New member but long time lurker here and lemmygrad, it might not be a good starter post for my social credit to make such a theoretical posts but nevertheless this article is a great criticism of our method of viewing the world and basing our practice on it.
I myself admit of ideating towards idealism and thinking that diamat explained everything in the world and that the revolution IS inevitable and that there is no need to struggle anymore because it was all going to workout in the end…
I started applying the process of “negation” and “sublation” to my own life and decisions (history as an automatic upward spiral, etc.) which as you might guess lead me to nowhere, but once I realized the mistakes I had made and started epistemic overcorrection and refuted dialectical materialism(for a short while).
I would love for this to be discussed widely…
I’m skeptical about this author’s grasp of the Hegelian dialectic, let alone the Marxian variant.
Critics note that Hegel’s style of dialectical logic was speculative and unfalsifiable
This is a meaningless accusation. The point of Hegel’s dialectic is precisely to remove the arbitrariness of this speculative moment, to ground that speculation entirely in the subject matter without any external reference, i.e. in immanent critique.
If one wants a useful critique of Hegel, look no further than Marx’s own Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The problem with Hegel, according to Marx, is not that his speculation is arbitrary. It’s the opposite; it inevitably reinforces the status quo, because the Hegelian dialectic can only justify the object of critique while pretending to negate it.
There is no removing speculation from the scientific process. Ever. Speculation is essential to science. If we must insist on the grade-school rubric of the scientific method, the one that moves like hypothesis — experimental setup — data collection — analysis — conclusion, then the speculative moment is inherent or maybe prior to the hypothesis stage.
Dialectics is necessary in Marxism precisely because it resists positivist, Popperian vulgarization of science. That they cite Karl Popper favorably, and uncritically, says enough for me to dismiss the rest of the article. Certainly, complaints about falsifiability induce eye-rolls.
I would agree that there are many bad interpreters of dialectics, even supposedly great Marxists. This is not a reason to reject dialectics but rather to improve on our collective understanding and on our pedagogy.
Marxism without dialectics would not be recognizable to me as Marxism. Anyway, this has already been attempted by the so-called Analytical Marxism school headed by G. A. Cohen. It is not useful.
Thank you comrade for the great explanation!
This book below is a great supplement to this topic and the whole Popperian criticism https://archive.org/details/CornforthOpenPhil/page/n21/mode/2up
Thanks for that recommendation of Cornforth’s book. It’s one of those books that has been floating in my virtual bookshelf for years, but I never got around to it (frankly I forgot about it til you mentioned it). So it’s now fresher in my mind and maybe I’ll get to it soon.
Second, I should say welcome to Hexbear and certainly I’m glad that you felt the courage to post as a new member, and I hope you continue to join in!
Now, I finished the Medium article and to be honest, I disagree with it completely. I felt a little bad about my strong and somewhat contrarian earlier comment, but now I think it is justified.
I’ll save the long lecture but this author really needs to read Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach to understand that they are advocating for exactly the Feuerbachian mechanical materialism that Marx refuted. That this author can then advocate for mechanical materialism and call it the real or original Marxism is absurd. What they are advocating for isn’t Marxist. That’s fine, but it should not be called Marxism.
I am a physicist by education and this author managed to also annoy me by misrepresenting quantum mechanics lol. Pilot wave theory is by no means proof that quantum mechanics is deterministic. It is one interpretation which is deterministic, but which is not provably more correct than the Copenhagen interpretation. Actually, due to things like Bell’s Theorem, pilot wave theory has fallen out of favor. We most likely do live in a probabilistic quantum universe. But that really has no bearing on these questions about materialism anyway!
Thank you very much for the warm welcome!
I will defiantly join in.
Thank you for the physics insight. I too don’t find the mechanical deterministic view compelling, but really it was partly due to my laziness that I judged the users name of Marxism Leninism and assumed he was level headed. Even if we were fully determined, it will eventually lead to fatalism which hinders our socialist cause as the other commentator has mentioned.
Sorry for broad questions but how do you apply this Marxian worldview in your personal/organizational life if you don’t mind intruding? Are there things you take for granted or you constantly criticize your own beliefs?
It seems to me what the author is proposing would only be possible if you could exactly segment everything in existence into neat little singular boxes without exception. I doubt that is possible.
Obviously we cannot, but maybe in the future… For now our best model is dialectical materialism which uses the scientific method as its main tool.
