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[–] 5 points 22 hours 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 22 hours 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 21 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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