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[–] 1 point 1 day ago* (7 children)

I would argue against dialectics being a necessary precursor to understanding or applying historical materialism.

Example: to successfully explain why the Bolsheviks chose to apply harsh and radical policy of forced collectivizations one doesn't need to look at dialectics, one needs to look at economics and geopolitics. The Russian empire was a preindustrial semi feudal state, which socialism inherited. The threat of invasion by capitalist industrial powers such as Nazi Germany, learnt from the lessons of the Russian Civil War, left no choice but to apply an extremely difficult policy of forced collectivizations to group up small landholdings and free up peasant labor that could be allocated to cities to carry out the industrial revolution they needed to (and achieved to) carry out in 10 years before WW2, therefore saving Europe from fascism and themselves from extermination.

This is a materialist understanding of history that doesn't explicitly rely on dialectics, could you tell me of a way to make it better with the use of dialectics?

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  • [–] 5 points 20 hours ago*

    Well, I agree with the analysis you laid out and I'll gladly admit, it subjectively seems "good" enough for me as it is without explicitly referring to either dialectics in general or specifically dialectical materialism (which is not as broad and difficult as dialectics in general, which I don't claim to be necessary).

    However what does "good" or "better" mean exactly? We know it's a good analysis, because it's compatible with the principles of historical materialism. It looks at classes, it takes into account that society has to reproduce itself, it conceives of the world as ever changing rather than static and most of all, aims to change it in the right direction. So why is historical materialism good for producing analysis that is able to change the world? You can't say it's good because it produces good analysis, that would be circular. Why can we rely on historical materialism to produce good analysis? Maybe another method would provide even "better" ones? How did it's inventors arrive at it? By applying the more general philosophy of dialectical materialism to human history.

    Why simple things like: "actual change in the world matters more than ideas about it", "contradictions drive the development of things", "things are defined by opposing principles", "gradual change turns into real difference suddenly" are true, is explained by dialectical materialism and that's what historical materialism is build on.

    We don't all have to get into it, it's enough if some intellectuals keep it alive. But where it is forgotten completely, mistakes are made. A good example of a wrong analysis, that claims a vulgar materialism but lacks dialectics is the gender essentialism of terfs.

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  • [–] 6 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

    If one does not deploy dialectics, one can essentially argue that Russia went from a massive empire with a monarch, to an even larger empire with a dictatorship (the liberal understanding of history).

    While instead Russia can be understood as a series of internal contradictory processes, such as the pursuit of modernization (an idea) without the state, bureaucratic or educational institutions to support that pursuit, for example (the material). A potential negation of this is communism. However, it isn't that simple, and with the external pressure applied, the negation of the negation could potentially look a lot like what Russia under the USSR looked like, with it's own internal contradictions. A socialist state under the same geopolitical pressures as Imperial Russia.

    Basically, the USSR may have somewhat resembled Imperial Russia, but we know that it only looks like that because of the negation of the negation. We could also use materialist or systemic explanations, however, only watching the material angle allows the changes to be obscured.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 hours ago (1 child)

    If one does not deploy dialectics, one can essentially argue that Russia went from a massive empire with a monarch, to an even larger empire with a dictatorship (the liberal understanding of history).

    I don't need to apply dialectical thinking to say that's bullshit. I can point to the structure of ownership of society, to full-employment, to economic planning without markets, to universal healthcare and education and pensions, to the material help to Vietnam and Cuba and the PLO and to a wide array of anticolonial movements, to the lack of classes in society through material analysis... I really don't see what's dialectical about what I said and not just materialist cold-hard analysis.

    While instead Russia can be understood as a series of internal contradictory processes, such as the pursuit of modernization (an idea) without the state, bureaucratic or educational institutions to support that pursuit, for example (the material). A potential negation of this is communism. However, it isn't that simple, and with the external pressure applied, the negation of the negation could potentially look a lot like what Russia under the USSR looked like, with it's own internal contradictions

    This is mostly mumbo jumbo repeating the word "contradiction" for some reason instead of just analysing the process with material evidence without the need to use that word every 3 lines.

    Basically, the USSR may have somewhat resembled Imperial Russia, but we know that it only looks like that because of the negation of the negation

    ?! No! It's not because of "the negation of the negation", that's just philosophical dribble!

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  • [–] 2 points 4 hours ago

    All a negation is is something that transforms a part of the internal contradiction. The negation of the negation is something which either brings back the original contradiction, or transforms it further in such a way that it directly contradicts the original transformation.

    Just because you don't understand how something works philosophically does not make it 'dribble'.

    And yes, you could use materialist analysis. You should! But you can also understand it in a purely dialectical method. However, I agree, it isn't as useful as the combined aspect of a dialectical materialism, which examines the idea using a dialectical method, then tests those hypotheses using a materialist method.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago* (2 children)

    Dialectics helps us understand and analyse the outcomes of historical decisions, as well as helping us analyse the potential outcomes of current decision making. It has an important focus on internal contradictions of a thing, which can help us understand why the class composition of the USSR led to particular historical outcomes besides the looming threat of nazism. It can also help us better analyse the components that resulted in the break down of Soviet socialism, the economic and social factors that led to the break down and why those formed intrinsic parts of the Soviet model. They were not imposed on it from without, they were historical conditions that required navigating by the communists at the time. Without dialectics we can miss the forest for the trees and avoid analysing the system for what it actually is and what it achieved and how those two things shaped and maintained one another.

    In your example, why were the collectivisations forced? Why didn't the classes in the countryside voluntarily accept collectivisation? What was the shape and composition of the opposition to that policy and what were its results? What was the internal make-up of the party within those regions that led to their successes and failures? What could be done to avoid those failures in future? Were they inevitable? A dialectical approach would seek an immanent critique of the social system to analyse why history played out the way it did.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    Based on your comment, you're summarizing dialectics as "look at contradictions" (whichever that is, because it's poorly translated let alone defined) and "ask questions and critique". I could argue that breaking up a system into variables and examining the effect of those variables and how they play with each other is not exclusively dialectical, and it's something materialist instead.

    In your example, why were the collectivisations forced? Why didn't the classes in the countryside voluntarily accept collectivisation? What was the shape and composition of the opposition to that policy and what were its results? What was the internal make-up of the party within those regions that led to their successes and failures? What could be done to avoid those failures in future? Were they inevitable?

    I can answer all of those questions without ever having studied dialectics: the collectivizations were forced because they go against the landowner interests, the shape and composition of opposition was mostly petty bourgeois landowners who are a byproduct of the abolition of serfdom in the late 1800s and of the New Economic Policy, the results were resistance from the Kulaks in the form of sabotage and lack of incentive to peasants to obtain increasingly large production, the internal makeup of the party was mostly uneducated landless peasants who were just beginning to understand socialism together with some city emigrees of the working class who taught socialism and organizing to said peasants, in order to avoid to a degree the failures in the future we must not underestimate the necessity for private incentives to proprieted classes, a large extent of the bad consequences were inevitable due to such a big social upheaval forced into such a short time due to external geopolitical causes. Tell me how I've used dialectics in answering those questions, and not mostly the material and quantitative study of history.

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  • [–] 6 points 23 hours ago

    The point is that those questions were assembled to provide an immanent critique of the policy, and the posing of the questions was in order to carry out a dialectical analysis while you answered with the material factors that existed at the time thus fulfilling a dialectical materialist analysis.

    You need dialectics to know where to look, as it were, to understand how to shape your analysis and what questions need asking, and how to handle the answers your investigation generates. The study of dialectics makes us better at knowing how to carry out an immanent critique, what questions to ask, and how to interpret results. The philosophical underpinning for how to do analysis and how to interpret data is vital as far as I'm concerned, I think as Stalin put it: to have a compass that allows us to navigate the seas of history instead of charting a course blindly (probably butchered the analogy but I'm trying to pull it from memory).

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