I’m talking about deeply held beliefs you have that many might disagree with here or deem to be incompatible with Marxist ideology. I’m interested because I doubt everyone here is an ideological robot who all share the same uniformity in belief
I’m talking about deeply held beliefs you have that many might disagree with here or deem to be incompatible with Marxist ideology. I’m interested because I doubt everyone here is an ideological robot who all share the same uniformity in belief
I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s just that we seem to be working with different definitions of dialectics. Yours seems to be much more broad and all-encompassing. I am just wondering how useful it even is to call it dialectics at that point.
Anyway without getting too sidetracked, i guess what i’m taking from all this is that perhaps i should correct my original point to clarify that what i disagree with is the tendency i have seen from some Marxists to apply the Hegelian dialectic to nature.
Viewing everything in terms of contradictions, of thesis, negation and synthesis, seems unnecessarily restrictive and forced. Your more general take on dialectics in nature being about systems that interact and change is much more reasonable, but also sort of feels redundant…i mean that’s kind of just stating the obvious don’t you think? It’s a bit of a truism.
I actually think that the use of the Hegelian dialectic by Marxists is an error. My first introduction to dialectics was Hegelian but my reading of Mao and many secondary sources has disabused me of what I believe is an error of interpretation. Mao posed the debate as between 1-into-2 versus 2-into-1. 1-into-2 is Spinoza-like: the universe is the only unitary, everything else is part of the universe. You can divide the universe into conceptual parts, but those subdivide and subdivide and interpenetrate. 2-into-1 is Hegelian: there are two distinct things, they interact as wholes and they give combine to become a new thing.
My understanding of Marx and Engels is much better for recognizing these 2 interpretations and interpreting it all through the 1-into-2 lens. 2-into-1 is idealism: the idea that any two things exist in and of themselves, and act upon and are acted upon as units, is a lossy model, an ideal. The reality is the unitary whole of the universe and we divide the 1 into 2 when we examine it. Anything we choose to analyze can be broken down into contributory parts, and is itself a contributory part to a larger scope of concept until you get all the way up to the universe.
Mao made it clear with class analysis: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat do not exist as billiard balls that meet in a social context and come into conflict. Instead, humanity divides itself into groups in many ways that interpenetrate and we can conceptualize yhe emergence of classes of people that are useful for explaining the dynamic of systems.
I don’t think this a truism. I think this sort of thing has been hotly debated by philosophers for millennia. We’re talking about a debate that pits Aristotle against Deluze. It’s far from obvious, but I do think that if you’re steeped in systems theory, contemporary science, and Marxism, it might seem sort of obvious.