This is a culmination of a lot of ideas I’ve had over the years that constitute my world view and understanding of our reality.
Some key realizations I’ve had are that there are many parallels between concepts of energy gradients driving evolution of dynamic systems, emergence, and self-organization with the core concepts of Dialectical Materialism rooted in contradictions, transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation.
Dialectical Materialism describes the cyclical process of development where an initial thesis is countered by an antithesis, leading to a synthesis that retains aspects of both but transcends them to a new level. This directly mirrors the idea of energy gradients driving systems towards higher levels of complexity and organization. In both cases, emergent properties arise from the interactions within the system driven by the selection pressures.
I see nature as having a fractal quality to it where environmental pressures to optimize space and energy use drive the emergence of similar patterns at different scales. I argue that our social structures are a direct extension of the physical reality and simply constitute a higher level of abstraction and organization that directly builds on the layers beneath.
If you’re simply interested in a standalone introduction to dialectics can skip to chapter 8, which is largely self-contained. The preceding chapters build a foundation by illustrating how self-organization leads to the emergence of minds and social structures.
One of the goals I have here is to provide an introduction to diamat for people in STEM who may be coming from the liberal mainstream by demonstrating a clear connection between materialist understanding of physical reality and human societies.
Feedback and critique are both very welcome.
an audiobook here (it’s LLM narrated so not perfect) https://theunconductedchorus.com/audio.html
To clarify a bit, I don’t see the pressures as being products of contradictions, but rather being synonymous with them. My view is that pressures are a result of energy gradients. Any system that has an energy gradient present within it will try to find its way to a ground state due to the laws of thermodynamics. My argument is that thermodynamics is ultimately the engine behind all physical processes, and our social dynamics is a level of abstraction that is an extension of the physical world.
I’m not sure there’s much value separating external and internal conditions though as both ultimately feed into the system. Complex systems often have recursive properties to them where operation of the system itself changes the environment and that feeds back into the operation of the system.
And I should read up on Feuerbach and Cornforth a bit more. I’m familiar with them, but haven’t really studied their work in detail. 😅
I wouldn’t say that changing the contradictions from creators to synonymous with pressures improves the system a lot, I also have to say that there is always value in separating external and internal conditions as they become easier to study as such and greater understanding is always valuable.
And although I don’t have the necessary knowledge in thermodynamics to expand on your argument around it, it does fell to me eerie similar to what the material mechanists did centuries ago when they tried to understand the world through the laws of mechanical physics.
You can get a better understanding of thermodynamics by using Dialectical Materialism to study it, but trying to understand diamat by trying to fit in it laws of any branch of physics can lead to grave mistakes.
And I do recommend those books, they go in with way more detail and knowledge about what we are discussing here.
The boundaries we create between internal and external are necessarily artificial constructs in our mind. They’re useful for partitioning the world into categories we can manipulate in our heads, but it’s important to keep in mind that the reality is a continuum.
The way I look at diamat is that it’s a framework for understanding social evolution, but the world itself is ultimately a material thing and society itself is a product of material conditions. The whole book is basically me building the case for how I arrived at my current understanding of the world.
I’ll definitely check the books out though.
I thought our discussion had already run its course, but only now it came to me just how crucial to the understanding of Dialectical Materialism is seeing the value of separating external influence and internal conditions. In my other comment I said it allows for easier study, but that is very far from being complete, it actually is the pivotal abstraction when studying something with Diamat.
Dialectal Materialism gives internally, through its contradictions, the “possibilities” a thing can be. But only after affected by external influences that it actually becomes one of these “possibilities”. To go back to the Egg example, the egg holds within himself, through its contradictions, the possibilities of hatching, breaking, rotting, etc… But which one will the egg actually become depends now of the external conditions.
I also have to add that throughout our discussion it might have lost its focus, but I see the root of the problem being in what is wrote in my very first comment, of trying to use Hegelian Dialectics in the same way as ancient Greek Dialectics, they may share some terminology, but their movement is entirely different.
In short in Greek Dialectics A vs B leads to a C with characteristics of A and B; in Dialectical Materialism A vs B already have characteristics of each (that’s why they are contradictory) and they lead to B, with the newer one necessarily (given time) triumphing over the former.
Right, but what I’m saying is that complex systems shape their environment. For example, a society transforms the land around it by cutting down forests, creating fields for agriculture, and so on. This in turn affects the way a society functions internally. An egg hatches into a chicken, and a chicken will proceed to eat food, produce waste, and so on. It’s part of the environment, and it has a direct effect on the environment. Hence, why I’m warning of the danger of rigidly separating the system from its context.
Well, there are philosophies that study things focusing on its context and interconnection with other structures, that’s French Structuralism.
It’s only Dialetical Materialism that requires the investigation of the internal contradictions inherent in everything.
I don’t see how these two concepts are at odds with each other. Contradictions deal with forces within a dynamic system that guide its evolution over time, but both internal and external forces contribute to shaping the contradictions. As I said earlier, there is a recursive quality at play in any complex system.
I think I understand pretty clearly what you mean, and it’s slightly incorrect, the contradictions are the “tracks” that guide the evolution caused by other forces, and as such the shape of those contradictions is given internally, but the actual “location” within those “tracks” is given mostly externally.
Hence the example from Mao about the egg and the rock, the internal contradictions from the egg are what allow it to become a chicken in the correct temperature (the external influence that leads to that contradiction), but regardless of what you do externally to it, a rock that doesn’t have that internal contradiction will never be able to become a chicken.
I wanted to add a classic example of Marxist contradiction, and thought it would be good to use the contradiction between socialized production and private property of the means of production, that contradiction by itself doesn’t do anything, only when inserted in the capitalistic mode of production that it will cause so that the production as whole creates poor resource distribution, inequality, crisis, etc., so to try and fix the production as a whole we could fix this one contradiction by struggling to change the private property to socialized property. We would then find that although there were improvements, there are still problems (other contradictions) within the system.
So we can see that the answer to solving the internal contradictions within a system lies inside those contradictions themselves, even with those contradictions being only a part of the whole system and the solution of one not leading to the solution of the whole system.
I think I see what you mean here. You’re talking about the system of rules set up by a society as being the external framework that the internal selection pressures stem from. The overarching framework is the overarching context that guides the evolution of the system as a whole. I definitely agree with that, and that is the argument I’m trying to make in the book as well.
Actually it’s the other way around, the framework is given by the contradictions and therefore internally, while the pressures that affect them are usually external, the combination of both is what leads the system’s evolution.
The framework itself acts as the source of the pressures and contradictions however. For example, capitalist system of relations is a framework that rewards particular types of behaviors, and this creates selection pressures within society. The contradictions arise as a product of the system operating within its framework of rules that society agrees upon. Things like exploitation of the workers by the capital owning class create stresses within society that end up needing to be resolved.
Sorry to bother you again with this conversation after 3 months have passed, but this sentence has come back to me a couple of times during this period due to how poorly it was dealt with by me, and just how it crucial it was to our discussion, so I will now attempt to correct that.
Structuralism differs form Marxism in that it tries to take Marxist advancements on sociology and understanding of the structures of society while refuting the knowability of the internal contradictions within said society, therefore negating the existence of the internal contradiction that lead to capitalism’s demise. They claim that the problems of capitalist society are consequences of poor implementation of the system, and consequently believe that with just a change in policies and general politics the problems can be fixed, therefore it is the philosophy which gives birth to reformists.
The way that structuralism achieves that separation from Marxist conclusions is by following the agnostic logic of compromising materialism with idealism, in its specific case, it is Marxist sociology with fichtean subjective idealism, it turns Fichte “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” into reality-ideas-structures.
Out of the top of wikipedia’s page on structuralism: "Structuralism is “The belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations.”. (Things are unknowable but their interrelations are knowable, classic agnostic muddle.)
Out of the top of wikipedia’s page on Post-structuralism: “Structuralism proposes that human culture can be understood by means of a structure that is modeled on language. As a result, there is concrete reality on the one hand, abstract ideas about reality on the other hand, and a “third order” that mediates between the two.” (reality-ideas-structures.)
Looking back in our discussion, you said “I’m not sure there’s much value separating external and internal conditions though as both ultimately feed into the system.”, but to study a thing with Dialectical Materialism it is a necessary step to separate from its current context in order to discover its internal contradictions, which is why in his texts Marx himself does so many abstractions, to allow him to understand the internal movements of things.
The condition that materialism demands of every theory, that it must be put to the test of reality, does not mean that one shouldn’t use abstractions when creating said theory, in fact it is quite the opposite if we look at Marxism.
Looking even further into our discussion, we can see that it went through this contradiction where I was attempting to simplify things in order to make more apparent the differences between philosophies, mentioning eggs, water, etc., while you kept complicating matters by bringing more complex and bigger things, such as society, environment, etc., making the discussion less clear and hiding misunderstandings behind big words.
While it did annoy me at the time, which lead to my last comment, I can now understand that it wasn’t personal, it is of philosophical necessity that agnosticism muddles things, for when the matter being dealt with is clear and simple, the separation that it tries to create between knowable and unknowable loses all reasoning, which is why we can’t just discuss over an egg hatching into a chicken, we must to consider how the “chicken will proceed to eat food, produce waste, and so on. It’s part of the environment, and it has a direct effect on the environment.” and therefore we can only comprehend it as a structure and not its specific parts, as Lenin would say, pure muddle.
Having explained all this, it would be incoherent of me to leave the same books recommendations as I did last time, considering we can now see that the divergence comes before we get to dialectics, it is between materialism and agnosticism, I will then recommend a single book on the matter, Lenin’s “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”. Even though it was written before Structuralism was a thing, it goes on such great detail on the differences between the logic of materialism and agnosticism in general (and idealism as well) that it provides the best method of understanding what separates those fields of philosophy.
May this help you to comprehend the differences between philosophies and the necessity that materialism has of objective knowledge and it’s complete compromise with the truth, Good Luck comrade.
My key point here was that all the inputs matter, and we can’t focus on just the internal inputs without considering the effects of the external ones. We can certainly identify internal contradictions, but we have to be aware of the fact that they are in turn influenced by external factors.
As an example, many of the contradictions within USSR were a result of the fact that USSR was under siege by the capitalist world. The phenomenon Parenti refers to as siege communism. The external factors necessarily affected the way USSR developed internally.
In fact, lack of accounting for external factors is precisely what leads to flawed analysis of USSR on the left where people decry it being authoritarian and abandoning original policies in favor of using a more centralized system. The actual reasons for these internal developments can only be understood when accounting for the surrounding context.
At first I was shocked of reading this, on a ML instance of all places, to take Parenti’s siege socialism and attempt to make it as the result of some kind of struturalistc analysis feels unbelievable, but considering that our discussion has been around the fact that you’d rather use an agnostic analysis over a materialistic one, and that you don’t follow Hegelian dialectics and therefore the term “contradiction” means whatever you want, it’s then possible to see how one could claim such absurdities.
Let’s then actually quote the man himself:
Parenti literally wrote that the external influences exacerbated the internal contradictions already present within the system, because he was using dialectical materialism and therefore saw first the existence of internal contradictions and then those being affected by the external influences, not the other way around as you claimed.
I need to say, having never had a discussion with a western “leftist” before, even though I somewhat knew what to expect, it is still impressive seeing it first hand how one can believe to make no mistakes and their arguments don’t require any proof since they personally own the truth, thinking that repeated enough times anything they say will become real.
Leaving that aside, this recent discussion has left me with a question which I look forward to the answer. If you can dismiss dialectical materialism so easily in favor of a struturalistic analysis, and don’t care about Hegelian dialectics, why were you writing about diamat in the first place?
You continue to put words in my mouth while ignoring what I’m actually saying. I am very much using materialistic analysis, but you keep labelling it as agnostic while failing to actually engage with what’s being said to you.
Except I did not claim the other way around anywhere. What I said is that internal contradictions are influenced by external factors. Which is precisely what Parenti identifies.
Given that I grew up in USSR, this is the most hilarious thing I’ve been told in a while. I have to give you credit for the level of sophistication in your trolling. It took me a while to catch on.
Maybe you should spend a bit of time to actually understand what dialectical materialism is instead of writing pseudo intellectual comments.