Can someone please explain Dialectal Materialism to me

[campesino]

I look at some threads and webpages, And I don't even understand what they mean.

what is dialectal materialism a philosophy, a manner in which too look at things, rules, facts? please give an example of dialectal materialism and its use.

[Prometeo liberado]

I had to read Dance of the Dialectics to really get a good handle on it as there is no pat answer. Argument form, a tool for anaylisis so on and so on.

[Anarcho-Brocialist]

Materialism : Nothing comes from nothing. (Example : The physical world and our minds interact. "I am, therefore I think." Ideas reflect and recreate the material world and are themselves a material force when acted on by masses of people.) . Dialects : the study of contradictions (Example : Change is irrevocable, not circular, but like a spiral. When things change, we witness something entirely new, yet carrying forward aspects of what it was.)

[campesino]

Materialism : Nothing comes from nothing. (Example : The physical world and our minds interact. "I am, therefore I think." Ideas reflect and recreate the material world and are themselves a material force when acted on by masses of people.) . Dialects : the study of contradictions (Example : Change is irrevocable, not circular, but like a spiral. When things change, we witness something entirely new, yet carrying forward aspects of what it was.)

so what is its relevance to marxism? I understand materialism's importance, but not dialectics.

[Prometeo liberado]

so what is its relevance to marxism? I understand materialism's importance, but not dialectics.

When the materialist outlook is applied to the dialectical method of analyzing the world one sees the opposing forces that have governed history through the ages, ie class conflict. At least the way I understand it.

[dodger]

THE IDEAS BELOW HAVE BEEN PERCOLATING IN OUR CLASS FOR MANY YEARS.......the attraction of leaving our thinking to others has proved fleeting. Disastrous.


Dialectics

WORKERS, DECEMBER 2009 ISSUE

As thinking beings we always try and make sense of the world around us. (We wouldn’t last long if we didn’t). From the earliest days of antiquity, through the flowering of classical civilisation and on to the birth of modern society and developed industry, every advance has come about through our improved understanding of how things work. Dialectics is the tool for appreciating the inner workings of things, events, phenomena, but more importantly, how they change.

Elaborated first by the Greek philosophers (dialego – I debate), dialectics remained something of an intellectual curiosity, a philosophical cul de sac, particularly when religious beliefs dominated. It was Galileo’s dialectical approach which forced him to conclude that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not vice versa as the Bible insisted.

The signal breakthroughs in natural science which were a feature of the explosion of knowledge in the post-Reformation period were undoubtedly the work of geniuses, but what unites them is a dialectical approach. If conventional wisdom doesn’t explain why something happens, then jettison it and approach the problem with new eyes. Even if the conventional wisdom is as revered as the Old Testament. Think of Darwin and his theory of natural selection. Evolution over millions of years. Only impossible if you insist on wearing blinkers.

It was the German philosopher Hegel who finally drew out the laws of dialectics, principally that everything contains a pair of opposites, as seen for instance in a plane flying at a constant height – aerodynamic lift wants to take it ever upwards, gravity wants to bring it hurtling down. And that gradual, quantitative change between these opposites leads to a qualitative leap to something new. Apply heat to ice, a solid, and you get water, a liquid and eventually steam, a gas.

Hegel however was an idealist in the sense that he saw things as being a reflection of thought. Figments of imagination we would call it now. It was his materialist students Marx and Engels who understood correctly that thoughts and ideas are a reflection of the real, material world, and who took Hegel’s ‘upside down’ dialectics and stood it on its feet.

Contrary to other, fatalistic ways of looking at the world, dialectics enables us to see things and events as ever changing or capable of change. It is the working out of the contradictions within a thing which determines not if but how it will change.

True for the test tube and the nuclear reactor, at the microscopic and the cosmic level. True for all natural phenomena and true for society. Applying dialectics to Britain in 2009, we see a society full of contradiction. Millions of workers with the skill and capacity to make and do the things we need, held back by a system which puts profit before people. Fatalism says “It’s always been like this, nothing ever changes.” Dialectics says “Nothing is insurmountable. If we put our minds to it we can generate change. Possibly not a huge step all at once, but part of the process of changing the ice to steam
*********

Contradiction and Change

WORKERS, JAN 2011 ISSUE

The question of change (and what determines it) is a fundamental part of philosophy. In spite of appearances, nothing can remain the same – all life is development, or motion, and all development involves a series of changes. When we consider things in their motion, change and interconnection, we are at once confronted with contradiction.

Every phenomenon in nature contains contradictions, opposites which exist together in unity. Development comes about through the struggle and unity of these opposites. Contradiction is an internal process and the basis of all quantitative development.

For example, cause and effect make up a unity of opposites. Or, bourgeoisie and proletariat together make up capitalist society, also as a unity of opposites. The two opposite elements of a contradiction are both mutually exclusive and mutually dependent. Their unity and struggle is absolute, quantitative and ongoing.

All processes develop in stages. Development occurs from the division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation. The relationship between the two sides of a contradiction becomes more contradictory within each stage, forcing the emergence of a new quantitative stage. Quantitative, stepwise, change creates the conditions for qualitative changes to occur. For instance, heat applied to cold water in a kettle causes the water to change, becoming hotter and hotter – a quantitative change – until the water boils and turns into something new, steam – a qualitative change.

Antagonism replaces and destroys contradiction: it is the mode of destruction and transformation to a new quality. For instance, in Russia in 1917, the antagonism between classes boiled over into revolution in which the working class and peasantry took power, thus creating a new kind of society. So out of this process, a synthesis, a new quality, a new unity of opposites, is born. A new process emerges to replace the old. All qualitative changes occur as leaps. They can appear to come from nowhere, but in fact are a result of the old contradictions becoming impossible to reconcile.

In contrast, religion attributes the changes going on in the world to god, whilst metaphysics sees nature as an arbitrary collection of objects and events, independent of and isolated from one another. Metaphysics wrongly asserts the cause of change as being not inside things but outside them. Dialectics grasps that internal contradiction is in all things and is the basis of quantitative and qualitative development. To understand the development of a thing, we must study it internally and in its relations with other things.

Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society, that is, the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction between classes. The development of contradictions pushes society forward.
*********************
2009: There is a future, and it begins here…

WORKERS, JANUARY 2009 ISSUE

In a land swamped by doubt and diffidence, we declare there is “a way through” the gloom. There is “a way out” of relentless harassment, encirclement, and destruction of all we hold dear.

Doubt and disillusion come when people cannot detect hope or chance of progress within the system. And they are absolutely right. And in a sense, temporary self-doubt and despair are a necessary stage in the process of learning. But to stop at this juncture, imprisoned by disillusionment, is to close our eyes to the whole picture. Progress will have to come from us, the working class, acting together. We are the only force seeking advance; all other institutions set out to diminish or destroy us.

Knowing it’s going to have to come from us, we need to be sure about, to reflect on, the best way forward. In other words, we must plan. In particular, we must make certain that our strategy and tactics are sound.

To be able to plan we have to know where we have come from, where we are now and where we ought to be. We can’t plan in the abstract, in a detached way. Neither can we be dreamers: we must be realists.

Certainly, our working class is nowhere near as strong as it once was. The post-World War II high in terms of organisation and influence, which lasted for several decades, has been dissipated and replaced by a new low caused by a succession of external, aggressive ruling class tactics such as deindustrialisation, mass unemployment, privatisation, mass immigration, and so on.

A word of caution: the highs were never as glamorous nor as profound as sometimes imagined. Our 40th anniversary celebratory articles in Workers throughout 2008 re-published the warnings our Party gave in 1968 of the weaknesses apparent even then in our labour movement during a dispute in engineering. As early as 1976, our chairman, Reg Birch, was alerting everyone to the dangerous consequences of a perceptible withdrawal by workers from trade union activity. Without doubt, it was not just external attacks but also internal weaknesses, particularly of outlook, that have led to the ceding of our strength.

But, for all our travails, we are still a class and the only force for progress.

Action and ideas

Action changes ideas, quite quickly. Well conducted class struggle has a huge stimulating effect on the realm of ideas. This was brought home forcibly in last year’s NUT strike action over pay, unsuccessful though it may have been in the end. It has been the custom in recent years to talk of the younger generation as “Thatcher’s children”, but the sudden, eager participation of young teachers in schools which was also evident on the march and rally in central London showed the young to be very readily involved, indeed willing participants in this outburst of trade union action.


Workers can change the world, but we must fight for our liberation.
Political understanding does not proceed in a simple, upward, linear fashion. Working class history records progress being more in waves: with ups and downs in organisation and thinking. Thinking and action go hand in hand and sharpen each other, as is evident whenever collective action occurs.

Our working class is not going to survive if we continue to think in the same stale, passive way; we need to think according to the ways of nature, dialectically. Dialectics regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence. And that is how workers ought to view capitalist Britain in absolute decline.

British workers need to examine, understand and exploit to their advantage all the prevailing contradictions here and in the world in order to transform all the class potential into a qualitatively new approach.

Not only was dialectics the cornerstone of Marx, but also in the maelstrom and madness of the First World War carnage, Lenin studied it and then reintroduced all his learning and knowledge to the Bolshevik Party. It is largely because of this painstaking work that in Russia the workers and communists transformed the imperialist war into a civil war for the establishment of workers’ power – the only country where such an earth-shattering event happened. The mental outlook was right. Elsewhere the people continued to be slaughtered as cannon fodder.

The economic is the political

British workers have long accepted a sorry separation between their economic and political interests. To re-establish the influence of our class and our unions, workers will have to square up to a weakness in their operation that has existed for over a century.

We can no longer afford to cede our politics to a social democratic Labour Party that was always prepared to work with the capitalist system and has always betrayed our class. Our class organisations need to advance our economic and political aspirations jointly; there is no separation. Workers can handle both simultaneously because the political usually emanates from the economic anyway. We need a politically conscious working class, capable of actively reshaping society, not a Labour Party.

In its old age, capitalism has an ever-increasing tendency to dictatorial methods of rule and a diminishing tolerance of any semblance of democracy. Latter-day capitalism is inimical to democracy, often down to the last detail.

One London Borough’s town hall was a wonderful late Victorian rabbit warren of a building that was full of different sized meeting rooms, which unions or community groups or local people could hire for their gatherings according to their need and specification. When the Council built new buildings on the other side of the borough in the late 1980s, surprise, surprise, no provision was made for people to meet. That attitude is replicated throughout the land: fear, mistrust, hatred of the people.

One feature of this anti-democratic tendency is the vast apparatus of CCTV cameras and general surveillance of the populace, installed to intimidate. How can it be countered? Surely, the only answer is in numbers, in the scale of class activity.

Remember first, moments during the English Civil War in the 17th century and particularly the army’s Putney debates in 1647 (the army then was essentially the people in arms); and second, during World War II where the whole direction of post-war society was hammered out in national debate by conscripted soldiers and civilians. In the coming years, the class has to take tentative, then full-blown steps, to becoming a permanent, self-acting collective dictating the direction of the country.

A feature of capitalism is its never-ending ability to revolutionise the means of production in search of profit combined with its minimal, antiquated mechanisms for political expression. The class cannot avoid the practical question: how do power and change best accrue?

Somehow society has ossified into an unquestioning acceptance of universal suffrage in a representative bourgeois parliament, as if this is the best and only way to progress political matters and as if this method and institution is somehow the quintessence of human political decision-making, never to be superseded. But really, has the idea of how to run a society come to a halt with the establishment of parliamentary representative assemblies? These were first invented by feudal nobles to restrain the overweening powers of medieval kings. We shouldn’t be browbeaten into thinking ours is a holy cow.

Bourgeois parliaments involve the people handing over responsibility for politics to others once every four or five years. Surely a proper political arrangement ought to be based on the active involvement of the people and demand their permanent participation in the denouement of decisions and lines.

In the early years of our party, we studied at great length the political and organisational structure of the nineteenth century Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Those skilled workers had constructed a body in which the power of the collective working in their trade would be protected and allowed its expression: the supreme body was an elected lay national committee who met to take decisions about the direction of their union and instructed their national executive officers. Not only did our Party study this working class practice, so too did Lenin when deciding how best to organise the Bolshevik Party.

War and liberation

Workers must foresee where world capitalism is heading. At a time of economic depression, it appears to be dividing into competing blocs and powers – USA, EU, Russia, Japan, India, China – fighting over markets, commodities and resources. Workers need to look deeply into the concept of war again, not just accept prevailing views. In the past often discussion has been limited to whether it is “a just war, or an unjust war”.

But oughtn’t we to propose an altogether different approach: it is capitalism that fights wars and enlists workers to sacrifice their interests and often themselves in the greater good of the rulers. Workers do not want war, workers need only to engage in fights for liberation, for emancipation. There is a world of difference.

Recent massive levels of immigration into Britain on a scale hitherto unknown are deliberate attempts on the part of the ruling class to weaken, disrupt and nullify our class. They want to drive down wages and worsen conditions and let the employers be able to crack the whip over us. All immigrants must decide whether they for advance and progress as part of a British working class. If they are, then they must become part of our class culture and struggle for what everyone desires: work, pay, better conditions, employment, health, education, etc. If they are not, then like those blacklegs and scabs in our past they will have to be opposed and confronted so as not to undermine our budding power. Scabs can be of British descent or of a new background, but they remain the same thing. Together we are strong, divided we are weak.

To workers, capitalism is like a foreign body, an occupying force, distorting our land and the productive process. It attempts to make us aliens in our own realm, to denude us of our natural strength. In turn, we should aim to make our outlook the one that predominates throughout all the sectors of life; capitalists should feel they are the outsiders. Workers should create their own agenda, their own future, which will some day move centre stage.

In particular we must struggle to retain society’s culture as secular and scientific. As a result of a long sequence of events in British history, popes, clerics, church courts have long ago been put firmly in their place, so that religion was pushed to the margins of society, a materialistic outlook was commonplace and people were free to form their views and live their lives free from their control. But now a worrying equation that says religion equals good has re-formed. Our traditions need to be maintained if we are to establish a unity across our class. There should be no more toleration of religious schools, which will only become ghettos, increasing bigotry and mutual distrust.

The way forward

When deciding on our future direction, the first step to be taken is: stop looking for an escape route – there is none. We don’t have to make the same mistakes again; in particular, we do not need to be enslaved to a Labour Party or a son of Labour Party because social democracy and the political sects have always seen workers as passive, an electorate, a force to be harnessed, whose lot would be improved by “politicians” doling out reforms on their behalf.

To change the direction of industries, services and sectors across the whole of our society, our class needs to be strong in the workplaces of Britain. The strength of unions lies in there, not in the minds of a few general secretaries or national executives. A culture has to be revived.

And in the years ahead a guiding rule to any class struggle must be: it’s a protracted campaign; it needs to have a guerrilla perspective – fight where we are strong and they are weak, use flexible tactics, and aim to build our strength, organisational and political. Always, always, we must preserve our class force.

With long working hours, inflation rocketing, prices and interest rates and utility bills soaring, workers need to reinvolve themselves in their defensive organisations. But the tactics and strategy have to be sound – there must be no grand gestures or posturing and action has to be well prepared and supported.

A plan for a future cannot emerge from a few minds, a cabal. To succeed, it has to involve a greater mass, evolve out of a never-ending exchange inside our class. This battle of ideas will throw up a programme to ensure our survival. Workers must start to plan how to tackle the practical problems we face within each sector of society and incorporate these ideas in struggle.

Consider water. Let’s demand a national grid for water: an integrated system of tunnels, pipelines, aqueducts, reservoirs, whatever is needed, to move water – a staple of life – across the whole of Britain. We can shift water from the wetter areas to the dry ones. Crucially, water needs to be re-nationalised because it is not safe in the hands of profit-making, foreign water companies. Take energy and power. We need an integrated approach combining nuclear, coal, gas, oil and renewable forms of energy. Otherwise, there is literally the danger of the lights going out. Each sector of industry and the economy should be rethought.

Our Party has achieved much in 40 years. The outfits that mushroomed in 1968 have disappeared, most of them quite quickly. Only we have stayed the course. We have contributed and learned a lot. In our early years, valuable tenets of our Party’s outlook were established: workers think for themselves; they are not misled; they are the only force for progress; we will not have a party of full time professionals; the two class line.

We do not seek power for our Party. We seek power for the working class. We share weal and woe with the people and do not seek advantage.

We are a new type of party, and must see that our traditions are handed down to the coming generations.

Workers are active, self-reliant, able to think, speak and act for themselves, and thus capable of changing the world. We have belief in the working class, in its ability even when it has voluntarily not exercised such powers for a while. The skill, the sheer professionalism, the creative potential in workers must now be tapped to design a programme for survival.

[citizen of industry]

http://home.igc.org/~venceremos/whatheck.htm (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/whatheck.htm)




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What the Heck is Dialectics?

Dialectics is a tool to understand the way things are and the way things change. Understanding dialectics is as easy as 1 - 2 - 3.

One--Every thing (every object and every process) is made of opposing forces/opposing sides.

Two--Gradual changes lead to turning points, where one opposite overcomes the other.

Three--Change moves in spirals, not circles.

These are the three laws of dialectics according to Frederick Engels, a revolutionary thinker and partner of Karl Marx, writing in the 1870s in his book Dialectics of Nature. Engels believed that dialectics was "A very simple process which is taking place everywhere and every day, which any child can understand". This web site is dedicated to proving his point. In fact, if you understand the first seven pages of this site, you already understand the basics of dialectics. (If you landed here without visiting these pages first, please go to the Dialectics for Kids Home Page (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/index.htm)now).

Here's how it works -

1) Everything is made of opposites.

No object could hold together without an opposing force to keep it from flying apart. The earth tries to fly away from the sun, but gravity holds it in orbit. Electrons try to fly away from the nucleus of an atom, but electromagnetism holds the atom together. Ligaments and tendons provide the ties that hold bones together and muscles to bones.

Like material objects, the process of change needs opposing forces. Change needs a driving force to push it ahead, otherwise everything stays put. A billiard ball only moves when hit with a pool cue or another ball. We eat when our hunger tells us to. A car won't move if it's engine won't start. To win in fair elections candidates need more votes than their opponents.

Engels, drawing from the philosopher, Hegel, called this law the "interpenetration of opposites"; Hegel often referred to the "unity of opposites." This may sound contradictory, but it is easy to understand. It's like the saying, "It takes two to tango." There is no game if one side quits. There is no atom if the electrons fly away. The whole needs all of its parts to be a whole.

Here's a challenge--Can you think of anything that isn't made of opposites? Send your suggestions to [email protected] ([email protected]) To read some challenges and responses click here. (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/challen.htm)

2) Gradual changes lead to turning points.

The ABC's of Change (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/ABCS.htm) give 26 examples of this, one for each letter of the alphabet. What happens is that the two opposing forces in a process of change push against each other. As long as one side is stronger than the other side, change is gradual. But when the other side becomes stronger, there is a turning point--an avalanche, a birth, a collapse, a discovery, . . .

Physicist Michio Kaku gives a detailed example of this process in his book Hyperspace. He follows the turning points or stages in the heating of an ice cube. Click here to see how he describes it: The Dialectics of Water (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/water.htm)

Engels called this the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. Quantitative change is the gradual build-up of one opposing force. Qualitative change takes place when that opposite becomes dominant.

This law is powerful in describing the stages of development of anything. A person's life follows these quantitative/qualitative changes. Likewise human history, or the history of a particular place, has gone through many stages. The tool of dialectics is so powerful that Michio Kaku describes the history of the universe for its first 10 billion years by a series of dialectical stages, using only 250 words. Click here for Kaku's stages in the evolution of the universe: The Dialectics of the Universe (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/Kaku.htm)

Using the same approach it is possible to trace the history of the universe right up to the present by identifying the key turning points. Try it by clicking on The Top Ten Stories of All Time (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/topten.htm)

3) Change moves in spirals, not circles.

Many changes are cyclical--first one side dominates, then the other--as in day/night, breathing in/breathing out, one opposite then another. Dialectics argues that these cycles do not come back exactly to where they started; they don't make a perfect circle. Instead, change is evolutionary, moving in a spiral.

Maybe the changes are tiny, so we think nothing is really different--it's true that we hardly change in a measurable way with every breath. But we can see that many cycles do come around to a different place --children are not the same as their parents, even if they are a lot alike. People go to school and learn; when they return home, they are no longer the same. And, like it or not, you are a bit older with every breath. For more examples, see Spirals A - Z (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/spiralaz.htm) or Popcorn, Earthquakes, and Other Changes (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/Popcorn.htm).

Engels, again following Hegel, called this law "negation of negation". This sounds complicated, but, as Engels said, it is going on all the time. What happens is that first one side overcomes its opposite--this is the first negation. This marks a turning point as in Engels' 2nd law. Next, the new side is once again overcome by the first side. This is negation of negation.

Here are a couple more examples, one cosmic and two common:

The earliest stars were made of hydrogen and helium that were produced in the big bang. Those first generation stars fused these elements into heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, and iron. When those stars died,(i.e.were negated) they pushed those elements into space. If the first generation star died in a supernova, even heavier elements such as silver and gold were hurled into space. When second or third generation stars form, like our sun, they have these heavier elements, thereby allowing planets and life to form. This evolution is negation of negation.

A normal conversation requires negation of negation to move ahead. First one person talks, then the other; the second negates the first. Pretty soon, however, the first person begins talking again. The conversation makes no sense if the first person simply repeats what they said the first time. Instead, the first person now has listened to the second person talk, so the negation of negation returns to a different place (hopefully one of more understanding.)

Unfortunately spirals can go down as well as up. For example, if a person is feeling depressed, they may take drugs or alcohol to feel better. This may negate their bad feelings for a while, but when the drug wears off, the person often feels worse than when they started.

Of course we want our spirals to go upward. When they do, we live healthier and happier lives, full of learning, growing, and reaching our full potential.


So that's the three laws of dialectics--not too difficult, don't you agree?

Of course, there's more to understanding change than these three laws. If you'd like to learn more, here are some more essays about dialectics:

Where did this all come from? - Hegel, Heraclitus, Lao-tzu (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/dialhist.htm)
Contradictions - First things first (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/firstthi.htm)
Why doesn't everyone learn about dialectics? - The red scare (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/whynotdi.htm)
What good does it do to understand dialectics? - Making changes (http://home.igc.org/%7Evenceremos/whatgood.htm)

[Sir Comradical]

Basically there's opposing forces in the material world and change happens when one thing negates another thing and then there's qualitative changes and quantitative change and then there's stuff which has both form and content and yeah.

[Railyon]

Dialects : the study of contradictions

I find that to be a bit simplistic. Dialectics contains looking at contradictions (and it's indeed a big part of the concept) but the dialectic itself is to look at things not as "things-in-itself" but in terms of interrelation, which includes contradictions but it goes deeper than that.

Take the simple example of a spoon. A non-dialectician would say, it's a spoon. Period. Nothing about it.

While a dialectician would look at the spoon and say, a spoon is only a spoon when it fulfills the function we associate with the concept (and is something else when it fulfills a different function), we look at the conditions it was made under (which includes a possible commodity status), the history of the spoon as a thing and the concept, we consider why we even recognize it as a spoon, and so on and so forth, it's basically a giant net of relations with no clear beginning or end.

+1 to Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic, I'm currently reading that one.

[u.s.red]

I look at some threads and webpages, And I don't even understand what they mean.

what is dialectal materialism a philosophy, a manner in which too look at things, rules, facts? please give an example of dialectal materialism and its use.,

I think it is really hard to find a straightforward definition of dialectical materialism, esp one without endless jargon. Maybe such a thing is impossible. The most famous part of the dialect is the negation of the negation. Here is my take: All things, systems, ideas, etc, contain within themselves the possibility and inevitability of their own destruction, but then there is a regeneration into a higher or more developed state. Everything evolves from a lower stage to a higher one. Nothing is permanent or fixed.

Examples: A seed germinates. The seed no longer exists, it is negated. It grows, flowers, the plant produces thousands of new seeds. The plant dies, is negated, and so on. The seed not only is negated, but it regenerates into thousands of new seeds, thus a higher order. Not all seeds germinate, some are eaten, etc. This example is from Engels' Dialectics of Nature.

I think the process can also be seen in cell division, mitosis; also, the creation of matter and anti-matter

Maybe some common ideas reflecting dialectics: "seeds of one's own destruction," greek tragedy - the hero is killed because of a fault which is the basis for his heroism, thus, Achilles; somebody is on the "horns of a dilemma;" etc.

For Marxists, capitalism contains within itself the origin of its destruction. The capitalist exists only because he brings together, "socializes," wage workers to make a product. This socialization then creates a class which recognizes itself consciously as a social class. Obviously the process is not perfect and doesn't take place without setbacks, violence, revolution, blood, sometimes peaceful, etc., but take place it does (as Marx might say.) Capitalism is then negated, but it itself is the result of a prior negation, feudalism, therefore socialism is the negation of a negation.

So why hasn't dialectical materialism become the dominant modern philosophy? The ruling capitalist class obviously has an extreme interest in maintaining that the current system is the perfectly designed system and any attempt to change it will only lead to social chaos. Thus, you get reactionary philosophers like Karl Popper (although he called himself a social liberal), The Open Society and Its Enemies and Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses.

I'm pretty sure that molecular biologists, for instance, when watching a cell divide under a microscope, they don't think, "Wow! Dialectical Materialism happening right in front of my eyes!"

[Book O'Dead]

I invoke the anti-mystical powers of Rosa Lichtenstein...

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/index.htm

[Mr. Natural]

I now revoke "the anti-mystical powers of Rosa Lichtenstein." What the dearly departed Rosa L refers to as "mysticism" is actually the relations of life and society. Rosa L's pervasive reductionism takes the life out of life, community, revolution, and Marxism.

Comrades will have radical disagreements, but attempt to resolve them through discussion and debate. Rosa L, however, posted to destroy any attempt to discuss dialectics. She would have already bombed this thread with page upon page of insult and prepared links to turgid, reductionist philosophy.

Rosa L is a very bright person who fanatically lives to kill dialectics. Revleft is not the only site to ban her. I invite comrades to visit the philosophy archives to see her mean-spirited and highly effective sabotage of discussions of dialectics.

On a positive note, several comrades have already referenced Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003), which shows that Marx's materialist dialectic is based in the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations (world as internally related whole consisting of internally related wholes) and its abstraction process and dialectical categories ("laws"). This Hegelian dialectical philosophy brought nature and society to life in Marx's mind as the organic, systemic process that they are. The materialist dialectic engages life's and society's organizational relations, and thereby represents the "life" of Marxism.

I'd really, really like to be part of a discussion of the Hegelian/Marxist/Ollmanian dialectic. Ollman is the only Marxist to see Marx's debt to Hegel's philosophy of internal relations, which is in agreement with the new sciences of organization, and Dance of the Dialectic is his clearly written masterwork.

In my world, anti-dialecticians are always welcome, but only if they want to engage in discussion leading to theoretical illumination and praxis. I'm a red-green revolutionary, and I have no time for conservative fanatics.

My red-green, dialectical, revolutionary best.

[Mr. Natural]

Comrades, I gave out a lot of "Thanks" to posters in this thread. It's just great to encounter others engaging organizational, processive relations, as does Marxism and the materialist dialectic. Yes, life consists of "things," but those things are organized, systemic processes. There is no separate life.

Life is community, as is communism, and life's communities are self-organized, differentiated, dynamic, systemic processes. The materialist dialectic successfully captures the general sense of all of this.

My red-green best.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

I found this article very useful for the rudiments, since it addresses how the dialectic evolved over the course of history.

http://socialism-science.blogspot.com/2008/06/marxs-dialectical-method.html

[MotherCossack]

THE IDEAS BELOW HAVE BEEN PERCOLATING IN OUR CLASS FOR MANY YEARS.......the attraction of leaving our thinking to others has proved fleeting. Disastrous.


Dialectics


As thinking beings we always try and make sense of the world around us. (We wouldn’t last long if we didn’t). From the earliest days of antiquity, through the flowering of classical civilisation and on to the birth of modern society and developed industry, every advance has come about through our improved understanding of how things work. Dialectics is the tool for appreciating the inner workings of things, events, phenomena, but more importantly, how they change.
Knowing it’s going to have to come from us, we need to be sure about, to reflect on, the best way forward. In other words, we must plan. In particular, we must make certain that our strategy and tactics are sound.

To be able to plan we have to know where we have come from, where we are now and where we ought to be. We can’t plan in the abstract, in a detached way. Neither can we be dreamers: we must be realists.
Certainly, our working class is nowhere near as strong as it once was. The post-World War II high in terms of organisation and influence, which lasted for several decades, has been dissipated and replaced by a new low caused by a succession of external, aggressive ruling class tactics such as deindustrialisation, mass unemployment, privatisation, mass immigration, and so on.

British workers need to examine, understand and exploit to their advantage all the prevailing contradictions here and in the world in order to transform all the class potential into a qualitatively new approach.
The economic is the political

British workers have long accepted a sorry separation between their economic and political interests. To re-establish the influence of our class and our unions, workers will have to square up to a weakness in their operation that has existed for over a century.

We can no longer afford to cede our politics to a social democratic Labour Party that was always prepared to work with the capitalist system and has always betrayed our class. Our class organisations need to advance our economic and political aspirations jointly; there is no separation. Workers can handle both simultaneously because the political usually emanates from the economic anyway. We need a politically conscious working class, capable of actively reshaping society, not a Labour Party.

Bourgeois parliaments involve the people handing over responsibility for politics to others once every four or five years. Surely a proper political arrangement ought to be based on the active involvement of the people and demand their permanent participation in the denouement of decisions and lines.

The way forward

in the years ahead a guiding rule to any class struggle must be: it’s a protracted campaign; it needs to have a guerrilla perspective – fight where we are strong and they are weak, use flexible tactics, and aim to build our strength, organisational and political. Always, always, we must preserve our class force.

With long working hours, inflation rocketing, prices and interest rates and utility bills soaring, workers need to reinvolve themselves in their defensive organisations. But the tactics and strategy have to be sound – there must be no grand gestures or posturing and action has to be well prepared and supported.

A plan for a future cannot emerge from a few minds, a cabal. To succeed, it has to involve a greater mass, evolve out of a never-ending exchange inside our class. This battle of ideas will throw up a programme to ensure our survival. Workers must start to plan how to tackle the practical problems we face within each sector of society and incorporate these ideas in struggle.


Dodger ... that was very inspiring and interesting... you are right about what is needed.... totally...

Dialetics... should kind of explain how the world and everything works... like life..... it is like a pendulum ... first things go off in one direction..... then stuff happens and life reacts to it and gets pushed in the opposite direction.....
then inevitably life meets other stuff and pushes off again in a third new direction........
basically the bottom line is things do not stay the same.... life has to keep changing ... it is a physical certainty.... and also things tend to swing from one opposite to another because of the nature of the whole set-up.
this is obviously a major simplification... but thats how it works ...ish... if you think about it... you can see the pattern, roughly speaking... in history...and in our world today.
Trick is... how to equate that with our hope for a radical swing to the left......
Dodger is right though .... it will have to be all-inclusive.... socio-political- economic-transformation........none of this half-hearted, excuse proffering, collaborating with the enemy, conceding power to the capitist establishment labour party, ... it is liberal nonsense and only delays us more.

[dodger]

Dodger ... that was very inspiring and interesting... you are right about what is needed.... totally...

Dialetics... should kind of explain how the world and everything works... like life..... it is like a pendulum ... first things go off in one direction..... then stuff happens and life reacts to it and gets pushed in the opposite direction.....
then inevitably life meets other stuff and pushes off again in a third new direction........
basically the bottom line is things do not stay the same.... life has to keep changing ... it is a physical certainty.... and also things tend to swing from one opposite to another because of the nature of the whole set-up.
this is obviously a major simplification... but thats how it works ...ish... if you think about it... you can see the pattern, roughly speaking... in history...and in our world today.
Trick is... how to equate that with our hope for a radical swing to the left......
Dodger is right though .... it will have to be all-inclusive.... socio-political- economic-transformation........none of this half-hearted, excuse proffering, collaborating with the enemy, conceding power to the capitist establishment labour party, ... it is liberal nonsense and only delays us more.

Hells teeth. Madam Cossack, "Trick is... how to equate that with our hope for a radical swing to the left...... ". Balls Ma'am. what have those urchins ever done for you? Perhaps you need to swing a left, a knee to the groin--maybe a right follow-up! What is good for Madam Cossack, what are your hopes, what do you need? What do you want? That is what is important. Many who can do just little- do nothing.This is unfortunate. Seize the space around you, plant your flag on it. Make it a little better, join with a few others. If you are drawn to a political party, attend the odd meeting as long as it fits in with your domestic situation. Be a member or not..might be more your cup of tea to be a sympathizer. Your circumstance will dictate. YOU have the reins.

The great thing is Ma'am Cossack, there are millions of us- just thousands of them. Just the odds Dodger is comfortable with. We just have to learn how to say no, if we are not yet sure what to say yes to. You have been blessed with the knack of expressing yourself, an asset, pass it on to others.

[MotherCossack]

I suppose you are right...
well sounds like a material approach anyway...
so I'll be in keeping....and all that....
so no blood and no guns then... and no courage and no honour....
no actually.. no guns but plenty of courage and honour in spades.
Business as usual...

[Hit The North]

Dialetics... should kind of explain how the world and everything works... like life..... it is like a pendulum ... first things go off in one direction..... then stuff happens and life reacts to it and gets pushed in the opposite direction.....


The point is not to push the pendulum but to abolish it altogether.

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

so what is its relevance to marxism? I understand materialism's importance, but not dialectics.

Nothing.

[Mr. Natural]

Vox Populi, In response to the question of the relevance of dialectics to Marxism, you "replied': "Nothing."

Marx and Engels referred to dialectics as the "science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought." (Anti-Duhring). Marx and Engels obviously thought dialectics to be of the greatest significance to Marxism. Were they wrong?

Prole Art Threat, What exactly did you mean with your cryptic comment, "the point is not to push the pendulum [dialectics?] but abolish it altogether"? Were you actually dismissing dialectics? I had you pegged as a "half dialectician," in that you accept dialectics as applicable to human and social affairs and as applied by Marx in Capital I.

[Mr. Natural]

Siembra Socialismo, Your version of dialectics provided three laws: unity or interpenetration of opposites, transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa, and spiral form of development. This is the "Stalinist" version, I believe, that intentionally omits negation of the negation (contradiction) and thereby served Stalin's need to not be negated as he was negating the others who made the revolution.

Here is Engels in his plan outline for Dialectics of Nature, found on page 313 of Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol 25: "Dialectics as the science of universal interconnection. Main laws: transformation of quantity and quality--mutual penetration of polar opposites and transformation into each other when carried to extremes--development through contradiction or negation of the negation--spiral form of development."

Indeed, the missing law is the most important of all. This is not contradiction as understood by formal logic, though, which sees isolated, opposed "things." Hegelian/Marxist contradiction works with the living interconnections and relations of "opposites" such as proletariat and bourgeoisie.

Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003) has already been recommended by several posters. Here is Ollman on the dialectical category (law) of negation of the negation/contradiction: "Of the four main relations Marx investigates in his effort to make dialectical sense out of capitalist reality, contradiction is undoubtedly the most important .... 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."

Hegelian philosophy and dialectics brought nature and society to life in Marx's mind as organic, systemic processes. That they are. Dialectics brings Marxism and nature and society to life in the mind, and the current dismissal of the materialist dialectic or its reduction solely to a means of surveying capitalist development has led to the current moribund state of Marxism.

If Marxism is to return to life, it must honor and develop its own life: materialist dialectics. The new sciences of the organizational relations (dialectics) of life and the cosmos will be essential to this effort.

My red-green, dialectical best.

[ckaihatsu]

The point is not to push the pendulum but to abolish it altogether.


Negate the pendulum!


x D

[Hit The North]

Prole Art Threat, What exactly did you mean with your cryptic comment, "the point is not to push the pendulum [dialectics?] but abolish it altogether"? Were you actually dismissing dialectics? I had you pegged as a "half dialectician," in that you accept dialectics as applicable to human and social affairs and as applied by Marx in Capital I.

If the dialectic of class society is the class struggle and the point is to abolish class society, then it follows...