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.