Can someone summarize in a few words what exactly dialectics means? I have searched for this on the net yet I haven't quite managed to find a comprehensible definition. Please do not (yet) critique it, Rosa, I am merely asking what the common understanding is of this word.

So far, this is what I understand:
Thesis + antithesis = synthesis

And the whole world is, according to dialectics, defined by this rule? Or at least society? Or am I wrong in this assumption of what dialectics means?

Perhaps there is more to dialectics than this as well?

Thanks in advance.

I think that's about it, but these dialectians will put loads of other theory behind it to make it terribly complicated.

I think it's too damn confusing and I dont really see the purpose of it.
When does this stuff come in handy?, maybe we can bore the bourgeoise during the revolution with it and kill them in their sleep.
Dialectics arent worth the time.

My shorthand of what dialectics is: change through the development of contradictions.

The Greeks used it to describe the sort of dialogues Plato wrote whereby people take someone's initial view, which others disagree with, and, through reasoned debate, end up in agreement. Hegel, and others, used this to describe how ideas develop and change.

The triad, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, based on the Ancient Greeks' idea, is another shorthand. Some see this as an oversimplification which it is, although it is a useful simplification IMO.

There's an awful lot of it though.

ajs2007:

This is in fact Kant and Fichte's schema. Hegel turned his nose up at it.

Details here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...95&postcount=7

I have also heard people equating this "triad" with the form of a spiral. Saying the history of society moves like a spiral, or something to that extent. Can anyone describe why this form, exactly?

Dystisis:

This is Engels and Lenin's attempt to explain the alleged 'dialectical' progression of knowledge. They conceive the convergence on 'truth' not as a simple linear process (with humanity pregressing steadily 'toward the light'), but as a sort of faltering backward and forward movement -- three steps forward, two steps backward sort of thing.

For example, the ancient atomists were 'closer to the truth' than earlier theorists were who believed in the four forms of matter (air, water, fire and earth). Even so, the four forms theory dominated science until early modern times. But, that theory was not fully wrong, since it was better than what went before it (namely mystical, theo-centric ideas about nature). Nevertheless, it too was replaced in modern times by atomism, which was not itself fully true, and this was in turn replaced by quantum mechanics, which is 'closer to the truth', and so on.

So, we are told that the path to truth is a backward and forward movement. We do not move in on the truth so much as spiral toward it.

The problem with this idea is that if it were true itself then it would refute the idea that we never quite attain truth. This is because, if this view of final truth (i.e., about truth never being final) is true, then it itself cannot be true!

If it were, it would be a final truth, which this theory denies we ever have access to (except, that is, at the end of an infinite meander through epistemological space).

So, we could only ever say this 'spiral theory' itself is true at the end of time!

On the other hand, if we now declare the 'spiral theory 'true', then it cannot be true, for we would, on this basis, already have attained truth in the here-and-now, not at the end of the spiral!

In short, this idea is no less confused than every other idea in dialectics!

Dialectics are a tool that lets you speak without saying anything at all.

It provides a "recipe" to insert "catch phrases" into a subject.

Some example catch phrases:

"By the negation of the negation..."

"...the interpenetration of opposites..."

"...contradiction..."

"...dialectical unity..."

And so on and so forth. The net result is that you sound pretentious and you have a way to get out of an argument for free by uttering "It is evident that you just don't understand the dialectic...".

Hahahahahahah
I used to do that when I didn't quite understand dialectics.
Now that I do I think dialectics is a useful tool of analyzing history, politics,economy and even literature!


To the OP:
Dialectics is hard to understand but one you do that will create a qualitative leap in your conciousness,

Therefore I will apply dialectics and I ll tell you that the quantity of reading transforms into quality of your conciousnes

OIOIOI:

1) Dialectics is impossible to understand -- I'd like to see you prove otherwise. [To be fair, I have proved my side of this challenge, at my site.] Witness the difficulties dialectical comrades are having explaining, for example, what a 'dialectical contradiction' is, here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/contradict...742/index.html

2) Your comment makes it sound like the eager novitiate has to be 'born again', and have the 'scales drop fron his/her eyes' before the sacred mystreries of this Hermetic creed can illuminate her/her soul.

Small wonder we call you lot mystics!

3) Max Eastman was right: Hegelism is like a mental disease -- you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you have got it.

I wish I had the time and patience that you have explaining your ideas.
Unfortunately I don't

haha
Although this sounds funny it is also exagerated.
It wasn't mystic it was a way of saying that he will open up his brain to new horizons or wtv.
It is like when you teach a kid the ABC .That creates a qualitative leap on his/her conciousnes .
Nah I think OI OI OI was right when he said " Dialectics is kewl and whoever doesn't understand dialectics is a newb lawl. "

OIOIOI:

1) It's not exaggerated. In well over 25 years of debating and studying this mystical creed, I have yet to encounter a single dialectician who can explain it. It is quite apparent to me that it is based on faith and dogma. [Trivas is an excellent example of this mallady.]

2) This 'leap' (of faith!) you keep referring to is, I presume, the one that is covered by Engels's first 'law'. Unfortunatley, that 'law' is far too vague and defective for anyone to base any opinions upon. Check these threads out:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/quantity-q...709/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalin-mat...588/index.html

3) All this is no surprise, since this theory in fact derives from an ancient mystical tradition in which only those whom 'God' illuminated could 'understand' its sacred mysteries.

Check these out:

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion1.htm

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion2.htm

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion3.htm

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion9.htm

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion10.htm

If you read these, you will soon see what the real source of 'dialectics' is.

And Hegel was a Hermeticist, too:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/su...s/en/magee.htm

I know a bit about hermeticism, as well as pythagoreanism. There is definitely something similar with the concept of the "triad" of thesis, and some elements of numeration and sacred geometry. To be honest, so far dialectics seems more vague. Plus, a weird thing that it relies on opposition (duality) being the only possible result of division of unity.

Well, if you examine the links I have posted above, you will see that there is far more than just similarity between dialectics and Hermeticism (so much so, that we should consider banishing the dialecticians to the Religion section!).

For example:

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion10.htm

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion9.htm

What is dialectics?

At its most general level it is the ‘science’* of movement and connection, and is the method employed by Marx to understand the complex manifestations and relations of social life. The general content of the dialectic (what Marx refers to as the ‘rational kernel’ of the Hegelian dialectic) is an emphasis on interaction, development, qualitative ‘leaps’, and contradiction in our understanding of history.

Hegel argued that history proceeded dialectically. Marx agreed, but whereas Hegel saw this process located in the world of ideas (or Spirit), Marx argued that it was the dialectical relationship between the forces and relations of production, made manifest through class struggle, which drove history forward. Lenin puts it like this:

I think we can break it down like this:


View of Reality: In a state of development, or movement, within a complex of interconnected relations.

Method of Analysis: A many-sided and relational appreciation of the concrete. For instance, social classes can only be understood in relation to each other because (according to "View of Reality" above) they only exist as a relation to each other.

Relationship to natural science: It was Marx and Engels view that progress in the scientific understanding of the natural world (Darwin, for example) was revealing a similar process of development and movement as that which their studies were uncovering in the understanding of history. This does not mean that society and nature operate according to the same laws - merely that both are in a state of development and therefore have a history.


* 'Science' in the German sense of the word, ‘wissen’.

BTB:

1) This is not quite right; 'movement' here is supposed to be the result of the action of 'internal contradictions', the nature of which has resisted all attempts at explanation.

2) Despite being asked many times, dialecticians still refuse to tell us how long these 'leaps' are supposed to last, which means that this idea can be applied subjectively in a 'science' that is supposed to be objective.

3) Again, despite being asked many times, dialecticians also refuse to tell us what these 'qualities' are supposed to be. This means that dialectics is more accurately to be described as 'Mickey Mouse Science'.

4) According to Marx's own description of 'his method', this 'rational kernel' is in fact empty, since it contains no 'contradictions', no 'negation of the negation', no 'quantity passing over into quality', no 'unity and identity of opposites', no 'interconnected totality', no 'universal change'...

Unfortunately, Hegel, Engels, Lenin, Plekhanov, and Mao all declared that dialectical opposites will sooner or later inevitably turn into one another. That means that the forces of production and the relations of production will one day turn into one another. So, according to this 'scientific' theory, things like factories, railway systems, airports and coal mines will one day turn into the class relations of ownership and control, etc.!

1) This confuses objects with relations.

2) We have yet to be told (once again!) what the word 'concrete ' means when it is used by dialecticians.

In short, this theory is a mass of confusions, vagueness and mysticism.

Small wonder then that it has presided over 150 years of almost total failure.

This is entirely an idealist understanding of movement in the science of dialectics. Movement isn't the effect of something else. Movement is matter in motion.
Leaps are the observed effect of quantitative changes turn into qualitative ones. There is nothing re dialectics that preclude a subjective dimension to science.
Marx is embued with a tendency of seeing contradiction, relationships between disparate processes. His scientific socialism is entirely predicated on the development of historically mediated contradictions.
Hegel, Engels, Lenin Plekhanov and Mao believed no such nonsense.
Only an idealist metaphysician believes that dialectics are the determining revolutionary force in history.

Trivas:

Ok, smarty pants, my reference to 'movement' was in relation to what BTB alleged of it, so pick a fight with him, not me.

And, it is worth pointing out too that you have passed up another golden opportunity to tell us what these mysterious 'dialectical contradictions' are.

And yet they are supposed to be objective features of reality. In no other branch of science would a key idea like this go undefined. But, let us remember, this is Mickey Mouse Dialectics, not science, so it's all OK.

Moreover, there are countless qualitative changes in nature and society that do not go through a 'leap'. For example, melting metal, glass, plastic, butter and toffee.

And even the hackneyed example of boiling water refutes this 'law'; the addition of energy at the alleged 'nodal point', when water turns into steam, produces nothing new. Either side of the alleged change, the substance is still H20. No new 'quality' has emerged.

Not in Das Kapital it isn't, as I have shown here many times.

And for all the sense this quoted passage of yours makes, you might as well have posted:

This is because we know no more nor no less about these mysterious 'contradictions' you keep referring to than we do about slithy toves.

And you lot keep refusing to tell us -- or when you do, what you say makes no sense at all.

Oh yes they did (and so do many other dialecticians), and here are the quotes:

References can be found at my site, here:

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

So, if all things change into their opposites, or into that with which they 'struggle' and 'contradict', as the dialectical gospels tell us, then the forces of production should change into the relations of production, and the proletariat should change into the bourgeoisie!

The fact that this does not happen suggests that dialectics is about as useful as a chocolate fire door.

Basically it's a philosophical tool that Marx and Engels used throughout their lives to reach their groundbreaking theories of class society and its inevitable destruction. It has been of great use to subsequent thinkers: Lenin used it in his work on the relationship between the vanguard party and the working class, Luxemburg in her attack on the reformism of Bernstein and Kautsky, Trotsky in his study of history, etc. etc.

If you look at the history of Marxism, you will find that most renegades who turned reformist or even entirely anti-Marxist began by rejecting the materialist dialectic. On this website there seem to be many people who do the same, yet still consider themselves Marxists, for example Rosa and Redstar2000. I'm not sure why they object so strenuously to the dialectic, nor am I terribly interested, but I think it would be quite beneficial for people on this site learning about Marxism to investigate dialectics on their own before taking either Rosa or Redstar at their word.

The best book I can recommend on the subject is The Algebra of Revolution by John Rees, an excellent study which I am currently wrapping up.

Oddly enough, RP, I began my anti-dailectics project in earnest just over ten years ago when John's book came out, and my Essays were originally aimed at pulling it apart.

However, this is not correct:

Now, you come from the IS tradition, like me, so from that perspective there are far more anti- and counter-revolutionaries who are dialecticians than there are revolutionaries who are, namely the Maoists and the Stalinists. So, if anything, this proves that adherence to the dialectic creates more "renegades" than the opposite tactic.

Of course, if that is not so, then your claim that abandoning the dialectic creates "renegades" cannot itself be correct. You can't have it both ways.

Moreover, I have been a revolutionary for over 25 years, and I am more convinced today of the need for a revolutionary transformation of society -- led by a vanguard party of workers (on the Leninist model) -- than I was 25 years ago.

So, the story you tell is not at all correct.

And the theory you advocate is even less correct, as my Essays and posts here show.

Finally, all this is academic; but if truth is tested in practice, then the last 150 years of almost total failure of Dialectical Marxism shows that there must be something wrong with our core theory.

If it doesn't, then it is false that truth is tested in practice.

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

Incidentally, John was told at Marxism 1990 that his view of logic was woefully inaccurate, but he has ignored that and reproduced those serious errors in his book. My advice is, ignore everything he says about logic, and especially everything he reports Trotsky saying about the 'Law of Identity' (a law Trostky confuses with the Principle of Equality, as does John and most other dialecticians).

Proof here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2006.htm

Not so; there's nothing in the German understanding of 'wissen' that precludes it from being a subjective feature of reality.
But this is why I said 'leaps' are subjective observations. They are not laws of the chemical composite of matter.
I suggest you reread Capital with an open mind.
Nonsense; none of these quotes state that the means of production turn into the relations of production, which would be an absurd proposition.