Talk:Dialectical materialism/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

in english?

i got through this entire article and i still have no idea what 'dialectical materialism' is or why i should care . Decora (talk) 14:34, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

It's something terribly important to old commies, because it makes their failed system somehow seem worthwhile. As far as I know, it's hardly contributed to modern mainstream philosophy. — OttoMäkelä (talk) 23:19, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

something terribly stupid to say given what's going on with the global economic system. perhaps you should think about making a trip to some of the european countries such as greece, spain, or italy to express your positive views regarding this great system that we have. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.58.133.229 (talk) 23:58, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, we should look instead to the economic miracles that are/were the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and the like. Fortunately we still have a handful who understand this; psychologically stable individuals like "Rosa Lichtenstein" and "Papapazou". With revolutionaries such as these the future is bright.

The problem here is German intellectualism, which is mainly a problem because they were fond of using big words that are rather clunky to the anglophone mind. Materialism is greed: people want more of everything. Dialectic is back-and-forth, a sort of karma, a "debate", pilpul, I think. 192.12.88.41 (talk) 06:10, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Ahem. The Wikipedia article currently says that 'dialectical materialism' is a fancy way of saying that the economy strives towards maximum efficiency, and doing so, it becomes a house divided unto itself, and therefore cannot stand192.12.88.41 (talk) 06:16, 15 May 2012 (UTC).

Dialectical Materialism: The frame of mind within which we are expected and taught to think of gain and industry, above psychology and self-knowledge, self-preservation or self-education. We are given the bug to consume words, regardless of their source, and when not consuming to think constantly in our own heads. Try to not think, read or hear anything for 10 minutes.86.130.244.250 (talk) 17:25, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

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Once again (and I only mentioned this three years ago)! This link at the foot of the page:

Grant, Ted; Woods, Alan (2003), Dialectical Philosophy and Modern Science,

in fact takes us to Henri Lefebvre's book, not Woods and Grant's chapter. It needs correcting. I'd do it myself but I don't know the correct url!

Rosa Lichtenstein (talk) 04:14, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

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And while we are at it why is this still in the article?

"The thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic triad..."

This is Kant and Fichte's method not Hegel's!

How many times does this point have to be made?

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/Thesis_Anti-Thesis_Synthesis.htm

Rosa Lichtenstein (talk) 04:30, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

"...in the formulation" :Grammar problem or obscure English?

Second para:

It was exported to China as the "official" interpretation of Marxism but has since then been widely rejected in China in the formulation of the Soviet Union.

Surely should be:

...rejected in China as the formulation...

Centrepull (talk) 21:10, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Lead

Per WP:LEAD: "The lead section (also known as the lead or introduction) of a Wikipedia article is the section before the table of contents and the first heading. The lead serves as an introduction to the article and a summary of its most important contents. It is not a news-style lead or lede paragraph." The key word there is summary. The very purpose of the lead is to repeat, in a condensed form, what can be found elsewhere in the article. I have just had to undo a recent edit to the lead that removed content from the lead for an entirely mistaken reason: "it's already mentioned elsewhere in the article". That the content in question is "already mentioned elsewhere in the article" is a reason for having it in the lead, not for removing it. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 07:22, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Cherkash, it would be courteous to reply to me on the talk page, rather than simply continue to make reverts at the article. You wrote in your edit summary, "mentioning only one critic in the lead (while many criticisms have been mounted) violates WP:LEAD & WP:NPOV". Might I ask, then, who are the other critics who ought to be mentioned, in your view? Or is it your position that the lead should not mention any criticism of dialectical materialism at all? It is peculiar that you would complain that my edits violate WP:NPOV, because excluding all mention of criticism of dialectical materialism from the lead, and thus presenting dialectical materialism as though it were uncontroversial, certainly violates WP:NPOV, in quite a drastic fashion. Wikipedia doesn't exist to promote Marxist philosophy. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 09:03, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

(Seems like our edits here have crossed in the wires. I'm not going to re-write again, so here goes the response.)

You are not stating the facts correctly, I explicitly mentioned this as a reason: "mentioning only one critic in the lead (while many criticisms have been mounted) violates WP:LEAD & WP:NPOV". Happy to elaborate if it's still not clear: basically, the dialectical materialism has been criticized and argued about quite a bit, and there's a specific section (Dialectical materialism#Philosophical evaluations) to talk about it. There are quite a few specific critics and works mentioned there. Singling out a single author for mentioning in the lead section is not reasonable, and goes against presenting a neutral point of view: since the lead is a quick summary, it appears that this is the only criticism – and it clearly is not. If you want to mention that criticism exists, please do so in the lead (something to the tune of "there are other viewpoints, yada, yada"), but no reason to essentially copy a small part of a section into the lead. Again, please re-read WP:LEAD & WP:NPOV if this sounds crazy or unclear. cherkash (talk) 09:11, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

I am aware of the reason you stated. I'll repeat that the existence of a section discussing criticism of dialectical materialism is not a reason to remove all mention of criticism of dialectical materialism from the lead. I do not consider singling out a single critic to mention in the lead inherently unreasonable - since Kolakowski is a famous figure and his criticisms seem to do a good job of summing up the case against dialectical materialism - but I agree that there might be better ways of approaching the issue, and I am open to specific suggestions. I do not agree with the suggestion you offer above, however. It is useless to suggest that the lead should mention that other philosophies besides dialectical materialism exist, as the point of the criticism dialectical materialism has received is of course not that other philosophies exist (which obviously no one disputes) - it's that dialectical materialism is wrong. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 09:22, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Isn't a lot of criticism raised in the form "this is wrong" (whether wholly or partially wrong)? So again, the lead is supposed to be a summary of the article, where the article talks about the details within the appropriate sections, and the lead summarizes a top-level view. In this particular case, saying that criticism has been mounted should be enough to direct an interested reader to a section discussing the details. cherkash (talk) 04:09, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

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'How' in this context isn't redundant?

Hello all,

I'm reading the article today for Dialectical Materialism and became confused at the need for citation in the following.

"The formulation of the Soviet version of dialectical and historical materialism in the 1930s by Joseph Stalin and his associates (such as in Stalin's book Dialectical and Historical Materialism) became the "official" Soviet interpretation of Marxism. It was codified and popularized in textbooks which were[when?] required reading in the Soviet Union as well as some Eastern European countries. It was exported to China as the "official" interpretation of Marxism but has since been widely rejected in China in the Soviet formulation.[how?]"

Is it necessary to outright say Marxist-Leninist-Maoism is an ideological break from Marxist-Leninism? Thanks 2604:2000:D05D:9000:950D:2001:ADDC:6469 (talk) 23:27, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

Needs drastic editing

This page is a mess. It appears to have been hijacked by someone spreading an unorthodox interpretation of Hegel and (to put it charitably) a highly imaginative interpretation of Marx -- based on the ideas of Leonard F. Wheat. This Wheat business seems to be metastasizing: it's also invaded the page on Hegel and the page on Dialectic (and perhaps others?). I'm not an expert on Hegel, so I'm not going to edit the Hegel page, but I do know a great deal about Marx's theory of history, and this "Dialectical materialism" page needs drastic editing. First, almost all the Wheatian stuff in the "Hegelian background" section is superfluous and should be deleted. (In any case, it's duplicated on other Wheat-infested pages.) The section on "Marx's Hegelian dialectics" is very misleading, POV, and in places flat-out wrong: e.g., the claim that "Marx perceived dialectics as a metaphysical force that actually determines the course of history. Although both Hegel and Marx were atheists, Marx was nonetheless a supernaturalist of sorts; he was a metaphysical supernaturalist who believed in metaphysical (supernatural) determinism of history." Marx and Engels explicitly and repeatedly rejected this view. Scales (talk) 03:53, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Indeed. This article is overladen with personal opinion and "original research". Bgvaughan (talk) 13:13, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

You say it is "flat-out wrong" that "Marx perceived dialectics as a metaphysical force that actually determines the course of history." Several interpreters disagree with you. Tucker says that Marx "regards the victory of the proletariate to be historically preordained." Supernatural determination of future events, when not determined by a god, is metaphysical determination. (Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, p. 227.) Popper refers to Marx's "metaphysical theory of economic reality." (The Open Society and Its Enemies, volume 2, p. 108.) Stumpf writes, "Marx clearly expressed a metaphysical belief in the existence of a predetermined goal for all history." (Philosophy: History and Problems, 417. Yet you seem to reject the widely accepted fact that Marx regarded final Communism as inevitable. If this final development in history is inevitable, it has to be supernaturally caused. Supernatural causation can be the work of either gods or mindless metaphysical forces such as the Greek logos. It is well known that Marx was an atheist ("Religion is the opium of the masses"), so Marxian historical determinism can't be the word of God. That means the determinism is metaphysical. Where are your authorities who say that Marx's dialectical materialism embodies no metaphysics?Atticusattor (talk) 01:10, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

First, many scholars don't think that Marx was a "dialectical materialist" at all. On that score, I could add many more references to the ones I included. I've quoted Marx and Engels as rejecting what they perceived as the metaphysical notion of history with a capital "H". On that, I could have inserted a number of additional quotations from Marx and Engels separately. (I could, because I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Marx's theory of history.) Frankly, not a lot written about Marx's theory of history, especially in English, before the 1970s is worth much. Popper, for example, confused Marx's theory of a model of the capitalist economy, with its peculiar laws of development, with Marx's general theory of history, applicable to all modes of production. Marx warned against turning "my historical sketch of the development of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophical theory of universal development predetermined by fate for all nations, whatever their historic circumstances in which they find themselves may be...." (Saul K. Padover, ed., The Letters of Karl Marx, p. 321) But that's just what Popper (and others) did. Fortunately there was a renaissance in scholarship on Marx that began in the 1970s. Scales (talk) 02:12, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

I've done the deed, or at least made a major start. Scales (talk) 23:29, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

You certainly have done the deed. And an evil deed it was: you have taken the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics out of dialectical materialism – by wildly swinging away with your ax in a manner that would have made Lizzie Borden proud. I can’t fight no-nothing vandals like you, so I won’t try to undo your undo. What I can do is put a brief summary of Hegelian-Marxian dialectics here on the Talk page so that people who get this far can understand that “dialectical materialism” is more than a meaningless label for Marx’s thought.

Marx’s dialectical materialism relates to a very small element of his thought, namely, his description of human history. Marxian history is progress from primitive communism through three stages of “enslavement” (slavery, feudalism, and capitalism) to final communism – separation from and return to communism. Marx’s base-superstructure nonsense, in which he tries to describe the evolution of systems of production, is nondialectical and has little connection with his human history dialectics.

When Marx said, in effect, that he was going to turn Hegel’s “standing on its head” dialectics right-side up, he was accurately recognizing the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics in Hegel’s thought. But it was only the Hegelian format that he approved of, not the substance. (Hegel’s substance dealt with ideas, whereas Marx believed the true substance of dialectics was things in the material world – modes of production, classless and class societies, wealth and poverty, and literal and figurative enslavement of the working classes.) The two broadest examples of the Hegelian dialectics (Hegel has dozens of dialectics) are these:

* Thesis: unconscious + union

* Antithesis: conscious + separation

* Synthesis: conscious + union (Spirit’s “self-realization”)

I won’t try to explain the substance of this dialectic; I won’t go into what unconscious and conscious mean or what union and separation mean. What concerns us is the format. The format in this and most other Hegelian dialectics consists of a two-concept thesis, a two-concept antithesis, and a two-concept synthesis. The concepts can usually be stated in one or two words. Each antithesis concept is the opposite of, not just different from, its thesis counterpart. (Conscious is the opposite of unconscious; separation is the opposite of union.) The synthesis genuinely synthesizes by combining the best concept from the thesis with the best from the antithesis. (Synthesis means putting things together. It is the opposite of analysis, which is taking things apart.)

My second example of a Hegelian dialectic is this:

* Thesis: potential + freedom

* Antithesis: actual + bondage

* Synthesis: actual + freedom (another description of Spirit’s self-realization)

Both this second dialectic and the first illustrate a second characteristic of Hegelian dialectics: separation and return. Paul Tillich, a later dialectician with a firm grasp of Hegel’s dialectics, wrote: “Obviously – and it was so intended by Hegel – his dialectics are the religious symbols of estrangement [separation] and reconciliation.” And Hegel wrote: “Spirit . . . becomes alienated [separated] from itself and then returns to itself [reunion] from this alienation” (‘’Phenomenology’‘, Miller translation, paragraph 36). The “religious symbols” Tillich refers to are from the gospel of John, where God separates from himself by coming to earth as God in the “flesh” (the God-incarnate Jesus) while simultaneously remaining in heaven, then returns to himself in heaven after the crucifixion. In the first of the above two dialectics, Spirit separates from and returns to union. In the second dialectic, Spirit separates from and returns to freedom.

Marx copies the Hegelian format in the following history dialectic (and in several others):

* Thesis: communal ownership + poverty (primitive communism, or “Gens”)

* Antithesis: private property + wealth (slavery, feudalism, and capitalism)

* Synthesis: communal ownership + wealth (final communism, which lies in the future)

Observe that this dialectic incorporates the two salient features of the illustrative Hegelian dialectics. First, it uses the two-concepts-per-stage format in which the synthesis borrows one concept from the thesis and one from the antithesis. Second, it embodies the separation-and-return concept: the dialectic separates from and returns to communism (communal ownership of property). Robert Tucker, in his outstanding book on Marx’s thought (Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx) puts it this way: “Communism lost and communism regained [separation and return] –such is the plot of world history” (p. 23).

There you have it. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics is not the myth that Mueller said it was. It is a real triad used by both Hegel and Marx. But the vandals who have massacred the article just can’t believe the evidence in the former article. And so only the people who read the article and then go beyond it to the Talk page are going to learn the truth. What a shame. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Atticusattor (talk • contribs) 00:02, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I forgot to sign the above. Here is the correction.Atticusattor (talk) 00:07, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I have reintroduced some of your material, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with it but simply indicating (as is proper in an encyclopedia entry) that this is one scholar's position. Even if you are 100 percent right in your interpretation of Hegel and Marx and all who disagree with you are wrong, an encyclopedia cannot give pride of place to unorthodox or novel views. Scales (talk) 06:38, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for restoring a few pieces of the original article. You are wrong, however, in saying that the illustrative Marxian dialectic originates with Wheat, is of recent origin, and is novel. Bober first called attention to this dialectic in his 1927 book, Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History. Bober pointed out that the three middle periods of the Marx-Engels five periods of history (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, final communism) are collapsed into three for dialectical purposes. The three periods are characterized by class societies, private property, and separation of the worker from the fruits of his labor. Bober wrote: “Primitive communism represents the thesis; the private property of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism is the antithesis; and the communism of the future will reestablish the communal property of archaic days, but as a synthesis of a higher dimension” (p. 386). Bober also pointed out a "dialectic formula on a reduced scale" covering just the last three of Marx's five periods (p. 386). The shorter dialectic is this:

* Thesis: domestic production + worker ownership of tools (feudalism)

* Antithesis: factory production + capitalist ownership of tools (capitalism)

* Synthesis: factory production + worker ownership of tools (final communism)

Also, your restored material needs at least a small amount of additional material to clarify the fact that the characteristics of Marx’s dialectics originate with Hegel.Atticusattor (talk) 23:56, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

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Of course, the above 'method' was Fichte's, not Hegel's, and, as far as I am aware, Marx used the terms 'thesis', 'antithesis', 'synthesis' in only one of his works (The Holy Family), and even then it is arguable he was being ironic.

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/Thesis_Anti-Thesis_Synthesis.htm

Independently of this, it is quite easy to show that by the time he came to write Das Kapital, Marx had waved 'goodbye' to that confused mystic, Hegel (upside down or the 'right way up').

Any who doubt this might like to consult the proof, set out here:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2009_01.htm#Marx-And-DM--11

[If you are using Internet Explorer 10, you might find that the links I have posted won't work properly unless you switch to 'Compatibility View' (in the Tools Menu). That appears to fix the problem.]

Finally, one can impose any number of arbitrary schemas on an author's work, just as one can impose a secret code on the Bible, but if we attend to what Marx actually wrote (follow the above link for more on that), as opposed to what he can be made to say, his work isn't the least bit metaphysical, or deterministic (which is, incidentally, a confused theory, at best!), and it certainly doesn't conform to Fichte's ridiculous 'method'.

Rosa Lichtenstein (talk) 05:16, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Marx examines Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis in depth in The Poverty of Philosophy. This page's claim - backed up with a citation from the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy - that Marx rejected the Hegelian dialectic is entirely unsubstantiated. RnRa76 (talk) 20:13, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

The article does not claim that "Marx rejected the Hegelian dialectic". It states that Marx rejected the language of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis", and the statement is properly cited, to a reliable source (actually The Oxford Companion to Philosophy; I have corrected the citation). Please see WP:NPOV and WP:RS, which explain that the content of articles is based on reliable sources. Your argument for removing the material is original research. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 21:22, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Bad Citation

In question is this line: "There are critics, such as the Marxist Alain Badiou, who dispute the way the concept is interpreted.[46]"

Which then refers to page.44 of Zizek's book "Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism". Now, I have that book, and could not find Badiou saying anything of the sort on that page. There is brief mention by Zizek in that chapter (but not that page) about how the mistakes of interpretation involved in Hegel's dialectic are themselves interesting case studies on its method, and that Hegel was only possible through the chain of Kant-Schelling-Fichte-Hegel, which suggests that each subsequent philosopher in the chain works by misinterpreting the theory of the previous one. Whatever may be the case, I challenge anyone with a copy of the book to refer me to the page being mentioned where Badiou specifically disputes the way Hegel's dialectic is being interpreted (also, by whom? It's so vague as to be almost meaningless). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2607:FEA8:E60:BF6:ECA3:D54E:AD9:C7F6 (talk) 16:08, 26 March 2018 (UTC)