One has to wonder if the sheer quantity of arguments on dialectics is going to increas the quality any time soon.

I guess the thread starter's point that it doesn't seem to offer any clear definition of what it is, is pretty telling. I sometimes think the only reason people use it at all is because they feel it is part of the Marxist package.

From what I can make out here, the theory doesn't even tell us much of interest even if it were correct. I suppose it tries to show the way society might build up towards revolution, but you don't need some sort of bizzarre meta-physics to do that-you just have to look at the way social movements take time to build up.

I don't normally get involved int hese discussions because I don't really think it is that worth discussing msot of the time, but I read through this thread just to keep up to date on this war and was struck by how little the defenders of dialectics can actually say here. I'm not sure I can agree with Rosa's position that it has ruined Marxism simply because I am not sure enough people, even amongst Marxists care enough, but it does strike me as an utterly pointless and dreary theory.

Z:

Then I look forward to you never using this analogy again.

Not so, it depends on whether you are dealing with what us mathematicians call a 'conservative field' -- but you would have known that had you read that Essay properly.

And, anyway, this depends on another vaguary you are happy to gloss over; Engels speaks of "adding" energy, not expending it.

No energy is "added" when these molecules are re-configured.

Again, I dealt with all this in that Essay you decided to skim read.

Demogorgon:

Where have I claimed it has done this?

What I do say is that it is part of the reason Dialectical Marxism is a long-term failure.

On the other hand, the idea that our core theory (dialectics) has nothing to do with that failure is, quite frankly ludicrous,

Okay granted, I may not have phrased that very well. I know you don't claim it is the only cause of failure, I am just taking the position, and I know you disagree with this, that it is not particularly relevent. Dialectics strikes me as intellectual masturbation, it seems so divorced from actual action that I don't know how it could be doing much more than simply wasting our time.

I'm not criticising you for putting so much effort into refuting it, because as long as it is around someone has to, but I tend to view it as nothing more than a bit of superstition.

OK, but if you check out this essay, and use the Quick Links to skip down to the 'Case Studies' section, you will see exactly what damage this 'theory' has done to our movement:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2009_02.htm

So, we cannot afford to be laid back with these mystics.

They will continue to help ruin our movement if we just ignore them and their dotty 'theory'.

That is why I have spent literally tens of thousands of hours on my work (no exaggeration), and ten years' effort.

I reckon it will take another ten before I am finished.

Let's hope so.

Quote:

Originally posted by Demogorgon@November 25, 2007 09:13 pm I guess the thread starter's point that it doesn't seem to offer any clear definition of what it is, is pretty telling.

I don't think the thread starter had much of a point at all. He just introduces his own confusion into the issue.

Quote:

Originally posted by Demogorgon@November 25, 2007 09:13 pm From what I can make out here, the theory doesn't even tell us much of interest even if it were correct.

I actually sort of agree. Quantity-quality, at least in my opinion, is the least insightful of Engels' laws.

Quote:

Demogorgon

I wonder what more you'd like us to say. I've addressed all the reasonable points brought up so far.

Interesting. But you answered your own question:

Quote:

Rosa Lichtenstein

That's rather unscientific Rosa, do you now claim that such an analogy could never be useful in any circumstance?

Actually I did read that part, and Engels in fact, in a quote you used, refers to such usage of the term"energy" in a derodatory fashion. Engels understood that by heating something up, you set the molecules in motion. Just because he talked about "adding energy" when he was speaking to people to get the point across doesn't make him wrong, you are just using semantics again.

Demagorgon, I'd suggest that the reason defences of DM on here are so dreary is because we only get dreary arguments to answer to rather than any attempt to deal with the exhilirating philosophical vision of Marx in itself.

Rosa,

I don't know your meaning of "conventionalist".

Of course the principle only works sometimes. That's because some thing are linear and some things are nonlinear. When people speak of a sudden change in the "quality" of something they are generally saying (whether they know it or not): I see a noticably nonlinear process. The variable x was stepping up bit by bit, and suddenly y jumped. Move the lighted match just a little bit closer to the wick of the dynamite, change x by one percent, and y goes boom. That's a big nonlinearily.

Maybe people are using the word "dialectics" to mean "several outstanding issues that still seem to be paradoxical, at our limited stage of understanding." We still have a paradox in the calculus: that no one could figure out another way to calculate certain things from real life, until they tried saying that a finite thing is an infinitely large number of infinitely small parts. Something we do see in everyday life has to be expressed in terms of things that we will never see, infinitely small slices, infinitely many of them, and that's the only way to know, for example, how thick to make the wall of a dam so that it won't burst, a real-life problem. We have that paradox. To call it the "unity of opposites" seems like a poetic metaphor to me, but we are discussing what the users of 19th century terminology were trying to express by it.

V:

The meetings were excellent, the rallies were shit. Perhaps it's just me, but I can't stand listening to predictable "The bosses are bastards" lines over and over, and then clapping like a pratt when they're finished. Like I say though, the meetings were very good, especially one on Historical Materialism.

I commend the effort mate, but this is still too abstract to grasp. Perhaps it's unreasonable to ask for an explanation that short?

Well okay, but if I can flatter myself for a moment and say that I am not utterly brain-dead, I don't see why self-described experts on dialectics can't seem to get through to me on it. It's as complicated as the people at that meeting made it seem - I'm just reporting what came across to me.

Please explain this.

I don't see how you got this conclusion. Sorry, you're gonna have to accomodate for the layman.

Explain this in layman's terms. I genuinely am apologetic for this, I just don't understand.

But what "distinctive property" has changed here? None! The water is still water with precisely the same molecular structure. No change.

-Alex

V:

I think not, since there is no "addition" of matter or energy.

Me:

You:

Silent at last?

Z:

Only in Mickey Mouse Science -- but then again, only you and your fellow mystics seem to like that kind of 'science'.

I am sorry, this is far too confused to do anything with.

And when you mystics begin to refer to 'semantics' that is short hand for "I, Zurdito, prefer to use language in sloppy and ill-defined ways", as mystics have always done.

That is why I call what you indulge in "Mickey Mouse Science" -- there is no way that genuine scientists carry on in this way.

Mikelepore:

Check this out;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventionalism

In this case, you are just proposing a terminolgical revison.

What has 'linearality' got to do with anything?

You are clearly using this term as a way of magicking this 'law' into respectibility.

And with a few ill-considered metaphors thrown in for good measure. "Jumped" -- wtf is that?

That is as vague as 'node' ever was.

And you are being very liberal with 'increase in quantity'.

Engels specifically referred to increases in quantity of matter or energy, not increase or decrease in distances, or variables.

And. you are using an ill-defined notion of 'linerality' you clearly got from Woods and Grant (or the same source those jokers pinched it from).

I find it interesting _where_ the differences of opinion in this thread have appeared. I am critical of what Engels did with "quantity and quality" because his concept, while it's true, and while it's easy to understand, is not very important or relevant, perhaps minimally useful, not a universal law, not rigorously applicable to anything, just a curiosity, equivalent to a page from Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not. But here I have found other people stopping at the steps that I jumped over -- they don't concede that it's true or that it's easy to understand.

Mikelepore:

I wish it were this simple, but what is actually happening is that from a few ill-defined notions dialecticians derive universal laws applicable throughout the entire universe and at all times (while they appeal to a few trite examples as 'proof'), which they then use to produce crude theories of revolutionary change. And they are not at all phased by the fact that this is a Mickey Mouse way to do science.

None of their examples work -- and even yours can only be made to seem to work by the liberal use of metaphor and yet more ill-defined terms.

Why we/you give this ancient piece of metaphysics any time at all beats me.

Question: What does "node" mean in this context? I never heard of it before.

Mikelepore;

Dialecticians use it to refer to 'leaps' -- what you call 'jumps'.

None of these terms is defined -- how long is a 'leap'?

This is what I have written about it in Essay Seven:

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

I don't think I am doing the same. As I said earlier, I view it, not as a universal law, but as an observation that "this sometimes happens", and its usefulness is to offer it as an illlustration to other people who assert that "this never happens." It's important to note that there are some people whose political views are stuck at a place where they think it never happens that something can become qualitatively different because of quantitative measures. Every time a member of the Libertarian Party goes up to a homeless pauper lying in the gutter and says to them, "Why don't you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, by establishing your own competitive industrial corporation?" - they are being so unrealistic because they don't know that a quantitative and incremental variable, in this case, economic wealth, can produce a binary can-do/can't-do result. The person being so unrealistic about social issues needs some illustrations, not of a universal law, but of "this sometimes happens." Whether analogies to atoms and molecules will communicate the point to them, I have my doubts about that, but, if not that, then I hope some other illustration will be found to get through to them.

Thanks for that explanation of "node".

The reason water vapor leaves the surface when the temperature is below the boiling point is because the molecular speed is a normal distribution in any phase. Temperature is a way of speaking about the mean of a bell curve. Even in cold water there are some fast molecules.

Anyway, I want to mention social issues again ...

Conservatives can't recognize the existence of economic classes beause they think that the existence of classes would require pinpointing a boundary between them, and pinpointing the precise amount of class mobility. They keep tossing questions such as this at a socialist: "If someone gets 70 percent of their income from wages and 30 percent from dividends, are they a worker or a capitalist? If one out of seven workers who work hard and save their money becomes a capitalist, is it still a class system? What are the exact boundaries? You don't have any? Or, if you do suggest certain boundaries, you have selected them arbitrarity. A-ha! That proves that there are no classes at all!" --- that is what conservatives say to socialists. What cognitive process is making them think that way? It is because they don't realize that classes are like mountain and valley -- you don't need to know where some boundary between them is in order to recognize that they are there. Classes are like clouds, they are over here and not over there, and yet, if you look for a sharp edge, there is none. Suddenly things are noticed to be of a different "quality."