Alright, thank you, that clears things up. I would agree with you that it is useless, but would go further and say that it is useless precisely because it is nonsense. As for the Hegelian terminology, I think it serves to obscure Marxist ideas, which can easily be communicated in ordinary language, and hence made accessible to ordinary people.

Hey there Rosa, welcome back to the forum.

I was walking through a bookshop today and came across the book The Parallax View (Short Circuits) wherein Zizek attempts to rehabilitate dialectics, and apparantly he's quite succesful at it because that book is now considered his magnum opus.

Here's a short description:

Now, you just claimed that dialectics has had nothing but 150 years of failure, this while Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all claimed that their understanding of dialectics made their ideas applicable and more importantly correct.

If it really had nothing but 150 years of failures, don't you think people like Lenin, Trotsky, Zizek, Sartre etc. would have given up on it already? Or are they just too dogmatic in your opinion?

You see, this is why I can never take your position on this matter seriously. It implies that you are right when others much more knowledgable than you were wrong.

EDIT: By the way, the only reason I won't debate you head-on about dialectics is because I admittedly have not studied the matter thoroughly. Lenin said it was quite a complicated matter, and struggled with it himself, so it's not something you can do by just reading one or two books. When I have studied the matter though, I will definitely get back to you and refute you in debate, like CommunistLeague and Severian already have.

What does that mean? You're just saying that the jargon used by dialecticians could just be replaced with a different jargon. That would work if your "ordinary language" described the same patterns of change which dialectics aspires to describe.

Because it's not an issue of linguistics. As you point out, reality does not depend upon what language, what concepts are used to describe it - it exists independently of, and obliviously to, how we speak or think about it. Although this is a grossly simplistic way of seeing it and, crucially, not the whole story when it comes to social reality.

Of course to really understand the relationship between how the world is and how we conceive, speak and act in it, we need the ability to model a complex, inter-related causality which is what dialectics seeks to do.

Now, above, Rosa argues, as do you, that history and social change can be explained using ordinary language. However, that doesn't tell us who's "ordinary language" you're referring to. Adam Smith's? Jeremy Bentham's? Adolph Hitler's? George W. Bush's? In fact, apart from sounding like a sensible dose of Anglo realism, it doesn't tell us anything at all.

Instead of you anti-dialecticians coming on here and telling us what you're against, why not tell us what you're actually for.

This is admission that you don't know what dialectics vis-a-vis Marxism is.

^^^ Historical materialism???

What this has to do with the original post re dialectics & its relevance to Marxism is beyond me.

CZ:

First of all, ordinary language contains literally thousands of words that can be used to depict countless types of change, in a level of detail and precision unmatched even by science. Here are just a few:

More details here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2004.htm

Secondly, dialectics can neither describe nor explain change; that was established here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...57&postcount=2

It may not depend on language, but we certainly use language to depict it, and here ordinary language beats dialectics into a pulp.

The ordinary language of the working class, the language you use every day (when you are not trying to 'philosophise'), the language found in Socialist Worker (minus the Hegelian gobbledygook -- which, mercifully, is very rarely found in that fine paper). Examples given above.

Speaking for myself, the same things as SW:

http://www.swp.org.uk/about.php

Not an ounce of dialectics in the above, and amazingly, it's written in ordinary language!

Anyone would think they were trying to communicate with workers!

The very idea...

trivas7, my original post lambasted dialectical "analysis" and jargon for being incapable of connecting with the workers' movement. I then responded to Zurdito's quasi-legalese response above. Then you said that "avoiding reductionism doesn't constitute a philosophy."

My response that you quoted was a rebuttal to your remark.

Trivas:

1) This would be fine if Marxism was set of dogmas cast in stone; but it isn't.

2) Like any science, Marxism has to reject that which is incorrect and which does not work. In that case, dialectics should be dropped into the trash can of history.

3) I challenge you to try to respond to my thorough demolition of this mystical 'theory'. Links above, and in my signature.

4) I have been a revolutionary Marxist now for over 25 years, and believe in a workers revolution (and the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.) more now that back when I joined.

5) I would never accuse you of not being a Marxist, and resent your attempt to say that of me.

6) As I have shown several times at this site, Marx also rejected this mystical theory. For example, here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...8&postcount=11

But more fully here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2009_01.htm

So I am in excellent company.

I'm sorry, but this is too silly to argue re. Marx writes perfectly ordinary language that anyone with normal intelligence can understand. It's not the language you disagree with, it's Marxism qua philosophy that you disagree with.

Fine. Now give me a thorough outline of this method without mentioning the interconnections of phenomena such as nature and human society; forces & relations of production; or material relations and ideology, which Marxist dialectics attempts to understand.

Rosa, it's nice to have you back . But you talk as if the limits of our analysis of the world begins and ends with a copy of Socialist Worker. If that was the case, why do we bother with ISJ?

Besides, my point above was that its not the words that are important but the way they are mobilised into conceptual tools which help us to understand the world around us. If the truth of theoretical argument came down to who deployed the most "ordinary language" then the most philistine argument would always prevail - and your mate, Wittgenstein, could be consigned to the dustbin.

EDITED to add: besides employing a dialectic analysis certainly doesn't preclude anyone from using all those words for change you mentioned.

CZ, I think Rosa is more well versed in HM than I am. Sufficed to say, at least I've got my geocentric model (including the magnetosphere, which is affected by the core ).

Yes but your, ahem, analogy aside, answer the question. You're fond of firing little broadsides against dialectics, tell me what you think and stop hiding behind Rosa.

EDITED to add: There are a number of attempts to outline a non-dialectical version of historical materialism. Which do you think is the best one?

The key word here is "attempts." I just think that dialectics has worn out its usefulness, given the increased information content amongst the general population, as well as given the shifts in language.

Yes, there are interconnections, forces and relations, etc. But using a method more suitable for ideas (the idealism of Hegel) to describe matter, energy, material interactions, etc... well...

For example, the merger formula that I speak of is NOT the unity of opposites (because there is no fundamentally "hostile" relationship between political socialism and Marxism on the one hand and the workers' movements on the other). So what "dialectical law" can be used, then? Totality (which allegedly "describes" parallels and other distant relationships)?



Again, I'm not as well-versed in HM as Rosa. However, I've got old threads debunking the notion that Stalin's post-revisionist successors were same-old, same-old "Marxist-Leninists" (Stalinists):

http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenin-stal...656/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/limitation...278/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/two-stalin...x.html?t=63356

No one has suggested that your merger formula has anything to do with the unity of opposites. Nevertheless, the relationship between the communists and the working class is a living relation. The historical movement towards merger would be conditioned by levels of class consciousness which themselves are influenced by levels of class struggle which is dependent upon the material fortunes of capital, which itself is dependent upon the success of regimes of exploitation which are, to a certain extent, reliant upon the coercive power of the capitalist state which itself can be off-set by the organized resistance of organised labour, which in turn impacts upon levels of class struggle and class consciousness, etcetera through our dialectical spiral of mediation.

Now, I've just dashed that off and it's perhaps not analytically accurate but you get the point?

To be blunt, you might as well have used the words "cyclical relationship."

Furthermore, there are points in that cycle that can connected to one another without having to be dependent on just one factor: the historical movement towards the merger can be conditioned directly by the material fortunes of capital, as well as clarity in language, and so on.

And if I had, would it be any less dialectical?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Led Zeppelin Now, you just claimed that dialectics has had nothing but 150 years of failure, this while Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all claimed that their understanding of dialectics made their ideas applicable and more importantly correct. If it really had nothing but 150 years of failures, don't you think people like Lenin, Trotsky, Zizek, Sartre etc. would have given up on it already? Or are they just too dogmatic in your opinion? You see, this is why I can never take your position on this matter seriously. It implies that you are right when others much more knowledgable than you were wrong.

Philosophers have been wrong on many matters for a lot longer of a period of time than 150 years. Roughly the entire history of metaphysics consists in error upon error carried over from generation to generation due to a misunderstanding of language. Dialectics is just yet another of these errors.

You must keep in mind that dialectics, alongside most metaphysical systems, was constructed prior to the advent of formal logic. Formal logic provides us with a much better tool for understanding certain propositions, and it shows the emptiness of metaphysical jargon. The mere fact that a sentence has a grammatically correct form doesn’t make it meaningful.

Moreover, it isn’t only a few of us here on this board who are anti-dialectics (and, more broadly, anti-metaphysics), but much of the history of 20th century analytic philosophy is the same.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Citizen Zero What does that mean? You're just saying that the jargon used by dialecticians could just be replaced with a different jargon. That would work if your "ordinary language" described the same patterns of change which dialectics aspires to describe. Because it's not an issue of linguistics. As you point out, reality does not depend upon what language, what concepts are used to describe it - it exists independently of, and obliviously to, how we speak or think about it. Although this is a grossly simplistic way of seeing it and, crucially, not the whole story when it comes to social reality. Of course to really understand the relationship between how the world is and how we conceive, speak and act in it, we need the ability to model a complex, inter-related causality which is what dialectics seeks to do.

As Rosa said, it isn’t an issue of replacing one jargon with another. Ordinary language does a better job of describing these phenomenon than dialectics. In fact, speaking more broadly, many age-old philosophical problems exist only in philosophical language, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, when [ordinary] language goes on holiday. The problem with metaphysics in general, and dialectics in particular, isn’t even that it poorly describes the world, it doesn’t even describe the world at all.

This is a good example of a statement that really I don’t understand. And I’m not being intentionally obtuse. What exactly is a “living relation”?

(I really don’t take any issue with anything that you’ve said following that sentence, that was, more or less, clear; but I fail to see how calling something a “living relation”, whatever that means, illuminates anything, let along the relationship between the communist movement and the working class.)