Was Marx Hegelian?

I believe he was Prussian.

Sorry Red, but I don't have time for this. But I will say the following:

Colletti does not use Lukács' rejections of his own positions later in life against Lukács as a serious point against Lukacs. (In fact I don't remember this being a criticism of Lukács at all. Rather, Colletti tries to show that despite Lukács own rejections of certain positions, his overall take on Hegel and Marx remained the same throughout his life, and this is because diamat in truth is not terribly far from the more respected dialectics of "Western Marxism." (I think this is one of Colletti's strongest and most important arguments.) So it's not so much a matter of Colletti painting Lukács with a broad brush but of arguing that in order to repudiate one's own "Western Marxism" and transform oneself into an orthodox dialectical materialist, one has to do very little because they have quite a bit in common. (Which isn't to say that they are identical, either.)

In addition, Colletti was a very big fan of Lukács despite his disagreements with him regarding Hegel and Marx, and his concept of reification. Personally I think Colletti was way too soft on Lukács, at least as regards certain points.

The book Colletti wrote which delves most into these issues is "Marxism and Hegel", which in my opinion is one of the best books of Marxist scholarship around, if one is into that kind of thing. (And I know you're not, so I wonder why you are even concerned with this.)

And lastly, read an introductory textbook on formal logic, plus a bit of your own ability to reason through things (if you do indeed possess this ability) if you want to understand why dialectics doesn't make sense.

Mike

Since Mike and I don't need to have another argument re: dialectics, I will simply suggest that dialectics does not operate on the same level as formal logic, and so one does not negate or contradict the other.

Logic in the traditional sense is about the coherence of or distinction between propositions or judgments. It is primarily concerned with the form of the proposition or judgment. However, it does not deal with content. Hence the reference to "formal logic" versus "dialectical logic". The latter is concerned with the content, not merely the form. Within its space, formal logic in no way contradicts dialectical logic. Dialectic is really properly speaking ontological, that is, it is concerned with being and content, not propositions or judgments.

Hence dialectical logic does not per se deny that from the point of view of formal logic, contradiction does not exist. From the point of view of being, however, contradiction most certainly does exist.

In Hegel this can lead to some interesting problems because his idealism does in fact involve a lack of clarity between the logical and the ontological. Most Marxists, much less anti- or non-Marxists, fail to understand this difference between formal logic and dialectic. that is quite common to DiaMat which sees dialectic as an alternative logic to formal logic, rather than seeing them as operating at fundamentally different levels. DiaMat also tends to view dialectical materialism as a question of epistemology, of knowing, rather than of ontology, of being. Given the mistake of treating dialectical logic as operating on the same level as formal logic, on the level of propositions or judgments, that should not be terribly surprising.

For a succinct, if somewhat bozo-ish, treatment of anti-dialectic Marxism, see http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/Anti-D_For_Dummies%2001.htm

Some Marxists, aware of the issues at stake, have taken the view that dialectic operates on both levels, such as Richard Gunn in his article Marxism and Philosophy in Capital & Class #39(might be 38.)

Others, such as Lawrence Wilde, Lukacs, and Scott Meikle, defend the distinction I have drawn here. The three of them have some substantial differences, but in general they agree on the ontological status of dialectic.

Colletti IMO is aware of the issue at hand, as is evident from his later essays in New Left Review. It is worth reading these, and then consider the Marxism and Hegel book, as Mike recommends. It is also worth recognizing how and why Colletti decides that Marx is in fact inseparable from dialectic, which in the end played a significant role in his complete rejection of Marx and communism and his drift into Berlusconi's party. Colletti has the merit of following his own views to their logical conclusion.

AFAIK, Lukacs never discusses Colletti, but the fragments that make up The Ontology of Social Being provide an alternative view. Meikle and Wilde (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/wilde1.htm) are both available in the Cambridge Companion to Marx. All three take up the idea of Marx as an essentialist, and all that that entails from their various points of view.

Martin jay's Marxism and Totality takes up a lot of this stuff, but from that very particular angle, It has the advantage of being a decent introduction and it touches on Lukacs, Colletti, Timparano, Della Volpe, Adorno, etc.

Chris

While you're at it Chris, do you think that formal logic is a creation of capitalism, regardless of whether or not it is functioning on another register than dialectics. It would seem that one in the dialectics camp would argue that judgments and so forth are a reification, etc. Furthermore, it would seem that formal logic would conclude that two registers could not exist, as that would be a contradiction. And last, now might you suggest formal logic be applied to the understanding of capitalism.

maya

I don't think logical statements are even "true" in the normal sense. They're a system of rules by which statements can be made. They play the same role in an idealized language that syntax plays in the English language.

The problem is that dialecticians always want to supersede rules and act as if significant statements can be made while ignoring them. This is why most every dialectian wants to "justify" logic by reference to the world (whether it is a "material" world, as for the dialectal materialists, or the idealist world of Hegel). This cannot be done since any description of the world will have to be made in a language, and hence within a system of rules (syntax) as well. Thus logical statements, which are normative statements of how rules work, are taken as significant ones.

In contrast, I don't think the statements of logic say anything. (They are tautologies.) Nevertheless they are of interest.

There is nothing even remotely of interest in what you say. Any introductory logic text will talk about cases in which language is vague and it is not possible to decide the truth-value of a statement, and it is therefore necessary to further specify the conditions under which a statement is true. This is no more a criticism of formal logic than it would be to say that you don't like formal logic because it didn't clean your shoes when they got dirty.

And why we're on the topic of normal usage, please tell me the last time you got confused with someone about whether or not an apple was an apple.

Actually, contradictions rarely arise in normal language that are not quickly clarified, unless reinterpreted by a philosopher. (See Hegel's disastrous discussion of the "Here" and the "Now" at the beginning of the Phenomenology, which claims to derive inadequacies of our normal sense experience, but which in fact does nothing more than embarassingly distort the meaning of normal words. I'd consider this to be philosophy par excellence.)

That is an empirical claim and thus has nothing to do with logic.

This is not what most dialectians think, including Hegel himself who was not averse to criticizing formal logic. If you are trying to reinvent dialectics, so to speak, then okay, but it should be made clear that 99% of what has been called about dialectics has seen itself as also ontological, and even empirical.

You seem to be referring primarily to Aristotlean logic. (You might respond by saying that this is clear by your use of the term "traditional", but Fregean logic is also called "classical logic" now, which may be somewhat confusing.) I'm no logician, but I have yet to come across any lengthy discussion of distinctions between propositions and judgements in logic textbooks. And really, if we're discussing logic, there is little point in discussing Aristotle today, as almost no one besides historians of logic and students of classical theology study his logical ideas in depth. He plays almost zero role in modern logic.

It is true that formal logic may not itself contradict dialectical logic, if only because formal logic does not make propositions but gives rules for the formation of sentences. But it is also the case that many propositions of dialectical logic cannot be made in formal logic because they violate its syntactical rules.

Furthermore, most logicians would have criticisms of dialectics that indeed make the two "logics" incompatible in other ways as well. (I use the word "logic" here not in the same way that it is used by actual logicians, but only as a shorthand because dialecticians generally consider dialectics to be a form of logic as well. See this essay, however, for a very good argument that dialectics is not a logic as we usually define logic.)

In fact, the view that a logic can deal with reality (by "deal with reality" I mean "deal with empirical facts", like, say, that the sun is 93,000,000 miles away from the Earth) is a major part of the problem with dialectics, since it gets into the realm of "necessary" truths, which simply cannot be defended. (Unless one is a Theist, although even this can't save you from contingency.) In the Hirsch essay I linked to, he points out Hegel's prediction that there were exactly 7 planets in our solar system because of whatever necessary truth he had discovered. Unfortunately, Hegel was proved wrong before his work was even published. Obviously that single example doesn't prove dialectics wrong in itself but it does illustrate the feature of "dialectical logic" that it is believed that it can make necessary claims about the world without empirical observation and study. Which is why the mixture of logic (and it's "necessary truths", so to speak) and "content" (or empirical statements, which can never be anything other than accidental) is so pernicious.

This looks like an empirical statement but is actually not. (And this is aside from the fact that "point of view of being" has not yet been given a clear sense.) Contradiction, as it is usually defined (except by dialecticians) refers to incompatible syntactical statements within a given system of notation. To say that "contradictions exist" is nothing more than to say that you are using a system of notation in which what are normally called "contradictions" are allowed and can be used to form significant statements within that system. But to do this you are using the same word "contradiction" in two different systems, and its meaning thus changes. This is nothing like an empirical issue, unless you have discovered a "contradiction" in the world which is not just a matter of your linguistic usage. (And by definition you can't, unless you think the world makes statements. Which might be fine for an idealist like Hegel, but not for you.)

It's good that you distinguish between the two "levels", but the whole "level" of dialectics is really nothing, anyway.

I think Colletti's (in)famous NLR article is actually terrible. It caused me a good deal of stress for a while, and I guess was good for me to read in the sense that it made me actually take the time to understand formal logic, but it is clear that Colletti doesn't know the first thing about logic. (Unless he had already rejected Marx for other reasons and just decided to justify it with ridiculous rejections, which is possible given that he at least claimed to be familiar with Tarski in that essay. Perhaps he had just skim-read Tarski.)

I think you are confused, we were talking about Colletti's discussions of Lukács, not the other way around.

Logic is basically self-consistency (hence it is all tautology). Mathematics reduces to logic because it is all a self-consistent structure of tautology.
Because the world is self-consistent, it is logical, and hence logic can be used in reasoning about it.

I already dealt with this in our old science debate. I will have to see the statements that "the world" has made before I can agree with you that it is self-consistent (or inconsistent for that matter).

Only that which is self-consistent is possible. Ergo the world is self-consistent, logical, and mathematical.

I really did mean to reply to that old science debate. I went to the trouble of making notes on that article, and then forgot about it. Will get back to it if you like.

Since the premise is exactly what I dispute (because consistency has nothing to do with objects but only with statements), your "proof" does very little to help you here. And if you change your premise around to make it compatible with logic (which you seem to be trying to defend in a very misguided way), it will have to be statement about propositions, namely that in order to be possible they have to be consistent. In which case the statement, "The sun is 93,000,000 miles away from the Earth, and is not 93,000,000 away from the Earth" is impossible. But as I've just made it, it is clearly not impossible, hence the premise is false.

And if you reply to that by saying that what you mean to say is that only consistent statements can make true statements about the world, then you'd be right within a given system of notation, but it would do little to prove anything ontologically because it has nothing to do about the consistency or inconsistency of the world, but only of statements.

You can reply if you'd like, or not. I have no particular feeling either way.

I'm not up on this shit but this seems little more than a tautology, a statement of circular logic rather than a statement about the actual universe, which I took to be Mikus's point, no?

Perhaps the world appears self consistent, logical and mathematical because they are the only tools we have for examining it.

Like Revol, I'm not "up on this shit" but surely part of the problem here is that the only way humans can reason through the world is through language i.e. statements.

To me, dialectics has always been about a method of analysing processes. I've always considered "contradiction" in dialectics is about the various opposing tendencies within a given process. For example, in the orbit of a planet you have two opposite influences: inertia which, left to itself, would cause the planet to veer off into space and the centripetal force of gravity which, left to itself, would pull the planet into the sun. These two forces interact to produce a stable orbit. Isn't that dialectical?

Mike, read this:

The Mathematical Universe (Max Tegmark, 2007)

This is complete garbage. (For reasons I'll expand on later.) But you can see things are already off to a bad start when he uses ideas inspired by Pythagoras and Galileo in order to try to defend materialism! Galileo thought that mathematics was the language of the world, which was created by God. (Which explains how one can see nature as a "consistent" entity, since it implies that nature is linguistic. How someone who is not a Theist can claim this, I don't know.) The Pythagoreans had all sorts of crazy mystical ideas about the nature of geometry, which I'd imagine you don't want to defend.

If you want materialism, you're going to have to find some other way to support mathematics. Rejecting the "objectivity" of mathematics has nothing to do with solipsism or relativism or anything like that.

But in the meantime, why not defend your claim that objects are consistent? What have objects told you? Do they like my new shoes? Do they think that I should buy some new ones or not?

where do you suppose "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" comes from, if the universe is not mathematical?

The universe being mathematical does not imply God, nor does it imply that it the universe is 'linguistic'. (The fact that we can use language to convey mathematics is merely due to the fact that language is a way of conveying relations. In fact, probably the reason our language is as it is is because there are relations in the world to reason about - you're putting the cart before the horse). This is all an amalgam argument on your part, and I don't see its relevance.

If we met aliens, would their mathematics be the same as ours? If not, why not?

Can you imagine a universe where 2+2=5? Do you think such a (non-self-consistent) universe would be possible?

It's not a problem but a fact. To say it's a problem is to imagine that we can make statements without a language, i.e. without rules for the use of symbols.

Well, that's what some comrades think, and it pretty clear o me that this is what Marx meant as well the few times that he talked about dialectic. If this were all that were meant by dialectics I'd have little problem with it. But for Hegel and for over 100 years of "dialectical" Marxists it has also meant a "method" by which one reveals truth about the world through the (butchered) analysis of statements. I mean, the stuff that Engels, Lenin, and whoever wrote on this is just atrocious.

But if that's all dialectics means, then there is no reason for dialecticians to criticize formal logic at all, since there is nothing in formal logic that rules out analyzing processes, or change, or whatever.

Marx gives a similar example of a "contradictory" statement in Capital actually. This seems to be a common way of explaining orbits even within physics circles. You can call it dialectical if you want but then the word really does very little because physical scientists will go on with their theories without any reference to dialectics whatsoever, and certainly no attempt to use it as a "method."

Generally I don't care if people talk about dialectics, actually. It's just a way of speaking which can be retranslated back into ordinary language. It's when dialecticians think that they have a special method, or have elaborated some kinds of truths that can't be expressed in normal language, that I get annoyed and feel the need to criticize them. But as it so happens, those people are mostly on the internet or at the center of various political parties, or writing some shitty book on Marx that no one besides myself and a few other people will ever read. If you deal with actual class conscious workers who talk about dialectics (if they talk about it at all) it functions about similar to how a slang functions. And I have no problem with that.

I mean a problem for those who try to separate logic (and language) from "the world". Otherwise I agree.

I'd have to go back and read some of it before I can respond to the charge of "atrociousness". I think though that there is a "dialectic" in nature (i.e. in the terms I have described) and within the world generally. I'd probably agree with the comments made so far that in many senses dialectical and formal logic are attempts to describe different things. I may be wrong but I think that many of your criticisms of Engels, etc. spring from a modern appreciation of logic which has moved on quite considerably since the 19th century. The hard sciences certainly have largely incorporated the "dialectic" into their world view - Marx and Engels praised Darwin for having brought the dialectic to biology if I remember rightly. I don't see any reason why they would adopt a particular philosophical language when their own is generally quite adequate, but it doesn't mean that what they do isn't "dialectical".

It's not necessarily all it means, just what I personally think is one of the most important aspects (and understand!). But I have to say that in the summaries of dialectics that I've read that there's really much to object to and I don't really understand why you (and others) are so hostile to it. Still, I'm willing to admit that maybe I don't understand all the issues.

No, I don't think that formal logic is really connected to capitalism as such. I don't want to conflate formal logic, which developed under Aristotle (and in Asia under different influences, it was not unknown in India and China independently of Aristotle as far as i understand the trajectory of philosophy in those places) long before capitalism. Maybe you could treat it in somewhat the same way that Sohn-Rethel treats abstract quantification as being connected to the development of commodities in general and the separation of mental and manual labor, but only attaining a complete autonomy from and dominance over matters of content under capitalism, but that is, for me, highly speculative.

Certainly formal logic has developed more in the last 150 years than it had in the time between Aristotle and about 1830, and I do think that starting with positivism, formal logic becomes dominant and questions of being and essence are either simply denigrated or left to lebensphilosophie, but I would not go further than that, and even that is of course nothing more than a general characterization of the trend.

Insofar as formal logic is concerned with propositions and judgments, however, it is IMO completely outside its domain once we are discussing content and ontology. Formal logic would only be ideological IMO where the attempt is made to either 1) deny the ontological level as meaningful a la neo-Kantianism or empiricism which dominate so much of post-Hegel philosophy, or 2) the claim is made that formal logic can prove the lack of contradiction in reality, not simply in judgments or propositions.

Marx is just as obliged to obey formal logic where it is applicable as anyone and he spent no small amount of time taking people he criticized for their failures in formal reasoning. However, the whole of concept of critique implies not merely an attack on formal logic, but on the very field to which formal logic might be applied. The question then is not merely the logical incoherence of political economy, but that its very categories are ontologically suspect. The problem is not merely the logical coherence or validity of propositions or judgments of political economy. To me, this is why Marx charges political economy with never asking, despite the labor theory of value, why this labor takes that form. Political economy's categories assume exactly what must be exposed. The contradictions lie between the social relationship of capital and labor.

I suppose I should add that where formal logic provides a series of methods which can be applied to any set of propositions or judgments regardless of their content, dialectic is exactly the opposite. Dialectic is not a "method" which one can "apply" to anything regardless of its content (nor as I stated is it primarily concerned with propositions or judgments.) Of course, try telling that to the bulk of Marxists trained in Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, DiaMat and Mao. A dialectic emerges where something develops through contradiction, negation, non-identity, where an organic whole actually exists, where relations are mediated not immediate, etc. There are worse definitions than Adorno's: Dialectic is the consistent sense of non-identity. It treats categories as fluid and open, and as products of actual activity. To me, if someone talks about "laws" of the dialectic they are probably already conflating dialectic and formal logic.

Anyway, I think the Lawrence Wilde essay i cited is a decent place to start instead of me writing a really, really long typical Chris post.

So I really do not see formal logic and dialectic as opposed at all, though I do see some of the claims formal logic makes as opposed to dialectic, especially the ontological status of identity and non-contradiction, as opposed to its propositional or judgmental validity.

Chris

Wow, I just accidentally hit the X on the tab I was writing this in and lost all of it. Shit.

Chris

Did I not say it is not what most Marxists think? Did I not say that Hegel falls into exactly this problem? Can we not do that dance?

I am sorry for being somewhat ambiguous. I was not saying that logic evaluated distinctions between propositions and judgments. Rather, I was saying that it evaluates propositions or it can also be understood as evaluating judgments. By using "coherence" and "distinction", I was pointing to the how one may evaluate those propositions or judgments, either within a single statement or between two statements.

Actually, logic gives us rules for the formation of propositions or judgments. They may be longer than a sentence or even a small group of sentences, but the proposition is what is being evaluated.

I never claimed that dialectic worked within the confines of formal logical rules for propositions. If it did it would be a variant of formal logic. Not only that, since dialectic rejects the laws of non-contradiction and identity, which is common to all formal logic, except para-consistent logic, it would be odd if it did follow its rules of syntax. That is a statement of fact, but not an argument.

Nor do i disagree that formal logicians generally feel that dialectic is not logic in a sense that they recognize. Which is an irrelevant consideration, since few economists would recognize your definition of capitalism. Should I therefore rest my claims on the authority of the majority of economists? The majority of people in the world period disagree with the view that God does not exist, and yet I hold that view and I am guessing you do to. Now you are arguing as if dialectic is invalid because a body of people does not recognize it as such.

Hirsch's essay is another matter however. If I get a chance, I will find my notes on it. I read it some time ago.

I never claimed it was an empirical statement. It followed logically from the previous statement, and it also followed logically from my previous statements, that I was making a statement re: the difference in how my understanding of dialectic deals with propositions versus being. the point of view mentioned here is from being, that is, from an ontological point of view (of a dialectician.) Since I do not consider contradiction to be a question of a proposition, I see no reason to take seriously the rest of your statement.

Your specific argument even rests on a false premise: that logic and our statements about the world fundamentally have nothing to do with the world. This is pure neo-Kantian dualism. Of course, you now have a complete split between the empirical world and our statements about it (and therefore our ideas.) And all science becomes more or less a series of more or less plausible fictions in which you hope to rely on empirical data to prove something, but empirical data of itself proves nothing.

The level is not of dialectics. The level is the ontological level.

I am afraid that you are confused about the nature of dialogue. I thought that it might be interesting, to someone who was looking at what Colletti had to say about Lukacs and dialectic, to compare what Lukacs had to say about Colletti. Sadly, he does not seem to have been aware of, or written about, Colletti.

Chris

I think Schopenhauer was right about Hegel. He's awful. I see no sign that history advances dialectically. If you accept this outlook, doesn't it follow that neither the proletariat or the bourgeoisie triumph -- they just meld? I think history advances by the force of the will. Bakunin falls to pieces with this shit, because on the one hand he values individuality and the revolutionary will and on the other he's made a deal with the devil of Hegelianism. Anarchism has always been voluntarist, even if Malatesta was the only "thinker" who had the balls to admit it.

The main problem with libertarian Marxism is its attachment to the ridiculous ideology of dialectical materialist fatalism. The council communists were interesting, but the navel-gazing entailed by historical fatalism kind of smothers a lot of their genius. I favorite, Ruhle, was also the most voluntaristic, put the most emphasis on the individual.

I think Sorel's reading of the Marxist tradition was the last productive one - getting all the vital stuff out and discarding the BS. All interesting thoughts coming out of Marxism after that have only been productive in spite of their Marxism.

Yes, Marx was a Hegelian but that's no reason why we should be. I've tried reading Hegel three times and he just talks a load of gibberish. He was also a religious nutta. i suppose what Marx saw in him was the idea that changes takes place through internal contradiction, but I' m not sure this is true. Change happens of course and that it does is the only constant, but more through external not internal influences.

To be honest Mikus I've never took dialectic to be about anything other than contradiction, I've certainly not thought it replaces formal logic or whatever and to be honest I've never encountered anyone who has other than perhaps a few snippets from the introductions of various Soviet era books, y'know where the writer desperatedly tries to make their research and theories compatiable with the 'official state religion of diamat'. Infact most of the stuff I've read states explicitly that dialectics is a property of the human sphere as there is no such thing as a contradiction in the 'thing itself'.

So are we forced to conclude that because we can describe quite a few features of the world in English, the world is fundamentally based on the English language? Or perhaps that because Hartry Field was able to describe much of physics without mathematics but rather with Hilbert's axioms, that the universe in fact follows Hilbert's axioms which have nothing to do, strictly speaking, with mathematics?

The fact that the universe can be described quite well both by means of mathematics, and without it, would seem to imply (if your views on this were to be accepted) that the universe is both mathematical, and non-mathematical, which is exactly the type of contradiction you have tried to rule out by ascribing properties of sentences to the universe itself!

I point it out in order to make clear that their versions of the "universe is consistent" argument depended crucially on anthropomorphizing nature (through God in Galileo's case, and through some bizarre mysticism in the Pythagoreans' case). That is how they can conflate natural objects with statements, and claim that they are consistent. Since you don't intend to anthropomorphize nature, your argument doesn't even make sense. You haven't even explained what you meant by saying that the universe is consistent, since the meaning of "consistent" that is generally used applies to sentences and not to objects. Now, you can give "consistent" a meaning in the other context -- except, it won't have anything to do with the meaning of "consistent" as it is generally used. And you'll be back to where you are now.

This is pure speculation. But given that a wide variety of mathematical systems have been invented, and are constantly being invented (yes, invented, not discovered), there is no reason to imagine a priori that their mathematical systems would be the same as ours. You might as well ask if their chess would be the same as ours.

Since I don't think the statement 2+2=4 is a statement about "the universe", it makes no sense for me to wonder if the statement "2+2=5" can be true of the universe. You first need to convince me that 2+2=4 is a statement about objects. If so, which objects?

Your question is a bit like asking "Can you imagine a universe in which we played chess with all the same rules, yet, check mating the king meant that you lost, rather than one?" There is nothing mystical here.

And you still haven't defended the claim that objects are consistent (or inconsistent). Without this, you have no leg to stand on.

Mike

This is quite bizarre, surely Anna is just making one of the most basic and stupid errors you can make by mistaking the means by which we articulate and convey the world with the actual world itself. Like a person using a map and wondering where the various coloured triangles that dot it actually are?

Which is one of the places where I think it all goes to shit, so I don't know why you seem to imply that it is a defense of dialectics.

Have you read much in the Marxist tradition? 99% of the "classics" spend a considerable amount of time discussing the "dialectic." Everyone from Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao, to the Situationists, Lukács, Korsch, CLR James, Dunayevskaya, Grossman, etc. If you are not terribly aware of the Marxist tradition (and I wouldn't even see that as a bad thing) I can see how you'd not see the importance of dialectics when discussing Marxism. But if you are, that claim seems very bizarre.

Yes, many in the Western Marxist tradition do say this, but what is meant is not that contradictions are a property of statements, but rather than there are contradictions in the way that society operates. Which I'd dispute by saying that only sentences are contradictory. What is meant by the claim that, say, capitalist society is contradictory, is that there are opposing interests, that the same thing that functions as a benefit to the accumulation of capital (say, productivity) can also function at other times to stop accumulation, and so forth. (Although that isn't what is always meant, either.) And I don't object to that. But the meaning of "contradiction" in that case is entirely different from its meaning in logic. Yet, that hasn't stopped Western Marxists from producing some of the most stale criticisms of formal logic of all. (Marcuse, or that production of space guy... what's his name... yes, Lefebvre, and I'm sure much more.)

I've read the Situ's, Lukac's and Korsh but I've never got the impression the dialectics were an actual trait of the universe as so much part of the human experiance of it. So there is the dialectic of class in a class society and on a grander more philisopihical level there is the subject/object dialectic of at once being an object in the world and also a subject, as summed up in the Marx quote about man making history but history also making man.

No, all of them are quite clear that the social world is itself dialectical, not merely our way of describing the social world. If you want to use them in a different way then props to you, but they certainly would've disagreed with you.

Not sure about Western marxists ranting on about formal logic but I have found some of ther overegged shit about 'instrumental reasoning' extremely tiresome.