Do We Need the Dialectic?
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LBird wrote:'Dialecticians' pretend to have access to an unmediated 'structure'. That is why Leninists favour 'dialectics'. They can claim to have access to a special method, which is not accessible to the class, so they have a more profound consciousness.
Yes but we are not Leninists (except for RL) or "dialecticians" either. Now Marx did have a method that he refered to as "dialectic" if we want to we could discuss what he meant by this and how his method is different from others e.g Wittgenstein.But I don't think the outcome of the world revolution depends on what we come up with!
LBird wrote:Whilst any comrades think that there is anything to dialectics, we have to confront and discuss it, because it has been so influential and damaging for the proletariat.Where exactly is it that dialectics has been "so influential"? I'd love to know, everyone I try to start discussing it with at the bus-stop just looks at me funny and runs away!
ALB wrote:Actually I agree that when it comes to actual research I can't see that there would be any difference between what "non-dialectic" and "dialectic" researchers do and was going to say so, but didn't. Perhaps I should have done. The only difference would be in what they say or think they are doing (if they bother, that is, about this).Yeah, I agree about actual research, so, just why do 'dialecticians' bother so much to stress their 'method'?Why do members of the SPGB feel the need to mention 'dialectics', even if they already agree that it's the same as 'non-dialectics'?
DJP wrote:LBird wrote:'Dialecticians' pretend to have access to an unmediated 'structure'. That is why Leninists favour 'dialectics'. They can claim to have access to a special method, which is not accessible to the class, so they have a more profound consciousness.Yes but we are not Leninists (except for RL) or "dialecticians" either. Now Marx did have a method that he refered to as "dialectic" if we want to we could discuss what he meant by this and how his method is different from others e.g Wittgenstein.But I don't think the outcome of the world revolution depends on what we come up with!
Once again, why would any Communist then stress 'dialectical method'?Perhaps 'dialectics' is a mystification intended to prevent proletarian revolution?There's one thesis that has some evidential basis!
DJP wrote:LBird wrote:Whilst any comrades think that there is anything to dialectics, we have to confront and discuss it, because it has been so influential and damaging for the proletariat.Where exactly is it that dialectics has been "so influential"? I'd love to know, everyone I try to start discussing it with at the bus-stop just looks at me funny and runs away!
Well, DJP, it's 'been so influential' enough that SPGB posters here keep mentioning it!
LBird wrote:DJP wrote:Where exactly is it that dialectics has been "so influential"? I'd love to know, everyone I try to start discussing it with at the bus-stop just looks at me funny and runs away!Well, DJP, it's 'been so influential' enough that SPGB posters here keep mentioning it!
LOL.Who bought this up anyway?But seriously my interest is because I think Marx has something useful to say about the present moment, and in various postfaces, prefaces and footnotes he describes the method he used to construct this work as "dialectical". Now what Marx meant by this, and how this is different from what other people have meant by it is, to me at least, a useful and practical question since I hope the answer will help me in my own work.It is also interesting to compare Marx to others who would not have described their methods as "dialectical". So for example; Do you think it would have been possible to write Capital using the methods based on linguistic analysis that Wittenstien used? What use are the methods of analytic philosophy for creating a critical social theory like the one constructed in Capital?This is where my interests in "dialectic" lie, not in trying to uncover some mystic driving force that controls the universe.
As we can see the concept of dialectic is very ambivalent because the Marxist-Humanists claim that it was Engels who really distorted Marx conception of dialectic.I do not think that we need the holy spirit in order to understand dialectic and Hegelian philosophy, we just need to read and study the proper sources. Many have learned dialectic from second sourcesBolshevism and Leninism is the summation or the combination of the vanguard party concept of Ferdinand Lasalle, and the theory of revolution of Leon Trotsky. All works of Lenin can be reduced to four famous books.The concept of dialectical materialism was created by Dietzgen without the need of the Hegelian philosophy, what Lenin created is what is known as: Dialectical Historical materialism, and Stalin created what is known as Marxism-LeninismI do not think that Marx should have called Dietzgen a phenomenological because he did not learn dialectic from Hegel.I said that dialectic is a wasting of time because we can spend years in spirals discussing about the same subject and will never reach a conclusion or an agreement, because the concept is too volatile.What is having damaging to the proletariat is the distortion of real conception of socialism propagated by the Leninists, the world never knew anything called socialism, what we learned was Leninism-Stalinism
Correction: What have created great damage to the proletariat is …….
Engels made many mistakes, such as. founding the conception of Marxism and Marxist, applying dialectic to nature, and taking on an uncritical manner the research of Lewis Morgan, and calling communism a doctrine ( which proves that between Marx and Engels there was not a single unity, he has his own legacy ) but he did not distort socialism in the same way that Lenin and his follower have done.I do not underestimate Leninism, I know it pretty well, it was my bread and butter, as it was Stalinism and Enverism, my point is that you do not have to be a dialectician in order to become a renegade or to take reactionary stands. Kautsky was one of the best Marxist theoretician and he became an anti-socialist, and he was more influenced by Marx than by EngelsThe stampede of 'Marxists' after 1989 was enormous, and many organizations fell apart due to the fact that they were Leninist, but not because they were dialecticians. I know an organization that when the membership started to question Leninism it was totally dismantled by the members.I went through a lot of splits and cliques, and fighting between organizations and memberships, but everything was based on the Leninist method of organization. The case of the Socialist Party is different, we started as anti-Leninist organization, and we have dialectician, and non-dialectician in our membership, but we have not become a reactionary group.
DJP wrote:LBird wrote:DJP wrote:Where exactly is it that dialectics has been "so influential"? I'd love to know, everyone I try to start discussing it with at the bus-stop just looks at me funny and runs away!Well, DJP, it's 'been so influential' enough that SPGB posters here keep mentioning it!
LOL.Who bought this up anyway?But seriously my interest is because I think Marx has something useful to say about the present moment, and in various postfaces, prefaces and footnotes he describes the method he used to construct this work as "dialectical". Now what Marx meant by this, and how this is different from what other people have meant by it is, to me at least, a useful and practical question since I hope the answer will help me in my own work.It is also interesting to compare Marx to others who would not have described their methods as "dialectical". So for example; Do you think it would have been possible to write Capital using the methods based on linguistic analysis that Wittenstien used? What use are the methods of analytic philosophy for creating a critical social theory like the one constructed in Capital?
I'll have to come back to your important points later, DJP, time permitting.This is precisely the area that I've tried to raise discussion. I think that it's possible to regard Marx as a 'critical realist', and to argue that his use of the term 'dialectic' was an early attempt to describe 'critical realism'.Of course, we'd have to discuss, compare and contrast all these methods: Marx's dialectical, linguistic analysis, analytical philosophy, and critical realism. I think we'd need Rosa for 2 and 3, because I for one know nothing about Wittgenstein.
DJP wrote:This is where my interests in "dialectic" lie, not in trying to uncover some mystic driving force that controls the universe.Ditto, comrade.
mcolome1 wrote:I said that dialectic is a wasting of time because we can spend years in spirals discussing about the same subject and will never reach a conclusion or an agreement, because the concept is too volatile.Exactly, comrade! Tried googling Alexander Fleeming and 'dialectics' but come up with nothing! Thank fuck for that! We would probably all be dead with his indecision by now! Let's get on with convincing the working class that we have come up with a cure for the worst disease to hit humankind in the whole of history.
Well, the Marxist-Humanist define dialectic as the algebra of the revolution, and they do not have the same definition as Plato. They define it as the unity of the opposite, and in this book the concept of dialectic is explained by them:http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Negativity-Dialectic-Dunayevskaya/dp/0739102672We do not need any guru or anti-dialectician to explain to anybody what dialectic is, we can do our own digging. This is the way how Marxist-Humanists explain Hegel Phenomenology:http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2008/Dec-Jan/Essay_Dec-Jan_08.htm
We might also ask why the materialist philosophers from the Arab world are not so popular ?
That reminds me. There's Paul Mattick's cruelly honest criticism of Dunayevskaya's Hegelian Leninism that was published in the Western Socialist (journal of our companion party in the US and Canada) in 1958:http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1958/dunayevskaya.htm
Dunayeskaya claimed that she broke away from Trostkyism, but she never departed from Leninism,( the same case of some anti-dialecticians ) even that she rejected the vanguard party concept which is only one component of Bolshevism, ( she re-wrote Trotsky's concept of the permanent revolution ) but, then, she claimed that in 1914 Lenin became a Hegelian philosopher when he was takling notes from Hegel Science of Logic, and that he was an ambivalent thinker. Lenin was the same Lenin in 1903, 1905, in 1914, and in 1917. Lenin said that the vanguard party concept was only applicable to Russia, but he re-edited his book What is to be done again, and they continue using it in the Bolshevick party.We have Killman who is a dialectician but he does not approve Lenin transitional societyRaya also claimed that Marx inherited from Hegel his concept of alienation as it is expain on this article http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/articles/alienation.htm. The question is, if Marx took from the Utopian socialist the labour voucher, Why was he going to reject completely the Hegelian philosophy when he was also influenced by Hegel ?
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