‘Thinking systematics: critical-dialectical reasoning for a perilous … ‘
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I wonder if the anti-dialectic Keith Graham or the pro-dialectic Wez would like to review the grandiosely titled ‘Thinking systematics: critical-dialectical reasoning for a perilous age and a case for socialism’, by the Trotskyists (?) Murray EG Smith and Tim Hayslip. Michael Roberts has done so here: https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1530/monistic-and-materialist/ . He thinks it’s just great.
(As ever I am completely unconvinced that there is any need for ‘dialectics’, unless you are some kind of cultist.)
Looks like another reinvention of the wheel. I’d give it a read although the price is above my pay grade as a pensioner. A strange assessment of China saying it is neither capitalist or socialist! A crumbling state capitalist regime that has long ago succumbed to the realities of global capitalism despite all of the propaganda. The author would probably have said the same about ‘soviet’ Russia and we all know how that turned out.
“Dialectics” is just a word that has become overinflated. I don’t think it makes much sense to talk about being “for” or “against” it.
It just refers to a movement or development of something through the pull and push of opposing forces or arguments.
For example, the writings of Plato are “dialectical” in that they take the form of a dialogue, with the arguments developing through the exchanges of the characters.
In Capital (page 102 Penguin edition) Marx says that his method of *presentation* is dialectical, meaning that it is presented as an unfolding and development of relations.
He also says that the way he conducted his research was different. That is, he had to gather and analyse material by reading classical political economy, government reports, and newspaper articles etc. Only after the material was gathered could he begin to work out the connections and relations between it all.
DJP – “Dialectics” is just a word that has become overinflated.’
‘It just refers to a movement or development of something through the pull and push of opposing forces or arguments.’I think it is rather more than just a word that has become ‘overinflated’ as it represents a ‘continental’ approach to philosophical analysis that is almost entirely absent in the purely ‘analytical’ philosophy that is dominant in the British/American intellectual tradition. It is far too ‘superficial’ to speak of it as merely a form of dialogue after the insights it provided for Marx and others. You speak of Marx’s empirical research of economics preceding any dialectical analysis whereas I think his conclusions were only possible by treating such data within a dialectical/historical perspective. As always I recommend Bertell Ollman’s book ‘Dance of the Dialectic’as an introduction to the rules and procedures of post Marxian dialectical analysis.
Ollman also felt the need to deflate ‘dialectics’ of the magical thinking and mysticism that it became associated with:
“Dialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that serves as an all-purpose explanation; nor does it provide a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history. The dialectic, as such, explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing, and causes nothing to happen” (Dance of the Dialectic, pg 12)
DJP – Ollman went out of his way to demystify dialectics however the rest of the book is dedicated to the superior kind of ‘philosophical toolbox’ (as he calls it) that enables us, among other things, to cut away the ideological overgrowth of traditional (in this country) economic and political analysis. The triad of ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis is something other philosophers have concocted and is never mentioned by either Hegel or Marx.
‘A strange assessment of China saying it is neither capitalist or socialist! A crumbling state capitalist regime that has long ago succumbed to the realities of global capitalism despite all of the propaganda. The author would probably have said the same about ‘soviet’ Russia and we all know how that turned out.’
How typical this is as a strand of left-wing thinking.
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