25
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
25 points (100.0% liked)
Dialectical-Materialism: Theory and Application
329 readers
1 users here now
Join us in Awe of the beauty of Nature...
Among the greatest contributions to human thought stands the tradition of Dialectical Materialism - a hard-labored theory of metaphysics that offers tools from which to construct objective analysis of material phenomena, including those societal, cultural, and scientific.
Let this community be a space to train our application of the theory so that we may, as occupants of the present, better fulfill our obligation to the future.
Allowed and encouraged:
- Our own analysis
- Excerpts from theoreticians
- Study groups
- Hegel shitposts
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This one's easy on the surface. Just don't say it's inevitable. Please let us know what you need to rely on inevitability at all.
Under the surface, this is hard if you don't have other arguments. So we need to help you develop other argument.
This is a great question, because it starts to move you away from the morality of good and evil, it moves you away from the position of the victim and the demand for justice. I think the greater good argument is still rhetorically useful, but it's not the crux of the Marxist argument and analysis. So, good on you from moving away from this, just don't throw it out in the trash and keep it around for when it's useful.
This is another good one, not just because it helps you move away from morality but because it forces you to enrich your understanding of exploitation. Exploitation sounds like a bad word to most people, but exploitation when used in ecology is not a bad word, it's a description of how components of the ecosystem relate to each other. For example, a particular insect exploits the abundance of sugars present in deciduous trees in order to provide it the energy it needs to reproduce. So, if exploitation is amoral, what's the argument here?
This was me at one point. It comes with the territory of growing up in liberal democracies. We're trained to argue this way, to reason this way, and to think this way. The process of coming to understand Marxism is difficult precisely because it requires us to unlearn so much of what we have previously learned and everyone around us constantly reinforces.
The "proper" Marxist analysis is one that sees society as the subject of analysis, not people, not morals, not ideas. Marx's work established him as the progenitor of Sociology, no cap. I didn't realize that at first, but prior to his work and Engel's work, there was no scientific field of sociology. They created it.
So if society is the subject of analysis, how did they come to the conclusions they came to? First, what conclusions did they come to? There's a few that highly relevant to your current question:
So, with all these points taken for granted for this conversation (read more Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, and secondary sources to deepen your understanding of the above and understand the arguments behind these points).... how can we argue without "inevitability, the greater good, the capitalists being evil, et cetera?"
You take the position of systems explainer and you let your audience inject their own morality. It is not a question of morality whether society collapses and humans go extinct. However, for those of you in the audience who rely on society existing, I would like to explain to you how society reproduces itself and its failure modes. Based on the analysis, society is in danger of collapsing due to contradictions. Here's how that works. Based on the analysis, we can stop society from collapsing, if we choose to. Here's what it would need. (eliminate current contradictions, move to stateless, moneyless, classless) Here's how that would work. Here's why your alternatives don't work. I'm not saying we have to choose communism, but if we choose to maintain human society, then communism is the only way for that to happen. Otherwise, the contradictions will destabilize and collapse society back to earlier forms, up to and including extinction.
It's mechanical, it's causal, it's amoral, it's explanatory. We don't need to exist. But if you want to exist, you need human society. If you need human society, then communism is the only form that can sustain itself. Class-based society will collapse and in fact has been in the process of managing it's unstable equilibrium since classes emerged. Here's the analysis, here's the evidence from history, here's the contemporary evidence.
Once you get here in your understanding and debate posture, you'll start getting into real arguments with anti-communists about their alternative solutions and you'll need to get better at understanding the analysis to proceed. You'll also start getting into real arguments with other leftists who disagree about how to bring it about. And you'll start to understand how Lenin both extended Marx's work as well as argued against and disproved some his assumptions (specifically that the most likely place for revolution was the industrialized European core and not the agrarian periphery).