This excellent video on dialectical materialism got me thinking more about the pedagogy of practicing and learning it: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10142756
Which is a fancy way of saying, I thought, "What if school-like exercises for practicing the components of it to grapple with comprehension and retention of it?" After all, quantitative engagement with its component parts could lead to qualitative change in understanding. :)
In Mao's essay On Contradiction, he gives examples such as:
In mechanics: action and reaction. In physics: positive and negative electricity. In chemistry: the combination and dissociation of atoms. In social science: the class struggle. In war, offence and defence, advance and retreat, victory and defeat are all mutually contradictory phenomena. One cannot exist without the other. The two aspects are at once in conflict and in interdependence, and this constitutes the totality of a war, pushes its development forward and solves its problems.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm
The idea is to expand on that with what you can think of.
What I wrote down so far:
hot and cold; growth and decay; strength and weakness; noisy and quiet; action and rest; theory and practice; imagination and sensation; wet and dry; beginning and end; the forest and the trees (e.g. big picture and the details, collective and individual); spiritual and secular; venerated and vulgarized.
So now I put it to you: What are some more examples of this?
Bonus question: What's an example of something that can occur when opposing forces collide?
P.S. Feel free to correct with a why, if you believe something shared is not an example of opposing forces. Just remember to think of it as for teaching and learning.
The potential is the negation. A thing must contain the conditions for its negation (or opposite), and this is what forms a contradiction and why we talk about internal contradictions.
The bourgeoisie for example creates a proletariat by necessity of their existence. They need people that work in their factories and businesses to appropriate surplus value from. So as the bourgeoisie expands, so does the proletariat. As a business expands it will employ more people therefore require workers therefore requires a proletariat to employ from.
Proudhon's idea was exactly 'vulgar' dialectics. He said, well, seems like it's desirable to be bourgeois and not desirable to be proletariat. So let's make everyone into a bourgeois - give everyone land, and let them work on it. then everyone will be rich and unalienated like the bourgeoisie!
But this isn't solving the contradiction because (the potential for) the negation still exists: if you have a bourgeoisie, it will necessarily create a proletariat because it needs a negation somewhere. We can't just pluck the negation out with tweezers.
So we have to find the actual contradiction taking these laws in mind, it may not be readily obvious and may not just be the 'common sense' answer, i.e. "oh dark is the contradiction to light obviously, because 1. they are diametrically opposed and 2. you can't have a concept of 'light' if you don't have concept for 'dark'" -- I believe this is a shortcut and also vulgar dialectics (but don't really have a better answer myself for the contradiction to light). Which is why I like that balloon example, because it shows a process and negation of the negation (uninflated balloon contains the potential to become inflated and that inflated balloon contains the potential to pop).
And this is the hard part lol, going from examples and explanations we read in books and into our own practice of dialectics and finding contradictions for ourselves instead of being told. Very difficult.
Hmm. Yeah, so, my aim is to get people thinking about the building blocks more so, so that they can gradually form a better understanding of dialectical materialism. But maybe focusing on opposites in isolation is too divorced from practical application of it (like too dictionary). I lack a thorough enough understanding to be formulating a whole ladder of learning progression through it myself.
So perhaps a helpful exercise would be asking people to name a thing with the conditions for its negation/opposite and how that arises within the scope of the thing. I think this is the step I was fumbling my way toward reaching for with the "bonus question".
I think an exercise set to smoothen the learning curve is sorely needed. Apart from finding contradictions like the examples you gave, I think it would be useful to also know how to identify the forces themselves in a given snapshot of a given system.
This is just my perspective, but since everything is interconnected, it feels difficult to know where to delimit what constitutes a force whose contradictions you want to analyze with other forces. A force is a system in itself, with its own contradictions. How far do we zoom in or out? Maybe the answer is to just pick whatever suits your current needs, but it was confusing for me when seeing examples like plus/minus and water/steam. I thought "ok, so does this framework only apply to certain categories of forces, and if so, what criteria define these forces? Why water/steam, why not a contradiction between water at 40°C and water at 90°C? If there are no criteria, can I apply this to literally anything in the universe as a sort of master framework for understanding the world? Should math and natural sciences be restructured around contradictions?".
I think we need to develop a sense for spotting contradictions that are useful to analyze for whatever problem we have at hand, and an exercise set could help build that. Or some heuristics for it, to make it even more explicit.
Yes, definitely, and any help people can provide with that, even if it's a halfway attempt like my original post, I think could still lead to developing better exercises and thereby better understanding. In other words, I encourage people to go for it and see what they can come up with for discussion, and if it ends up receiving some correction from others better versed in dialectical materialism, that process alone can further learning and give us an overall better sense of how people are comprehending the theory.
It's a good exercise! The tough part in anything is always moving from theory to practice.
True, true. That does give me an inkling of an idea. If it'd be possible to leverage a game-like simulation to help demonstrate diamat and involve the player in the process of something changing. Even if it's something as basic as an interactive balloon popping that explains things alongside, similar to the example you talked about. Although that would not be on the level of implementing theory in real world conditions, it would be one step closer than textbook and might help clarify for people, especially for people who struggle to engage with text alone.
Something I'll have to think about more (though if anyone else wants to look into it too, please do). I've been meaning to learn Godot engine for a while and this might give me a more pointed reason.