How can people categorise themselves as marxists if they do not also consider themselves DM's, surely to be a "scientific socialist" you would need to be one?
Do Anarchists subscribe to dialectics or dp they only uphold historical materialism?
Is dialectics everything, or does applying it to everything make it redundant?
I have heard that Stalin did not negate the negation LOL, can someone explain?
I always thought of myself as a DM as for example I see the struggle between opposites the workers/ruling class, conditions create ideas etc etc but feel I need to study it more.
In my opinion the least scientific thing about Marxism is the idea of dialectical materialism. In honesty though I would not be able to give you a good definition of dialectical materialism, although I also think that very few people would.
I think that Marxist theory provides good tools for theoretically unmasking ideological forms e.g., found in the media. I don't think that Marxism is very good at understanding the "fundamental contradictions" in capitalist society which lead towards communism. In society there are antagonisms, conflicts of interests: there are not contradictions. If there are contradictions, they can stay there, there is no reason why they must be resolved or tend towards being resolved.
I cringe when Marx uses the word contradiction. What is he talking about? How is there a contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production? As I see it there is simply a state of affairs here; to call it contradictory is only to impute one's own imagined state of affairs.
As I see it Marx's dialectical materialism goes against the basis of most of the political work discussed on this site. The latter seems to work on the basis that we fight for small reforms, better wages, against austerity, etc., in order to build up working class consciousness. Dialectical materialism suggests that capitalism heightens social contradiction in such a way as to lead towards a revolutionary situation. If we look at Capital, we find Marx, on the subject of the “immense impetus given to technological development by the limitation and regulation of the working day”, writing that
The removal of safety valves as the path to social revolution is the precise opposite of what most libcoms seem to be into.
I recently read Lukacs - The Destruction of Reason, where he heralds dialectical materialism as the greatest achievement of science and talks endlessly of social progress, and I have to say that it was one of the most dogmatic, worthless wastes of intellect I have ever encountered. What precisely is scientific about the idea of dialectical materialism is something that entirely escapes me.