This is a culmination of a lot of ideas I've had over the years that constitute my world view and understanding of our reality.
Some key realizations I've had are that there are many parallels between concepts of energy gradients driving evolution of dynamic systems, emergence, and self-organization with the core concepts of Dialectical Materialism rooted in contradictions, transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation.
Dialectical Materialism describes the cyclical process of development where an initial thesis is countered by an antithesis, leading to a synthesis that retains aspects of both but transcends them to a new level. This directly mirrors the idea of energy gradients driving systems towards higher levels of complexity and organization. In both cases, emergent properties arise from the interactions within the system driven by the selection pressures.
I see nature as having a fractal quality to it where environmental pressures to optimize space and energy use drive the emergence of similar patterns at different scales. I argue that our social structures are a direct extension of the physical reality and simply constitute a higher level of abstraction and organization that directly builds on the layers beneath.
If you're simply interested in a standalone introduction to dialectics can skip to chapter 8, which is largely self-contained. The preceding chapters build a foundation by illustrating how self-organization leads to the emergence of minds and social structures.
One of the goals I have here is to provide an introduction to diamat for people in STEM who may be coming from the liberal mainstream by demonstrating a clear connection between materialist understanding of physical reality and human societies.
Feedback and critique are both very welcome.
an audiobook here (it's LLM narrated so not perfect) https://theunconductedchorus.com/audio.html
At first I was shocked of reading this, on a ML instance of all places, to take Parenti's siege socialism and attempt to make it as the result of some kind of struturalistc analysis feels unbelievable, but considering that our discussion has been around the fact that you'd rather use an agnostic analysis over a materialistic one, and that you don't follow Hegelian dialectics and therefore the term "contradiction" means whatever you want, it's then possible to see how one could claim such absurdities.
Let's then actually quote the man himself:
Parenti literally wrote that the external influences exacerbated the internal contradictions already present within the system, because he was using dialectical materialism and therefore saw first the existence of internal contradictions and then those being affected by the external influences, not the other way around as you claimed.
I need to say, having never had a discussion with a western "leftist" before, even though I somewhat knew what to expect, it is still impressive seeing it first hand how one can believe to make no mistakes and their arguments don't require any proof since they personally own the truth, thinking that repeated enough times anything they say will become real.
Leaving that aside, this recent discussion has left me with a question which I look forward to the answer. If you can dismiss dialectical materialism so easily in favor of a struturalistic analysis, and don't care about Hegelian dialectics, why were you writing about diamat in the first place?
You continue to put words in my mouth while ignoring what I'm actually saying. I am very much using materialistic analysis, but you keep labelling it as agnostic while failing to actually engage with what's being said to you.
Except I did not claim the other way around anywhere. What I said is that internal contradictions are influenced by external factors. Which is precisely what Parenti identifies.
Given that I grew up in USSR, this is the most hilarious thing I've been told in a while. I have to give you credit for the level of sophistication in your trolling. It took me a while to catch on.
Maybe you should spend a bit of time to actually understand what dialectical materialism is instead of writing pseudo intellectual comments.