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.
Well, 1.5x max comment is quite an effort, thanks for that. It was a worthwhile read. I have sat down with my morning coffee and eaten something, so I can now respond.
I read your two replies a couple of times, and I have to say that I agree with the majority of it. We share a distaste for interpretations of Marxism as a purely contemplative (idealist) theory. That happens routinely in academic philosophy, both traditional bourgeois philosophy and Western Marxism. The Frankfurt School in particular took on, as their special task, and more or less consciously, the subordination of Marxism under mainline philosophy. They abstract from all Marxian categories and thereby sap the theory of its vitality. Distaste for this kind of interpretation seems to be the basis of your rejection of a Marxian epistemology.
You gave a good description of Feuerbach and the correspondence between historical trends in philosophy and in the material development of society. You are correct to point out that Feuerbach's materialism is idealist. Marx's critique of Feuerbach is that Feuerbach wants to negate Hegel's idealism, he wants to have a fully materialist philosophy, but he succeeded only partially for the reasons you mentioned. I should have said that Feuerbach is, relative to Marx, a strict determinist rather than a strict materialist.
If I'm understanding, the essential point you make is that abstractions can become reified. Humans, as subjects, encounter these abstractions as objective structures of their social existence. For example, value is not made up of atoms, yet it has all the social reality of an objective force of nature, yada yada. In this sense, an abstraction has escaped the confines of imagination and become material. This led to Alfred Sohn-Rethel's popularization of the concept of real abstraction to describe this phenomenon. (I don't particularly like the Frankfurt School or Critical Theory, as I mentioned. I reference this due only to relevance.) Briefly connecting back to the topic of language, Marx discusses in Capital how contradictory expressions like "value of labor" are the result of the contradictory nature of capitalism itself, which operates such that it appears as though workers directly sell living labor, and not labor-power. This shows that overcoming alienation does involve correcting language, but I think OP takes it too far in suggesting that thought is strongly confined by language.
I accept some concept of real abstraction as described above, though I cannot know if I conceive it in the same sense as Sohn-Rethel because I have not read his book. It is plenty clear, from Marx and from everything we have discussed, that human thought is grounded in the material world, and that the material world is changed by human activity as an objective force.
Here is the crucial question: does Marx's philosophy generalize the concept of abstraction into a bi-directional process that includes both human sense-perception and human activity? I don't think so. Abstraction still refers only to the first leg of that journey, and I think that is the sense which Marx always meant by abstraction.
Abstractions can become reality, but not on their own, not directly. They have to be mediated, through human activity. Yet, this human activity is not itself the abstraction per se, but merely its form of appearance or mode of expression. If this sounds similar to the problem of value requiring a mode of expression which it finds in exchange value, it is because the two scenarios are formally the same: an abstraction cannot be directly its opposite without mediation. Likewise, concrete labor cannot be directly social (i.e., abstract) labor except by transformation into money, the representative of value and of abstract labor.
Now, as Marx himself acknowledged, the general form of the dialectic, the mediated unity of opposites, is to be entirely credited to Hegel. What Marx did was to discover that this is a basis upon which to understand the interaction between human consciousness and its material environment.
I've definitely enjoyed the thoughtful discussion and engagement. Most of the time i get this deep into the topic, I end up losing people.
Honestly I was kinda riffing with this stuff. Being able to get into the weeds with you was an opportunity to work through some points I've been thinking a lot about. If I were to point to examples of real abstractions, which are definitely mediated through practical activity, though I def need to think more about what that means, would prob deal with some points Marx made in Capital v1 about abstracting labor to alienate it from workers. The watch maker example, of a highly skilled craftsman, who could make one watch like per week. The watch was highly sought after and expensive until a capitalist figures out how to use a tool to make one piece of the watch, and then has an unskilled craftsman just make that one piece all day. Put the craftsperson in a factory with a bunch of other workers who make the same part over and over, and then assemble them at the end. Take a specialized task of a worker, and have a machine do it, now you can produce more springs or whatever at a cheaper cost, because you no longer need a worker who can make springs, you just need someone to load a strip of metal into the machine and pull a lever.
Its like the way that the labor is abstracted, takes away the human element. As the work is made abstract and given over to the machine, the human becomes part of the machine. And what Marx takes great care to prove, is that the more this labor becomes abstract, the more it is used to exploit more vulnerable people. What took a trained craftsman can now be accomplished by a child, or elderly.
Another example is actually software. The user interacts with an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, and so on, in order to like perform some task on a computer. The user never has to think about ones and zeroes, or circuits, or even computer code. But all those things are abstractions. they are the product of human labor, but once they're existing, they reduce human labor, or limit it in some ways.
This is where I need to spend a bit more time with your description that abstractions are mediated by human activity. I'm gonna need to chew on that a bit. Its an important clarification, and I appreciate you identifying it for me.
Okay you caught me. My application of Marxism is heavily humanist. Probably my biggest other influence is Paulo Friere. I have some criticisms of him, like I think he naively leans toward an academic new-left orientation in some ways, not explicitly, but I can't help but read what he's writing about the cultural revolution and compare it to the various academic milquetoast "maoists" I've encountered. But I also deeply appreciate and heavily apply the method of revolutionary critical pedagogy, so I think that's what you're picking up here. I think Lenin and Trotsky had a good practical grasp of this method, which they synthesized out of Hegel, sometimes via Plekhanovist determinism, sometimes more particular and human-centered. Fanon's analysis I believe is very close to this as well. But it isn't strictly Marx, and studying Gramsci for example, he doesn't do this. He sticks to history, he sticks to class. I think Marxism opens the door to this kind of critical method, I think it is consistent with Marxism, but as I engage in organizing and political work I recognize that not everybody is on the same page as me here. Many of my more politically minded comrades don't seem to want to bother with pedagogy, but also, I still see them making errors like defining consciousness as an individual trait at the expense of a structural critique. In my view, the structural is deeply connected to the subject, in this dialectical contrast. When I mentioned that Capital was more than just a book of economics, that was very much the impression I got after reading it but couldn't put my finger on it. Friere, Fanon, and (obsessing over) Theses on Feuerbach/The German Ideology -- and maybe a little Pannekoek too -- was where I found my orientation toward Marx's method after Capital. I'm also very impressed with Friere's ability to concretize even concepts which might be nearly Metaphysical.
Good discussion! Appreciate the rec in real abstraction, I'll look this over.
I'm having to read the Laclau/Mouffe book in the near future, which will me my next hate-read. I haven't gotten into the Frankfurt school stuff yet, thankfully, but that doesn't mean it won't happen, just that i haven't recognized problems caused by it in my local conditions
That all sounds good to me. Before bothering with any of the Critical Theorists, I would recommend reading I. I. Rubin. In my opinion he gives the most precise and clear explication of the dialectic inherent in Capital. He wrote an excellent book, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, but for a shorter (still dense) read, there is also a transcribed lecture of his, which touches on the difference between substance/content and form.
I'll def put Rubin on my list, and check out that lecture. To be clear, my engagement with Mouffe/Laclau is specifically due to an observed ignorance of Gramscian definitions of hegemony and passive revolution, which the Mouffe and Laclau exploits in order to actually divide Gramsci from Marx (impossible if you actually like study Gramsci.) This leads to Leninist formations to actually respond to the pomo framing by reverting to like 1903 Menshevist understanding of power, which Lenin was explicitly critical of.
I'm also captivated by how often moderate academics fall for this "guys what if there's a trialectic" bit from L&M. But in that respect, an alternate but cohesive and coherent formulation of Marxist dialectics that expands my own pedagogical critical dialectics is very appealing, especially as I am starting to recognize some practical weaknesses.