Janus, I think you are being far too kind to dialectics; it is as if you had said:

"I thought that the whole problem with the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ is that it only works some of the time. Therefore, it's more of a superfluous thing rather than a truly valuable tool."

And no doubt you will find Christians who might believe this (and worse), but since that doctrine is arrant nonsense, it cannot explain anything, nor can it 'work'.

I claim the same for dialectics.

I have yet to see any proof to the contrary.

All that I'm saying is that you don't have to have or need dialectics to explain something.

I don't understand that analogy at all. You're comparing dialectics to something that requires one to totally drop all their rationality even though it explains absolutely nothing?

Janus, the point of that analogy was that dialectics makes as much sense as the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ.

DM-fans have to abandon their materially-based good sense in order to substitute into their heads ruling-class mystical ideas (that no one can explain -- as my site seeks to show in painstaking detail).

So why use it, or either?

I wasn't supporting that position. I was stating that we can do without dialectics and that it doesn't have to be used to explain something. Something that is only right sometimes but not others isn't really valuable at all. I was responding to a previous post questioning Newtonian physics.

Janus, I really didn't follow that last reply; thereseemed to be too many, or perhaps too few, negative particles; for example here:

I edited it. Sorry, I was in a rush when typing that response. All I was saying is that dialectics seem more superfluous than anything else and that it isn't crucial to explaining some type of phenonmenon. My original post had been in response to Axel's post and not yours.

Do we really need 8 pages on this?

dialectical "materialism" is a 150-year old "theory" that makes no science sense and hasnt actually proven anything in all that time. isnt it pretty fucking obvious that its time to move the fuck on!?!?

i mean really guys, i know that marx liked some of hegle's stuff, but the dude was living in the nineteenth century. accept that he may haver been wrong on some shit and lets get on with actually useful shit!

Vermont, as much as I agree with your sentiments, dialectical materialism will not go away because you do not like it, or do not think it works, or even because you think it is 150 years old.

There are thousands of comrades out there who swear by it, so: yes its refutation does merit 8 pages; in fact, at my site, when I am finished in a few years, I will have devoted in excess of 1500 pages to its refutation.

yeah rosa, i guess your right :blush:

i just think its sad that this is still so much of an "issue" for the left. but I didnt mean to insult the hard work that you and LSD and redstar and comradered and others did in this thread. sorrry if I offended

Vermont, have no fear, I took your comments in the spirit they were given.

It is frustrating to see so much time and energy wasted on this 'theory' and its refutation, but, if I am right, this 'theory' has been a major contributory cause (among others) to Marxism's abysmal failure over the last 100 years or so, so its demise is long over due.

What we're trying to say is that we don't need dialectics to prove something. You could say that dialectics accounts for something like class struggle but does it really prove it?

Rosa would've never spent all that time writting those essays if it were that easy.

How? I would like to see a check list or a recipe (or something better than canonical quantization procedures :P) on "using" dialectics.

Is there any criteria on what is dialectical anymore or is everything "inherently" dialectical and those who "can't see it" is "wrong"?

Janus, I am not sure what point you are making (unless, of course, you were merely being ironic), but I have been working on this 'project' intensively for nearly 8 years, although I have been reading and thinking about it for over 20. It will take at least another 5 or 6 to finish (but even then I will be updating and improving the arguments contained in the Essays at my site indefinitely).

If I can, I will then try to re-write Historical Materialism (with the Hegelian virus removed, quarantined, and destroyed), so that my work is not all negative.

This is not easy to do because the mistakes DM-fans make are of the same sort that ruling-class theorists have been making for 2500 years; they are simple errors, but extremely difficult to spot, since no one until Wittgenstein spotted the source of confusion (although there are suggestions in Marx's writings he was thinking along similar lines, he just never developed his ideas in this direction, since I do not think it interested him, or he had more pressing things on his mind).

I try to summarise these errors (and their cause) here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-12.htm

A full account will appear when Essay Twelve is published later this year.

I'm not so sure about discarding DM entirely.

It seems that the meaning of any word can only be socially meaningful as opposed to simply its dictionary definition if it's opposite actually exists in social reality.

For example, does it make any sense to talk about Serfdom and Feudal tyranny if Feudal society doesn't exist anymore and is not a part of anybody's social experience in the industrialized west? We only have a vague idea of what it means to be a serf and how horrible it might have been, but this is simply from it's formal definition. Why do you think there are celebrity worshipping idiots who fantasize about the "glamorous" life of members of the British monarchy rather than condeming it as an oppressive relic of the past. That is because Feudalism has no social reality for them as it actually does have for the Nepalese masses who are under the power of a real monarchy. Exploitation as it really socially exists for workers having to "slave away" for their exploitative boss is more of a reality than Feudal monarchies (at least in the western world). Similarly slavery doesn't exist as what historical slaves understand slavery to actually be for citizens in an industrialized country because its not a part of the social reality. Exploitation exists as a sort of pseudo-slavery, but even then your boss doesn't have the socially recognized right to beat you up or kill you if you displease him/her nor is it a part of anybody's social experience (apart from consensual playing with slavery ).

Similarly, I'm pretty sure that even in "real" Communist societies if it ever does come there will be generations of people who have never experienced exploitation, but will confuse exploitation with the civic duty to contributing part of the workforce. Work avoiding people who complain about "exploitation" when privileges are refused them when they freeload and shirk the duty of work. But, they are not really being exploited as what exploitation has historically been experienced by workers living in this epoch. All will be guaranteed food, shelter and healthcare, but some lazy ass will complain about exploitation because he will consider it a right to have that color T.V. without working a day for it. It's really motivation to perform duty rather than exploitation because exploitation will no longer exist as a social reality.


Negation of the negation is the obliteration of the meaning of A, so think tristate instead of binary.

Red Team, thanks for those thoughts, but, if I may speak plainly, very little of what you posted was relevant to DM.

Indeed, I can and do accept much of what you say, even if I'd put it differently, although I reject dialectics.

And your last sentence does not seem to make sense.

I am not sure that the Negation of the Negation (NON) has anything to do with obliterated meanings, but even if it had, are you really suggesting that, to use Engels's own example, when a plant 'negates' a seed, and is 'negated' in turn in the new seed, that the meaning of the word "plant" (or even "seed") is obliterated?

If so, how can we continue to use that word and mean anything by it? We would have to read Engels's own writings and wonder what his words meant.

And what gave plants such power over our words?

The NON makes no sense to begin with (as I establish at my site**); so it is poweless to obliterate anything, with or without the help of a few seeds.

It makes no sense since it confuses linguistic categories with material objects and processes.

That's about as crass an error as confusing, say, a map with the terrain mapped, or a music score with the music played.

We can call this a fetishisation of language; attributing it with magic powers that run the world. This misidentifies the product of social relations among human beings (how we use language to communicate) as the real relations between things -- to adapt Marx's brief analysis of the fetishisation of money (in Kapital).

Hegel got this general idea from his mystical forebears, who thought logic (the Greek Logos, of New Testament fame) ran the universe.

That is why I call it a ruling-class idea (which explains my implacable hostility to this 'theory'), inadvertently smuggled into Marxism because of contingent features of Marx and Engels's biographies (at a time when the working-class was too small and weak to provide a materialist counterweight to the Idealist theories with which Marx and Engels had been educated).

This is no longer true.


------------------------------

** Here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2007.htm

About 3/4's of the way down the page.

By saying that class struggle is due to the contradictions between different forces. Like I said, do we really need it and does it actually prove it? I think no.

Yeah, it was meant to be a joke (as can be seen by the laughing smileys).