This is why you have to read theory, folks. There’s no better response than to be really condescending using 19th century socialist jargon. Just completely incomprehensible.
“does your freaky-nomics book teach you how many yards of linen it takes to make a coat? … heh, didn’t think so!”
Dialectics is one that I’ve never understood, actually - I’ve just never understood what the word means. Marx doesn’t use it, incidentally, it’s used by Engels. And if anybody can tell me what it is, I’ll be happy. I mean, I’ve read all kinds of things which talk about “dialectics” - I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is. It seems to mean something about complexity, or alternative positions, or change, or something. I don’t know.
It’s not a new idea in the general sense so you can find a few different ways it might be defined.
When it comes to Marx, it’s about what he took (and often flipped on its head) from Hegel, where Hegel was the first nerd to get really into dialectics when it came to analyzing society.
A very short summary of dialectics wrt Hegel and Marx is that it is an often-useful tool by which you can frame a thing is actually by the states through which it may transition, that a thing is better described by what it is and how it can become not that, and then by looking at the reasons this would happen, produce salient contradictions that explain the thing itself. This sounds confusing because it’s abstract, but it’s not really that foreign to most people nowadays.
Example: there is a fly buzzing around your room. We can say that the fly is alive. Eventually, it will die, decompose, and become earth. We have the state of the thing (alive), another state of the thing (dead/dirt), and say that a fly may be better understood by knowing the processes that move the fly to or away from either state. And, most importantly, a hard subscriber to dialectics would say that our understanding of the fly should be about these processes in opposition, not a list of descriptions of the fly in the “alive” state. Metabolism keeps the fly alive. An end to metabolism, such as being exposed to the cold for a long period, leads to its death. It must constantly eat food to live. If it stops eating food, it dies. We can keep enumerating things to come up with insights that we believe are important until we feel satisfied that we have understood and distinguished the fly from other things via this process.
This example is very similar to Hegel’s formation, where we understand the world through DEEP THOUGHTS and, in fact, reality relative to human interactions is derived from them and can only be understood via the correct extraction of those thoughts. Marx liked the processes and contradiction part, but disliked the ideas --> reality part, flipping it around: material forces stand in opposition, they are the processes, the transitions, and instead, ideas are the product of material things. A simplistic example is that Romans didn’t have an opinion on motorcycles, but there are deeper and subtler implications that Marx related to economic production.
This is where simple fights about idealism come from as well, with Marxists appealing to economic forces determining the population’s ideas and socioeconomic transitions and crapping on people who think that it’s mostly about convincing people that the right ideas are true - and if we just had that, we’d win.
Hey, I’m sorry, my post was a bit. It’s a quote from Chomsky when asked about dialectics.
This is a great explanation and tbh very helpful. I genuinely appreciate that you’re taking the time to explain this stuff cause it is pretty difficult. :heart-sickle:
Steven Levitt had ONE interesting take about Sumo wrestling and has spent his entire life going “Hey remember when I had that one funny idea, how about paying me an insane amount of money to justify fascism using economic buzzwords?”
Dubner is even worse because he’s coasting on Levitt’s one good idea, to the point where he’s keeping freakonomics going years after Levitt has moved on and years after it totally abandoned even the pretext of economics.
I hate gladwell’s books/ideas so much.
I’m extremely new to podcasts. I’ve been enjoying about 50% of wtyp episodes and 0% of other podcasts (I tried true anon and kill james bond… wasn’t impressed by either.)
But I’ll have to give that a try. Alice is always delightful, regardless of whether everyone else can keep up.
fuck. I just tried. unlistenable. everyone talking over each other constantly and making worse versions of the joke the other people just made. and they can’t finish a single thought. also, Felix sucks at this. how tf did that man make so much money doing something he’s not very good at?
My high school had me read this shit over the summer lol. Most of my notes and annotations are complaining and sarcastic remarks about how much I don’t care about the book
They have a show on NPR now, when I was staying with boomer relatives it would be on sometimes for segments, including recent hits like “we invited a bunch of university presidents to share some surprisingly sexist and racist takes about why the kids who are avoiding college due not wanting to take on six figures of debt are somehow stupid and wasting their futures”
