what the fuck is a dialectic?

I just wanted to say im sorry. Facing wierd over intelectualized forms of bigotry and racism is very painful and taxing. In part because these same kinds of fuckers should know better. I hate that you were put into that situation and that these people were trying to indoctrinate an audience.

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Some tweets talking about the exact type of person you ran into, @judytuna:

https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1141617630832406528

This thread is talking about commonalities between fascist reactionaries and a particular sort of dogmatically “scientistic” Marxist:

for example:

The scientistic Marxism they wish to wield as a cudgel is ideal for their vision of the world, where they the rational genius ‘material’ facts & ‘dialectical’ reason technocrat smarter than every1 else (esp pomos, soc scis, religious folks & others) gets to plan the world.

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Okay, let me take a stab at explaining “dialectic” using that quote from the Grandin essay as an example. I’m just doing my best to express my understanding here.

This is from the Wikipedia article Dialectic:

Within Hegelianism, the word dialectic has the specialised meaning of a contradiction between ideas that serves as the determining factor in their relationship. Dialectic comprises three stages of development: first, a thesis or statement of an idea, which gives rise to a second step, a reaction or antithesis that contradicts or negates the thesis, and third, the synthesis, a statement through which the differences between the two points are resolved. Dialectical materialism, a theory or set of theories produced mainly by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, adapted the Hegelian dialectic into arguments regarding traditional materialism.

Briefly, I think the dialectic was so important to Marx and Engels because their analysis was that this dialectic contradiction - two opposing tendencies - was present in capitalism and would drive it inevitably towards instability and collapse.

I think for Marx these oppositions and their interaction - which would drive toward a synthesis and therefore a shift - are like the engine that drives history.

When Grandin refers to “American Hegelians,” he’s being a little cute. He’s not saying that these 19th century theorists of the frontier were literally followers of Hegel, but that their vision of history expressed a similar idea. In that passage he’s saying that there was a thesis/antithesis relationship that these 19th century manifest destiny types saw between the will of the nation to gobble up the entire continent, and the kind of “universal law” that would restrain that kind of central federal power. So the idea that Grandin sees them expressing is:

  1. the nation has a will to dominate the continent
  2. Free spirited American pioneers go to the frontier seeking freedom, thus locating the violence that comes with them to the periphery (convenient for the rest of the country that doesn’t have to worry about it as much)
  3. this territorial expansion will entrench the nation and set up a “universal law” that frontier theorists thought would then restrain the will to power of the federal government

So the conflict between the governmental will to dominate and frontier expansion to get away from that would thus lead to a synthesis wherein the governmental will to dominate would in the end be subordinated. So in this view that conflict is the engine that drives change toward a third, different state. Like, you can almost think of it like a physical engine, like the two ideas rotating around each other to produce power and movement and together they motor along to a third place.

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i just got this slim volume in a used bookstore just now for two reasons:

  1. the intro beseeches us to engage in dialectical relations
  2. there are a bunch of instant photos

examples:

i have lots of instant photos piling up; maybe i can make a art too

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