Dialect Talk

Dialectics is one of the two theoretical pillars of marxism, the other being Materialism. Taken together, they are known as Dialectical Materialism.

Materialism is the idea that the real world is a solid, consistent place, existing independent of our thoughts, governed by physical laws and definable forces. Knowledge comes from practical interaction with the real world, not from political authority, religious revelation, or armchair speculation.

Dialectics is the theory of how this material world changes, not abruptly in jumps, but constantly and smoothly. This means the categories we use to conceptualise the world break down because when something is partway through a process of change, it straddles two or more incompatible categories, giving it a blurred, undefined feel.

Dialectics is conceived as a form of reasoning that both includes and supersedes aristotelian logic, goes further than multivalent and fuzzy logics, and describes not just the way the physical or social world changes, but any form of change.

Most marxists either embrace dialectics and use it extensively, or ignore it and get on with campaigning. A few though, actively reject it while still calling themselves marxists, and someone going under the name Rosa Lichtenstein is one of these.

She(?) argues that the failure of marxism to become a significant force in either academia or the political arena is due to several factors, one major factor being the acceptance and use of dialectics by marxists.

On the introductory page of her site, she makes a number of related points:

Given the fact that dialecticians assure us that truth is tested in practice, and that "materialist dialectics" is the main-spring of all they do, this can only mean that their 'theory' has been tested and shown to fail.

Firstly, marxists have never claimed that dialectics is the sole wellspring of their ideas and actions. To build a bridge you need both mathematics and steel - each is useless on it's own. Likewise to act politically you need both a sound method of analysis and a lot of people - and even then, success can be partial, or nonexistent.

Secondly, her popperian reading only works, even in strictly popperian terms, if she can show that the acceptance or rejection of dialectical reasoning was the sole determining factor in all (or any) past defeats. That, for instance, the failure of attempts by the German left to stop the rise of naziism were a test of the dialectic, and of nothing else.

Oh, and thirdly, she seems to think that overthrowing all the governments of the world and replacing them with worker's states is the only goal of marxism, and because this has not happened there have been no successes.

...there is a close connection between the class-origin of the ideas found in DM and the rabidly sectarian nature of revolutionary politics.

I take this to mean that marxists are mostly middle class, and Dialectical Materialism is a doctrine which both stems from and legitimises the worldview of this class.

It may (or may not) be true that most leaders of marxist groups and movements are middle class - in the marxist sense of the term, obviously. Lichtenstein seems to think being middle class predisposes you to thinking in terms of blurred boundaries and shifting categories. In my experience, the opposite is true.

dialectics is an important part of the reason why revolutionary groups are in general vanishingly small, neurotically sectarian, studiously unreasonable, consistently conservative, theoretically deferential (to 'tradition'), and almost invariably tend toward all forms of substitutionism.

Substitutionism is the notion that, seeing as the workers aren't engaged in the struggle that's in their interests, we've got to do it for them. It is a common pseudomarxist idea among small marxist organisations.

It's certainly true that marxist groups tend to be small, authoritarian and given to fighting each other. But it's a complete mystery to me why belief in the dialectic should be the cause of this.

Differential Calculus is a branch of mathematics which deals with change in a way that resembles dialectical logic, but we don't see organisations of mathematicians publishing screeds against each other or expelling members for expressing doubts.

A lot of christian groups behave like the revolutionary cadres Lichtenstein talks about - but there's nothing dialectical about their beliefs.

...all the major theses advanced by dialecticians do not stand up to close scrutiny.

I can't comment on this yet, because I haven't yet read Lichtenstein's close scrutiny.

the criticisms dialecticians make of Formal Logic and the so-called 'Law of Identity' are as ill-informed as they are misconceived.

This is just silly. If you want to know about First-Order Logic, Aristotelian syllogism theory, or the work of Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Tarski and Quine, ask a marxist who's made extensive study of dialectical logic.

...bitter experience over the last twenty-five years 'debating' with the DM-faithful tells me I am talking to Marxists with stoppered ears.

In other words, "They don't listen to me because they're scared". I'll have to reserve judgement on this one.

Three billion or more workers cannot be wrong; we can't keep blaming our failure on their "false consciousness". Dialectics is not the "world-view of the proletariat", since they know nothing of it, never have, and never will.

Strawman. No one has ever claimed the workers are instinctively dialectical. To say that marxism is derived from what is in the interests of the workers is not to say it comes from what the workers are interested in.

Lichtenstein expands on a justifies these points in many essays, and promises many more to come. I'm not terribly impressed with the arguments she gives in the overview, but I'll be reading more of her work when there's time.

Dialectology (so to speak) is a surprisingly neglected field, given how central it is to several schools of philosophy. Chris Arthur has written articles and a book on the subject, and there's John Rees' "Algebra of Revolution", plus of course works by Engels. I think we could use more, and Rosa Lichtenstein is one of the few writing about it.

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As a footnote, a google search on Chris Arthur (Who I met briefly at a conference on...dialectics) bumped me into this this site. Myths and legends of Marxism - looks promising.