Am I right in thinking that Dialectics is the concept of a debate between two people?!?

Why are a lot of forum members anti-dialectic?

(Excuse my ignorance!)

Dialectics are a method of describing the motions of the universe so that as few people as possible have any idea what the hell you're talking about.
It has nothing to do with 'debate between two people', surely.
Or would debate count as the unity of opposites, thus leading to a contradiction?

Also, any thread about dialectics on Revleft is a ticking bomb.

This was part of the original meaning, but the German philosopher Hegel transformed it into a cosmic system that ran the entire universe (since he thought that everything was mind, so it made sense to him that the universe sort of argued with itself, so to speak).

Early Marxists took these ideas over, extracted what they called their 'rational core', welded it to materialism, and this became 'Dialectical Materialism'.

It's hard to say what proportion of RevLeft members are anti-dialecticians, but my guess is that practically all of the anarchists are, and some of the Marxists are, including me.

You can find a simple explanation of this theory, along with my refutation of it, here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/...mmies%2001.htm

Rosa is it not possible for you to ever condense that down so you can explain it in a short paragraph?

HLVS, that is a tall order! I am not sure that this is possible without serious distortion to dialectics and to my criticism of it.

Here is a 2000 word article I wrote for the Weekly Worker last year (hope this is short enough!):

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/688/dialetics.htm

It was criticised by Jack Conrad, leading CPGB theorist, here:

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/711/marxistthinking.html

To which I replied here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/...f_Darkness.htm

There are some people who are anti-dialectics on this site. There are a few reasons for this. Many of them are just not Marxists and adhere to more conventional sets of ideas, notably anarchism. Some would claim to be marxists.

The underlying difficult for those people is firstly that dialectics is inherently vague and this makes people ask what use is it and what importance does it have. Secondly dialectics has been used for purposes of intellectual bullying often linked to undesirable political causes - most notably Stalinism but also others such as the Healeyits WRP in the UK in the past, within which reference to dialectics was widely used to suppress debate. Thirdly within the broad tradition loosely called Marxism there have been some significant thinkers, notably Lukacs, Adorno and Sartre who have been influenced to various degrees by Hegel in ways which are different from Hegel's influence on Marx.

So its a complex picture. Rosa's article sets out her position succinctly. That position traces the issue of dialectics back to Engels. Others would say, on the contrary, that Engels did no more than defend a position he shared with Marx - and one Marx had asked him to defend. There is an answer to that argument and an answer in turn to that answer and on it goes.

Underlying this is a question about what Marxism itself is....or rather what it needs to be to play its role as the self-consciousness of a revolutionary movement. For some people, it is possible for us to think clearly. If we put aside ideology and spurious or false bourgeois ideological notions, we can think clearly and such clear thinking can lead us to Marxism - i.e. to a particular understanding of history and the economy.

For an alternative view, Marxism can only exist as a critique of the dominant ideas. For this view, socialists cannot expect to produce independent social or political economic science, but can only expect to pick out the particular flaws in the dominant view which reassure people that capitalism can go on for ever. To do that, so this argumment goes, Marxists need to think in ways that dont fit well into conventional science. They need to make use of provisional, schematic ideas about change.

The nub of the issue is Marx's political economy. There are two alternative views of what Marx's poltical economy involves, one dialectical and the other conventional. But that aspect of the debate has received very limited attention on this site.

Gil:

Just as there are comrades here and elsewhere who have sold their radical souls for a mess of ruling-class pottage, served up by that bourgeois theorist, Hegel.

The evidence for this is thin at best, and it gets even thinner after the publcation of Das Kapital.

You are right in thinking that dialectics was originally a concept relating to debate between two people. It has its origin in a three way distinction between logic, dialectics and rhetoric. The original idea, roughly, was to try to identify what is different between a logical argument on the one hand, a merely persuasive form of speaking at the other extreme and, in between, a form of argument which is persuasive in context.

Medieval theology developed the concept, on the basis of the concept from Greek philosophy. The term was redefined by Kant who saw disputation as a process of seduction by appearances, in no way better than private reflection. For him such semblances involved pretending to apply formal rules of logic to reality. Thus he sought to replace the ars disputatoria with a reconceptualisation of dialectics as critique, in which it had a solely negative role of showing how something does not agree with the formal criteria of truth set out in logic. In his philosophy this creates the space for practical reasoning.

Hegel rejected this dislocation between dialectical critique and practical reasoning. He did not believe the two could be divided up in that way. On the contrary, he believed that the way we come to a certain view of things is bound up unavoidably with the history of how those things have been viewed. In that sense we are always part of an historical discussion on the nature of reality.

But he goes much further by arguing that this process of discovery through history, this debate between the ages, is the dialectic of history.

Feuerbach has usefully suggested that we imagine Hegel as articulating the point of view of a pantheistic God. God is nature and unfolds its/his/her true nature through the historical process....the historical dialectic.

Marx, of course rejected all this idealistic metaphysics and the debate then is around what if anything was left of the Hegelian idea of history as a process. In the course of developing his understanding of the dialectic Hegel had taken the concept far beyond the simple idea of a disputation. He had tried to show how all reality is involved in an unfolding process.

To some it has seemed that once you deny (as Marx certainly does) that the process is one of an unfolding awareness (for Marx it is a process of the development of the forces of production) then the whole dialectical analogy falls flat and must be just abandoned. However, there are statements in Marx (and other Marxists) which suggest differently and which have been persuasive to many - for all that Rosa considers them thin at best and thinner after Capital.

In a way the mystery (if I can call it that without any mystical implications) goes right back to the origins of the concept - in what sense is there anything to a conversation other than logic and rhetoric ? The point arises again in 18th Century philosophy - what is reason, other than logic and rhetoric....and arguably arises again in the 20th century in the discusssion of epistemology.

But it undoubtedly has a very particular character in Marxism where there is much talk of turning Hegel back onto his feet....an analogy which promises much but remains opaque for many.

Thanks for that summary of certain aspects of ruling-class thought. The question is: what possible interest has any of this for socialists (other than antiquarian)?

Well, you have yet to show otherwise.

i would really like a very easy to understand explanation of dialectics because so far i only got "everything keeps on changing"

so please what is dialectics and how is it useful to me ?

piet, does the article I posted not help in any way?

yes but i would like to hear from the dialecticians how its actually supposed to be useful.
giving them a chance to argue their case you know.

Ah, I see.

Good luck on that one...

wikipedia

That is where I got my explannation from?! Hence the confusion about "debate"

The problem with answering that is that dialectics is of little or no use to you..........unless we know who 'you' are. There is a view (which I would share) that you cant grasp the materialist conception of history, as used by revolutionary socialists, or Marxist political economy without understanding some difficult methodological gymnastics which went into constructing those sets of ideas.

In my opinion, for example, you will not understand why Marx started his analysis in Das Kapital from the analysis of the commodity rather than value or a concept of capital unless you understand the very particular methodology he used. Similarly you will not understand why the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is not and cannot be a statistical phenomenon unless you understand its role within the structure of capital. By the same token, in trying to understand the materialist conception of history you should very soon come across the constant reliance on a concept of the 'level of development of the forces of production' and should quickly realise that this concept is used without supporters of the materialist conception knowing what the level of development of the forces of production is to which it refers. Is this a problem ? For some it is. Within a dialectical methodolgy it is legitimate. Similarly, you wont go far in understanding the materialist conception of history without realising that the conception of class used there is a very unusual one which bears only a limited relationship to the sociological conception of class which we see commonly used around us.

And it goes on. Rosa might (im guessing) want to suggest that all these issues can be resolved by clear thinking. Well, I'll believe that when Rosa actually sets out a clear and consistent communist theory of history and political economy which does not face such issues. She can if she wishes, try to show that it is also Marx's theory and that she is doing nothing more than paraphrasing what he has said, but that would be an add-on; its not required.

As it is, for now, on the face of it there are some very strange methodological approaches taken by Marx which deserve to be wrestled with, instead of pretending there is no difficulty there. As you come to wrestle with those you will come to a conception of what Marx's method was and that is the dialectic.

What is it not (and no classical Marxist has seriously suggested otherwise) is an a priori theory which saves you from engaging with the particular problems of different historical analyses or different political economic issues. As you come to your own view on these issues, you are engaging in an historical dialogue with a writer (Marx) who was deeply embedded in certain intellectual traditions. To engage with him, you must engage with the traditions he came from....critically, as he did. If you try to understand him without referring either to the science of political economy (Smith Ricardo etc) or the philosophy of identity from the critical appreciation of which he developed his views, you will find it difficult to understand his ideas. If you are not involved in that difficult task of engaging with the particular theoretical tradition of Communism then dialectics is of no use to you.

It is important that you are aware that no-one....and I think I am correct in saying 'no-one' who has ever written on this topic or looked carefully at Marx's relationship to Hegel shares Rosa's theory that there was some sort of radical change in Marx's view of Hegel just before the publication of capital. Others - notably Althusser - have argued that Marx's methodology needed little or nothing of a dialectical character. They tend to emphasise what Marxism needs to be while conceeding that Marx thought otherwise. Most people who have looked at the evidence would consider it incontrovertible that Marx had a high regard for Hegel and saw his own methodology as a critical appropriation of Hegel's. They merely say Marx was wrong about that and that his methodology was not, in any distinctive way, an appropriation of that of Hegel. If you accepted those views you could of course be interested in understanding Marx while rejecting dialectics. It is however notable that neither Althusser nor anyone else of this ilk has produced a positive representation of either the materialist conception of history or Marxist political economy which stands up to critical scrutiny.....unlike Marx. Funny that.

i see a wall of words that are not telling me much of anything at all.

where would i go for an understandable explanation of dialectics gilhyle ?

Don't bother asking Gil, piet; I have been doing that for well over two years. You will either get a load of Hegelian gobbledygook, or silence --, the latter, of course, being far more use, and much the clearer of the two.

But, you will notice that using dialectics to help explain Das Kapital ends up doing the exact opposite of what Marx intended (a nice dialectical inversion, if ever there was one); it mystifies it again, and renders it immune from scientitic analysis and confirmation.

Which is, naturally, the whole point...

Gil:

Indeed, and just like other mystics who look at the world and see 'incontrovertible evidence' for the 'hand of god' in creation.

One small point: not one of you can cope with my objections to your mystical reading of Das Kapital.

But, hey, who am I to come between you and your opiate?

Apologies to jump in here, but hopefully if will be useful to the original poster as well.

If people were to recommend one book on dialectics (and don't give favour to online books, I much prefer paper), from the point of view of a dialectician, what would it be?

There is in fact a long list here (compiled by yours truly):

http://www.revleft.com/vb/dialectica...813/index.html

The best single book on this 'theory' for a newbie is probably:

Cornforth, M. (1976), Materialism And The Dialectical Method (Lawrence & Wishart, 5th ed.).

More advanced, and easily the best book defending this 'theory' is:

Bukharin, N. (2005), Philosophical Arabesques (Monthly Review Press).

Anti-dialectics books are few and far between (that is why I set my site up!).

The best is by Eric Petersen (an Australian Marxist in the IS tradition), but it is not easy to get hold of:

The Poverty of Dialectical Materialism (Red Door, 1994).

http://www.greenleft.org.au/1996/221/14949