Can anyone tell me what dialectical materialism is and how we can use it when analysing history? What do I read to understand it? I did some cursory research and found Plekhanov's essays on history and materialism. But I find Marx's writings on the subject of dialectical materialism too scattered to do a proper study of his texts. After the fall of the Soviet Union, people kind of thought dialectical materialism was woo woo. But I understand that Derrida responded to Fukuyama's thesis that liberalism will be the next world order, and that Marxist analysis and dialectical materialism never came true, but Derrida isn't an outright Marxist and his writings are usually only riffing on Marx rather than looking at history under a materialist lens. Derrida just seems sympathetic rather than using actual Marxist philosophy.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1893/essays/3-marx.htm>Can anyone tell me what dialectical materialism is Dialectical materialism—the only correct reflection of reality within human consciousness—is the scientific methodological world outlook of the proletariat, which exposes the deterministic motion of class struggle, the historical inevitability of socialism, etc., through the objective comprehension of the material laws of reality. Dialectical materialism is the highest form of science. Dialectical materialist practice is when people make a concrete analysis of every given situation, of the special features existing in their country and the world at any given time, as a process in which man, a material being, acts upon his material environment. Practice is the entire activity of man in altering the world, and primarily his productive and social and revolutionary activity. Deviation from dialectical materialism, neglect of its laws and propositions, lead in the final count to failures both in theoretical analysis and practical activity.
>how we can use it when analysing history?Extending dialectical materialism to the field of social phenomena, they created historical materialism, which is the greatest triumph of scientific thought. To the non-historical approach to human society, they counterposed the historical approach, based on a profound study of the actual course of development, by revealing the objective material laws of socio-historical development.
>What do I read to understand it?Read Stalin.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm> I did some cursory research and found Plekhanov's essays on history and materialism.Plekhanov is revisionist who failed to grasp the revolutionary science of dialectical materialism.
>But I find Marx's writings on the subject of dialectical materialism too scattered to do a proper study of his texts.The scientific outlook is not the subject of his studies but the product of it. Read Marx to understand dialectical materialism.
>After the fall of the Soviet Union, people kind of thought dialectical materialism was woo woo.Wrong. Dialectical materialism, like in Communist China, has triumphed over all bourgeois outlooks.
>But I understand that Derrida responded to Fukuyama's thesis that liberalism will be the next world order, and that Marxist analysis and dialectical materialism never came true, but Derrida isn't an outright Marxist and his writings are usually only riffing on Marx rather than looking at history under a materialist lens. Derrida just seems sympathetic rather than using actual Marxist philosophy. These pseuds have nothing to do with dialectical materialism.
>>2607194
would a communist claim that while all its members or meetings aren't expressly about dialectical materialism, that a student of marxism who studies it should be able to learn dialectical materialism with guidance from a party intellectual? it just feels weird i go to socialist meetings but no one really tells you what or how to interpret history and world events with marxist philosophy or historiography; instead, you just get phraseology and vibes
>>2607174Get a job.
>>2607162Dialectical Materialism is one of those terms that I'm half convinced doesn't actually mean anything but we've all gone along with because we don't want to appear ignorant.
With that said,
from my understanding, it's the idea that the world is best understood as a kind of algebra of interactions. Virtually everything in existence is the outcome of an interaction between other things that were themselves the results of other interactions between other things, going all the way down to the interactions between subatomic particles. If you've ever messed around with Infinite Craft, it's kind of like that.
>>2607174This bitch is a landlord of vietnamese land lmao
>>2607254and Engels owned factories, what's your point
Dialectical Materialism is secular Islam. Haz told me so. See >>2575373
>>2607212>would a communist claim that while all its members or meetings aren't expressly about dialectical materialism, that a student of marxism who studies it should be able to learn dialectical materialism with guidance from a party intellectual? ye
>it just feels weird i go to socialist meetings but no one really tells youare the party intellectuals supposed to be everyone?
>>2607254Zhou was from a upper class Mandarin family, what is your point?
>>2607162You should get a grip on Hegelian dialectics first. Which sounds somewhat mystical but it is just an evolutionary view of human history. After Darwin it is really not that difficult for us to extrapolate biological evolution to human (intellectual) evolution. Also study history because it is easier to apply this approach to events that already happened and well understood than to understand contemporary events that are distorted by propaganda. Btw dialectical materialism is not really useful these days. It was a naive approach by Russian and third world communists to help the revolution.
>>2607272>>2607289The cope of falsifiers is immaculate.
>>2607254Wrong. In Vietnam, landlords were eliminated long ago. What remains of landlords were reformed into proles. Luna has paid for her ancestor's sins. Luna is not landlord.
>>2607251You are totally wrong. You say dialectical materialism is when things interact. You say dialectical materialism is alchemy game. This is most vulgar, revisionist understanding of dialectical materialism. Read stalin.
>>2607212Correct. Revisionists fail to grasp dialectical materialism and therefore understand its application as useless ritualized phraseology and therefore fail to apply it. That is why they are always wrong.
>>2607293>Btw dialectical materialism is not really useful these days. It was a naive approach by Russian and third world communists to help the revolution.Everything you say is wrong, but this too wrong.
>>2607626>Read stalin.I already did. I had trouble fully making sense of what he wrote. It would be nice if you explained it to me, as opposed to repeatedly going
<Dialectical materialism is correct. If you don't apply it properly, you are incorrect. >>2607174>Deviation from dialectical materialism, neglect of its laws and propositions, lead in the final count to failures both in theoretical analysis and practical activity.list the laws and propositions
>>2607359you have to say why Luna Oi is wrong, not just whine about her background, since Marxism was itself created by non-proletarians, and Lenin himself (a lawyer from a family of middle peasants and local officials) stated that proletarian class consciousness never comes from within the working class, whose spotnaneity is only capable of developing into trade union consciousness. The proletariat NEEDS professional revolutionaries, often petty bourgeois and bourgeois class traitors, to educate them.
>>2607754I don't think you realize just how poorly this speaks to Leninism and its variants.
>>2607784
I wouldn't know, I'm not an anarchist. I can tell you that the Paris Commune didn't need bourgeois looking to institute monopoly capitalism in order to exist.
<inb4
The Paris Commune died because of the material conditions it existed within, not because it had the "wrong ideas". It still serves as a fantastic prototype for a DotP, unlike the Soviet Union, which functioned like monopoly capitalism and imploded in spite of great material conditions because its underlying political system was retarded.
>>2607646dialectical materialism is proletarian grindset. Dialectical materialism conscious scientific application of material laws of historical and social development.
>>2607874That doesn't actually explain what it is though. I can't start thinking dialectically if I don't even know what it means.
>>2607792 >fantastic prototype for a DotPThey did not have time to do anything else but fight off aggression of French reactionaries and the Prussians
The Communards are honoured due to their historical significance, but there’s nothing to learn from them really. Apart from their balls, their courage.
Dialectics is fucking nonsense, something either is, or isn’t
>>2607941Dialectics simply deals with processes.
Dialectics does not mean a rock is not a rock ffs.
>>2607945There is no such thing as a process
>>2607937They were an actual worker-lead movement with worker-control of the means of production. They definitely weren't perfect, but they're infinitely closer to what Marx and Engels had in mind when they described a transitional DotP than, say, the Soviet Union, which was just capitalism with state-enforced monopolies, or China, which is even less socialist than that.
>>2607200Braindead vermin like this are always why discussions about DM online are so mind-numbing. It's always "Aha! This explanatory source is wrooooong, but I'm not going to tell yooooou how to actually study DM!", adding literally nothing of value and just muddying the waters for less experienced comrades. Fuck off, you obnoxious prick.
>>2608616I love capitalist development!
>>2607949You keep parroting the same thing. They spent the few weeks of their existence fighting off the French reactionaries and the Prussians. They did not exist for enough time for us to 'learn' any organisation from them, be it civil administrative stuff or production and distribution.
>>2608647Capitalism brought a superior mode of production than the feudal system. Socialism is the next stage.
And I don't fucking know how the fuck brain dead retards like you can just skip that, are you fucking sprinkle fairy dust over industries and It will become socialist, what is your plan bordiga cunt, go fucking suck fascist cock like your daddy bordiga did previously, you fascist shit.
>>26071621. its materialism. i.e. it's not idealism, it doesn't believe that the mind (or spirit or God) comes before/creates what materially exists. (btw materialism takes no sides on what
is. E.g. it doesn't privilege matter over energy or anything like that like some people think just because they use the word matter to describe what exists.)
2. it's dialectical (because it's materialist - i.e. without concepts like negation of negation and quantity into quality, you can't talk about what exists without creating something outside of and antithetical to matter, which would be a version of idealism). These laws are: negation of negation (i.e. difference and the negation of difference. Put another way, the identity of identity and non-identity. The unity of things beyond their differences, and the fact that difference is still there), quantity into quality (or quantitative difference resulting in qualitative differences; this explains qualitative difference), and unity of opposites which is basically negation of negation as far as i can tell.
Lenin describes dialectical materialism as an epistemology. Materialist, because it's not idealist, and dialectical, because of the way it approaches the production of knowledge: it holds that every object of study has its own logic, and the only way to understand its logic is to study it (groundbreaking, i know) (Hegel was a logician btw). He also talks about how we cement knowledge by putting it into practice; e.g. we know that alazarin is what makes madder red, and we prove it by synthesizing alazarin from coal, and this science experiment is validated a million times over as it becomes an industrial process that's constantly repeated. There's a dialectical relationship between knowledge and practice. Knowledge needs practice to exist. None of this should be super shocking. I believe that dialectical materialism is basically the working philosophy of much of science, even if the scientists themselves aren't going around talking about dialectical materialism. You see the ideological struggle in science shine through sometimes through e.g. in pop science quantum physics vs people who actually physically research quantum physics. The pop version is woo woo nonsense about how things are in two places at once until a human soul (implied) views it (with their eyes presumably). In reality researchers shoot particles at other particles and use the results to determine something about the beginning state which no longer exists because they just altered it. The act of observing (slamming another particle into it) changes things. So dialectical materialism is very much necessary still and woo woo idealism exists all around us, but if you're not an idiot then it shouldn't feel like any huge revelation.
Semi unrelated, but sometimes also people talk about dialectical presentation in Marx, which i disagree with since the idea undermines the fact that the laws of dialectics laid out by Engels are necessary in order to properly conceptualize human knowledge of physical processes and relegates dialectics to just a way to format a written work for better consumption, but anyways I did read a very dialectically presented book and it was wonderful. It was about schizophrenia and dissociative disorders, and their relationship. It started out giving all the reasons for their unity, basically dissolving the concept of schizophrenia into the umbrella of dissociative disorders symptom by symptom. But then it reaches the unassimilable kernel of schizophrenia: the thought disorder. This is the negation of the negation of schizophrenia. It has a zone of difference from dissociative symptoms, and therefore deserves its own title and consideration as a unique disease. Some people say that the only reason you can apply a dialectical lens to science is because it's only a way to format a writing to better be understood by the reader. I disagree, because it's obvious that even if no one formulated schizophrenia and its relationship with dissociative disorders dialectically, the truth of their relationship is dialectical, that they have large areas of unity but also their own kernels of difference. And this is the secret to dialectics and dialectical thinking. I now see all concepts as an area. Imagine a sphere. Now in relation to all other things, there is overlap. So your sphere is more like a flower - a bunch of venn diagrams. As you traverse its relationships with other concepts, you leave and come back to the concept with a richer view of it. You can see what makes it unique and what it shares with others. You trace something like its outline - though it's not an outline, it intersects other concepts and then comes home to its center again. Just like you're drawing a flower. Consider how Hegel was a logician. Consider that humans only know the world through our symbolic representation of it. Our representation gives static symbols (e.g. a word) domain over areas of concrete reality. Concrete in marxist terms means that it is richly interconnected and given a multitude of determinations. Concrete is in opposition to the word abstract, which means something taken out of its context (and thus simplified - we immediately see why simplification is happening if we're looking at it dialectically. The flower is gone and we're left with just the center, just the "pure" concept without any of its messiness. We know that the messiness is part of it, and by getting rid of that we lose huge parts of the concept and lose the ability to actually understand it). Reality is inherently concrete. Language inherently abstracts. You can have more concrete or less concrete abstractions. So the purpose of dialectics in science is to give our abstractions (our object of study) as much concreteness as possible by not taking them as static abstractions but as internally divided, externally implicated, and possibly evolving things, whose conceptual messiness (overlaps, or areas of unity) and internal lack of perfect coherence does not negate them. Thanks for coming to my TedX talk
>>2608693 (me)
actually I should say near the end of the last paragraph at "(our object of study)" that the object of study is a piece of the concrete totality (of material reality), but that our subject of study, the conceptual area we define, that's our abstraction that we start with.
>>2608668Then "communists" should let the libs develop capitalism so that communists don't get associeted with the brutal development of capitalism.
>>2608716then how tf the libs gonna usher socialism, shitface. Will they just become communist out of nowhere?
>>2607162Dialectics is a way of reversing common sense. For example, you think science and industry were the dehumanization of man, as Marx noted? Maybe but only for a minute it's actually laying the foundation for real freedom. You think AES is a capitalist country with red flags? It's actually the real movement.
If anyone goes on about dialectics, ask them to explain the first image.
>>2607626>Everything you say is wrong, but this too wrong.How can you explain the collapse of the USSR then? It improved the material conditions for everyone yet it was dissolved overnight. What went wrong?
marx never proposed any "dialectical materialism", but only spoke of historical materialism, e.g. base and superstructure, class struggle, etc.
>>2608775Common sense is stupid because common sense does not explain the tension between why there is a difference between how we project things to be (which is common sense) with how things actually are. To use the lettuce example, a more appropriate comparison is why a dish entirely made lettuce considered food when humans are omnivores and not herbivores? This is what the old philosophers referred to Art and how it contrast to Religion and other such things. The Dialectics is a way to solve this contradiction by proposing tha these seemingly contradictory things are actually the same thing which exist at different stage of the process. It is not exactly scientific but neither are the other alternatives to this problem (i.e saying that these differences are immutable but equal to each other)
>>2610089all this to say "lettuce is lettuce".
>>2610130Would you call a salad entirely composed of lettuce a lettuce?
>>2610133common sense tells me that salad is salad and lettuce is lettuce. a salad is typically an assortment of vwgetables rather than one type. one type of vegwtable would remain what it is, just in greater quantity.
>>2609287Why is he wrong?
>>2607162>what it isThe idea that contradictions are what drives the world and its evolution. Furthermore, Marx is materialist, which means he believes that contradictions come from matter and not ideas or subjective opinions.
Contradictions arise because different interests and needs come in conflict. The bourgeoisie needs x to survive as a class, the proletariat needs y to survive. Both oppose each other, thus a contradiction exists in the system.
Mao, Stalin and Engels also wrote about it. And sadly didn’t understand it. Mao and Stalin both have a very childish view if it and uses it to justify some vague economism. Engels used to describe biological change, something rejected by most marxists and scientists.
its obviously notoriously hard to explain but i have been thinking it might be easier to explain what its not
to me the central premise is that things are not things but instead temporary forms of matter in motion abstracted into concepts for human utility
this is opposed to things being things conceived of as objects separate from subjects, observed from observer. dialectics seeks to reintegrate the observer back into the observed and vis-versa.
even if you dont think it, conceiving of things as objects necessitates a static existence where change comes from external mechanism of objects interacting, this is basically an error where early science imported the christian concept of the great chain of being. whereas dialectics recognizes that conceiving of objects is in itself immediately contradictory because there is nothing but matter in motion, yet we must give names to the various forms in order to understand and communicate them. the "contradictions" are the movement of thought up and down the chain and back again ensuring that the conception is integrated at all levels in order to understand the development of a thing instead of just how it comes to appear which is deeply socially mediated by necessity and therefore can be profoundly incorrect.
the reason dialectics often seems like just regular science is because as science becomes more correct it naturally does this action of reintegration as it circles to more and more precise concepts, but it does so completely blindly with no structure of intention, and only arrives at correct concepts by accident, whereas dialectical study seeks this holistic understanding from the start. it becomes increasing blurred with things like systems theory but there is still a gap where systems theory creates arbitrary limits of scope for utility and accuracy. you might say you dont need to consider politics to model the climate but the whole point of marx's addition is that you very very much in fact do, and obviously most climate scientists nowadays would agree but for fundamentally different reasons that dont offer solutions outside of liberalism.
>>2610888what existed before brains gave rise to sense experience?
poststructuralists dont typically believe in "contradiction", but rather believe in "difference", and so abandon the very notion of linear history since its concept is too totalising (which is where the "contradictions" actually appear, since youre trying to fit everything into one idea).
Any thoughts about Diabolical Materialism?
>>2611071Whats a non linear history?
>>2611115it would be a plural history; histories, rather than a single metanarrative. when we talk about "history" we imagine one big story instead of many smaller stories.
the concern with the marginal and the minority (rather than the total and majority) is also the field of concern with various postmodern writers, which inherently conflicts with the larger view of things. someone like slavoj zizek would say that the particular can be the universal (e.g. we are all spiritually minority), but the predominance of "difference" often substitutes the universal for the particular as such (e.g. feminism is for women, LGBT rights is for queers, etc.). the universal is often looked upon suspiciously as the position of the master (e.g. "white", "male", etc.). a concrete example would be how "black lives matter" was substituted with "all lives matter" as a protest, which encoded into its universality its inherent whiteness (e.g. "white lives matter"). this symbolic discourse is then inherently semiotic (e.g. metaphoric or connotative; it says what it doesnt say), rather than "material", lets say. the particularity of marxist historians would be "class", yet poststructuralists may insist that class is a false abstraction, and that class again obscures its position of mastery within its feigned universality. zizek here again intervenes by seeing how someone like bernie sanders as an old white man was embraced by the left "in spite" of this, showing the universality embodied in his person, as a representative of the working class. so zizek i would say is halfway between the marxists and poststructuralists, as an observable medium, while marxists and poststructuralists are generally entirely opposed to one another, since they disagree on what society even is, and what history should be taught as.
>>2607779>asserts something<doesn't elaboratethis is very easy to do. for example, your pants are full of shit and you haven't bathed in 10 days
>>2607948>There is no such thing as a processinsanely delusional statement dreamed up by a madman
>>2607948in school we learn about states of matter
solid ice melts into water; water boils into vapour
the transition from one state into another is certain, and the period between each state is a "process", no?
>>2611171There's no use talking to this guy. He's immune to reason. He's been popping up in various threads to assert process doesn't exist. He thinks only distinct situations exist with no "between", ignoring that the very definition of process is a
procession of various distinctions from one quality or quantity to the next. Counting from 1 to 10 is the process but he says "no, there is no process, there is only each number as I count it." he would also say "no there is no film reel, there is only individual frames." It is a delusional logic that prevents the invention of any kind of analysis which acknowledges collections of moments, states, objects.
>>2608775Explain the diagram? it's clearly moving through a series of abstracton from universality to particularity, giving examples along the way. it's not that complicated. It's treating these abstractions as concentric ovals for a visual metaphor, but the metaphor isn't necessary.
You can have a particular piece of lettuce, lettuce in general, lettuce as part of a salad, a salad as part of a dinner. It's just classes and subclasses. Object oriented programming almost.
>>2608775The picture, idk where it's from, but it seems to suggests reality is made up of a dynamic relationship between universality (U), particularity (P), and singularity (S) which combine to form what is being called here syllogism. A universality like the general idea of “dinner” includes particular objects such as “salad,” and each particular includes singular, concrete instances like “this lettuce here.” But these levels don’t exist separately; the singular helps define the particular, and the particular helps shape the universality. In other words, universality, particularity, and singularity continuously interact and depend on each other, forming a living process where concepts and real things are always connected and influencing one another. Influence flows both down and up the chain. It doesn't just flow from universal to singular, but also from singular to universal. There's a feedback loop of definition and influence here.
>>2607212that's the point you can't "interpret" knowledge because reason isn't a tool
>>2607296this literally says nothing
>>2611172>Marx never said "Science and Industry are the dehumanization of man."It was a paraphrase of this:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
<But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man. >>2612038Ultra pseud graph
>>2613323Ultra pseud post
>>2612038Any idiot can draw random curves with random labels and you gogols will be impressed
>>2609742 social fascist revisionists took over the Party and Russia became imperialist and social fascist. Study chapter 11 of this Maoist textbook for dialectical materialist analysis of why social fascist union failed.
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/china/fundamentals.pdf Unique IPs: 30