I had this question proposed to me recently, and thought I would give it my best shot. I would love any input you guys have on how I can refine this further, make it more clear, more accurate, more succinct, all that.
Also, this is specifically geared towards Marxist-Leninists and Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, and that understanding of dialectics, just to be clear. I’m not interested in the hyper-orthodox understanding of dialectical materialism.
I don’t understand the ins and outs of gravity perfectly, but here goes.
Internal contradiction is what drives all things. This is true for gravity, as much as anything in the world. Gravity could then be analyzed in the framework of the contradictor forces within gravity. What would those forces be?
Well, Einstein’s general relativity is probably the best place to start. I will outline the two contradictory forces below.
Again, I don’t know a ton about the in’s and out’s of it, but the way I see it, there are two sets of contradictions at work in “gravity”.
First, the contradiction of Mass and Spacetime Curvature. We have the force of attraction, where masses attract each other, but contradictory to that, we also have the resistance of compression, where the curvature of space resists this attraction.
Second, we have the contradiction of Inertia and Graviational Pull. Objects resist changes to their existing state of motion, but the force of attraction seeks to change the motion of objects
In the case of general relativity, I would say the first contradiction is the primary one, since that relationship is what defines the attraction between masses, and the resistances between each one. I would say the second contradiction is the secondary one, since it’s still crucial for understanding how gravity works, but, it explains the result of gravitational attraction, rather than the fundamental cause of it.
In the case of the primary contradiction, I would say that the force of attraction is the primary aspect of the contradiction, over resistance to compression, since the attraction of mass to itself is the fundamental reason why spacetime is distorted in the first place. In the secondary contradiction, gravitational pull is of course, the primary aspect there.
Let me know what you think, and thank you.
Oh, you’re named after the podcast, then?
nope, i’m too old for podcasts
we had to learn diamat in the USSR, I wish they put more effort into teaching contemporary geopolitics and economy rather than dry philosophical bullshit that has little to do with real world. Looking back, Soviet society was astonishingly politically illiterate and I think this is part of why people so easily let go of achievements of previous generations.
diamat was by far the most hated subject. the boredom was palpable. you don’t need diamat to understand how the world works is what i meant.
I certainly won’t contradict you on the political illiteracy of latter generation Soviets. The majority that I have encountered (though my sample is deeply skewed as an American) have been politically incoherent to a jarring degree.
However, it seems to be plainly absurd to say that throwing away diamat would help people embrace the accomplishments of the earlier Soviet Union. Do you think that Lenin and Stalin viewed the subject as irrelevant philosophical bullshit? Or did they view it as an integral element of their understanding of politics? Do you think that the revisionists were really too keen on Marxist economics and not keen enough on liberal economics when their entire project was the liberalization of the Union?
It seems to me like you see clearly the symptoms but are just assuming the cause. Have you considered alternative hypotheses, like the transmission of Marxist theory falling into formalism and phrase-mongering rather than existing as a living revolutionary project?
I do think leaving diamat to specific philosophy studies and instead teaching people about contemporary geopolitics and economics would make society much less susceptible to liberal propaganda.
I don’t think diamat is central to Lenin at all. If you think it is, please explain how.
I’m sorry to say but Stalin’s ramblings about it are complete gibberish, he will for instance say “all things in nature change and diamat is about change so diamat is a natural science” which is not what makes a theory scientific (that would be the application of the scientific method which has nothing to do with diamat).
Diamat is completely unnecessary to understand geopolitics and economics and a few modern economists I’ve read e.g. John Smith, Paul Cockshott, Zack Cope, never even mention it.
But I didn’t read much Marxist theory, I can’t say I’m well read in general, frankly I don’t remember a lot from what I learned in childhood and I don’t have that much time and energy to read dense theory nowadays so I’m open to have my mind changed, just not by pompous proclamations and thinly veiled accusations of “revisionism” like in your reply.
(Edit) Kwame Nkrumah also didn’t need dialectics to formulate neocolonialism. The list goes on.
Also a nice false dichotomy there between diamat and liberal economics, very productive.
What makes you think that none of those authors are dialectical materialists? Just because they avoid using certain jargon?
exactly, people thought dialectically long before dialectics were coined by hegel.
I’ve read Paul Cockshott’s work and he is most certainly a materialist. He is somewhat skeptical of dialectics (though not to the point of abandoning it), but he understands it and talks about. I would say that Marxist theory without DiaMat does not have historical materialism, and developing historical materialism is the crowning achievement of Marx and Engel’s work.
You say that the soviet political education that you received was boring because it did not focus enough on contemporary and concrete issues, and this makes perfect sense. But do we need to throw away DIaMat? Wouldn’t it be better to relate DiaMat to existing issues to make it more concrete?
This is kind of what I was trying to get at when I suggested that perhaps Soviet education fell into formalism and phrase-mongering, but you expressed it much better than I did.
Capital is filled with dialectics. For Lenin and Mao it’s clear if you read their works that it was ingrained in their ideology, they just generally talked so the average worker could understand. If you don’t like podcasts read the aforementioned authors and Anti-Duhring by Engels. In addition The Dialectical Biologist.
The most direct example I know of is Lenin explaining at length the importance of a historical materialist grounding in “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”. Here’s the link to an English translation since I don’t know Russian.
That said, I think a still simpler and more direct inference can be drawn from the fact that historical materialism (which, let us remember, is diamat applied to history) is the core of Marxism, something summarized well in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Lenin, as a dedicated Marxist, is working from this framework.
There’s no need to be cute, and crying fallacy fails to prove the antithesis even if we assumed you were correct that what I said was fallacious.
But it was not, as the three groups in discussion were early Soviets (Marxists), latter Soviets (revisionists), and liberals. The question was where the revisionists fell in the power struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Now, if you believe the revisionists were actually some other, completely distinct thing despite their track record of liberalizing the Soviet Union, that’s not necessarily invalid, but then you would need to introduce what you think it is. Without your having done that, what we are left with is a broadly successful early Soviet Union and the moribund late Soviet Union, and we need to figure out some way to distinguish why one was superior to the other. I suggested one framework, but you can refute it and suggest another, though I encourage you to not nebulously talk about being taught “politics” as though historical materialism is not a political theory. If you believe another political theory is superior, you can say so, but don’t dally in vagaries.