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.

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[–] juice_@hexbear.net 2 points 4 days ago

Thanks for your comments, I see where you're coming from in your points, so let me clarify these call outs.

The 2nd thesis which you cited should not be interpreted to mean that there is no difference at all between thought (ie, abstraction) and material reality.

Yeah I've been called out on this before, I need to figure out how to state a some things better. To clarify, thought is objective human activity. I particularly like the choice of the word "contemplation." If I have an experience, I contemplate it, it initiates change within myself. I experience my own thoughts, which I may also contemplate. I do believe that thinking is material, because it drives actual material changes in the individual. But if it is referred to statically, like some ghost that lives only in the mind, which IMO it often is, that abstraction is idealistic.

That is an epistemological claim!

I see where you are getting at. But here is the problem I have with it. This places Marx's materialism next to every other theory of knowledge, like a buffet. This is fine when we are surveying, learning and critiquing. But Marxism isn't a philosophy, it contains philosophical concepts but in a particular way. It harnesses them into a revolutionary practical method. I think the problem with defining it as an epistemology, which I admit parts of it technically are, is that if it is one epistemology among many, then we aren't involved in negation. If we consider Marxism an epistemology, we aren't doing Marxism, we are philosophising, interpreting. We have removed the thing from its practical function, put it in a museum. This is fine and interesting, who doesn't love a museum? But if we are engaged in class war, in libratory, revolutionary struggle, then placing these philosophies next to each other is not fulfilling the actual purpose.

Marxism negates idealism, and the way it does this is really fascinating, to me. You mentioned that Feuerbach's philosophy was "strictly materialist" but this is not true. It was the closest anyone had come to practical materialism up to that point, which is why it moved Marx and Engels as much as it did, but it still contained idealist elements. Marx identified these idealist elements, like the essentialism of human nature and abstraction of human thought. Feuerbach had taken Hegelian dialectic idealism and negated many of the idealist elements, and created a theory of social transformation where the functions of the christian church were secularized and harnessed by society to get all of the social benefits of religion, without the baggage and negative consequences of the three estates.

But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice (my emphasis.)

This last line is really important, and underrated. By the time society has developed to the point where philosophers are able to criticize parts of it, the object of critique has already completely negated, and replaced the subject.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Obviously to us, the holy family was based around the nuclear family, but when its hegemony was developing it wasn't clear what was happening. Violence and repression destroyed the old, and ideology recontextualized the new order Only once a totality is established, and the new relations negated and replaced the basis for it, could society begin to criticize it. By that time it is impossible to negate the negation without a social transformation that eliminates the material (productive) basis for the domination of the church. By the time of Feuerbach, the development of capitalism had been underway for 200+ years. The basis for the philosophers to criticize the church in this way was a material productive change to society, not the independent development of philosophical thought.

In the time of Marx and Feuerbach, there was a material, productive change in the works (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Sec 1):

Reason became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head first in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by, also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.

We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law, that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.

Capitalism and industrialization had already demolished the basis of Christ and King. A new ruling class was ascendent, needing only to topple the old power, which had disassembled piece by piece, holding by holding, the basis of material power of the church, first through the enclosure and then through the enlightenment. In Feuerbach's case, he was standing at the end of an epoch, trying to jury rig the declining social power of the church into a secular framing that had no real basis. Feuerbach's materialism still contained an idealism that did not reflect reality, it abstracted the human subject in a way that obscured people's actual conditions. It was an idealist philosophy with a materialist character.

On the other hand, the productive bourgeois had also developed their own materialism which was legitimately revolutionary. Science, manufacturing, abstraction of human labor into dead labor, (an example of abstraction that is not pure thought) was the material basis of a new society. But since it was based in class society, it contains an idealist character, namely that some parts of nature are necessarily dominant over other parts.

So now we have two sides of a dialectic. Feuerbach's subject -- idealist philosophy with a materialist character; and the bourgeois object -- material revolution with an idealist character. Both contain the same fundamental idealism: the abstraction of real thinking, feeling, living, laboring people. Feuerbach's philosophy imagines people that don't exist objectively in any time or place, a subject without object. Bourgeois revolution considers people only mechanically, abstracting their time and labor into the value of commodities, an object without a subject.

Here are the conditions for Marx to turn Hegel on his head. The materialist character of Feuerbach's philosophy is what negates the idealist character of bourgeois revolution.

This forms the basis of Marxism, both positively and negatively. In the positive it is a practical, scientific transformation of society that centers real people and our experiences. In the negative, it is a movement of the masses (not a privileged minority), it is scientific and materialist (not idealist), that is based in people's action, need, and inner life, (not abstract rationalized "humans").

You are right, I also do not view the object and subject as "fused" since that indicates a static inseparable thing. For me, dialectics is like a motor, with a subject on one end and an object on the other. In the case of Marxism, which resolves the contradictions of idealist philosophy and bourgeois production, the object and subject are connected by human practice and experience, like the belt that drives both sides. Practice transfers power from the subject to the object, and experience transfers power from the object to the subject.

With regard to consciousness, I tend to think of it not as a separate thing but as its own dialectic. Again, I do not like to think of consciousness like a thing that happens inside the mind of an individual. I mean, obviously there is a subjective side, but as a matter of emphasis I think that generally, consciousness is only thought of in this way. Consciousness also has an objective, structural side that does not get much consideration, although Lenin almost exclusively refers to it in this way.