Dialectics had been accepted as one of the most important parts of the Communist philosophy. Dialectic way of thinking is a very strange thing actually, speaking from experience; it can have a similar effect with drinking alcohol. It enables the person to have fun just by thinking. Dialectics have a mystical attraction, it is really joyful to think and discuss in this language. Hours can pass by in a cafe when you are talking about dialectical matters with others, and you won’t even notice! It is not harmful by itself, but it is quite irrelevant to revolution and even more irrelevant to Materialism. In fact, trying to use dialectics with materialism and the revolutionary purposes is as senseless as driving while drunk. The worst part is, with dialectics, you don’t get better after sleeping because it comes with the arrogance of being able to speak in a mystical language others can’t understand. Striving from dialectics is a hard process, it requires being able to criticize the self, and after it is done there is a pretty painful hangover period.

Dialectics is purely idealistic method of thinking and in fact, it by itself is idealism in practical thinking. Materialism can’t be dialectical; the term is a contradiction in itself. Ideas can be interpreted as they evolve in ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis which becomes the new thesis and then comes a new antithesis and so on’ fashion, but materials do not work in that way and classes most definitely do not work in that way. So was Marx wrong by calling materialism dialectical? To be able to give the answer of this question we need to know the conditions Marx was living in and we need to know Marx. First of all at that time Dialectics was recently rediscovered by Hegel and it was the cool thing among the radical and young European intellectual circles and those circles were what Marx was coming from. Marx thought that the young intellectuals who were constantly discussing philosophy had a real potential. By using this contradictive term, dialectic materialism, Marx first of all discredits Hegel. It most obviously is a term targeted against young left Hegelians to save themselves from dialectics, which is very dear to young Hegelians. Therefore, Marx tries to give doses of materialism to dialecticians to make it possible for them to realize that no real change can be done with dialectics. After all, you can’t tell an alcoholic to give up drinking at once. Would Marx do such thing? There is a clearer example showing that he would do it. In the Communist Manifesto he talks about ‘German or True Socialism’, but there is no socialism in Germany at that time! This is exactly what Marx is critical about German philosophers. They only deal with ideals; they don’t care about materials and economics. Can you imagine a Hegelian caring about earthly matters such as wages and products and workers? Of course not! Marx has a rather weird sense of humor, here’s a paragraph from the Communist Manifesto;

“It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote “Alienation of Humanity”, and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois state they wrote “Dethronement of the Category of the General”, and so forth.”
You understand what I am saying. By inventing terms such as ‘German Socialism’ or ‘Dialectical Materialism’, Marx is having fun with German idealists, but also helping them realize the importance of reality in his own way. Could he just tell them bluntly and simply? He probably could, and maybe did, but it is obvious that it wouldn’t work. Obviously Marx is thinking ends-based here, he’s also having fun.
The dialectical materialism in fact has nothing dialectical in its essence. In fact, it is well know that Marx did not want to call it that way when he was serious, the proper term he used was ‘historical materialism’. Marx knew exactly what dialectics was, what he didn’t know was how dogmatic the future Marxists were going to be in embracing this almost pre-historic method of thinking. He never imagined anyone just accepting something simply because he said it, people unfortunately did so, and they are still doing so. Hegel’s curse continued to live in Dialectical Materialism and because of the Marxists who were unable or just simply too dogmatic to recognize there was a contradiction in this term, Hegel’s dialectics managed to get on top of Marx’s dialectics.

Personally I’ve got nothing against dialectics by themselves, just as I’ve got nothing against drinking. In fact I do really love drinking, the contributions it made to my life were unbelievable, but I won’t drink if I’m going to drive, it’s just common sense. So, we can use dialectics once in a while to have fun, to have pointless discussions that would last for days with no conclusion without actually having to deal with life problems, but we must learn to be back in our senses if we are going to have anything to do with materialism, history and revolution otherwise we would surely crash like every other Marxist revolution before us.

This has been debated many, many times in the Philosophy forum where this belongs as well.

Modern Hegelians

Good! The more it is debated the better... I was undecided regarding where to post this... Oh well, then someone should move it to philosophy...

Thanks for the link.

Hey, I hope you don't mind, but I included a couple of breaks because the text hurt my eyes

Anyway, there are number of threads dealing with specifics, but it seems that you are arguing particuarly about the harm caused by dialectics.

I realise you said that they are harmless in themselves, and that dialectics have been used in ridiculous ways in the past, but I just don't see the major impact today. Perhaps there are some groups that use dialectics to weird ends, but shouldn't the criticism lie on these ends rather than the use of dialectics?

To me I see dialectics in a semi-serious way, and perhaps a fun way to explain something that can be explained materially. Sometimes a varierty of approaches can help people understand concepts, and whilst I will admit I never really rely upon dialectics, I don't see the harm in dialectics themselves.

There are those who are very much more pro-dialectic, and certainly those who oppose dialectics more than can I say regarding myself. No doubt you will hear from them.

That's pretty much all we've been debating here for the past few months.

Some political groups still use it but I doubt that they rely on it. So far, not much has been achieved even by those who were supposed masters of it.

Take cover! This will soon erupt into a battleground between Rosa and the dialecticians here.

Janus, I am already engaged in such here (with Axel 1917 in disguise):

http://discussion.newyouth.com/index.php?topic=1441.15

I had written something to post here, but a computer glitch lost it for me.

There does not seem to be anything new on this thread, so unless something worth commenting on appears, I will pass on this.

Sorry about that , it wasn't intentional

Well, they are harmless if you don't get addicted, agains similar to alcohol. My problem is this: almost all Marxist groups tend to use and value Dialectics as the highest way of interprating the event happening around them.

That's a pretty good way to be, they can really be fun, especially if you are discussing it with others. They aren't harmful by themselves, but they aren't one bit useful either. The whole point of Materialism is to explain things materially. It is fun, yeah, but it is something which specificly shouldn't be used when things get serious.

Hey, I'm new alright? I can't know everything you discussed in the past. ^_^

Leo, I did not mean what I said personally; I had in fact written a long piece in respoinse to what you said, summarising much of my earlier posts (since I realised you were new), but I somehow manages to lose it all bt clicking the wrong whatever, and just could not bring myself to re-write it.

If you look at the discussion developing here:

http://discussion.newyouth.com/index.php?topic=1441.15

you will be able to catch up reasonably quickly.

Particulary after I realised that 'Morag' is sincere....

[I.e., ignore my early, ill-tempered posts there!]

Oh, I totally understand that. I did experience such stuff before, not fun. <_<

That's a pretty dense discussion... There are some points you make and I particularly like.

The inner bourgeois in our heads, a tool of the ruling-class rather than an invention. It is a subconscious norm in our minds, created by the material conditions of the world we are living in, but that norm, the inner bourgeois in our heads, is used to invent another powerful tool for the ruling class: the so-called human nature which limits us. I really like the term, "the inner bourgeois in our heads", it is really explainatory.

Here, this is not entirely wrong, it is just unprovable, just like the Holy Trinity, but there is also a difference, it makes more sense but it is not (supposedly) ordered. Basically he first says 'Individuals form the community and community is formed out of individuals" which is a fact. Then he says that "Every individual has a part of the universe, as it is one of the elements forming it, and universe is individuals collectively" which is also fine, but then, from that he makes the assumption 'individual is universe', which, from a philosophical perspective, can be interpreted as what he said above, but from that he
goes to:

Which is every specific cell, element of dialectics disclosed proves that dialectics works in all human knowledge in general.

I went to you website where you made a defective analysis of Lenin's usage of logic:

So to summerize, Lenin says:
-"Individuals form the community and community is formed out of individuals"
-"Every individual has a part of the universe, as it is one of the elements forming it, and universe is individuals collectively"
-"The individual is the universal"
-"The opposites are identical."

DIALECTICS AT IT'S BEST!!!

It only funtions to prove itself right through cloudy language. It is almost a form of demagogy... Lying in a way, or 'proving' the unprovable with philosophical statements with some truth in them. This is dialectics at it's best.

And here is the secret (or not so secret) hand of dialectics at it's worst:

Accepting Capitalism is the thesis, Communism is its antithesis, the only 'realistic' sollution dialectics offer us after a possible revolution is creating a synthesis which was called 'Socialism' in the past, and with each new 'antithesis' it is supposed to move towards 'communism' but in fact it never really gets there because by trying to create a dialectically reasonable synthesis by combinig Capitalism and Communism, Capitalism is allowed to live and it regenerates the capitalist class which had been eliminated over time. Either 'dialectician' revolutionaries actually thought that they would get closer and closer to communism, or the fact that 'dialectics' was what they thought as 'high thinking' in their minds, made them move that way but no matter which, this is the biggest danger of dialectics. If the person did not deal with it, It ilands on one's mind and stays there, makes itself used even though the person actually doesn't intend to do so.

If you really want to know what really 'hurts' one's eyes,go to www.anti-dialectics.org


Rosa, I will try to read your essays in your website, I find it very succesful and interesting. I probably will have some questions because philosophy is really not my 'strongest' side. Anyway, thanks for the reply!

Leo, thanks for those comments: I will respond to some of the things you say later.

Leo, Lenin is not using the words attributed to him in an ordinary sense; he is using Hegelian terms (which were themselves drawn from early modern and medieval philosophy, connected with something called the 'identity theory of predication' (as I point out in Essay Three at my site):

http://www.philosophyprofessor.com/philoso...predication.php

From this defective theory he draws universalist conclusions (i.e., ones that apply to everything in the universe), true for all of time. A classic, piece of traditional philosophy (and, as I allege, a give-away trait for ruling-class thought; no surprise then that it was invented by those who sought to justify the hierarchical nature of reality, and thus of the state, in the middle ages, although in earlier forms it also appears in Ancient Greek and Roman thought). Hegel adopted this theory, and so did Lenin, as well as other DM-fans.

[Independently of whether this theory of predication is correct or not, nothing justifies the extrapolation of contingent features of langauge (and, incidentally in this case, only of those found in Indo-European grammar -- predicates do not exist in other language groups) to necessary truths about nature.]

So Lenin is not saying:

The term 'individual' is a technical term from Hegelian philosophy. The way you put it turns a supposedly deep truth about reality into a platitude (and one that it hardly took a Hegel to discover for us).

Then you allege my analysis is wrong, but you do not say where and why:

Lenin is doing something more than this; he is using the contingent features of language to derive fundamental theses about reality, something you could only do if nature were mind, or was sort of condensed logic -- which was an ancient Hermetic idea.

As an Idealist Hegel can sort of do this (but only on the back of a rather poor piece of logic), but no materialist can.

I try to say why in Essay Twelve, summary posted here:

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

And, if this is dialectics at its best, then heaven help us.

As I show, it is not even third-rate logic, let alone anything for a materialsist to be happy with. I won't rehearse my arguments here. You can find them at my site.

Well, if there were truth in them, then that would mean that the world had an a priori structure accessible to thought alone.

It would thus be ideal, or the product of mind.

No wonder this follows from these doctrines, since this is precisely as Hegel (and earlier ruling-class theorists) intended.

Well, this is a Fichtean schema:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/fichtejg.htm

not Hegelian, and not one that should be used by dialecticans who try to tell us they do not think formalistically, like this.

Notice how you have to use terms anthropomorphically to make this point: it is only minds that can present theses, or anti-theses; so Fichte's schema is quite at home in his version of Idealism.

No materialist should touch it with someone else's barge pole.

We do not need this Idealistic jargon in Historical Materialism; we have countless thousands of words in ordinary langauge with which we can formulate scientific hypotheses (etc.) to account for the course of history, and for the overthrow of capitalism.

I list these here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2004.htm#Now this is very odd

Remember, the a priori style of philosophy Lenin caught from Hegel has been used by ruling-class hacks for 2400 or more years. It is easy to slip into this way of thinking, since it has been around for so long, no one notices it (these days it works as the inner ruling-class hack in our heads -- so we all tend to think this way, amateur and professional philosopher alike).

It is part of the reason why ruling-class ideas rule; and they rule dialectical thought too (hence, this is also part of the reason why dialectical Marxism has been so monumentally unsuccessful).

I explain why here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-9.htm

[This is a summary of Essay Nine (which will be posted in two parts later this year.]

Rosa, thanks for the replies.

This was exactly what I was trying to do. When Lenin says 'John is a man' and therefore 'individual is universal', the only way to understand this with non-dialectical thinking is interpreting it as a methaphor saying: Individuals form the community and community is formed out of individuals because what he actually says is non-material. Therefore it can only be a methaphor for material reality.
But forming the rest of his 'idealistic' arguement on this assumption which is materially interpreted as a methaphor, Lenin 'gets high' and his statement becomes materially nonsense and ideally...well, hegelian as you described.

Oh, I did not allege your analysis wrong. I wasn't focusing on what Lenin was subjectively and idealisticly doing, I was just adding how I saw it from a materialist perspective.

I call that dialectics at its best, because first of all it is harmless (and also useless but not the case), secondly a materialist point of view very easily points out that it is irrelevant and not provable. It is dialectics applied on ideals. Very fit to quite literally endless discussions, not provable, not knowable...

The a priori Lenin has in his words, as far as I can materialy see them, is 'John is a man' quote amd interpreting "individual is universal" quote as methaphorical.

Well, I was trying to give an example... Honestly I've never heard of Fichte... Through that example I was trying to show how worst of dialectics, dialectics applied on material conditions. My point was that in dialectics applied on material conditions, such thinking would be common and right, altough in fact it is wrong, and not only that but an arrogant dialectician who thinks dialectics should be applied on material conditions will not only do this consciously but also subconsciously. I see this application as dialectics at its worst.

What I try to do when I am facing dialectical logic is trying to apply materialism on dialectics. I think this is indeed what Marx () tried to achive when he invented the weirdly humorous term 'dialectical materialism', because when materialism is applied on dialectics, dialectics fall apart and when dialectics is applied on materialism, historical results ara disaterous.

We have actually started to ignore such people, of whom have no idea of what they are talking about. Debating with them is like debating with a capitalist supporter in OI; no matter how much you point out that they have no idea what they are talking about, they just keep saying the same crap over and over again. We all have better things to do than to write a 999999999999999999999999999999999999 page reply to someone that has a massive site that attacks a strawman instead of dialectics. History has shown that we were right in the past, and that we will be right in the future. Pre-Hegelian formalism is not going to help anyone understand things where formal logic breaks down.

I will say that it is no coincidence that the most knowledgable members of this site happen to be dialecticians, though. Not that any of you will bother to observe this...

I guess I am going to have to take issue with this statement just because I dont think that it attempts to really understand where bourgeois ideas come from. I mean there are two basic schools on this. The first is the Marxist/Post-Marxist which emphasize structuralist causes of bourgeois ideology. This can be traced through the works of Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Lukacs, Althusser, Adorno and to a lesser extent Benjamin. The basic arguement is that bourgeois ideas or ideology are caused by specific structures of society that allow for the rise and continued reproduction of ideology, this is something that Althusser refers to as the Ideological State Apparatus eg. schools. Adorno and co. later extend this analysis to what they refer to as "the culture industry" in which they examine how the commodification of everyday life produces bourgeois culture. The second school of thought is loosely titled Focauldian. This school of thought argue thats through the inter-linking and self referentiality of texts there is discourse. Thus, the social and cultural texts are discursively produced by power, which is in itself discursively produced. Bourgeois discourse is a network of nodes of power whick interlink and ensure that bourgeois discourses proliferate society.

Leo, thanks for that, and apologies for misunderstanding you!

Hardly 'harmeless' if it has helped preside over 100 years of failure.

I am not sure this is a metaphor, but is it any good if it is?

I allege not, and for the above reason (it introduces mystical, ruling-class ideas into Marxism), so no wonder Marxism is to success what Tony Blair is to truth.

The whole idea was invented by Plekhanov (Marx never used this term).

'Materialist dialectics' makes about as much sense as 'round square'.

No wonder comrades here are finding it so hard to defend.

Axel/Volkov:

You can't even write a one page reply.

And as I pointed out to you at YFIS, Trotsky took a different stance with Burham. At least he tried to defend the indefensible.

You can't even try weakly to do this.


The only 'logic' you know, is the garbled sub-logic you found in Woods and Grant; so you are in no position to judge.

So 'knowledgeable' that they (like you) cannot defend their/your core beliefs.

You asserted at YFIS that the comrades there were more knowledgeable than those at Rev left, but at neither site has a single dialectical 'warrior' mounted even so much as a pathetic defence of the mystical stuff you all seem to dote on.

Brownfist, I wasn't trying to subvert the usual explanation of the origin and influence of bourgeois ideas, but extend this to account for why comrades accept mystical ideas that play right into the hands of the class enemy; I used this metaphor to account for the origin of ideas in dialectical thought itself, since the latter is demonstrably dependent on individual thinkers, abstracting away on their own (with a nod toward the social nature of knowledge, but using a theory of knowledge that subverts this -- hence the lone, atomised dialectical individual has to form its isolated ideas, like a individual bourgeois in the head).

The details are in Essay Three, Part Two at my site.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2003_02.htm

That's the point of these debates. Has dialectics always been right and do we need it to prove something? From what I've seen, dialectics can only get it right some of the time and not others. Therefore, that makes it quite questionable in the minds of some.

Rosa thanks (again) for your replies.

Well, harmless by itself, harmless when discussed in a cafe by hopeless and arrogant philosophers. I agree that there is a danger when someone who is leading a revolution uses such arguements, especially with material conditions. Besides that, historically it has been very harmful.

Well, it is not intended to be a metaphor, that's for sure



Exactly...

Well, my statement isn't contrary to the first school or the second school... See, this 'inner bourgeoise' is not the 'bourgeois ideology' itself, nor does it cause the 'bourgeois ideology'. It is the subconscious norms the socio-economic, material conditions, specificly the capitalist system create in our minds, which is nothing extraordinarily surprising as the environment we live in is one of the main factors making us what we are today. It is not a constant, it is nor permenant. The main 'bourgeois ideology', reproduced in schools, the culture industry etc. of course has an effect on those subconscious norms, but such institutions actually target our conscious minds. The most significant place to see this 'subconsious norm' caused by the system itself, is the so-called human nature. Yet, unlike their arguement regarding 'human nature', this subconsious norm would become effectless while consciously building a new system.

Then why are you bothering to answer? Go do those 'better things'.

Well, I would argue that dialectics had always been unprovable applied on ideals and wrong applied on material-historical conditions. I can't think of an example of 'dialectics working when applied on material-historical conditions'. Do you have one?

Leo, and thanks also to you.

As far as Axel/Volkov is concerned, he has been told this hundreds of times; he is clearly an attention seeker.

He pays no heed to anything you say, unless you totally agree with him (i.e., with Woods and Grant, for whom he is a glove puppet).