Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 23:05:43 -0500 (EST) From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu> Subject: Re: M-I: Dialectics On Tue, 21 Jan 1997, Siddharth Chatterjee wrote: > First of all, please accept my apologies for confusion on your > employment status. In the paragraphs above and immediately below, > you seem to be implying two opposite views. No, there is no need to apologize. I didn't want to misrepresent myself. As for implying two opposite views, I don't believe so. I was offering more than one view, however. I am not a binary thinker. Remember, I don't accept a bi-polar conception of the dialectic. :) > But if historical materialism is dialectical materialism applied to > socio/historical processes, then it is more specialized than dialectical > materialsm itself. So, are you saying that you accept the validity of > the more narrow application of the theory but not the broader one? I find this statement incredible. Dialectical materialism is the application of the method of historical materialism to nature, not the other way around. It was not Marx's system. Marx never wrote about a system of thought called dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism is contrary to Marx's system of thought. This was the central thrust of my two posts. How could you (and others) miss this? I would think that anybody who has read and grasps Marx's argument would know this already. Let me repeat so that this is perfectly clear: historical materialism is not the application of dialectical materialism to the study of society and history. Historical materialism IS the Marxian method. Marx never thought a system called dialectical materialism. It is a vulgarization of Marx's system of thought and contrary to it. The epistemological foundation of dialectical materialism is incommensurable with the epistemological foundation of historical materialism. I have already sufficiently argued my case (as if the case needed to be argued at all). Whether you agree with this assessment is up to you. It is a statement of fact, and this is for hariette, too, if she can catch her breath, to say that the argument I have made, and the position I advocate is consistent with the writings of Marx. Dialectical materialism is not consistent with Marx. I am aware that my stating this fact may bring more posts attacking my conceit, or worse, but this does not alter the truth of my statement. > In a sense it is true that these laws were developed by human beings > in order to *bring order and correlate* a wide variety of apparently > random phenomena. And as human society advances, our understanding > deepens and the laws are subject to additional refinement. But are > you implying that "reality" does not exist, that it all is a figment > of our mental universe? That, tomorrow if human society disappears, that > the period of revolution of the earth around the sun would change or > cease to exist all together? Of course I do not assert that reality does not exist. Being precedes consciousness. We are first living, breathing, physical beings. If I believed the universe was a mental figment then I would be an idealist. I am a materialist, ergo, I believe in the concrete world. It is because I believe in the concrete world, a real world of human sensuous activity, that I understand that our consciousness, and all the thought systems that emerge from this material context, to be transitory. Reality changes, therefore our thoughts regarding reality change. The objective world humans produce, day in and day out, in the labor process condition our subjective understanding of that world. It is because I understand that nature, humans, societies have no essence, that only the relation is ontological--and this is the central premise of Marxian dialectics--that I do not fix the "laws of nature" external to the human world. Dialectical materialism is an affront to the Marxian system of thought: it ontologizes as natural that which is socially-constructed. > I do not understand your notion of falsehood and vulgarization. Why do > you say Engles failed? In fact, in his book "Dialectics of Nature" there > are numerous examples of the dialectical nature of Nature. Of course, > every thing can turn into its opposite and become a joke if it is > not correctly applied. If I try to calculate the amount of heat that is > required to boil off 1 kg of water at 1 atm, it would be crazy if I > tried to use Newton's second law of motion for this purpose! This split > between Marx and Engles has been remarked on before and it would be > helpful if you could cite some sources regarding the nature of this > split, if at all it existed. However, if you read Marx's "Mathematical > Manuscripts" (this is a rare book which I was lucky to obtain - if > you want to know the name of the publisher, please let me know), in it > he studies the differential and integral calculus adopting a dialectical > viewpoint. As is well known, integration is the reverse process of > differentiation. So it is not correct to say that Marx only applied > the dialectic to social reality. I would snip this, but you might think I am avoiding what you have written. I really don't know how to respond to what you have written here. I regard the difference between Engels and Marx as self-evident. I am really not going to spend time bashing Engels; I think, in his crude and clumsy way, he did much to popularize Marx's work. Yet he went overboard trying to scientize (that is make applicable to natural sciences) the historical method of Marx. And the strawman of equating Marxism to dialectical materialism has gone a long way in making our position easily attacked. I spend much of my time defending Marx's materialist conception of history against those who characterize the Marxian worldview as dialectical materialist. As for your statement "integration is the reverse process of differentiation," I can only say: look around you. The reverse of integration is disintegration. In fact, differentiation of components internal to wholes can lead to greater structural integration. > So if historical materialism envelops natural sciences, then it also > should encompass dialectical materialism. So who is the parent and > who the child? Historical materialism is the social scientific method of Karl Marx, a brilliant political economist and sociologist. Dialectical materialism is its bastard child that has done more to distort Marx's thought than any other system of thought that presently comes to mind. 'Nuff said on this thread. Andrew Austin --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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