higgins]

But materialism can be more general and isn't necissarily Marxist - and some "Marxist" materialism is just badly or over-deterministically conceived. Modern science is materialist but not marxist - evolution looks at material changes (i.e. changes to the environment or habitats or food sources) resulting in changes to the species. Aerodynamics has to seriously look at the physical and material forces for flight, rather than making a beautiful full-scale model of a bird or wishing for flight really hard.

[Zealot]

You can read Dialectical and Historical Materialism (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm) by Comrade Stalin for a quick review of this.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

So can the dialectics be used against the human nature argument many capitalists have against communism? Because nature is always changing?

[Rooster]

Dialectics isn't an answer to anything. At best it's a methodology, like other forms of logic. And it's pretty poorly understood. The evidence of which is plain to see in nearly every post where dialectics is the answer.

[Jimmie Higgins]

So can the dialectics be used against the human nature argument many capitalists have against communism? Because nature is always changing?There's overlap, but don't know if that's quite a fit - dialectic method is intended to help explore how things change, not prove that it does. Maybe in a specific example of the human nature argument it could be useful. (Or maybe another poster has a clearer sense of how this concept would help with general human nature arguments.) You obviously can't have both viewpoints: if human behaviors are fixed and inherent, then a theory of dialectical change in society is not possible.

Materialism can help argue against some crude human nature arguments: both social conditions and nature are in flux and in a historiacl-materialist view this would then influence human behavior. It's easy to give concrete examples from history of how material changes and changes to the modes of production change human behavior and organization and attitudes - with a little historical background.

But non-Marxist version of materialist science might alternately claim biological-determinism: that war is not because of "bad or immoral people" as idealism might have it, but war is because of genetics and inherent biological factors.

Do you have particular "human nature" arguments in mind?