Do We Need the Dialectic?

I could cry with gratitude, ALB, at both reading the mysterious E. W.'s opinion of Engels' travesty of Marx's views, and your posting of it! tears of joy, I assure you!

EW were the initials used by the writer Ted Wilmott and as I am someone who has not yet understood the point of dialectics, I have to say it seems like a pretty convincing case against dialectics.

De r all esp. Adam,I agree with the notion that Engels' error was to take a theory of mental contradictions and apply them to physical processes.Unless he was being *extremely* subtle. But I doubt it.Marx adopted the skeptical approach. I have been thinking long and hard on how to explain this, because I want to write an article that might be of some use to the Party, in the near future. Hence also, Adam, why I've been so useless over the Anthropology issue – sorry, I wanted to squeeze my own article in.Look at it this way.  When we talk about the world, what do we mean? We mean *our impressions of it*. That is all that we have. We are simply not talking about a world out there beyond the senses: we are talking about our shared experiences.That means that when we say "water turns into steam" we are not talking about a qualitative change in this extra sensory world. We are talking about a change in the way we perceive it. The world is not a bouncy castle: but our minds certainly are. We as a community have started using a different concept to refer to our experiences in this area.The creepy bit is where you realise that you are not standing outside of yourself while you are thinking. You can't analyse your thinking and get to a true, as opposed to false, consciousness. There are no external facts to cling onto – the stars are cold and silent, and without mercy. The world beyond the senses is without form – Without even the notion of formlessness, which you probably just conjured as grey and cloudy.Input from this world beyond the senses is entirely negative, and Darwinian in the widest sense. Humans build square pyramids in certain ways across the continents, not because of Atlanteans or some universal Fourness, but because when you stack bricks that's how they happen to fall, whether you're Egyptian, Sumerian, or Maya. And ultimately, the development of ideas comes not from reaching towards greater universal Truths but because holding stupid ideas gets you killed. We stand on top not of good ideas but bad ones, just as we are descended from those animals that a) survived basic physics and then b) died the least and reproduced the most. (OK, it's a bit more complicated than that). This also means that just as Darwin spoke not of evolution but descent with modification, so we should see our cultural development as a secular process in  no way guided by time's arrow.this is irreligious criticism at its root – that we are the only gods that we no, and entirely finite. All the doings of gods are our doings, and where the world seems magic it imply means that we have not yet developed the concepts to explain a phenomenon. In other words, there is no meaning outside of the community of human minds, whether inherent in the environment or in the mind of a Creator. Meaning is a thing that we *manufacture* – and of which we are made.Oh, dialectics? Right. Where was I. Since what we are talking about is our concepts, that allows them to interact in a way they would not if they were of fixed, solid matter. There is no factory without the experience of labour inside it: a ship may be inert sat in the harbour but on a stormy night sea it becomes a fickle She: and so forth. A castle, set beside a house, makes that house a hut, not because we live in a bouncy castle but because our concepts of residences and of status are inextricably interlinked.This, of course, renders crude materialism obsolete. Control of the means of life is essential; but this is not just control of big and heavy things, and the relegation of light and flighty things to the philosopher's tower. So, while taking it all back from the capitalists is a good idea – you can't go wrong if you grab it all – it may be that more subtle approaches to revolution may pay dividends. In particular, disrupting the value that is socially attached to the objects of capitalist society. A society almost self-sufficient in values, not just a starving survivalist band, is possible within capitalism: the technology that has rendered our value exchange so malleable, information technology, is key to this. It is telling that capitalism has tried to minimise the intrusion of this new technology by treating its products *as if they were heavy* – charging a rate per item as if it was a physical product from a factory, a car or pat of butter; selling rights to a product only on purchase of a physical equivalent item (the academic publishing model): and so forth.That's about as far as I'd got, but expect an article at some point. Comradely regards, Simon W.

Dear LBird, I think it might make things clearer if I added two things to my hypothesis:1) I used the word 'have' with respect to our ideas. This was a liberty, loose talk. What I mean is not that thoughts are something we *have* but something that we *are*. That was implied in the rest of what I wrote, I think.2) Individual identity, our sense of self, is one more thought passing through our heads rather than the sine qua non of existence that it is in private property society, We are all moments within a communicating whole.so,3) what we say about the world, we say about ourselves. this isn't saying anything idealistic – it is saying something *less*. Whereas in our current model we believe in the solidity of our thoughts as objects in space, and consider our existence within it as a divine mystery, instead I am saying that we start from what we are, and step no further than we are able – in our case, beyond the nervous system (though of course we have so arranged the world beyond the senses to reflect our thoughts, to make our environment a medium of communication). There is no divine – what we know, we know, and what we don't is simply beyond our purview.  So your notion of going further in our knowledge of the world than empirical experience just won't wash here, because we are the world and the world *is* empirical experience. There's no magic US to which the empirical experience attaches. Our identity is in the experiences themselves. Comradely regards, Simon Wigley.

It's been discussed before on this forum as well of course.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/rosa-lichenstein-and-anti-dialectics

I don't think I agree with this assumption of yours, Morgenstern, if I understand what you're saying correctly.Do you wish to discuss it, or is it an axiom of yours, an a priori assumption which is beyond analysis? (we all have them, 'starting points', by the way, it's just that I think we should try to expose our axioms, rather than hide them, as does bourgeois science)