I’m really trying to commit myself to getting a better understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism. I’m starting with the Vietnamese textbook on dialectical materialism that Luna Oi translated, before moving on to The Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Duhring.
My problem is I really struggle with philosophy. Marxian economics I can vibe with all day, but philosophy is something I’ve never been able to really get a hold of (but wanting to fix that).
So my first big struggle is understanding the difference between dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics. Is the former more of the worldview or viewpoint, and the later is more for explaining and analyzing specific processes? And if that understanding is correct, isn’t materialist dialectics the things we should be committing ourselves to as it’s what helps us better understand material reality (rather than dialectical materialism, which I guess would be more of a “belief statement?)? I don’t know I probably have a lot of this mixed up, just looking for any help on this I can get.
It is similar to the difference between rice porridge and porridge rice.
Dialectical materialism is the kind of materialist understanding of reality you need to do Marxist dialectics, and materialist dialectics is the kind of dialectics you can do from that materialist standpoint. They do not exist separately from each other, so you can’t really only do one of them. Even worse, the whole the two make up is often called dialectical materialism, which in this use of the word contains materialist dialectics.
This is helpful, thanks.
Check out the book The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism if you haven’t. It really helped me understand it. Here is my reflections about the book…
That’s actually the book I’m reading. I only just recently got into the part on materialist dialectics, so admittedly my question is jumping the gun a bit.
I haven’t read Luna Oi’s translation in a while, but essentially the difference is:
Dialectical materialism: How subjective (human) consciousness and the objective material world interact with one another.
Materialist dialectics: Dialectical relationships from a materialist perspective.
So there’s a dialectical relationship between a book that’s resting on a table and a table that’s holding the book up. This is materialist dialectics because the book and the table exist within the context of each other and have a contradiction (force of gravity pushes the book down on the table while the normal force pushes the book up), but it’s not dialectical materialism because a human isn’t involved.
What gets tricky is that just like the table and book exists within a context of each other, they also exist within the context of the objective material world, and this objective material world is shaped by human consciousness through the action of humans. Someone made that table, someone made that book, and someone placed them in such a way that the book is on top of the table, which means there’s a dialectical relationship with the book and table on one side and the humans who made it so on the other side. Now, you have to use dialectical materialism to fully explain this.
In a way, materialist dialectics by itself is insufficient but naturally leads to dialectical materialism anyways.
If you are trying to understand marxism you should look for communist parties and no academic professors. Marxism is not about discussing ideas, its about making a revolution.
apparently luna oi wrote a book that explained dialectical materialism pretty well from some review i read, dunno if true haven’t read it.
Yep, that’s book I’m in the process of reading now. It’s very good, and Luna has added a lot of annotations which are very helpful. I’m also a little envious of students in Vietnam who get to learn this in a classroom setting.
