So I am writing on paternalism, as some of you know, and I am incorporating a touch of Marx to give my essay some flavor. I am looking at societies as emerging from the self-interest of individuals. After reading Nozrick, and reflecting on my own views, I came to a conclusion. From wikipedia,

• The thesis is an intellectual proposition.
• The antithesis is simply the negation of the thesis, a reaction to the proposition.
• The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis by reconciling their common truths, and forming a new proposition.

State of nature. Thesis insists on A. Antithesis insists on B. Compromise is not possible because there are no common truths. Thesis is eliminated by force.

You could say the synthesis still occurs, but that would be false because there is no new proposition, is there? Doesn't add up to me.

The infamous triad has little if nothing to do with Marx/Marxism.

Indeed, KC; I have debunked this myth here:

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

Could you give one example expect the class struggle related one?

Three people want to do something on Saturday. Two of them want to go to the movies, and the third wants to go to a circus. They opposing force, circus guy, ends up going to the movies. Their ideas opposing ideas didn't combine in any relevant way that I can see.

You are conceiving the stances merely as stances, and from that perspective a dialectical method is useless. It is only if you are interested in why the different people took their differing stances and how that origin of their positions is related to the outcome, that the thesis/antithesis/synthesis methodology - crude as it is - becomes relevant.

Thus imagine that the three people involved are a man his son and his grandson. Let us say that the man and his grandson vote for the movies and the son votes for the circus - but agrees to go to the movies. Now, we have a significant totality which can be analysed.

What you have done is to present an example in which the basis of totalisation is unarticulated. Without a totality to understand, then dialectics is irrelevant and its particular concept of opposition is also irrelevant.

But your example is just that - an example. In the real world, the three people have some relationship or other. It is a particular movie and a particular circus. THere is a time, date, weather, financial considerations etc - all potential factors in the totalisation of the situation. Thus your example never exists and is persuasive only because the totality is merely the sum of the parts considered separately.

Gil:

How can this be a 'totality' (unless you are using this word in a rather odd, and as yet unexplained, way)? Moreover, since everything in the entire universe is 'interconnected', this cannot be a sealed unit. In that case, those party to this decision must have been influenced by the movement of a few molecules on the other side of the universe.

As I have written in Essay Eleven Part Two:

This is, of course, quite apart from the fact that there is no evidence at all that the 'internal relations' that DM-fans fantasise about do in fact exist (nor could there be).

More details here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2011_01.htm

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2011%2002.htm

For example, in what I consider one of the best chapters in Capital:

Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labor and the external conditions of labor belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are laborers or not laborers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes.

The private property of the laborer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the laborer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the laborer is the private owner of his own means of labor set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso.

This mode of production pre-supposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labor within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, “to decree universal mediocrity".

At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labor, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital.

It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious.

Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor. As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labor and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers.

This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.

The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...67-c1/ch32.htm

Clearly the language had some influence on him, clearly it had some effect on his understanding of the world and the way it operates.

But, as I have shown, Marx derived this bowdlerised Kantian/Fichtean schema (it's certainly not Hegelian) from Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus. So, this aspect of Das Kapital, at least, cannot represent the alleged 'rational core' of Hegel's system:

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

Of course, this is quite apart from the fact that we also know, because Marx told us, that he was merely 'coquetting' with obscure Hegelian phrases like 'the negation of the negation' in Das Kapital. If so, we cannot take his use of obscure jargon like this at all seriously.

And, this is not the least bit surprsing, since, if dialectics were true, change would be impossible:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...0&postcount=76

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...1&postcount=77

Finally, even if Marx were serious here, and dialectics could explain change, the above passages would suggest that Marx believed that Capitalism was one huge argument, and its development was powered by thought!

Hence, it is best either to regard these passages as non-serious, or ignore them as we disregard the mystical aspects of Newton's work.

VInnie you are quite right historically - Marx began the use of hegelian terminology by using it quite extensively in Volume One. Duhring picked up on this and charged Marxh with Hegelian schematism - Marx asked Engels to respond on his behalf; Engels responded to the effect that the use of the terminology did not mean that Marx was schematic in his approach, explaining that an hegelian terminology could be used without being schematic......and the matter went from there.

Gil:

Alas for you, as we have shown here many times, Marx (not little old me) told us he was merely 'coquetting' with this obscure jargon in Das Kapital.

But, if you need telling another thousand times before this sinks in, I am just the gal to do it...

And you need telling a thousand times that you misunderstand the verb 'to coquette'

Gil:

Well, you certainly can't help me out; the last time you tried, you failed miserably.

Still, 999 more of your failures to go...

Harsh, although I looked up the word. It means "to flirt." You can flirt with an idea. You consider its truth for a brief period, generally, and move on with your other pursuits. It often implies nothing significant arose from the consideration, but it doesn't necessarily imply that.

More importantly, language is used for expressive purposes. It's clear what she meant. Languages changes. There is only a problem when it leads to confusion, which I admit is often. However, it doesn't in this case if you "know" what the word references.

Dooga:

The full definition is:

The point is that Gil wants us to read this in a complicated fashion so that it does not mean what the word actually says -- that is, that Marx was not using Hegelian jargon seriously. [These days we'd use 'scare quotes' perhaps.]

I beg to differ. It is rarely clear what Gil means; in fact, if he/she put bag over his/her head, donned boxing gloves and randomly bashed away at his/her keyboard, she'd make more sense.

My fault, Rosa. I was siding with you, there. I should have clarified that. It was "clear" what you meant. However, I was admitting, for Gil, that the word might be considered as implying that the person didn't commit to the idea. They only flirted with it. Maybe that's also the sense you meant it. Either way, it's analytically a valid use was my main point. The other point was that, perhaps, another word could have been more "precise." However, we can't fault people for lack of precision, necessarily.

Basically, I was suggesting maybe you are using a less popular usage of the word that could "potentially" lead to confusing in someone who, recognizing the context, assumes something about Marx's belief in what he "flirted with."

And my point has always been this - the word coquette is not self explanatory in this case - one needs to read it in context to understand Marx's use of it; therefore one must read it merely as an addendum to the reading of all the usages of hegelian terminology by Marx in Capital. The word to coquette opens up (and delimits) a range of options which only the careful examination of the actual usage of the hegelian concepts in Volume One will resolve. That, however, is something Rosa will not do.

Gil:

Well, we need not speculate, for Marx very helpfully explained this to us. Indeed, he quoted a reviewer thus:

Once more, you will note that Marx calls this the 'dialectic method', and 'his method', but it is also clear that it bears no relation to the sort of dialectics you have had forced down your throat, for in it there is not one ounce of Hegel -- no quantity turning into quality, no contradictions, no negation of the negation, no unities of opposites, no totality...

So, Marx's method has had Hegel totally extirpated. For Marx, putting Hegel on 'his feet' is to crush his head.

So, the 'rational core' of the dialectic has not one atom of Hegel in it, which is why Marx merely 'coquetted' with a few bits of Hegelian jargon in Das Kapital.

That is hardly a ringing endorsement of this mystical theory...

I don't see how that quote implies Marx didn't use dialectics.

Cummanach:

Read what I said: