R. Guyovich posted:

have you read socialism: utopian and scientific?

Helianthus Annuus posted:

a better question to ask of a theory is whether it "works", whether it's useful. whether it's fruitful or whether it closes up on itself

quote:

−∞ ≤ n ≤ ∞

Helianthus Annuus posted:

marxism is strong because it doesn't require a rationalist or empiricist epistemology

those epistemologies goof up right out the gate by presuming that knowledge can be independent from the knower -- that theres some independent Standard of Truth that exists outside the material world and outside of history

by deploying the idea of dialectics, we know better to try separating knowledge from the knower. both are to be conceived as part of a holistic system -- the world, materiality

the lesson to learn here is that your initial assumptions matter a lot. for example, if you assume there's such a thing as "class", and you acknowledge and affirm the limitless interconnectivity between "class" and "everything else", then you can comment intelligently on our present circumstances under capitalism.

on the other hand, if you assume that a theory can be proven valid (that there IS a correct theory, and marxism is either it or its not), then you're getting away from dialectics and towards rationalism and/or empiricism. the problem is that you wind up asking questions that cannot be answered

a better question to ask of a theory is whether it "works", whether it's useful. whether it's fruitful or whether it closes up on itself

anyway sorry for the epistemological call out. god bless you for doing the reading

Wikipedia posted:

In May 1971, Foucault co-founded the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (GIP) along with historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and journalist Jean-Marie Domenach. The GIP aimed to investigate and expose poor conditions in prisons and give prisoners and ex-prisoners a voice in French society. It was highly critical of the penal system, believing that it converted petty criminals into hardened delinquents. The GIP gave press conferences and staged protests surrounding the events of the Toul prison riot in December 1971, alongside other prison riots that it sparked off; in doing so it faced a police crackdown and repeated arrests. The group became active across France, with 2,000 to 3,000, members, but disbanded before 1974. Also campaigning against the death penalty, Foucault co-authored a short book on the case of the convicted murderer Pierre Rivière. After his research into the penal system, Foucault published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish) in 1975, offering a history of the system in western Europe. In it, Foucault examines the penal evolution away from corporal and capital punishment to the penitentiary system that began in Europe and the United States around the end of the 18th century. Biographer Didier Eribon described it as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault's works, and it was well received.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

Former DILF posted:

actually such a work does not exist, and we know this by r guyovich's inability properly link the citation of such a work for our perusal

R. Guyovich posted:

god bless

Kobayashi posted:

I've tried to read this like 5 times, tfw the you realize the dude you knew as an "evil dictator" growing up is actually a lot smarter than you... owned

Kobayashi posted:

I've tried to read this like 5 times, tfw the you realize the dude you knew as an "evil dictator" growing up is actually a lot smarter than you... owned

splifyphus posted:

Anyways it all fell apart and everybody died and then you read this post.

splifyphus posted:

what is still so unique about the big H and his rather messy legacy is that the dude didn't just try to develop a systemic theory of all of human history, he turned his own mind into an active experiment in said history and wanted you to know you can too.

CSPAN Caller posted:

Long post

uncop posted:

The contradiction manifests in an emergent pattern of movement that does not resemble either of its parts but follows from their interaction, and its resolution leads to either new contradictions of the same type as the Moon flies until it ends up in the orbit of some other celestial body, or its resolution as the it crashes into such a body and creates a new one with different physical properties. And obviously the crashing or Moon into the Earth would not be working toward some ultimate goal defined by a "spirit of history" even if it was necessary and therefore eventually happened.

splifyphus posted:

thesis-antithesis-synthesis is a watered down abstract simplification that really doesn't help.

dialectics goes back to the Greeks, but in its 19 and 20c developments, it's basically a kind of systems theory. instead of looking at separate objects in an abstract spacial grid you're looking at interconnected processes, matrices of relations, feedback loops and whatnot.

Kant declared all knowledge claims were grounded in subjective abstractions like 'space' and 'time'. unempirical, but necessary for our experiences to be at all intelligible. he called this matrix of a priori concepts the 'transcendental subject'. for Kant, this relativizes all claims to objective knowledge, and comfortably leaves room for religious faith.

Hegel is responding to Kant and basically has 2 books - the science of logic and the phenomenology of Spirit. the SOL tries to demonstrate how it's possible to build a transcendental subject that isn't built on a priori axioms. he does this by trying to make a massive web of concepts that generates itself - rather than being built off simple definitions and propositions, the whole matrix of concepts is a circle that loops back on itself and grounds itself in itself. weeeeee! for hegel, our subjective experience itself could be objective, as long as our concepts were dynamic, open-ended, systematic, and fukken, dialectical breh. this made a lot of people really buttmad and has been widely considered A Bad Idea.

the POS is sort of like a history of everything that had to happen in order for this matrix of concepts to generate itself, told from the perspective of the completed system and simultaneously from the perspective of joe schmoe the average naive realist who thinks his perspective is direct and unmediated, while he grows into a hegel. if that sounds practically impossible to read, you're probably right. everything else hegel wrote is basically him throwing everything he encountered into the event horizon of his concept matrix and reporting the results. he lived before television, remember.

marx read all this poo poo and used it to do social and economic historical analysis. lenin read all this poo poo and used it to burn down tsarist Russia. stalin didn't read all this poo poo, decided it was all way too complicated and melted it down into dumbfuck axioms so he could ignore it and play God. mao fused this poo poo with weird taoism and waged a multiple decade guerilla war across Asia with it. turns out if you think history is intelligible you're going to need a theory of conflict, let's call it Contradiction, and if you're hyper-focused on conflict well... Anyways it all fell apart and everybody died and then you read this post.

there are plenty of systemic theories now that do not draw explicitly on hegelian dialectics - ecology, for instance, understands its object of investigation as a dynamic, chaotic matrix of energy flows. neuroscience likewise encounters the brain as an impossibly vast network of neurons. punctuated equilibrium theory in evolutionary biology actually does draw on hegel. pretty much every basic science has its own pet systems theory now - what is still so unique about the big H and his rather messy legacy is that the dude didn't just try to develop a systemic theory of all of human history, he turned his own mind into an active experiment in said history and wanted you to know you can too.

uncop posted:

Due to its messy origins and fringe position in society, dialectics seems way more complicated than it is. Notice how straightforward something like newtonian laws of motion are to grasp for us, since they start from given and static(ally moving) objects and explain how external forces work to alter their pattern of movement. The dialectical outlook turns that whole perspective on its head: its analytical starting point is a mess of chaotic transformation and movement and it attempts to explain how reality has these patterns that allow us to imagine given, static objects in the first place: what forces there are internal to these objects that keep them together and determine how they'd dissolve into something else altogether under different conditions. Under this kind of thought-framework, e.g. gravity isn't an external force that the Earth affects on terrestrial objects, instead the Earth and terrestrial objects form a higher-level system to which gravity is internal and explains why they don't just float apart from each other and form something else altogether. And the same questions have to be answered for those terrestrial objects, the atoms they are composed of and so on, why don't they just dissolve into some primordial mist, why do they combine, separate and recombine in only specific ways in specific conditions.

Dialectical thought is just foreign to common, at least western, intuition so that it's hard to explain and grasp. On the other hand e.g. Mao afaik had read considerably less about dialectics than Stalin by the time he started writing about it (lack of Chinese translations and living in literal caves for long periods), he just had a massively easier time intuitively grasping it than European communists did, probably in part because he came from a different philosophical tradition where European philosophy was something new and external. What Marx seems to have ended up doing was to apply Hegel to explain the relation of dialectical thought, which had been developed in all high cultures, to natural reality, and that enabled people like Mao to intuitively fill the gaps in their knowledge and build a materialist dialectics without going through Hegel first. And people in general have a massively easier time grasping Mao than Hegel, maoists are honing their methods to bring dialectics to barely literate peasants and slum dwellers as we speak.

Richard Levins has a good short essay called "Dialectics and Systems Theory" about how systems theory helps bring dialectics into the realm of serious testable science while dialectics gives a general method for finding likely qualitative aspects that would explain most of the movement of the system, which is a problem one needs to solve before they can build a quantitative model to test.

CSPAN Caller posted:

I think this is a justified reading of Marx. But I'm glad scientists don't refer to interactions of forces as contradictions.

I suppose my ultimate point is that Marx and many Marxists throughout history haven't done themselves many favors in terms of explaining their own theories. Sometimes metaphorical usage of words can go very wrong.

Grevling posted:

Kobayashi posted:

I'm dumb and drunk and was listening to the latest Rev Left Radio where two people who know more about revolutionary politics than I could ever hope to know discussed Lenin telling Bukharin that he didn't understand dialectics. It's always seemed kind of obvious to me, but I voted for Hillary, so I'm sure you can see that I'm missing something.

Here's what I think I know. In the beginning, there was a dude named Hegel. He was apparently an enlightenment philosopher who posited a "great man" theory of history. Something something great men have ideas something something dialectic. Then Marx and/or Engels came around and were like no dude actually something something historical materialism and something something class struggle and somehow this "inverted" the dialectic.

At first I thought this basically meant cause and effect, or perhaps Newton's third law, "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Later I was exposed to the idea of thesis, antithesis, synthesis and the notion of Greek philosophers engaged in a good faith attempt to understand issue. Lately I've been thinking it means to consider the possible reactionary response to any potential revolutionary action. Also, it seems kind of loosely related to the quantum mechanical notion that observation of a system invariably affects said system.

Then there's the idea of contradiction. The dialectic also seems to intimately related to the resolution of contradictions. I often hear it invoked in reference to "the contradictions of capitalism" (e.g. the contradictory goals of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie).

The problem is, I can't tell what the dialectic is supposed to be. Is it another word for contradiction? Is it a theory of motion a la Newtonian gravity? Is it an abstract concept that we cannot resolve e.g. infinity? Is it a classification? Something else? I swear I've Google'd this but poo poo's either way too philosophical for me to follow, or too basic for me to learn from. Please explain this to me as if I was a 5 year old. I am too dumb for quotes from people who died 150+ years ago.