what is the dialectic

iexist, you may want to try searching around the forums, there were several threads on dialectics in the past two or three years.

Chomsky what beautiful human being. The honesty is refreshing and the humble yet subtle critique of psuedo-intellectual posers is a joy.

It's funny because dialectics is such a simple theory and yet nowhere bar that film have I seen it explained clearly.

So I think the half nelson clip doesn't do it much justice, (but I haven't seen the full film and it looks pretty good) because that's historical dialectics, and it's not generalizing or abstracting it enough. If you really want to get a clearer picture of the way in which dialectical thought can be applied, you might want to look at Engels attempts at applying it to all of nature (WHACK!) etc.

So in Dialectics you have....

1. The Universe as Integral and interdependent (most useful point that I ever got from a "dialectician" was this. Which isn't all that unique). Stephen Jay Gould says:

2.Opposing forces (Worker/Capitalist, Master/Slave, Hot/Cold) Also, "Contradictions." Everything in the universe is made up of contradictory forces. These forces motivate change. You can see this nestling nicely into the above principle

3. For Dialectical Materialism specifically ("The Science of Making Revolution!" as some call it). Or historical materialism/dialectics (I might have a bad understanding of how these two are distinct) HISTORY is itself seen as the CONSTANT changing activity of these Opposing Forces. This is where it gets WHACKY!

4. One of Engels' Laws of Dialectics is the way that small quantitative changes can suddenly rupture into significant qualitative changes. The metaphor given is that of boiling water. Water heats up, slowly, in a manner measured by degrees (quantitative) and then there is a cataclysmic event at 212 degrees where it turns to vapor! (Qualitative).

So for me the whole issue is: Is this ontological? I mean, are maoists actually walking around assuming that what makes the light come on is the contradictory forces contained within the lightbulb or the photons, or tiny vibrating strings or whatever.

Much more satisfying is it's use or understanding as Gould points out; as an investigative heuristic, a way to place data into a thoughtful framework that counters to some extent platonic static-ism. I can dig that. But most of the time it's vague as hell and obscurantist for me to find much use for.

I hope this helps?

I think there is a big problem here in terms of the differences between dialectical thinking as a practical tool for understanding how human beings transform reality, creating the basis for the possibility for a communist society (or, indeed, any different society in history or otherwise) and dialectics as metaphysical mumbojumbo used to justify a teleological view of history that, despite its own ideas about itself, justifies capitalism.

"Dialectics" was an attempt, begun by Engels, to give history the kind of fixed laws of Nature that contemporary science had discovered in evolution by natural selection (I think that in his funeral speech for Marx Engels even makes this actual link!). In this world view man and nature are an immediate unity and historical development is simply the playing out a plan that is essentially beyond our control or that, at the most, we can speed up or slow down. In this world view industrial capitalism, although a bad thing, is a step towards communist society. The obvious problem is that this takes the creatively conscious dimension of human practice, or praxis, out of the equation. The thoughts, feelings, desires and imaginations of human beings, all history in fact, in this ontology are just the playing out of an antagonistic relationship inherent to Nature, at least for now, and not of their own creation.

Contrast this with the praxiological approach that Marx develops in his early work and which, I'd argue, is clearly present throughout Capital too. For Marx human beings are in a constant state of world and self creation that happens on both an individual and social level and therefore as part of a social totality. Marx doesn't place the dialectic in nature but rather sees it in the relationship between man and nature / objectivity (this includes our relationships with each other and therefore, crucially, the social relationships we create / experience). Man / subjectivity and Nature / objectivity are a unity of oppositions. Man is separate from nature in that he consciously creates (as Marx points out in Capital: the architect must imagine its building, the bee doesn't, but then the architect can imagine any sort of building and the bee can't). But Man is also united with nature through praxis: The transformation of Man and nature takes place through a dialectical process where man consciously changes his reality, this reality changes man, then man changes reality etc. This is the essence of who we are as individuals and as a society in any given historical moment for Marx. The importance of this theory (a dialectical one but not, crucially, a theory of "dialectics") from a revolutionary perspective is that it raises the ontological possibility for human beings to consciously create a communist society through practice.

The concept of an alienated praxis, a praxis that is divided and separated from its fundamental unity, is also the critique of hierarchy and contemporary society that is found in Marx. The key ideas here are fetishism and reification. These are immensely complicate in the details but essentially Marx is saying that hierarchical social forms create a reality that appears beyond our control (ironically it appears much like the teleological view of history later propounded by "dialectics") and something we must submit to rather than something that we consciously create through praxis. This is problematic for two reasons. One, it means that our everyday lives are defined by social forms that have no subjective content defined by our desires as human beings, and two, it appears like this is the natural state of things and we therefore find it hard to imagine anything outside it. On the first point, Capital goes through the pains of showing each key abstract social form of capitalist society as a unity of opposition between a concrete reality and an abstraction imposed on it. The commodity for example is a use-value and an exchange-value, it serves some concrete desire or need but it is, in fact, also an abstraction that bears no relation to human need. You could think of this in terms of people growing food then being forced to sell it off while everyone around them starves due to market forces. Or how the Zapatistas in Mexico had to fight to grow diverse foods on land while capitalists, with the government, wanted it for growing biofuels. Later on we get a discussion of labour which is both concrete, a person actual consciously making something in some specific way, and abstract, the actual specific nature of the work contradictorily doesn't matter so much as it is producing value. Hence we are forced to produce not what we desire and in a way that we would find enjoyable but instead forced to produce an abstraction, value, that bares no relation whatsoever to subjective need and desire (save for the imposition that we need to work to eat). So there is a dialectical unity of oppositions in these social forms that all threaten to explode and can be consciously overcome through the opposition of human practice in its consciously creative relationship with these social forms. All of this later paragraph has been quite hard to explain succinctly but I hope that what I've written here helps to explain Marx's use of a dialectical way of thinking about social totalities and their forms as I understand it and how this differs from the a metaphysics of dialectics.

So I'm going to give this a shot, but I'd be glad to for others to give what I'm saying is a critiquing as well, tho.

A dialectical process is where two ideas--often unconciously--bounce off one another and develop one another, sometimes resulting in a new idea.

So, I'll often say that in the class struggle, action and conciousness are a dialectical. So it's the idea that one doesn't need class conciousness to act in a class concious manner. However, acting in a class concious manner begins to make clear the class nature of bourgeois society and futhers the development of becoming concious of your class interests.

Jesus, does that even make sense?

So not this, then?

Eh, the lectures in the film are Englian dialectics, Gosling even explains Engel's three laws of dialectics (opposites, turning points, change in spirals rather than circles) which is all lifted from the director's father running the Dialectics for Kids site. He talks about dialectics in the Civil Rights movement and inhaling exhaling, I'd say that's both abstract and general.

One of the best explanations of this I have found on libcom is this chapter from Shorthall's book on Marx.

He (Chomsky) may be a beautiful human being, but he doesn't know shit about Marx. Marx specifically uses the word "dialectic"-- in his preface to the 2nd edition of volume 1, in his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in the Poverty of Philosophy, in Chapter 24 of Volume 1 of Capital, in the Grundrisse, etc.

He sure is purty.

Oops! I stopped the video after the initial classroom scene. My bad!

As I understand it the term 'the dialectic' has a different meaning to the word 'dialectics', and Chomsky mentioned the latter. I don't know whether the distiniction exists in German though. Did Marx ever mention, or talk about without explicitly mentioning, 'dialectics' as we understand the term today?

Ok, in that case could you explain the difference between "dialectics" and "dialectic"-- other than the plural facet?

And is there any evidence that Chomsky understands "dialectic" but not "dialectics"? Since he doesn't make that distinction, and to my knowledge, never explores any such distinction, I think it's safe to say he is using the word "dialectics" to encompass dialectic, Hegel's dialectic, Marx's dialectic-- all of it without distinction.

If Chomsky meant to say "dialectical materialism," then shame on him for not being specific enough in his use of language. I mean analysis of such specificity, after all, is his profession, is it not?

My understanding is the a dialectic is a heuristic for thinking about whatever the subject in hand is and dialectics is a sort of meta-subject based on the premise that nature and society are ontologically dialectical. If that's right (which it might well not be, I'm no expert) there's an important distinction, though whether that's what Chomsky means I've no idea. He certainly seems to enjoy claiming (pretending?) to be utterly unable to understand, broadly speaking, continental philosophy.

Marx, however, does not, abstract dialectic or dialectics from the object, and subject, of its analysis-- which is after all, human beings, the self-re-creation of humans as social beings appropriating the material world.

That's what dialectic is, or dialectics are for Marx. Actually, I think Chomsky is being more than a little bit insincere when he says a) Marx never used the term(s) b) he [Chomsky] has no idea what the term(s) mean(s). Marx demonstrated dialectic(s) in his critique of capital.

Actually his critique is the dialectic capital, edit:-- well, no, not actually is but rather expresses the dialectic of capital with class struggle and the abolition of capital becoming tha actual dialectic--where the very basis for capital's reproduction and expansion becomes the determinant for obstructing its reproduction, and causing its contraction.

What Chomsky really means is he disagrees with Marx's critique of capital that capital is a specific organization of labor. Instead, Chomsky gives us the feint of pretending that dialectic(s) is/are incomprehensible, and the "problem" really isn't capital-ism as capital-ism, but rather some meta-physical meta-theory world view that Marxists seek to impose on reality.

Shorter version: Just because Chomsky doesn't understand Turkish, that doesn't mean Turkish speakers aren't describing the real world correctly. The fault's not with the language, or the Turkish speakers, the fault is with the listener's ignorance.

Marx was always using the dialectical method. The method he learned from Hegel is thoroughly embedded in ALL his published work. It's a pity and a revelation to me that Noam made this statement. For instance, in the first chapter of Marx's CAPITAL v. I, the commodity, the basic building block of private property, is shown to be composed of a 'unity of opposites', a sure sign of dialectical analysis. A commodity must have both a use-value and an exchange-value--opposites i.e.one is NOT the other but both are necessarily connected. The exchange-value of a commodity is made up of socially necessary labour time (snlt) and the use-value is in the eye of the beholding human beings. A commodity can have all the snlt in the world embodied in its production and still not be a commodity, if it doesn't fulfill a perceived need in the mind of a buyer.

One of the BIG points most socialists miss about Marx's critique of the commodity is that it is tied to 'sublation'. Sublation becomes a reality when the unity of opposites breaks down, bringing forth something new from part of what existed before. Sometimes, people call this a synthesis. As the people at the group Aufheben know, sublation means both creation and destruction--creation of something new while carrying forward what is useful from before. Thus, socialism for Marx and Engels (see Engels' ANTI-DUHRING, the section on theory) conceptually describes an association of free producers in a classless society producing wealth for use and need. Exchange-value has been lopped off, sublated while use-value remains, consumed on the basis of the needs the producers have planned on fulfilling. Wealth is not commodified i.e. sold for prices fluctuating around exchange-value as commodities (including labour power) do under capitalism and other modes of production in which commodities are exchanged.

Our labour time and skills are bought for their prices, which fluctuate around their exchange-value, by those who can market what we produce. Capitalists can't market what people find useless. Use-value is in the eye of the beholder and indeed, some strange things are found to be useful in fulfilling certain needs amongst those in the buyers' market dominated by Capital. We reify things (including ideas) when we give them a subjective/human power. We fetishise commodities when we fail to see how, like gods, they are our own creations. We reify Capital in our language when we say, "Mercedes makes good cars." We fetishise commodities when we see ourselves as mere 'consumers', as opposed to being the producers of all wealth not just found in natural resources.

none of which insight is a product of "dialectical analysis".

Marx's relationship to Hegel and the tradition of speculative philosophy is one of the most hotly contested questions in Marxology, as a cursory look back at any of the archived threads on the matter will show! The commodity as "unity of contradictions" is arguably a matter of the employment of a dialectical method of presentation rather than the outcome of a dialectical method of analysis - see Marx's famous distinction between the order in which logical categories are derived and developed and the actual historical genesis ( or even current synchronic organisation of determinations in ) the object of knowledge.

there - that should get people going 'til at least New Year!

Malva: this is possibly the best succinct analysis of dialectical theory I have ever come across. Excellently written!

In connection with the above, it is also worth pointing out that Marx in Engels, in vol. 1 of The German Ideology (Feuerbach section), explicitly identify the concept of alienation/estrangement with the emergence of the division of labor. In summary they contend that with the emergence of the property relation, and its social structure (of which the family is the most primitive form) comes the division of labor, and hence (in political terms) the alienation of real human interests through the growth of a political structure to accommodate, preserve and advance the interests of the property-owning class, and to suppress the property-less class. The State is (and they use precisely this language) the "illusory common interest," the false ideology of common interest which is used to justify all manner of atrocities.

Thus the opposition between the State and civil society emerges in historical terms. But I think the overall point here is that there is a dialectic between the general interest and the particular interest of individuals; the State is the alienated form of the general interest.

Furthermore, the unity of opposites (an important characteristic of dialectical reasoning) occurs both (1) in their 'alienated' form (the State as alienation of civil society; bourgeois egotism as alienation of individuality) and (2) in their 'free' or emancipated form under communism (civil society / the dictatorship of the proletariat and the destruction of the State/class society; individuality as genuinely realised through communal control over production, social life, etc.).

Finally, sublation (Aufhebung: i.e., the transformation of reality into its higher truth) occurs with the negation of the old, oppressive society and the revolutionary transformation of society from a capitalist into a communist one.

I cite and discuss this example particularly because I think that it indicates some important continuities between the anarchist critique of the State and Marx and Engels' dialectical critique of the State as an 'alienated' form of the general interest. Against Chomsky, and in agreement with other anarchic dialecticians such as Murray Bookchin, I think that an acquaintance with dialectical theory is indispensible to an understanding of both history and how capitalism and hierarchy function (as illustrated, e.g., in the section of The German Ideology pertaining to the 'materialist conception of history').

I thus find myself in fundamental agreement with what Artesan said re. Chomsky:

And Y's analysis is very good too. I agree emphatically that one needs to comprehend the dialectic form as expressed by Hegel in order to understand Marx properly (a point sorely missed by Althusserians and their ilk, and also emphasised by Raya Dunayevskaya and Herbert Marcuse, amongst others).

Thank you very much. I've just finished writing a phd thesis about Vaneigem in which I do a fuller explanation as part of a whole chapter of which this is a kind of summary.

Yes, exactly. The unity of opposites is in many ways key to what makes us human in Marxian terms as I understand it. It is the alienation, which, as you point out, begins with separation, of this dialectic of creativity that defines class society. I also totally agree that this is where Marx and "anarchism" actually intermingle very well as it shows that the critique of hierarchy is absolutely fundamental to his thinking.

Do you have any writing you are working on of your ideas or that is already complete? I'd be interested to read it. PM me.

Can someone tell me what exactly is the practical value of dialectics? Seems like an overly extravagant thing to explain relatively simple phenomena. I'm not some valiant "anti-dialectic" or anything, I just don't see its value.

Hard question to answer, because the question itself is based on abstracting "dialectic" from the practical activity of human beings-- that is to say from the conflict between the labor process and the social mediation of that process; from the material basis whereby human beings reproduce themselves as social beings; from the critique of capital which is part of the process of its overthrow.

The practical value is in the necessity of revolution.

Dialectics is music to the ears!

Has any of this been useful iexist?