this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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I hate philosophy.
"If my premises are true, then my conclusion is true."
But you haven't demonstrated that the premises are true, and often the logic leading to the conclusion is flawed. Stupid people eat it up and shit it back out into society.
Not to sound cheeky, but we have to make some assumptions to get anywhere. We have very strong reasons for accepting dialectical materialism, but I'm not sure even those could be a demonstration that it's true. So we're left with "if dialectical materialism is true, then __".
Such as?
It's explanatory and predictive power. We can make sense of past events in terms of balance of forces. And, in the case of capitalism, it allows us to predict its replacement with socialism. Capitalism produces its own gravediggers, as Marx put it.
I'm not understanding. Can you connect the dots between dialectial materialism and how it predicts socialism?
Sure thing. So the dialectical materialist view of capitalism is that it is a relation between workers and capitalists. Crudely, the capitalist class wants the working class to produce as much as possible for as little as possible (provided the working class as a whole gets enough to reproduce itself). The working class resists the attempts of the capitalist class to do so.
But the capitalist drive for profit (surplus value from exploited labor) leads to periodic crises. Worse, for capitalists, the means of production (think factories, farms, shipyards, etc) keep accumulating as well. This is a core contradiction in capitalism: the need to accumulate undermines the ability to accumulate.
In short, capitalism gets so good at producing stuff that it requires different management techniques. This is socialism: very large enterprises under the democratic control of workers.
Why? Again, because the contradictions inherent in capitalism require it.
(Well, so long as capitalism doesn't succeed in overheating the planet first.)
I'm still trying to understand what "dialectical materialism" means.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/dialectical-materialism
Sounds right to me. Although I want to clarify, are they including light? We observe it with our senses, but it is massless, technically not matter.
Sure, that makes sense.
This gives me pause. Do we know this to be true? There is not a hard line between when a seed becomes a fruit. The macro objects we observe change, but the underlying particles just move. Molecules change; atoms change; baryons do not.
It sounds like it has little to no predictive power. We observe events and infer "principles" from them. In hard science terms, we observe, hypothesize, experiment, and theorize. Repeatable experiments help us predict what will happen under similar conditions.
Is that the one you were referring to?
Right, so... I still have no reason to believe dialectical materialism. The argument was that it has predictive power, but we don't know what will happen.
Another possibility I am thinking of: the capitalist class uses their resources to effectively enslave the working class through a combination of automation and surveillance. In this hypothetical, their control is airtight and revolution is impossible. Any dissent is punished with death. Forced breeding maintains the slave population if necessary, humans become more expendable. I am curious how that scenario might end.
I agree that capitalism is unsustainable and I would like to try some form of socialism, but I don't see how socialism is the inevitable outcome.
It's possible I'm just not understanding, or that I found a flawed definition. Thank you for the explanation.
Well, I won't be able to do this topic justice due to limited time, but I hope I can at least point you in the right direction.
Maybe the best place to start if you're new to this is the Communist Manifesto. It's short and to the point, and contains gems like:
The serf-lord relation of feudalism came under threat with the development of productive forces. The lords/aristocrats had the basis of their economic power, land ownership, undercut by new economic power managed by the new capitalist class. The more the latter developed, the more unsustainable the former became, until the serfs were "liberated" from their feudal plots, becoming landless members of the new working class.
The "dialectical" part here is the relationship between the opposing forces, and the "materialism" is the economic aspect. As you say, unlike Hegel, Marx and Engels rejected the idea that it was "thought" that caused such changes in class relations. Rather, changes in thought followed those changes.
I'll have to leave it there for now, but some additional resources are:
Most importantly, I hope you stick around on Lemmygrad. Keep reading, ask questions when you're not sure about things, and comrades will be here to answer!
That was one of my problems with philosophy 101 when we were talking about what is 'good (moral)' versus what isn't. My first question was "how are you defining good?" and that was laughed at and we just moved on. Like.. uhhh okay I guess I'm dumb?
On that point, she let us fight it out, mainly because she was big on writing assignments.
That's a fair critique of pure philosophy (like the Analytical tradition), but modern science is mostly "if the null hypothesis is rejected, then this will happen."
The argument itself is a way to look for things in the real world and can, and should, be discarded as soon as demonstration proves it false.
Philosophers explain the world, but they need to use philosophy to change it.
Holy shit, that is so backwards it hurts.
Don't accept claims without sufficient evidence.
Superstition is deadly.
To be clear, I agree with you. I don't think I was clear in my comment.
Thank you, that was not clear.
But they explain the world with magical thinking, and as a result they might change it for the worse without realizing. I am a big fan of relying on physical evidence to guide our decisions.
Imagination is good. That's the point. But not everything we imagine need be enacted. Most of us get caught up in imagining what's easy for us to envision. The mistakes come in not being able to envision variables that change everything.
In sociology, they called it latent and dominant effects.
Key word, "if." I liked Syllogistic Logic, too, but also critical reading was a prereq.