what is the dialectic

What is the dialectic? That is the question iexist asked. He got a lot of nonsense and some good but partial answers from S. Artesian, A.A., and Malva.

THE DIALECTIC is analytically grasping the dynamics of material reality as it constantly changes and transforms, in the head. This changing/evolving reality is in every thing (every system) at all nesting levels of nature, inorganic, organic or we humans; from the relations within and between atoms, to galaxies, stars and supernova in the cosmos; to all life and faster development, bacteria, cells, multi-cells, plants animals; to we humans and our relative exponential pace of evolution/development expressed in our social and historical activities, as shown in Capital.

Dialectics sees everything in constant motion and flux, coming into existence from other things, living in relative dynamic harmony, decaying and dying, traversing the phase of transition and chaos, the remnants giving birth to new things/systems. From order to chaos to order, or chaos to order to chaos, ad-infinitum. 'All that is solid melts into air', (Communist Manifesto).

Its fundamental laws, according to Engels are attraction/contradiction, the struggle, unity and interpenetration of opposites, which hold the thing/system together, through which development occurs. The transition from quantitative change to qualitative transformation brought about by the development of the fundamental contradiction of a cluster of contradictions in the thing/system. And last, 'negation of the negation', which less confusingly can be grasped as spiral development.

There are numerous other tools or categories in understanding material reality in constant change; essence and appearance, or content and form, or cause and effect, or necessity and chance, or space and time, or matter in motion/energy, etc.

There is much more to be said in all this. But a fundamental question is why has this then dynamic dialectics not been seriously developed since Marx/Engels day, despite the absolute exponential growth of science and technology? In fact, in the hands of following 'Marxists' the dialectic has been deified and worshipped, now Gorgon-like transforming everyone who touched it into stone. Why? Anarchists are no clearer on all this than the 'Marxists'.

Part of the answer lies with timeX's question which S.Artesian commented on in #28 above.

new year's greetings comrades - stevey

I would be careful about generalising dialectic too much; one quickly falls prey to the kind of bombast that plagues, for instance, Hegel's Philosophy of History and even certain moments of Marx's and Engel's writings, if one claims that dialectic is a valid mode of analysis for all forms of material reality. For one, certain branches of science--biology, psychics, etc.--entail certain standards of validity and falsifiability which are utterly lacking in dialectical analysis. This was not least among the reasons why, for instance, Kropotkin was so critical of the dialectical method (he called it a metaphysical pseudoscience). While I don't necessarily agree with Kropotkin, it is important that we are aware of the limitations of dialectical theory; more concretely, how easily it is misused and transformed into a metaphysical dogma.

As steve y mentions, Engels' and the dialectical materialist camp attempted to transfigure the dialectical method into iron-like 'laws.' In my view, as a result of this, dialectical analysis became vulnerable to the kind of crude, vulgar fatalism, mechanistic thinking, and above all positivism which belittles the role of human agency and culminates in a reduction of all history to a numbers game (one only has to consult some of the official publications etc. of the Soviet Union to see this in practice). Unfortunately (fortunately?) social evolution, social life, and historical development are all a lot more complex than that. The fecundity of social life and historical evolution cannot be reduced to iron-like "laws" of development in the manner that Engels desired, not least because so much of evolution itself is bound up in the spontaneity of life-forms and their symbiosis with other forms of life. This is not to say nature is not dialectical; but rather that I do not believe that Engels interpretation of dialectic (which in my view is rather crass and one-dimensional) does natural and human history justice. Marx's conception of dialectic, while plagued with several problems, did not commit the same kind of reductionism that Engels did in his later writings.

So what is the role, value, etc. of dialectical thinking or analysis today?

For those of you still confused, I would offer a simpler and more concise understanding of dialectical reasoning (having attempted to strip it of as much jargon as possible). This is my own interpretation:

Dialectic can ultimately be traced back to the ancient Ionian philosopher Heraclitus, who maintained that (1) everything that exists is in a constant state of change, i.e., Becoming, and thus (2) that Being and Nothing are simply opposite moments of this unity. This is the first and most ancient example of what Hegel calls the "unity of opposites"; in fact, Hegel largely took his concept of Becoming verbatim from Heraclitus. As Plato sums up Heracllitus' philosophy in his Thaeatetus:

...There is nothing which in itself is just one thing: nothing which you could rightly call
anything or any kind of thing. If you call a thing large, it will reveal itself as small, and if
you call it heavy, it is liable to appear as light, and so on with everything, because nothing
is one or anything or any kind of thing. What is really true, is this: the things of which we
naturally say that they 'are,' are in process of coming to be, as the result of movement
and change and blending with one another. We are wrong when we say they 'are,' since
nothing ever is, but everything is coming to be.

Of course, dialectical reasoning was developed to a much greater and more profound extent by Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and others. But the basic idea is a simple one: everything that exists is mediated, in some way or another, through everything else that exists.

Another important element of this is the historical dimension. Hegel, regrettably, constructed a highly erroneous analysis of history premised on the theological assertion that everything that unfolds is part of God's plan, and hence the real is "rational" in terms of its historical development and ultimate culmination (a highly dubious and abominable thesis if there ever was one). Lamentably, in my view, Marx's own theory of history reproduces Hegel's fatalism in various respects. But a 'dialectical' philosophy of history is not necessarily one and the same thing as this fatalism. For instance, one of the most profound elements of a dialectical view of history for me is Hegel's emphasis on "concrete" potentialities. This builds on Aristotle's distinction between what is potential and actual in what exists (for example, if you look at a flower, you could comprehend that its seeds potentially exist, even though they have not yet been "made"--i.e., they have not entered into a state of actuality). One of Hegel's great achievements was to postulate a distinction between "abstract" and "concrete" potentiality in dialectical development: "abstract" potentialities being those that are, for lack of a better word, merely speculative or fantastical, whereas concrete potentialities are grounded in the material possibilities of the thing in question (for instance, the potentiality of capitalism destroying the global biosphere is a concrete one, given the material evidence of its global destruction of ecosystems, etc.)

This distinction filters through the whole of Marx's theory of history, e.g., his analysis of the Paris Commune of 1848, the factors that led to its development, its failures, etc.

(incidentally, I think a lot of radicals, such as Kropotkin, use dialectical analysis without even realising it, indeed even while explicitly critiquing it).

In summary, I would say that dialectical analysis is so important and valuable for us today because it reveals the interconnections between the most profound events in history, and those of human consciousness, psychology, social structures, etc. On a more subjective level, too, we can witness the logic of dialectic unfolding in everyday life; on a more epic scale, the historical mediations between human development and the developments in natural history (see both Marx's 1844 manuscripts and Bookchin on this). However, applying dialectic to other forms of science (chemistry, physics, etc.) is mere conjecture (and, if worshipped as a dogma, pseudoscience).

Anarchists are no clearer on all this than the 'Marxists'.

If it weren't for the existence of Murray Bookchin, I would not take issue with this statement. However, Bookchin developed what, in my view, is probably the most coherent advance in dialectical analysis both anthropologically and historically (see his brilliant Ecology of Freedom, for example). Thus while I'm happy to acknowledge that the vast majority of anarchists have not appreciated the insights of dialectical analysis, there are important exceptions to this, the above being one of them.

FWIW, i think concepts that can't be defined in 100 words are less are pretty useless analytical tools--especially if we want to easily accessible by your average working class person.

Not saying the dialectics can't be, but iexist asked a pretty straightforward question, it shouldn't take 1000 words to explain it.

It's frustrating, every time I used to ask someone who was a huge advocate of dialectics, what it means they'd go on for 30 paragraphs about vague laws of history, and grasping man by the root, blah blah blah. It took Michael Albert, Stephen Jay Gould, and the Wikipedia Page for dialectical materialism for me to get a handle on it. (Some Hegel and Engels and Marx too, no doubt).

For instance, I've never met a Trot/Maoist/ML who when asked about dialectics said "Oh, well there are these few central concepts which we erect as an analytic framework. If we take for granted that all things are constantly changing as the first concept...." etc. It's always these weird grandstandings about how great dialectics are and not an actual explanation. The one exception to this was a really sharp dude I met in Minnesota a while back, and we had some interesting discussions.

It definitely fits into the category of useful tools for making ultra-radical pronouncements completely divorced from activity.

This sounds to me like a poor excuse for intellectual laziness and apathy. One cannot attempt to simplify a subject matter that is inherently complex. Just like the dynamics of social and ecological development, I'm afraid that the complexity of dialectical reasoning cannot be reduced to "100 words or less."

FWIW, it was only through seeing example of the dialect in process that I came to develop any understanding of it. I don't know if it was this thread, but someone mentioned Marx's discussion of the commodity being made up of use value and exchange value as a a great example of dialectal analysis. Similarly, I remember the first time I read Marty Glaberman and him talking about how struggle and conciousness isn't not a chicken and egg situations: but how one builds and informs the other and helps to overcome the contradictions that many workers have about capitalist society. It hit me that was dialectics.

And that's how I think most people will come to understand the concept, not through huge intellectually labourious treatises on the historical development of dialectics from Heraclitus to Hegel to Marx. Not saying those aren't worthy topics, btw. I just don't think such a deep grasp of such concepts is particuarly neccesary for the development of a revolutionary mindset, nevermind the class struggle.

Exactly. The conflict between the labor process, and the social mediation of that labor process which is the valorization process. That's the core to Marx's dialectic, or the extraction of the rational kernel of Hegel's dialectic, or whatever you want to call it.

"IT"-- Marx's dialectic-- does not exist separate from the subject of its inquiry. Doesn't mean don't read Hegel or Heraclitus; does mean that those philosophical expressions of dialectic are in fact alienated expressions, determined by the degree, type, level of the social organization of labor that makes the value form [almost] impenetrable.

Dialectics is described as the science of interconnections. It is about the way in which coexisting things relate to one another and to themselves.

Piss, the automatic subject.

Thanks for this, I found it interesting (if contentious in part). I recently read Samuel Scheffler's account of Heraclitean pluralism, which was written with a view to rebuking common assumptions of self-identity and cultural fixity.

I tend towards the view that dialectics are often appropriated or reduced to crude deterministic formulas of thesis/antithesis/synthesis and/or horrible fatalism. The most incisive or helpful way of understanding dialectics - for me at least - is to understand it as an incisive and helpful heuristic device revealing conflict, if not contradiction, within a single relation. Often, to the contrary, relations are assumed, on a superficial level, as fixed and absolute things.

i.e. Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic looked beneath the assumedly fixed relation between master and slave, instead looking at the contradiction and conflict within that single relation; revealing that the disproportionate burden of labour placed upon the slave would exercise and thus actualise his/her potentialities, while rendering the master dependent on him/her, inversing the assumed relation and suggesting its instability.