The relevance of dialectical materialism

[Kingfish]

As we all know one of the key factors that defines Marxism is its rigor in providing logical justifications for its claims and that this is a rigor that must apply to its philosophical foundations just as it does its economic and practical ones. Now I used to take a rather dim view about how valuable the philosophical aspect of Marxism until I read about historical materialism which I found to be an invaluable aide. Now historical and dialectical materialism seemed to be conflated in my readings but whilst I could see and understand the use of historical materialism I could not for dialectical materialism.


So my question :
Is dialectical materialism a necessary, helpful or even valid tool?


And for those who have found it necessary or helpful:

“Do you have the remotest idea what you would have to do to demonstrate that "dialectics" was something more than 19th century Germanic romanticist claptrap?

1. You would have to "use" dialectics to reach a conclusion about reality that could not be reached using ordinary generic historical materialism and the rules of ordinary evidence and logic.

2. The conclusion would have to then be verifiable by the ordinary rules of evidence”




Can you provide an answer to these points?



(questions from this website which I found to be very influential).


http://rs2kpapers.awardspace.com/theory2fe9.html?subaction=showfull&id=1082735164&archive=&cnshow=headlines&start_from=&ucat=&

[Red Economist]

As we all know one of the key factors that defines Marxism is its rigor in providing logical justifications for its claims and that this is a rigor that must apply to its philosophical foundations just as it does its economic and practical ones. Now I used to take a rather dim view about how valuable the philosophical aspect of Marxism until I read about historical materialism which I found to be an invaluable aide. Now historical and dialectical materialism seemed to be conflated in my readings but whilst I could see and understand the use of historical materialism I could not for dialectical materialism.


Historical materialism can exist without 'dialectical materialism' but the orthodox claim is that without dialectics historical materialism cannot be consistently 'revolutionary' in emphasizing the internal contradictions of capitalism between productive forces and production relations (what technology can do and would our social organization allows us to do) as well as the 'contradiction' express in the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The value of 'dialectical materialism' in that it can claim to explain social development exclusively in terms of 'self-motion' or 'internal motion' in society without relying on supernatural theories of divine intervention or secular theories of natural law and human nature (which assumption the separation of mind and body, of intellectual activity from physical needs/economic activity).
When taken logically, the role of 'consciousness' in deciding how society is run becomes secondary to what people are capable of technologically. This kind of throws the 'social contract' and concepts of 'government by consent' in the bin, because it is heavily deterministic and Karl Popper argued that this 'historicism' (historical determinism) had clearly totalitarian inclinations.


Is dialectical materialism a necessary, helpful or even valid tool?

It is 'helpful' in finding material explanations to social phenomena, and means you can get a bit of 'insight' into spotting connections which otherwise you would have not seen.

The necessity of dialectical materialism is only when you go in for a really extreme form of atheism which doesn't simply argue that god probably doesn't exist, but can't exist if philosophical materialism holds true.

Although it is now more acceptable to believe 'god does not exist', the legacy of religion is such that god as the creator of all things leaves underlying assumptions and an intellectual inheritance in judo-christian morality. The argument holds when you want an enormous amount of logical consistency.
Liberalism actually is heavily influenced by these assumptions as 'human nature' is little more than a secular description of 'the soul', stripped of it's theological clothing.

It is 'necessary' therefore when you dealing with situations that truly stretch the definition of what is 'real' and how far mental activity is 'real'.

In terms of "valid", you're pretty much screwed. Dialectical materialism should come with a health warning as it argues that knowledge is not passively objective and can there be studied in a laboratory. rather, knowledge is derived from activity- but in order to pursue such activity both dialectics and materialism acts as underlying assumption for the whole framework of knowledge. i.e. it's a dogma and is assumed to be true from the outset.

When Marx said "philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it", it was not simply a rally cry for social change, but represents the HUGE confirmation bias in dialectical reasoning that you can only know you are right after the event. This was another thing Karl Popper picked up on, that it is unfalsifiable.


And for those who have found it necessary or helpful:

“Do you have the remotest idea what you would have to do to demonstrate that "dialectics" was something more than 19th century Germanic romanticist claptrap?

no. and honestly, I don't think you can. Dialectical Materialism kind of starts with Feuerbach in arguing that 'god' does not exist, but is the product of the human imagination. The leap is realizing that people quite genuinely 'think' and 'feel' that god is real; and that people experience 'reality' in different ways, so that irrespective of whether god exists or not, people will behave as if he exists.

Dialectics means you get tangled up on questions of the relationship between objective and subjective knowledge until you accept it is 'dialectical' and that the distinction between objective and subjective is a man-made distinction.
e.g. The old Zen Buddhist teaching of where is the distinction between a hand being and a hand being a fist? ultimately it's up to you to figure out where the 'line' is drawn.

Dialectical Materialism is what happens when you take all the same set of psychological and emotional subjectivity of religion from German Romanticism of Hegel, and take 'god' out of it and put yourself in that position instead. Nicholas Ceasesceu said something along the lines of "Dialectical materialism is like concaine; you take it a few times it does nothing, you take it a lot and it changes you into an addict".

The attraction is simple; it gives you a 'natural' high based on a self-assessment of empowerment. [And I have no end of inner monlogues about whether this makes me a unwitting agent of totalitarianism].


1. You would have to "use" dialectics to reach a conclusion about reality that could not be reached using ordinary generic historical materialism and the rules of ordinary evidence and logic.


It 'works' with theological questions because the rules of evidence break down and you stop relying on 'scientific proofs' and instead have to use philosophical ones.

e.g. Does God Exist?

God is not a conclusion, but is an assumption of the 'prime mover' who creates the world, society and the moral code. It is based on the assumption of the primacy of consciousness, which is not subject to purely objective evidence. If consciouness cannot be seperate from the body and cannot exist without it- you cannot have a disemobdied spirit or deity. i.e. no god.

e.g Is there an afterlife?

materialism assumes that the mind and the body are interdependent, with the body taking priority. Therefore the concept of 'mind' is inseperable from the physical 'brain'. There is therefore no 'soul' and brain death equals death; i.e. no afterlife.

Both of these questions are not really subject to conventional modes of proof (i.e. laboratory science), but are dependent on philosophical proofs.


2. The conclusion would have to then be verifiable by the ordinary rules of evidence”

Dialectical Materialism is a 'dogma,' hence the dialectical and material nature of reality is assumed to be correct from the outset. But there is space to work around individual issues within it as an ideological framework.

It's difficult to explain but if you take the (idealist) conception of 'paradigms' which is similar to the concept of ideology; you can only think about what is real based on certain assumptions about the nature of reality. you are stuck thinking 'inside the box'. It's not a choice; you're trapped by the system of logic that your using- unless you set out to violate it.

the only case Dialectical Materialism will be outright wrong is if you're dealing with supernatural phenomena; but then you get back into the mess over the conflict between whether you're just seeing things or whether what you seeing objectively exists.

Taking this away from the boundary between the philosophical and the psychotic, Dialectical Materialism pretty much erases the distinction between natural science and social science, and does a pretty good job at destroying eliminating the distinction between religion and science too because it is dogmatic.

I've yet to get really into the debates that occurred within Soviet Science, but because dialectical materialism attacks virtually any form of 'original cause' or 'prime mover', it raises questions about the origin of the universe (big bang as a secular creation myth?), the origins of life and the actual mechanism for evolution (Lysendormism is an abuse of a much older philosophical debate), as well as questioning 'choatic' phemenoa and quantum mechanics (if everything is material it must have a cause, just not one we properly understand). This is more tricky as it stops being a philosophical 'hunch' and becomes a scientific claim and that is really subject to a level of proof which only a society can provide- not a single indivdiual.


Can you provide an answer to these points?

I've had a go so I hope it will be of some use. if you're head hurts- it means your on the right track. :grin:

I would want to add however, that I don't use a wholly 'orthodox' form of dialectical materialism and use Freudian psychoanalysis (courtesy of Wilhelm Reich) to cover explanations of a persons own 'internal contradictions' as Marxism only describes 'social consciousness', not 'individual consciousness'. plus dialectical and historical materialism give almost no mention of sex as a form of social interaction or mental phenomena what so ever; which is a big screw up even in theoretical terms. I would say this is a problem with dialectical materialism in terms of omission, but not a fundamental flaw in the system itself.

[RedMaterialist]

So my question :
Is dialectical materialism a necessary, helpful or even valid tool?


And for those who have found it necessary or helpful:

“Do you have the remotest idea what you would have to do to demonstrate that "dialectics" was something more than 19th century Germanic romanticist claptrap?

1. You would have to "use" dialectics to reach a conclusion about reality that could not be reached using ordinary generic historical materialism and the rules of ordinary evidence and logic.

2. The conclusion would have to then be verifiable by the ordinary rules of evidence”




Can you provide an answer to these points?




Your question assumes the existence of ordinary logic and then asks whether dialectics can be used to reach a conclusion about reality which ordinary logic cannot; and also "ordinary" evidence is used to confirm the conclusion.

By ordinary logic I suppose you mean statements like "If A, then B", "A is equal to A and never equal to B," "a statement is either true or false."

Dialectical logic demonstrates that there is no real distinction between this/that, true/false, if/then, subject/object. But that everything is in transition from one state to another.

It seems to me that evolution is the best example of dialectical logic proving an aspect of reality that ordinary logic cannot. How can one use ordinary logic to prove that humans are descended from apes? Ordinary logic says that humans and apes are separate, distinct, excluded from one another; so, how did humans and apes come to co-exist? The only possible answer is that if humans and apes exist then something must have created them individually.

Dialectics, on the other hand, proves that impossibly tiny changes in the DNA of pre-hominids over an unimaginable time produce an entirely different species. Darwin was probably not aware that he was using dialectical logic, but his entire theory is impossible without the existence of such a logic. Historically, one would say that the 19th century, beginning with Hegel, developed dialectical logic to explain reality, or rather, to explain the development of reality. And what was the origin of modern dialectics? Marx would have said the industrial revolution and modern capitalism.

How to explain an atomic explosion? Ordinary logic says it is like any other explosion, it is not there one second and there the next second, there is no excluded middle, it either exists or doesn't exist. In reality there is a specific quantity of uranium which is forced into a smaller critical mass which then begins a chain reaction of atoms which converts the mass of the uranium into energy. It is (probably) impossible to say that this one uranium neutron is the one which caused the explosion. You can create a hyper slow motion video of a chemical explosion of, say, dynamite, but a slow motion video of an atomic explosion?

One of the most common concepts in physics is the "uncertainty principle." For ordinary logic, there is no such thing as uncertainty, something either is or is not. It may appear to be uncertain, but only because we don't have enough knowledge about it. For dialectics, uncertainty is a fundamental principle of all matter. All matter is in motion, therefore its position and speed are incapable of being measured.

Take sexuality. Ordinary logic says you are either male or female and God made you that way. We now know that human gender, sexuality, genitalia can be entirely ambiguous and yet the person is still a "sexual" human being. The only possible way to explain that is with dialectical logic.

Or even personality. It used to be accepted that a person was depressed and was made that way by God. You're either a happy person or a sad person. We know know that molecular changes in the amount of certain chemicals in the brain causes depression. Is it one molecule of serotonin or two? Better living through chemistry!! Also huge profits for Big Pharma.

Or modern bourgeois economics. All economics is explained by marginal accretions, "marginal utility," etc. Although they would not admit it, the economists are make a dialectical argument.

1. All things are in motion, in development.
2. Changes in quantity produce changes in quality.
3. All things have within themselves a characteristic which produces a fundamental contradiction which ultimately negates the original characteristic. This last dialectical statement probably is too metaphysical.

At any rate, these are some ideas.

Also, briefly. People still use ordinary logic to explain reality. However, this is because they are still using the old "relations of production" while the actual, real, forces of production have become dialectical. Ordinary logic is, therefore, a type of thinking which has not yet caught up with the changed reality of modern production.

[Kingfish]

I thank you both for your responses however I still find myself quite confused on the matter although I realize that it might be worth looking into further. Im going to read Mao's on practice+contradiction and this book called ABCs of dialectical and historical materialism made by Progress Publishers as well as some more of that anti-dialectics website. So it might be awhile before I can respond properly.

[Luís Henrique]

Perhaps this discussion (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=167627&highlight=capra) may be helpful.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

1. You would have to "use" dialectics to reach a conclusion about reality that could not be reached using ordinary generic historical materialism and the rules of ordinary evidence and logic.

I have more than once read this kind of "question":


In a hospital there are four dying men. Each could be saved by a transplant of a different organ, but no donors are available. In the hospital waiting room is a healthy man who, if we killed him, could provide the requisite organ to each dying patient, thereby saving four lives for the price of one. Is it morally right to kill the healthy man and harvest his organs?

Most people who try to answer this in a "logical" way trip on their own feet trying to find a way out from the alternative conclusions that there either is a pre-rational notion of "justice" that forbids killing one person to save three others, or that that is what we should actually do, for it would beat the other option 3 - 1 in terms of lives saved.

One that reasons "dialectically" would point out that hospitals are not abstractions, but part of a more complex system - and that if they become places where you can be killed in sacrifices to Goddess Utility, people will stop going there, with nasty consequences for all involved.


2. The conclusion would have to then be verifiable by the ordinary rules of evidence

And what would the "ordinary rules of evidence" be?

Luís Henrique

[Art Vandelay]

And what would the "ordinary rules of evidence" be?

I believe he is referring to formal logic.

[Luís Henrique]

I believe he is referring to formal logic.

But then there would be a petitio principii.

Luís Henrique