Comrade_Improving

Good answer, comrade 🫡

It is always important to remember to think current situations in a materialistic way, and not fall for the idealistic lie that propaganda alone is able to "brainwash" or "control" people.

Thanks, that's what I was looking for, crazy that I've never heard of it or of the author.

Thanks for the recommendations. I actually started searching for a critique after seeing how many of those philosophers call themselves Marxists or post, all the while covering with the most idealistic BS the advances that Marx brought to Philosophy and Sociology.

Even tough I'm neither a zoomer or have ADHD I can relate with not being able to read Marx's "Capital", years ago I also jumped straight into it after only having read the manifesto and as consequence could not make past the 2º chapter.

But that is the "Capital"'s contradiction. It's such a complete and elaborated description of capitalist economy that you theoretically wouldn't need any other complementary text to understand capitalism, but as a consequence of that the book is extremely dense, complex and long, so much that if you never read a Marxist book prior you will be encountering new terms and logics in almost every paragraph, making it a very hard and slow read while also likely leading to misunderstandings.

The solution to that is to do exactly what your doing now, which is reading other simpler and shorter Marxists books and increasing your understanding of Marxism in general, before tackling the behemoth that is Marx's "Capital". So just remember that you can't do capital yet, but after finishing your list, if you give it another try maybe you will find out that you actually can do it.

That is a good New Year's Resolution to have, as it's always better to know more theory. Personally I always recommend to anyone that is planing to do a deep dive in Marxist theory to start with the philosophy on which the theory itself is based, that means reading books on Dialectical Materialism as the first step.

You already have a couple of them in your list, so my recommendation is to prioritize them over their application in the more advanced books. On that note the only book I would add to your list is M. Cornforth's "Materialism and the Dialectical Method" which is arguably the book to describe Diamat in the most understandable way for modern readers.

Other than that, I would say after finishing that list it'd be time to tackle the two most important works of Marx and Engels in Engels' "Anti-Dühring" and Marx's "Capital".

Good reading, Comrade.

Well, in the link they mention 5 out 40 in a class, that equals to 12.5% and 2 million out of 22 million in total, that is just over 9%.

Personally, I don't see the point of going in circles in this discussion, so I'll just add my two last notes:

First, I want to again make very clear that my entire point since the first comment has been around the misuse of Fichte's "thesis–antithesis–synthesis" in the place of Hegel's study of "the inner life and self-movement", and the consequences of this. I do want to add the if you know a Marxist author that uses the Fichtean method in a book, please send a link to me, for I would definitely need to read it.

Speaking of books, lastly I want to recommend the books that I read that deal with the dialectical method as I've been describing: F. Engels - "Socialism Utopian and Scientific"; F. Engels - "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy"; J. Stalin - "Dialectical and Historical Materialism"; M. Cornforth - "Materialism and the Dialectical Method"; Mao - "Five Essays on Philosophy"; V. Adoratsky - "The Theoretical Foundation of Marxism-Leninism"; V.I. Lenin - "Karl Marx"; G. Plekhanov - "Materialismus Militans"; G. Plekhanov "In Defense of Materialism".

Hopefully you will find within yourself to read, and maybe reread, those books so that the methodological mistake you've been making so far may be a thing of the past, good luck on this process comrade.

Actually it's the other way around, the framework is given by the contradictions and therefore internally, while the pressures that affect them are usually external, the combination of both is what leads the system's evolution.

I think I understand pretty clearly what you mean, and it's slightly incorrect, the contradictions are the "tracks" that guide the evolution caused by other forces, and as such the shape of those contradictions is given internally, but the actual "location" within those "tracks" is given mostly externally.

Hence the example from Mao about the egg and the rock, the internal contradictions from the egg are what allow it to become a chicken in the correct temperature (the external influence that leads to that contradiction), but regardless of what you do externally to it, a rock that doesn't have that internal contradiction will never be able to become a chicken.

I wanted to add a classic example of Marxist contradiction, and thought it would be good to use the contradiction between socialized production and private property of the means of production, that contradiction by itself doesn't do anything, only when inserted in the capitalistic mode of production that it will cause so that the production as whole creates poor resource distribution, inequality, crisis, etc., so to try and fix the production as a whole we could fix this one contradiction by struggling to change the private property to socialized property. We would then find that although there were improvements, there are still problems (other contradictions) within the system.

So we can see that the answer to solving the internal contradictions within a system lies inside those contradictions themselves, even with those contradictions being only a part of the whole system and the solution of one not leading to the solution of the whole system.

Well, there are philosophies that study things focusing on its context and interconnection with other structures, that's French Structuralism.

It's only Dialetical Materialism that requires the investigation of the internal contradictions inherent in everything.

I thought our discussion had already run its course, but only now it came to me just how crucial to the understanding of Dialectical Materialism is seeing the value of separating external influence and internal conditions. In my other comment I said it allows for easier study, but that is very far from being complete, it actually is the pivotal abstraction when studying something with Diamat.

Dialectal Materialism gives internally, through its contradictions, the "possibilities" a thing can be. But only after affected by external influences that it actually becomes one of these "possibilities". To go back to the Egg example, the egg holds within himself, through its contradictions, the possibilities of hatching, breaking, rotting, etc.. But which one will the egg actually become depends now of the external conditions.

I also have to add that throughout our discussion it might have lost its focus, but I see the root of the problem being in what is wrote in my very first comment, of trying to use Hegelian Dialectics in the same way as ancient Greek Dialectics, they may share some terminology, but their movement is entirely different.

In short in Greek Dialectics A vs B leads to a C with characteristics of A and B; in Dialectical Materialism A vs B already have characteristics of each (that's why they are contradictory) and they lead to B, with the newer one necessarily (given time) triumphing over the former.

I wouldn't say that changing the contradictions from creators to synonymous with pressures improves the system a lot, I also have to say that there is always value in separating external and internal conditions as they become easier to study as such and greater understanding is always valuable.

And although I don't have the necessary knowledge in thermodynamics to expand on your argument around it, it does fell to me eerie similar to what the material mechanists did centuries ago when they tried to understand the world through the laws of mechanical physics.

You can get a better understanding of thermodynamics by using Dialectical Materialism to study it, but trying to understand diamat by trying to fit in it laws of any branch of physics can lead to grave mistakes.

And I do recommend those books, they go in with way more detail and knowledge about what we are discussing here.