File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism.Jul12-Aug17.94, message 170


Subject: Re: Dialectics & Materialism
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 1994 04:43:17 -0700
From: Michael Lichter <lichter-AT-nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu>


This is a late reply to Chris Sciabarra's July 24 reply to my post and
Dave Hull's related post of July 23.

	Chris says:
	     Michael Lichter cites my discussion of dialectics and
	materialism, and states that method addresses the question,
	"how to," while a conceptual framework addresses the
	question, "in what way do we conceptualize social reality?"

	     In my original posting, I tried to distinguish between
	"dialectics" and "dialectical materialism," claiming that the
	first was a formal method of social inquiry, while the latter
	wedded a certain CONTENT to that method.  "Dialectical
	materialism" contains a dialectical METHOD and a materialist
	CONTENT.  The approach is MATERIALIST because it emphasizes
	the primacy of material factors (roughly, the "economic
	base") in social production and development.  The approach is
	DIALECTICAL because it refuses to "vulgarize" such
	materialism.  It retains an emphasis on the organic unity of
	many factors within a social whole, the material and the non-
	material, the economic, the political, the cultural, the
	ideological, etc.

As do Marx and Engels, you describe the *qualities* of the method,
without describing the method itself.  How does one *do* dialectical
materialism?  What you describe sounds more like a *mode of explanation* 
than a *mode of discovery* (or exploration or whatever the right word is).

In CAPITAL, Marx brilliantly takes apart each little piece of the
capitalist engine and shows us how it relates to each of the other parts 
to form an organic whole.  But this is *exposition*.  How did Marx
dissect the inner workings of British (mainly) capitalism before he
reconstructed it before our eyes?  And how did he know which scraps to
keep and which to toss?  He doesn't say.

What Marx in effect says, and what Chris seems to be saying is "when
the results look like this, then it's dialectical materialism".  How do
you paint a painting?  "Well, when it looks sort of like this, then
you're doing it right."  I don't find this especially satisfactory.

Maybe I'm being silly and this is just the nature of social inquiry.
Analyzing human history is not as simple as taking a geological core 
sample and pulling out a magnifying glass.  You just gotta have whatever
the Marxian equivalent of Weber's verstehen is, I guess.

As to Rwanda, Dave Hull illustrated my point by (no offense intended)
by pulling out a canned explanation about "haves" and "have-nots" and
their cataclysmic collision.  Cataclysm is what we've witnessed, beyond
doubt, but even to a casual observer such a simple opposition seems
far, far removed from the reality.  If Marx method had any rules, one
of them certainly must have been "be historical!  Ahistorical inquiry
is doomed to miss what is really happening."  And so we must at least
go back to the European colonization of Africa and its violation of
"traditional" tribal/etnic boundaries (among many other violations) to
understand contemporary politics anywhere in Africa.  So, if "look to
the past" is one rule of this method, what are the rest?  And what do I
look for in the past?

Regarding Robert Harle's post this morning, yes, I *am* trying to be
pragmatic, or at least practical.  Conducting real empirical inquiry
towards making real change *is* the point.

Michael


     ------------------

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005