The Early Days of a Better Nation

Posted 8:09 pm by Ken

From unidentified flying objects to the speeches of Brezhnev

Things change, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. When they change enough, whether slowly or suddenly, they may change into something else. Things are connected to other things, to an extent that we can't imagine but can find out, and we won't go far wrong if we imagine that everything is connected to everything else.

In other words, everything has a history, and everything has a context. For practical reasons we may have to think about things as if they weren't changing, and as if they were separate things, just there by themselves. But when we're trying to really understand how the world works, we have to remember that our ideas about things may have been formed by leaving aside the changes going on in them, and the connections between them. And we have to bring history and context back into our thinking about the things, and that may mean changing our ideas about them.

And that's dialectical materialism. No scientist would disagree with it, though scientists (like other people) often forget it. I get outraged by the way some Marxists think they can pronounce, on the basis of their supposed all-embracing philosophy, on particular questions of science. They're behaving exactly like clerics of a church that thinks its theology is the queen of the sciences.

When did Marxists start behaving like that? Marx and Engels themselves certainly didn't. One Marxist who was also a scientist, the Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek, argued that the rot started with Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Reading a piece by Adam Buick about Dietzgen and Pannekoek many years ago got me on to reading Dietzgen, and introduced me to a very different take on dialectical materialism than the one you find in the standard manuals, and one that I found actually useful in thinking about scientific questions, and indeed in thinking in general. Both Marx and Engels, though they had some criticisms of Dietzgen, agreed that he - a tanner by trade, entirely self-taught - had figured it all out, more or less independently of themselves.

Earlier this year, after I'd written a post about how some Marxists have misunderstood the notion of 'the selfish gene', I decided to read or re-read half a dozen popular introductions to dialectical materialism. I could have saved myself the trouble. When you've read one, you've read them all. It didn't make any difference if the writers were Trotskyists or orthodox Communists. They all use the same arguments and the same illustrations. They're hard to tell apart, and it's hard to take from them anything that makes you think - hey, that's useful, I could use that! They don't provide any intellectual tools, of the kind you can find in any introductory philosophical textbook - Simon Blackburn's Think, for instance - or in Dietzgen's recently reprinted The Nature of Human Brain-Work.

Not that I didn't learn anything:

'All man-made cosmic bodies are the products of scientific thought. And as thought need not necessarily be unique to earth-dwellers and there may be other beings in the universe who may well be our intellectual superiors, it is natural to suppose that other cosmic bodies whose origin is so far not clear to us may also be the products of thought. Then why not suppose that the Earth with everything there is on it is also a product of thought?'

That intriguing passage is from the second page of the first chapter of ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975 (English translation, 1978). It is, of course, the opening gambit in an argument that the Earth is not, in fact, the product of thought. The argument wends on and on, through the whole history of philosophy, to culminate in a quotation from Leonid Brezhnev about the freedom, social equality and justice of Soviet life. This compact hardback of 510 small pages has outlasted the state in which it was printed. The paper and binding are good enough to outlast quite a few more. But I can already see the faint traces of brown at the edges. Like all paper, it's burning, very slowly. Some day it'll crumble.

Labels: Marxism

21 Comments:

I keep on meaning to read beyond the first chapter of Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method. Was that part of your reading list, Ken? I'm wondering about whether the work is worth persevering with, so anyone else should feel free to chime in.

As a non-scientist (my girlfriend, who is more knowledgeable, constructs a Venn Diagram with her hands with my name and science in distant circles) I would like to learn more, but with Dawkins I'd have to overcome a lot of antipathy to his political/social opinions, "New Atheism" and a vague idea that it's somehow going to lead to evo-psych, the popular manifestions of which, at least, I find annoying. But I need to educate myself on a whole host of other scientific topics before I'd even get to that idea (for one, evolutionary theory as a whole).

By Nathaniel, at Tuesday, July 19, 2011 7:11:00 am

Thanks for reminding me of Dietzgen, whose work was rediscovered shortly after 1972. I meant to read it in German then and I *hope* to read it now. I was put off by 'Dialectics of Nature' in 1964, when a NYC philosophy teacher and Marx scholar showed me some silly passages about numbers. I read that Engels was advised not to complete and publish it, by a scientist friend. Good to hear that Pannekoek (pancake in Dutch!) noticed the rot that it caused. (I have had the same impression for decades.) For I've been meaning to read him too, either in his original Dutch or German. Not on science (I have read his history of astronomy (once: Dover)), but on his socialistic notions of workers' ownership and self-management.

By George Berger, at Wednesday, July 20, 2011 9:35:00 am

I have a vision of the great books Ken will write...
-"Chariots of the Gods!" by Ken Macleod: a pop exposition of transhumanist/futurist/space travel ideas, a cross between Adrian Berry's "The Next Ten Thousand Years" and Bernal's "The World, The Flesh and the Devil".
-"The Outsider" by Ken Macleod: philosophical biographies of the main figures of "critical materialism", from Epicurus to Mill and Marx. This would do for them what GK Chesterton did for Thomas Aquinas' life and philosophy.
-"The Phenomenon of Man" by Ken Macleod: selected situations and events in human history analyzed and interpreted using dialectical materialism, in a popular James Burke type way (Ken did something like this on the website a while back, using dialectical materialism to explain schisms in the Scottish Free Kirk)
On a far more serious note, solidarity with the people of Norway. The fevered dreams of the rabid right are driving the fanatics, fundamentalists and fascists to atrocities. Of course, it's all the fault of the Muslims, liberals and secular humanists. Of course.

By Jimmy Levendia, at Saturday, July 23, 2011 6:00:00 pm

It's not that your design skills 'aren't up to much', it's that you use the skills you have in a way that's guaranteed to repel readers. Just by re-organising the links and turning off the colour fonts you could turn the enormous amount of writing on your site into quite a readable book, instead of sending the reader hopping all over the place like a flea on a griddle. You could even turn all this into an actual book. Oh, well ...

As for trying to refute the arguments - why would I want to? As I said above: I decided to read or re-read half a dozen popular introductions to dialectical materialism. I could have saved myself the trouble. When you've read one, you've read them all. It didn't make any difference if the writers were Trotskyists or orthodox Communists. They all use the same arguments and the same illustrations. They're hard to tell apart, and it's hard to take from them anything that makes you think - hey, that's useful, I could use that! They don't provide any intellectual tools, of the kind you can find in any introductory philosophical textbook

You could contribute a lot more to online discussions if you were to take part in the actual conversation, giving your views on the topic itself, instead of popping up to say the root of the left's problem is dialectics, and diverting every discussion in that direction. (No doubt I'm exaggerating, but that's the impression I've formed over the past few years.) From your online bookshop as well as internal evidence, you've read a lot and have wide interests. You do your cause no service by coming across as a monomaniac.

In short: chill, man!

Good bookshop, by the way. I intend to be back.

By Ken, at Tuesday, March 20, 2012 6:56:00 am

Ken,

I have become aware of a recent fundamental breakthrough, a breakthrough in the formulation of a comprehensive and singular Dialectic of Nature, that may be of interest here.

Through the discovery of a new algebra, a 'contra-Boolean' algebra of dialectical logic, the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica research collective has been able to formulate a single dialectical equation which models, categorially, the epochal evolutions, and revolutions, of our cosmos, starting from the pre-nuclear "particles" [the bosons, quarks, and leptons].

This dialectical equation-model would be a "Dialectical Theory of Everything" except that, in its present form, as published to-date, it does not yet encompass the actualities that are presently referenced by the "titles of ignorance" of "Dark Energy" and "Dark Matter".

Apart from that exception, this single dialectical equation models the "Historical Dialectic of Natural History as the Totality" as a vast cosmological movement, generated by a recurrent, self-iterating "aufheben process".

The general documentation of this breakthrough is available at the www.dialectics.org website.

There is now a step-by-step introduction to this 'Dialectic of Nature as a Whole" model, and to the many dialectical models for various "sub-universes" of our Universe as a whole, including for the Marxian social forces of production and social relations of production, and a step-by-step introduction to the 'contra-Boolean algebra of dialectical logic' that makes the formulation of all of these dialectical equation-models possible:

http://www.dialectics.org/dialectics/Briefs_files/E._D._Brief_%238,The%20%27A-Brief-iated%27,%20Redacted%20Intellectual%20Autobiography%20of%20Karl%20Seldon,07MAR2014.pdf

Regards,

Miguel

By Miguel, at Sunday, April 06, 2014 9:27:00 am