Dialectical Materialism Study Group

As an aid to this study I strongly recommend comrades listen to the lectures on philosophy on mp3 here http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?t=44022

We will begin with a study of religion, if you have a chance you should also skim over the prefaces.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalhei ... mat/01.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalhei ... mat/02.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalhei ... mat/00.htm

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We shall now consider these two sources of religion, first of all in the most primitive social forms. As for dependence upon nature: it is clear that the less developed men are - technically and economically - so much more dependent are they upon nature, and they aye more inclined to view all natural phenomena through the eyes of religious fantasy. If you consider primitive man, armed with only the most elementary implements of stone, bone, or wood, scarcely able to sustain life by hunting, fishing, etc., it is clear that from such relations of dependence upon nature the most varied religious ideas must develop. Or take the primitive farmer: he is extremely dependent upon the forces of nature, on the sun, the wind, the rain, on the river which flows past his land. As long as man is style='letter-spacing:.2pt'>unable to supervise all these relations, to foresee them, and conquer them technically to a certain degree, he will seek mastery over these things through religious Ideas. In this connection I want to remind you of the distinctive characteristics of the ancient religion of China, which naturally is a religion of farmers; in it

the forces of nature which are most important for the farmer, such as rain, the heavens, the stars, etc., play a decisive role in the religious idea. If you consider the different social forms and their religions you will find that they always stand in exceedingly close connection with the way in which such a society stands in relation to nature. I do not wish to go into any further detail on this question, but simply to indicate the general aspect of the matter.

The second source from which the religious idea flows is the social relations of men with each other. These social relations show that the individual man in society is dependent upon the whole, that over against him a higher power is placed. In early times the society as a whole exercised a very powerful influence upon the individual, and the subordination of the individual to the family and to the tribe was extraordinarily great. For the individual, morals, laws, customs, usages and precepts of universal scope had the force of imperative commands. But their meaning and purpose were not generally, not even in the majority of instances, clear to the individual or understood by him. Conformity was instinctive, automatic. Primitive society was itself still a kind of natural organism. Its codes, precepts, customs, etc., affected individuals just like the uncomprehended forces of nature. Indeed, primitive social organizations in general reacted to their own regulations as they did to theseinmutable forces of nature. And from this characteristic of social organization there naturally arose the religious idea as its support and sanction. For example: everywhere in the South Seas we have the so-called tabu-commandments, that is, commandments which declare that such and such groups of men must not hunt and eat such and such animals at certain times, or not collect and eat certain plants. Such commandments once had a distinct significance. They were equivalent to the regulation of production; they effected a kind of division of labor and a kind of regulation of consumption. But these commandments later became obscure, became automatic. From them certain religious commandments developed to the effect that such and such spirits, demons, etc., had issued such and such commandments and would see to their observance by threat of punishment.

Still another example that comes very close to home: one of the oldest, perhaps the oldest religious idea is that of reverence for the souls of the dead, the spirits of the ancestors. Even in the most primitive religious ideas this plays a very important role. The spirits of the ancestors cannot be explained as the personification of a natural phenomenon, but they can easily be explained in terms of social relations. The souls of the dead, which are revered by their descendants, preserve the continuity, in the imagination of course, between ancestors and descendants. They assure thecontinuous recognition of the traditional social order. The ancestral spirit of the family or the tribe personifies its order. Especially potent sources of religious ideas develop when class conflicts come to the fore, for then religious ideas become a means through which the ruling class holds the exploited and oppressed class in obedience and subjection. Moreover, as soon as class conflicts arise in the course of the social division of labor, there emerges a distinct class or caste which specializes in religious matters, namely, the priests. This class is more or less freed from direct productive labor and lives upon the surplus product of the others. For this priestly caste religious ideas become a means by which to support and preserve their privileged status in society. We must not think of this matter as if it were sheer imposture. On the contrary, this class or caste, like their ideas, grew out of social and natural relations. Hence they became just as widely accepted by the mass of people as by the priests. They constituted a world-view adapted to primitive relationships and to primitive methods of thought. As a dialectical materialist one must recognize that for a certain limited period this priesthood played a progressive role. In a time when men had to exert themselves to the utmost to produce even the barest essentials of life, the priests represented a social stratum which did not directly participate in labor and, therefore, could occupy themselves with a number of socially important problems for which this very freedom from directly productive labor was prerequisite. Thus it was the priests who first developed the elements of science. The beginnings of astronomy can be traced back to the Egyptian and Babylonian priests; the first elements of geometry were discovered by priests; they discovered how to measure land; they developed the ground-plan for constructing temples; they predicted the rise and fall of the waters of the Nile, etc. The priestly caste developed the seeds which, in the form of philosophy and natural science, finally put an end to all priests and all religion.

Background material on August Thalheimer
Introduction - from Revolutionary History

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August Thalheimer (1884-1948) was a member of the German Social Democratic Party before the First World War, and editor of one of its papers, the Volksfreund. From 1916 he assisted in the production of the Spartakusbriefe, was a member of the USPD (Independent Socialists) from 1917, and a founder member of the German Communist Party (KPD). He quickly rose to prominence as the party’s main theoretician, being editor of Rote Fahne as well as of Franz Mehring’s manuscripts left unpublished at his death.

During the 1923 crisis he was Minister of Finance in the Württemburg local government, was subsequently blamed along with Brandler for the debâcle, and was called to Moscow in 1924, where he worked in the Communist International apparat, as well as for the Marx-Engels Institute. His lectures delivered at the Sun Yat-Sen University in 1927 were published as a textbook in philosophy (which appeared in English as Introduction to Dialectical Materialism, New York, 1936), and he also worked on the draft programme of the Comintern along with Bukharin. Pressure from the KPD, still uneasy with the leadership of Thälmann, secured his return to Germany in 1928, but a year later he was expelled from the KPD along with Brandler, and they went on to form the KPO, or Brandlerites.

The Brandlerite organisation restricted most of its criticisms to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, whilst maintaining that its domestic operations were basically healthy. Thalheimer insisted that: ‘We do not want to draw the conclusion that as the politics of the Comintern are wrong, it must follow that the politics of Russia are also wrong.’ (GdST, 4/1931) Thalheimer himself supported forced collectivisation and Stakhanovism, and whilst in Barcelona became involved in a heated argument with Nin over the POUM’s condemnation of the first Moscow Trial.

In exile in Paris from 1932 onwards, Thalheimer went to Spain in 1936, and then back to France again where the KPO’s exile organisation worked. When six members of the KPO were arrested in Barcelona by the Stalinists and charged with the usual crimes in July 1937, he issued a statement co-signed by Brandler saying that:

‘We take upon ourselves any political and personal guarantee for our arrested comrades. They are anti-Fascists and revolutionaries, incapable of any action that could be construed as high treason to the Spanish Revolution.’

They were not to stay long in Paris. In 1940 France fell to Hitler, and Thalheimer fled to Cuba, where he died in 1948.

I recently encountered the "five proofs of Saint Aquinas" on another forum.

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Aquinas's Proofs 1 to 3

1 - FIRST MOVER: Some things are in motion, anything moved is moved by another, and there can't be an infinite series of movers. So there must be a first mover (a mover that isn't itself moved by another). This is God.

2 - FIRST CAUSE: Some things are caused, anything caused is caused by another, and there can't be an infinite series of causes. So there must be a first cause (a cause that isn't itself caused by another). This is God.

3 - NECESSARY BEING: Every contingent being at some time fails to exist. So if everything were contingent, then at some time there would have been nothing -- and so there would be nothing now -- which is clearly false. So not everything is contingent. So there is a necessary being. This is God.

Aquinas's Proofs 4 and 5

4 - GREATEST BEING: Some things are greater than others. Whatever is great to any degree gets its greatness from that which is the greatest. So there is a greatest being, which is the source of all greatness. This is God.

5 - INTELLIGENT DESIGNER: Many things in the world that lack intelligence act for an end. Whatever acts for an end must be directed by an intelligent being. So the world must have an intelligent designer. This is God.

I wasn't sure how to approach this at first, but then I remembered about dialectics, which I think deals with all of them directly except for the fifth. (For the fifth I said it simply supported the idea of forces, but not necessarily a god)

To address the first, motion isn't caused by some "first motion" but by opposites. I haven't gotten a reply yet and probably won't, but one thing I'm thinking... does this really dismiss the idea of there being a creator? Where did the the original opposites come from?

I'm having trouble looking at this clearly so I thought I'd bring it up here.

There is the Epicurean position that matter is eternal and has always existed. This is somewhat refuted by the big bang. However modern science has recently suggested that our universe will someday collapse into another big bang. This would support the theory that matter is eternal.

Take a look at this Dialectical analysis of the big bang
http://www.marxist.com/science/bigbang.html

I think that in refuting religion we must do more than simply find the logical inconsistencies in theism. Or ridicule a particular passage in the Bible.

This is the campaign that Bob Avakian has against religion, and while there is certainly merit in scientifically examining religious claims, we can not hope to refute the faithful in that manner.

Dawkins likewise focuses more on the logical fallacies inherent in religion rather than attempting to understand its
material origins. This is not to say that the work of Biblical scholars, and logicians in refuting religion is worthless. But ultimately to negate religion we must preserve it.
Dawkins does make an excellent point about how belief in an afterlife causes us to neglect our interests in the material world. Pie in the sky. This is the cause of both submission and fanaticism.

The true refutation of religion comes through the works of Hegel, Feuerbach and Engels. They explored the spirit and rationality behind religion. The fundamental truth that exists within religion. And they preserve the rational kernel in philosophy and then science.

As we study the two chapters on religion, the focus will be not on ridiculing particular Biblical passages, but understanding the material basis behind mystical beliefs.

Here is an interesting passage on why even in a scientific capitalist society, religion continues to hold sway
http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalhei ... mat/02.htm

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Now to turn to the sources and role of religion in modern capitalistic society. One might at first believe that religion today no longer has any basis in capitalistic society, since this society's relation to nature is entirely different from that of all previous societies. Whereas primitive man found himself in extreme dependence upon nature, and whereas such was still the case to a great degree even in the Middle Ages, in modern capitalistic society we have a technology and natural science which enable man to master nature and which contain the possibility of immeasurably extending this mastery. No modern natural scientist believes in magic formulas. The technologist who wants to produce some machine will not go about it like an Australian magician or a Siberian Shaman, but he will attend to the known qualities and behavior of his material and then produce a machine accordingly. It thus seems strange that under such conditions religious ideas can still be present in modern capitalistic society. But the source of these ideas in modern capitalistic society is not nature; it is society itself. The significant fact here is that the ruling class knows well enough the methods of mastering nature, but knows no methods of planfully mastering society. As you know from our reading in political economy, the capitalist social order is throughout characterized by the fact that it does not produce planfully as a whole, but that in it blind anarchy reigns. Capitalistic society does not control its own economic and social life; rather, every individual and society as a whole is controlled by that life. Thus capitalist society copes with its own economy not otherwise than the Australian savage copes with lightning, thunder or rain. This characteristic of capitalist society is brought into sharpest relief in times of economic crises, in times of war and revolution. In an economic crisis hundreds of thousands of livelihoods are extinguished without the individual being able to defend himself against it, without his being able to escape this fate. Capitalist economy runs its course from depression to extreme prosperity, from prosperity to crisis, without being able to influence this development, without being able to foresee the occurrence of the crisis, without being able to avert it. Ever more extensive become these catastrophes which sweep over capitalist society in times of war, when millions of men are killed, when millions in goods are destroyed - and capitalist society is unable to do anything about it. No one wants millions of men to be killed, no one wants millions in goods to be destroyed, and yet capitalist society is powerless to protect itself against this. Indeed, it is capitalist competition itself which leads to such crises, and to the solution of these crises through wars and through revolutions.

These facts completely explain why religious ideas have not expired even in modern capitalist society, why they have social roots here, and also why they continue to exist and why they will continue to exist as long as this social base exists. It is significant that religious currents in their cruder or more refined forms surge up most strongly in the ruling class in times of such crises, wars, or revolutions. You all know - or perhaps you do not, but it is a fact - that a new religious movement sprang up among the European bourgeoisie during the World War. New religions currents also appeared in conjunction with the revolutions which marked the close of the World War. We have an extraordinarily strong revival and spread of spiritualism or occultism that calls for belief in spirits or ghosts. This is a belief which is no different from the belief of the Bushmen. And besides these crude forms of religion there are refined forms which are not recognizable at first glance; forms which are more or less related to the primitive beliefs of early man that the souls of the dead exist independently of their bodies and that they can influence human life. In such times as the present when the development of the European bourgeoisie is on the downward path, when they perceive opposed to them the proletarian revolution, religion becomes for them too a means of consolation and invigoration, a prop on which they support themselves when the ground begins to slip from under their feet.

There have, however, been times when the bourgeoisie fought against religion. These were times when the Church formed a part of those classes against which the bourgeoisie had to organize their revolution, when the Church was bound together with feudalism and with absolute monarchy. At such periods, although they were only very brief, the bourgeoisie became anti-religious and called upon the people to combat religion and the church. But as soon as the bourgeoisie had conquered power with the help of the people and was seated in authority, it always reversed its stand, for it discovered that religion was also an excellent support for its political and economic authority. We shall speak later of the period when the bourgeoisie prepared its revolution and waged war on the church and religion. By and large, however, such periods were of short duration. As soon as they found it to their interests to keep the great masses in a state of oppression, they transformed religion into a means of authority, a spiritual means of oppression against the great mass of the people.

Here is another great passage on the negation of religion
http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalhei ... mat/03.htm

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It may be asked: What takes the place of religion after it is destroyed? To this the best answer is an aphorism of the poet Goethe, who said: "He who has art and science, has religion; he who has neither art nor science, ought to have religion," i.e., such a person needs religion. What a man like Goethe claimed only for a small group of highly cultured people but would deny to the great masses will apply to all. In bourgeois society some could become intellectually free; in a fully developed socialist society all can become free. This matter we must also view as dialectical materialists. From our general survey we have seen that while today it is a hindrance to social development that only a small number of the privileged have the material opportunity to become free, formerly, due to the underdeveloped state of the forces of production, it was a necessary prerequisite for the creation of conditions which now make the material and intellectual emancipation of the broad mass of the people possible. The emancipation of a minority from immediate productive work - of certain classes, castes, or ranks - was prerequisite to for the development of natural science and technology, which, as soon as the necessary social conditions are created, provide the material possibility for the free cultural development of all. In this connection, I want to point out to you what is meant by historical dialectics. You have already met the term several times. From this instance we see that it means that a phenomenon which is necessary under certain conditions and signifies progress, under changed historical conditions straightway changes to its opposite and becomes a hindrance to further development. In the role of religion in different historical periods we see the elucidation of the universal law of historical development, namely, development through opposites or contradictions. We shall further see that this law of development through contradictions is valid not only for historical motion, but that it is a law of all motion.

The Nine Letters on the RCP has an interesting section on religion, that I think reveals some of the complexities involved in religious faith.
http://mikeely.wordpress.com/letter-5/

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You can’t challenge Christian morality by crudely equating it with venality — with Old Testament “horrors” or the ugliest “traditional values.” You also have to deal (in truly dialectical ways) with Jesus’ admonitions to “love your brother” and “turn the other cheek.” You have to deal with grace, redemption, forgiveness, reconciliation, charity and hope for blessings — in other words, you have to all-sidedly deal (critically!) with what actually attracts people to Christian teachings.

Just so that we are not too Euro-centric here is an analysis of how some of the more radical sects of Hinduism contained within them the fundamental truth of materialism.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalhei ... mat/06.htm

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The most radical form of criticism of Brahmanism, a criticism which went beyond the bounds of religion, was ancient Indian materialism, of which I shall now speak. This ancient Indian materialism certainly existed in 500 B.C., that is to say, simultaneously with Buddhism. In all probability it existed even somewhat earlier than Buddhism. Unfortunately this ancient Indian materialism is known to us only through statements of it made by opponents - the Brahmanist scholars - so that much of what was said about ancient Indian materialism is slander and misrepresentation. This ancient materialism was called Lokayata, derived from an old Indian word, Loka, meaning the (secular) world. It is thus the theory of laymen, as opposed to the theory of priests. The theory was also called Tcharwaka, from Tscharv (to eat greedily). This is the name which the opponents of the doctrine gave to it. They wanted to describe it as a theory of men whose eating and drinking are their chief concern. These materialists directed an extremely sharp attack against the Brahmans. Their aim was to break the monopoly of the Brahman priests and establish complete religious freedom. As merchants these materialists had a great interest in religious tolerance.

I will briefly describe the main theories of this ancient Indian materialism. It maintained that the source of all knowledge is simply sensory experience. They did not recognize the authority of religious revelation; but neither did they recognize the course of reason, the drawing of conclusions from given experiences, as the source of knowledge. Only immediate sensory experience is the source of all knowledge: all spirituality arises, according to this conception, from the material, from the four elements (which they had in common with the Greeks). Thought they considered as an activity of matter, matter alone is knowable and real. There is no hereafter and no immortality of the soul. The priests, they say, are deceivers and buffoons who perform their sacrifices, their ceremonies, etc., in order to cheat the people and live on the sacrifices. These materialists were also opposed to the Buddhists. One of the basic doctrines of Buddhism is that all is sorrow and that all pleasures of the world are illusory and had. To that the materialists answer: it is absurd to condemn pleasures because they are mixed with sorrow and dissatisfaction. Man does not throw rice away because the kernel is wrapped in a rough shell.

Indian materialism provides a good bridge from religion to philosophy. Ironically in Greece materialism developed before idealism. Many of the theories of Greek materialism are relevant to modoern science- although they were largely incredibly lucky guesses. Most of the chapter focuses on how material conditions created ideals. Below is the section where the main contributions of the pre-Socratics is outlined:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalhei ... mat/03.htm

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I now turn to the most important Ionian philosophers of nature and their doctrines. The earliest of these philosophers of nature, also called the father of philosophy, is a certain Thales of Miletus. At this time Miletus was the richest of all the commercial cities of Asia Minor. She commanded a great merchant fleet andruled over a great tract of land. Very little of the theory of Thales has come down to us. But it is characteristic of him that he had a natural theory of the origin of the world. This, indeed, is one of the first questions which religion also seeks to answer: "How did the world begin?" Thales tried to give a natural explanation of this. The world, he said, came into being from water. This was the "beginning" and the true essence of all things. It was reasoned that all the other elements (at that time the elements were divided into water, fire, air, and earth) derived from water. This was based on the notion that all substances were unitary, that all substances were capable of changing into each other. Of course, this early philosophy could not establish this assertion in a manner such as is employed by chemistry today. The idea that life first originated from water was also part of the theory. You knows that modern natural science explains that all land animals arose from sea animals and that life first appeared in the sea. Hence, this proposition contains, as we see, an ingenious presentiment of future discoveries. It is natural that Thales should have hit upon the idea that water was the material source of the universe, living, as he did, in a commercial city that lay by the sea. It was a city in constant contact with this element of continually changing appearance, this element teeming with an inexhaustible wealth of living creatures useful to men - a city for which the sea was the foundation of economic life. It is also asserted of Thales that he made great advances in astronomy and geometry. He is said to have made journeys to the Egyptian priests, from whom he obtained a great deal of his knowledge. This indicates that the knowledge of the Egyptian priests became one of the starting points for philosophy. The Egyptian priests had a special motive for developing natural philosophy. Egyptian life depends upon artificial irrigation from the Nile. Without artificial irrigation the land would be a desert. In order to be able to regulate irrigation, the priests had to be able to predict the time of the Nile's ebb and flow. And to do this they had to observe the stars. Irrigation, like the building of temples, required surveying the land. These were the motives which led the Egyptian priests to develop the elements of surveying and astronomy, as well as of mathematics. "These elements were taken over, systematized, and further developed by the first Greek philosophers of nature.

More on Greek Materialism
From the further development of Greek materialistic philosophy I shall select only the most prominent names and schools - Anaximander, Heraclitus and the Atomists, most prominent of whom are Democritus and Empedocles.

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I begin with Anaximander. Like Thales of Miletus, he comes from the renowned Greek commercial city of which we have already spoken. He lived somewhat after Thales. His theory is characterized by the proposition that the world has emerged from formless stuff, from unformed homogeneous matter, as he called it. The development of this matter or of this formless stuff occurs through its separation into contradictory elements. This is the way the heavenly bodies came into being, the sun and the other stars. Man developed from fish-like beings which had taken to the land. To this conception of the world, of the planets, and of life, Anaximander added the conception of the future decline of the world. If the emergence of the world consists in the division of matter, in the breaking up of matter into opposite elements, then the decline of the world, of individual beings, consists in dissolution of these elements. According to Anaximander's theory matter is eternal and indestructible. As you see, it is a fairly broadly constructed theory of the development of the world, a theory which is completely materialistic, that is, deriving from natural causes. One cannot help being astonished at its correctness in the large, at a time when all the great accomplishments of modern natural science were lacking.

Please visit the new Ira Gollobin (author of Dialectical Materialism) website at - www.iragollobin.com and click on the e-mail link to leave your e-mail address for notice when the site is fully launched about July 20.

Sincerely,

mediateam@iragollobin.com

Oh boy...I have my copy of The Algebra of Revolution - The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition right here. It is a shame that I only got as far as buying it and having it signed by John Rees. I still have to read the damn thing.

Thank you Comrades, for your collective thoughts on this matter.

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It may be asked: What takes the place of religion after it is destroyed? To this the best answer is an aphorism of the poet Goethe, who said: "He who has art and science, has religion; he who has neither art nor science, ought to have religion,"

This is very interesting, because it shows that Communism strives to re-define religion, away from theocracy, and toward material philosophy. Wrapped-up in this process, is the rhetoric of the destruction of religion as it currently stands. But surely it is more to the point, to suggest that religion as a concept, rather than being 'destroyed' as such, is actually being evolved?

There are already existing Indian religions/philosophies that are atheistic - i.e. Buddhism and certain types of Hinduism. The mind is declared all important, and we find Marx and Engels echoing this. when they re-define 'spirituality' as the use of the 'consciousness' for advanced thought;

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'...The class that possesses the means of material production, by virtue of this also poossesses the means of spiritual production... This individuals composing the ruling class possess, among other things, consciousness as well, and by virtue of this, think in so far, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and scope of an epoch.'

Kalinin: On Communist Education)

Is it too late for me to express an interest in this discussion?
It looks really interesting.

Its never too late if you have something valid to say.

The development of dialectical materialism in the USSR is a bit of a mystery to me. The official textbooks on diamat present it as a completed system, so it is difficult to trace the historic evolution of its' doctrines. Many of its' features were already laid out by Plekhanov and Deborin even before 1917. I think there was some talk about the issue of form and content in Deborin's work which Lenin commented on. But during Stalin's rule diamat was reduced to the 4 laws, and I'm not aware of any discussion of categories. In the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era, A. P. SHEPTULIN made the case that the categories of diamat were even more important than the laws. You can read his works here-
http://leninist.biz/en/1978/MLP519/
http://leninist.biz/en/1977/PU268/

According to the sovietologist "studies in soviet thought", the categories were developed during the post-stalin thaw and were initially wide-ranging including physical ones like time-space and sociological ones like base-superstructure. They eventually solidified intot he 6 categories.

Although Mao's lectures on dialectical materialism includes the 6 lesser categories, based on 1930s Soviet textbooks, so it seems the categories go at least as far back to the 1930s. Chinese diamat also contains the categories, and they seem to be consitant with Mao's later view that the law of contradiction was the ONLY law of diamat, and all others were simply specific instances of the struggle of opposites. Each category consists of an antimony.

The categories have received far less attention than Engels' 3 laws, although in some ways they are more specific and relevant to direct praxis.

The 6 categories are
1. Cause and effect
2. form and content
3. necessity and chance (freedom)
4. essence (reality) and appearance (phenomenon)
5. possibility and reality
6. particular and universal

Most of these categories go all the way back to Aristotle and even Plato, and were developed in western philosophy by the stoics, scholastics, and eventually Kant and Hegel.

Can somebody please explain dialectics to me in layman's term?

I wouldn't even dare try to explain dialectics, but I've been playing with it for a while now, only now I seem to understand it more and more.

Mabool wrote:

Oh God this is embarrassing.

I'll, uh, get back to it.

I DEMAND SATISFACTION, KNAVE.

Okay I'll just try to write something like a basic outline and then you can come back at me asking questions.

Open your eyes. You see a bunch of stuff. This stuff is what we call objects, and this assemblage of objects is what we call reality.

Open Wikipedia. You learn that it's all just made up of electrons and actually the world is really just a bunch of elementary particles in motion.

Compare. This is what you see:



This is what it is:



Obviously the difference is huge.

So actually the entire world is just a huge chaotic mess of moving energy. Now what's incredibly fascinating about this is is that some parts of this moving energy have developed consciousness. These parts have called themselves brains and decided that they're located in other parts of moving energy that are called bodies.

Now when consciousness focuses on the world, it doesn't see moving energy, but objects. What this basically means is that consciousness slices some parts out of the infinite moving energy and calls them objects. This is where subjectivity enters the picture; for instance two people standing in a library can look in exactly the same direction and the one will see "a bunch of books" while the other will see "OMG THERES A SPIDER ON THESE COLLECTED WORKS OF WITTGENSTEIN ;_;! I HATE SPIDERS!"

They're both confronted with the same infinite mass of moving energy, they're just apprehending it entirely differently - "slicing" different objects out of it. So basically this means that there are no objects, only processes (interdependent "streams" of moving matter) and we construct our reality by apprehending objects, that is, by turning these processes into objects in our mind. This is how dialectical materialism overcomes both the limitations of crude materialism and of extreme idealism (solipsism) - obviously, the world is different to everybody, but that's not because we create it with our minds, but because everybody interprets objective reality differently.

Okay, so these are the basics. Now you've probably learned that dialectics is all about contradictions: thesis and antithesis, and synthesis, and interpenetration of opposites, blah, blah. So here's what that means:

Whenever we apprehend an object, we're simultaneously constructing a contradiction around it. When I apprehend a cigarette, I slice it out of infinity - that means, I'm constructing the contradiction of "cigarette" vs. "non-cigarette", or, in other terms, "cigarette" vs. "the rest of the world". Meaning that whenever we focus on anything, a contradiction appears as we penetrate deeper into reality. Because as soon as I focus on the cigarette, I notice the contradiction of "filter" vs. "rest of it", when I focus on "rest of it", it splits up into "tobacco" vs. "paper", and so on. Obviously these contradictions exist only in our heads because the world is one. Infinity is non-contradictory, that's why we can't grasp it. Our interpretation, our understanding of the world, depends on contradictions. (Compare God.)

When child is born and begins understanding the world, it starts to construct its very own "version of reality" by constructing its very own set of contradictions: Infinity is subdivided, first into "suckable vs. non-suckable" objects, later into "mommy vs. non-mommy", "me" vs. "non-me", "home" vs. "non-home" (the latter subdividing further into "kindergarten vs. playground") etc. This is how our social environment creates our reality, our "nature".

So that's where the contradictions come from.

Everything is apprehended by distinguishing it from its surroundings, meaning that "non-cigarette" is necessary for a cigarette to exist (remember that all these exist only in our heads! We're talking about the existence of ideas here!) - that's the interpenetration of opposites. Likewise, a bourgeoisie is necessary for a proletariat to exist, to come back to more traditionally Marxist ways of putting it. Poverty necessitates wealth, summer necessitates winter, and so on - for what concept would we have of summer if it never got colder? Summer is defined as the antithesis to winter

- so that's what thesis and antithesis mean.

About synthesis:

In light of all the above, of course, it makes most sense to say that our mental idea of the world consists of object representations (or "concepts") of which every person has their own unique set (even though language, of course, makes it possible for us to have more or less the same conceptual system so we can communicate - a car is a car is a car, no matter whom you talk to, and it translates neatly into "voiture") and which must be distinguished from "the world" which is just infinite matter. Whenever something new appears and we apprehend it, we create a new object representation for it. To do so, we resort to object representations which were already there. So when capitalism turns into something new, we call this new "object" (or rather concept) "dictatorship of the proletariat", which is obviously a combination of two concepts we already had in our minds before socialism appeared: "dictatorship" and "proletariat", neither of which depend on socialism for their existence, but on which socialism inextricably depends.

(At this point, I recommend that you take a break from reading this and read this thread in its entirety: viewtopic.php?f=107&t=50656)

Negation (of the negation):

Whenever something disappears, it's negated. In classical dialectical terms we say that "things turn into their opposites", and since, as outlined above, the opposite of a table is merely "not a table", obviously the negation of a table is a table that is not a table anymore, either because you destroy it with an axe or because you leave it to rot until it disintegrates. The negation of dictatorship, is of course, communism. And because the dictatorship in itself is only the negation of primitive communism, communism is commonly called "the negation of the negation". Another NON would be a tree dying, disintegrating, becoming soil, thereby becoming the basis for a new tree to grow. Or an entire forest, actually - NON is just a nice concept to explain the cyclical nature of progress, but, as Lenin says, on ever higher levels - when the slave holding society collapsed, it reproduced as feudalism, which, after it collapsed, reproduced as capitalism, which will reproduce as socialism, at which point the entire class system will be negated and communism appears as negation of the negation that was the class system.

But again, since all of this exists only in our heads (there are no trees, just moving leptons, quarks and bosons, all of which are just energy) it's actually just a metaphor for how we see recurring patterns in everything new that develops, just like the first cars were referred to as "carriages without horses". Dialectics is not a way to predict any kind of future developments - at best, it's a way to make educated guesses for how we'll apprehend new developments.

Okay, that's all I can be bothered to explain atm.

To see dialectics in action, here's some quotes from the first chapter of capital, with my explanations for how they reflect dialectics and the awesome understanding that Marx had of it (so you understand what I was so excited about):

(I'll just retranslate this spontaneously because it's much easier to skim through my German book than to skim through the English text on Marxists.org, so if something is not entirely clear to you, do not hesitate to look it up in a more professional translation because it's probably much better than mine.)

Quote:

Every useful thing, like iron, paper, etc., is to be evaluated from two perspectives: Quality and quantity. Every such thing is a whole composed of many properties, and can, therefore, be useful in different ways. To discover these different ways, and thereby, the variable usefulness of things, is an historical act.

So what Marx does here is to move from the abstract to the concrete: This is what the dialectical method consists of, we begin with an abstract concept and introduce contradictions into it, that is, we subdivide it, to end up with a detailed perspective on the real world. So Marx starts the abstract "thing", then introduces the contradiction of "quality" vs. "quantity", then subdividing "quality" into "different ways to use a thing". This corresponds perfectly to what I said above about how children discover the world. Then, by saying that it's "an historical act" to discover the usefulness of things, he re-emphasizes how it all depends on the intersubjective, social perspective that humans have on things.

Quote:

The usefulness of a thing turns it into use value. But this usefulness does not hover in the air. (he means, it doesn't exist by itself) As it depends on the physical properties of the commodity, it does not exist without it.

...just like summer doesn't exist without winter, or a cigarette without non-cigarette; interpenetration of opposites, the dependence of things upon another, the unity of the world.

Quote:

The use value is only realized when it is used or consumed.

Its "realization" is the synthesis of man and commodity, it arises out of their "combination", or rather, of man's praxis.

Quote:

Let us now have a look at the remainder of the labor products. Nothing is left of them but that same spooky concreteness, a pure "jelly" of indifferent human labor, i.e., the expense of human labor without respect to the specific kind of this expense. These things only represent that human labor has been used, "piled up", to produce them. As crystals of this common substance, they are - values.

The reverse of the first example; Marx moves from the concrete (the specific kind of [labor]) to the abstract (indifferent human labor) - he takes a step back and lets the contradictions disappear in the distance. This is what I meant when I expressed awe at how masterfully he manages abstraction and concretion. (In fact, to "abstract" literally means to "pull away"...)

Quote:

The use values "jacket", "cloth", etc., in a word, the commodity bodies, are combinations of two elements, natural substance and labor. If you substract the sum of all different useful kinds of labor that are embodied in jackets, cloths, etc., a material substrate, which was provided by nature, always remains. In his production, man can only act like nature itself does, that is, he can only change the form of matter.

What we have here is labor. Labor is a kind of praxis. Praxis, is, in turn, the opposite of apprehension. Apprehension is the way in which the infinite moving matter acts upon our consciousness. Praxis is the way in which our consciousness acts upon matter. Labor is the way in which praxis permanently changes matter according to our wishes. In labor, a new concept appears in our consciousness and matter is forced to conform to it. In apprehension, nature presents us with something new and we are forced to synthesize a new object representation so our internal representation of the world conforms with nature. In labor, we come up with new object representations by ourselves and force nature to conform with them, by synthesizing matter into something new that fits them.

That's basically it, I guess.

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Divides_Into_Two (follow the link at the bottom of the page)

that post is BEAUTIFUL!