On the Dialectical Method

I find this text to be very interesting: http://libcom.org/library/dialectica...amadeo-bordiga .

I find it cool how distant he is from positivism.

Thoughts?

For the bourgeois materialists the material natural world exists prior to the thought that investigates and discovers it; but they were unable to extend this insight to the same level of comprehension with regard to the human sciences and history that was attained by Hegel, and to understand the importance of perpetual change in the material world itself.

I agree with this, as I believe most would.

The dialectic... means recognizing, in the causal order, the fact that the material and physical conditions for the life of man and of society continuously determine and modify the way man thinks and feels. But it also means seeing, in the action of groups of men in similar material conditions, forces that influence the social situation and change it. This is the real meaning of Marx’s determinism. No apostle or enlightened individual, but only a “class party”, can in particular historical conditions discover, not in the mind, but in social reality, the laws of a future historical formation that will destroy the present one.

I completely and utterly agree with Bordiga's assertion on this.

As a result, our way of explaining, reasoning, deducing and deriving conclusions, can be guided and ordered by certain rules, corresponding to the appropriate interpretation of reality. Such rules comprise the logic that guides the forms of reasoning; and in a wider sense they comprise the dialectic that serves as a method for connecting them with the scientific truths we have acquired. Logic and dialectic help us to follow a road that is not false if, after starting from our way of formulating certain results of the observation of the real world, we want to be able to enunciate other properties besides those we have just deduced. If such properties are experimentally verified, one could say that our formulas and the way we employed them were sufficiently accurate.

This is probably the best explanation of dialectics I have read in a long ass time.

For the dialectical method, not only is everything in motion, but in motion all things reciprocally influence each other, and this also goes for their concepts, or the reflections of these things in our minds, which are “connected and united” (among themselves).

As Bordiga stated earlier, this method should prevent us from making absolutist demands that must be followed by everyone. This is something that, I believe, different tendencies should keep in mind and why revolutionaries should have an open-mind.

It is thus a metaphysical error to seek to resolve human problems in one of either two ways, as is done for example by those who counterpose violence and the State: either one declares oneself in favor of the State and for violence; or against the State and against violence. Dialectically, however, these problems are situated in the context of their historical moment and are simultaneously resolved with opposed formulas, by upholding the use of violence in order to abolish violence, and by using the State to abolish the State. The errors of the authoritarians and the errors of the libertarians are in principle equally metaphysical.

Holy crap, if I could fit that in my signature I would! Basically this seems to be the argument that things should be viewed in their historic time and place and that man is a product of his time, correct?

I have to get headed to work right now, but I will finish this tommorow. Very good read!

I think that this is a very good statement and a good reason why materialism needs to accompany dialectics.

But the dialectic is itself a reflection of reality and cannot claim to be itself the source of reality or to force reality to obey its strictures. Pure dialectics will reveal nothing to us by itself, but it does possess an enormous advantage with respect to the metaphysical method because it is dynamic, while the latter is static; it films reality rather than photographing it.

Again, I think that one main component of dialectics (in a Marxian sense at least) is the denial of absolutism (which, of course, is in itself absolutist, blah blah, blah). I think what is stated below by Bordiga shows this again.

The dialectic is not the sport of paradox; it asserts that a contradiction may contain a truth, not that every contradiction contains a truth.

The sections criticizing other philosophic ideas and the section about what Marxists mean by property is very good.

This next quote is very good.

For us—to the contrary—the dialectic has a place in those representations that are subject to continuous change, with which human thought reflects the processes of nature and narrates its history. These representations are a group of relations, or transformations, which are accessible to a method that is by no means any different from the one that is valid for the understanding how two domains of the material world influence one another.

Overall a very good read.