Reading a few articles and posts, and I’m still just not getting it beyond a very basic understanding of dialectics being “stuff impacts other stuff and then affects other things including the original thing”. Materialism is easier for me to get.
Can anyone recommend a good book about it that is good for non-philosophers? Something that would work as an audiobook? I love Marx and Engels and generally I would agree with first going to the original sources to tbh their language can be too arcane for me to understand a concept I struggle with this much.
Have you tried Dialectical and Historical Materialism by J. STALIN?
I’ll include a bit of the intro to let folks know what they’re getting into
Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena, its theory, is materialistic.
Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of social life, an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, to the study of society and of its history.
When describing their dialectical method, Marx and Engels usually refer to Hegel as the philosopher who formulated the main features of dialectics. This, however, does not mean that the dialectics of Marx and Engels is identical with the dialectics of Hegel. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels took from the Hegelian dialectics only its “rational kernel,” casting aside its Hegelian idealistic shell, and developed dialectics further so as to lend it a modern scientific form.
“My dialectic method,” says Marx, “is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, … the process of thinking which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos (creator) of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought.” (Marx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Volume I of Capital.)
When describing their materialism, Marx and Engels usually refer to Feuerbach as the philosopher who restored materialism to its rights. This, however, does not mean that the materialism of Marx and Engels is identical with Feuerbach’s materialism. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels took from Feuerbach’s materialism its “inner kernel,” developed it into a scientific-philosophical theory of materialism and cast aside its idealistic and religious-ethical encumbrances. We know that Feuerbach, although he was fundamentally a materialist, objected to the name materialism. Engels more than once declared that “in spite of” the materialist “foundation,” Feuerbach “remained… bound by the traditional idealist fetters,” and that “the real idealism of Feuerbach becomes evident as soon as we come to his philosophy of religion and ethics.” (Marx and Engels, Vol. XIV, pp. 652-54.)
Dialectics comes from the Greek dialego, to discourse, to debate. In ancient times dialectics was the art of arriving at the truth by disclosing the contradictions in the argument of an opponent and overcoming these contradictions. There were philosophers in ancient times who believed that the disclosure of contradictions in thought and the clash of opposite opinions was the best method of arriving at the truth. This dialectical method of thought, later extended to the phenomena of nature, developed into the dialectical method of apprehending nature, which regards the phenomena of nature as being in constant movement and undergoing constant change, and the development of nature as the result of the development of the contradictions in nature, as the result of the interaction of opposed forces in nature.
In its essence, dialectics is the direct opposite of metaphysics. <note from Alaska, skoubalon on death watch since he’s a metaphysics nerd>
Lots of great answers here. My way to explain it would be the following: materialism is understanding that human society flows from the material realities of history (summing up the climatic and agricultural conditions, the political machinations, the level of technology and resources that are directly available or available through trade, etc. etc.); dialectics is a method of identifying a resolution to two apparently contradictory truths.
So in Hegel, a classic example of the dialectics is trying to understand the transition between ice and water. In terms of temperature, we can observe that at one temperature the actual quality of the water changes from liquid to solid ice. The quantitative change in temperature eventually becomes a quantitative change in the material. And today, we’re all familiar with a resolution to this, which is the molecular behavior of water molecules. The part of this that is dialectics is in noticing that one concept of water (liquid water) is contradicted by another concept of water (ice).
Putting the two together, what Marx was trying to do was understand Capitalism and what its actual motive forces are. Unlike the physics example above, you can’t use the same sort of direct experiments in a laboratory setting to build more correct models of the means of production and the nature of capitalism. What Marx comes up with that is a great example of historical materialism is his notion of value. Marx spent much of the time working on Capital finding all the evidence that he presents in later volumes and chapters. However, he decided to start with his theory and then present the evidence, so the most important dialectical materialism of the book is actually right in the front. Here’s the contradiction in what makes things valuable under capitalism: on the one hand, everything generally has some kind of use value that is qualitatively its purpose – food is produced to be eaten, CPUs are produced to play Netflix, a coat is made to be worn in the cold – but on the other hand, specifically under the social formation that could be identified as Capitalism, all things have an exchange value, which is to say you can always sell it for some amount of money and then exchange that money for something else with a use value, which of course you will inevitably do. The materialist solution to this dialectical contradiction in what it means for a product of someone’s labor to be valuable is to understand value as a more abstract concept than either use value or exchange value, and identify it as being equal to the socially necessary labor time to produce the thing. If this is a good resolution to this materialist dialectic, then we should be able to connect both use value and exchange value through this further idea of value as socially necessary labor time. We can of course, do that. Technological advances make some labor less valuable because it simply takes less time. We can see from this vantage point as well that production can only be reasoned about in terms of the only input we can actually change: how much time a person spends doing a task. Since that’s all that matters, we can see that the use value is accounted for insofar as people’s needs and wants have an optimal amount of socially necessary labor time to meet, and that as technology improves, the real value of something whose production is made more efficient is obviously lesser. A machine produced coat lessens the value of coats because it simply takes one less time to produce it. And there isn’t anything socially necessary about a cottage industry of coat-making over industrial factory coat-making, and thus the cottage worker finds their skills much less valuable than they used to be. Value in exchange, which is to say the price of goods, will change based somewhat on supply and demand, but the price of labor will depend primarily on how good Capitalists get at extracting from workers. And at a certain point, there it is. Capitalism is class war, built right into a basic resolution to what it means to do wage slavery and sell goods on “the market.”
I’m probably wrong in some critical way and I’ll get dunked on by the true Marx readers, but I think I’m correct about explaining the idea of the materialist dialectic.
By far the biggest stumbling block in understanding dialectical materialism is understanding dialectics. Like you said yourself, materialism is easier to understand. In order to train your mind in seeing the world dialectically, not necessarily using dialectical materialism but just dialectically, I would actually recommend Daoist works, or more specifically the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. Both Daoist works investigate the contradictions in all things and how these contradictions interact with one another.
Sample from the Daodejing:
The thirty spokes converge at one hub, but the utility of the cart is a function of the nothingness inside the hub. We throw clay to shape a pot, but the utility of the clay pot is a function of the nothingness inside it. We bore out doors and windows to make a dwelling, but the utility of the dwelling is a function of the nothingness inside it. Thus, it might be something that provides the value, but it is nothing that provides the utility.
The contradiction is between the object, be it a pot, wheel, or house, as it exist and the absence of the object which gives the object its identity. A pot without a hollow inside is just a weirdly shaped brick, a wheel without a hub is just a wooden circular table without legs, a house without an interior is just a small hill. It’s only through the absence of the pot that a pot is a pot and not a weirdly shaped brick and so on.
Sample from the Zhuangzi:
Ziqi of Nanbo was wandering around the Hill of Shang when he saw a huge tree there, different from all the rest. A thousand teams of horses could have taken shelter under it, and its shade would have covered them all. Ziqi said, “What tree is this? It must certainly have some extraordinary usefulness!” But looking up, he saw that the smaller limbs were gnarled and twisted, unfit for beams or rafters, and looking down, he saw that the trunk was pitted and rotten and could not be used for coffins. He licked one of the leaves, and it blistered his mouth and made it sore. He sniffed the odor, and it was enough to make a man drunk for three days. “It turns out to be a completely unusable tree,” said Ziqi, “and so it has been able to grow this big. Aha!—it is this unusableness that the Holy Man makes use of!”
There’s more before his paragraph, but essentially, it’s discussing the usefulness of uselessness. The contradiction is that a useful tree ie a tree with high quality wood, is more likely to be chopped down than a tree that is otherwise useless. It’s through its uselessness to humans that it still lives, so it’s uselessness to humans is actually one of its greatest asset to itself.
Once you start to internalize being able to see things dialectically, dialectical materialism starts to make a lot more sense while liberal ideas are completely undialectical. For example, strict pacifism is undialectical because it does not acknowledge the dialectical relationship between peace and war as well as not acknowledge the transformation from a violent world to a peace world might be violent. Compare that with the famous Mao quote:
We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.
This is a dialectical understanding of war and peace.
This article I found pretty easy to read and isn’t jargon heavy
Engels - Anti-Duhring (aka Mr Duhring’s Revolution in Science)
