Chapotraphouse

The languages I'm aware of (European ones) are all set up around the structure of talking about things, nouns, verbs, etc, and tenses that modify those things over time. Suzy and John go to the movies. Beans tasted good yesterday. Examples like that. But the concept of a "thing" is a non-dialectical framing, it's trying to take a snapshot of something away from the historical context it exists in, instead of looking at the totality.

For example, we could talk about a book, but the book is more than the paper and ink that it is printed on. There's the author, the machine that printed it, the publishing company, the trees the paper was gathered from, the ink, the language, the method of writing language, the readers who read the book, the whole history of fiction or non-fiction and the social context that creates those methods. The list goes on. Outside of the context of those other things that make up the totality of the book, the true nature of the book becomes difficult to understand. It would be incredibly difficult or even impossible to understand a book outside of any social context at all.

In a way we become alienated from the true properties of the book, the context of the book, not just in the sense of alienation during sale of commodities, but in the sense that by trying to compartmentalize it into a "thing" that exists here and now, we lose connection with what the totality of that "thing" was, is, and will be, and the other things that cause that thing to exist as it is now that are connected to it.

Even writing about dialectical thinking is difficult and hard to make sense of because all of our framing and words and concepts we use are all about trying to put things into tidy little still-frame boxes that can be easily understood at a glance. I think this unironically contributes to the wall of text leftism memes because we have to take time to describe the context of the situation outside of the normal framing and word usage and teach and entire new way of thinking.

I think this is why we end up with a lot of "Is China socialist?" type questions and answers that just look at whether the thing right now fits some abstract definition. It's trying to put the thing into a nice little box that we can understand. And we do that naturally by just talking, by the way we naturally form our words and concepts that are guided by the system of language that we just happen to use.

What I'm trying to say is that the very languages we use predisposes people to think a certain way and to play with concepts in a certain way, and that way happens to align with a non-dialectical thought process and framing. Socialists have to fight an uphill battle to communicate what is often an entirely novel concept using a language that wasn't meant to frame it that way.