Reading a few articles and posts, and I'm still just not getting it beyond a very basic understanding of dialectics being "stuff impacts other stuff and then affects other things including the original thing". Materialism is easier for me to get.

Can anyone recommend a good book about it that is good for non-philosophers? Something that would work as an audiobook? I love Marx and Engels and generally I would agree with first going to the original sources to tbh their language can be too arcane for me to understand a concept I struggle with this much.

  • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Many good responses in this thread.

    I'll just add one of the important later interventions (which you're welcome to take or leave) cribbed from Raymond Williams.

    When we talk about historical materialism, we should remember that social formations are never a totality. Instead, even though we live in a (dominant) capitalist society, there are still feudal (residual) elements. Furthermore there are new (emergent) social formations that might create friction with the dominant ideology (this is easier to see historically, for instance in the conflict between the emergent bourgeoisie and the dominant feudal structures in 1400-1700).

    Now these may interact "dialectically" in the sense they are in contradiction and conflict, but what I think is important about Williams's addition is that it reminds us that even if we find social formations moving towards new emergent possibilities, the reverse -return of residual formations- is also true.

    Basically the most important thing to remember is that dialectical materialism is not necesarily progressive. While Marx argues that capitalism should eventually dialectically resolve itself into communism, there's no guarantees.

    Postscript: "pure" dialectics posits a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (i.e. Nietzsche's famous analysis of debt, guilt, and mercy in Genealogy of Morals where eventually the power to take vengeance against the guilty man is sich selbst aufhebung (literally self-overcome by itself) into the dialectical opposite: the choice NOT to exact vengeance.

    • drinkinglakewater [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Isn't the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" a flawed way to conceive of dialectics because it implies an outcome is the combination of two opposing things? I remember seeing a better simplification being something like "abstract > negative > concrete" or something like that.

      • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I mean it's very simplified. After all, the "synthesis" contains the previous two terms in the third term (so the "resolved" contradiction retains the leftovers of the contradictory state).

        I think that also it's not an outcome of the things themselves, but the tension between them.

        When I learned Hegel (sadly only over a month), the thing that I remember taking away is the dialectic is ultimately about motion. So the fundamental thing is the movement between the two contraries going beyond either to a new state (that can then be opposed to another state).

        So rather than a kind of "back and forth" motion that goes nowhere, the dialectic continually moves to a new state (but then will continue to produce tensions that remain unresolved, even if it's just reaction to the new state and a claim to "go back").

        But yeah agree the terms are not perfect. They also imply a kind of equal opposition that is rare in dialectics.