Among the greatest contributions to human thought stands the tradition of Dialectical Materialism - a hard-labored theory of metaphysics that offers tools from which to construct objective analysis of material phenomena, including those societal, cultural, and scientific.
Let this community be a space to train our application of the theory so that we may, as occupants of the present, better fulfill our obligation to the future.
Allowed and encouraged:
To develop, a nation must break the chains of dependency—economic, cultural, military. “Cite one country that developed in democracy—it’s impossible.” Because development requires rupture. Sovereig...
An attempt to capture the essence of Marxist economics in a single blog post.
Sixty years ago, on November 14, 1831, died a man who will indisputably and always occupy one of the very first places in the history of thought. Not one of the sciences which the French call “sciences morales et politiques” has remained unaffected by the powerful and…
'Reading in Al-Mushtarak' an important contribution to Marxist thought
London’s Marx Memorial Library was packed on the evening of Wednesday August 21 for the launch of ‘Reading in Al-Mushtarak: Islam, the Commons, and Systems for Democratic Socialism’, published by Iskra Books. This important work was written by the late Ibrahim Allawi, the long-serving General Secret...
Fundamentals of Marxism is a collection of short, essential texts designed to provide an accessible introduction to classic Marxist theory and lay a foundation for further study.
Fundamentals of Marxism Fundamentals of Marxism is a collection of short, essential texts designed to provide an accessible introduction to classic Marxist theory and lay a foundation for further study. Included in this collection: The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Principles of...
The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organizations implies universal and full freedom to criticize, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Pa...
Is it possible for a movement to sustain itself without having a notion of its end goal? Bernstein’s principle, that “The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing,” though it claims to be an “orthodox” interpretation of dialectics, belies a purely mechanistic conception…
Assessments and conclusions on socialist construction during the 20th century, focusing on the USSR. KKE’s perception on socialism.
Communist Party of Greece
Distinguishing Charity and Social Work from Revolutionary Strategy by Kenny Lake (December 2020) Click here for a printable PDF of this article. In the 1990s, aside from militant protests and a wil…
How to properly use dialectical materialism (e.g., avoiding determinism, utilitarianism, morality)
When studying Marx and Marxist authors in isolation, there seems to be so many ideological struggles that one may take independently without critique from others. So, if socialism/communism is not completely inevitable, how do I form appropriate arguments for the use of Marxism to advance the cause of the proletariat against that of the ruling bourgeosie without falling to arguments about inevitability, "the greater good", the capitalists being "evil", et cetera? Are there any more advanced comrades here with experience showing the ideologically backwards, or even intermediate, the way of proper Marxist analysis?
Can human activity, practice, evolution be considered a natural phenomenon?
Darwin, although a materialist at heart (maybe) wasn't very dialectical. Darwin's major faults are his binary steps of evolution, you take the right step you continue to exist, you take the wrong step you vanish, hence evolution is the result of taking all the right steps. So the panda took a wrong step somewhere, but maybe easter bugs did too, helping out humans grow things by eliminating other bugs. Now they are becoming extinct because of pesticides and insecticides. Maybe bees will too.
Do we know that humans made right choices or not? They created capitalism and this seems to be accelerating us towards extinction. What about pre-capitalist choices, like that of 10k years ago to select seeds, cultivate them, modify them, create monocultures and sentence other plants and life in general to extinction to do so. To what extent do we perceive human choices as natural phenomenon and to what extent is the dialectic with the material world and those choices acceptable or rejectabl
What if we used this community for prompts for dialectical materialist analysis?
For random stuff, possibly even fictional, and the people come up with a short dialectical materialist analysis, as a common exercise for everyone?
I would propose a prompt, in r/WritingPrompts style, but I don't really know what could be interesting topics on the matter. I would just love to see your analytic skills, and possibly pick it up on how you are doing it. :)
Maybe I got a prompt: What's the value of this idea? Did I miss the point of dialectical materialist analysis?
Not a devil's advocate but asking similar questions and attempting to answer them
I am relatively new here, so please excuse my newbiness, I mean no harm or disrespect. Nor have I researched enough on how the original community was expelled by the CEO of reddit.com inc.
If I can identify with something concretely and not negotiably, is a firm believer of dialectical materialism, so I am not posting questions as an outsider to dialectical materialists. I am only posting questions to dialectical materialists, so idealists don't waste our time responding.
I do not wish to play devil's advocate, I usually hate the attitude, but I can't help to have questions that fit the profile. As a first step I'd like to state that the theory of Marx & Engels and the evolution of Marxism is not one and the same, for reasons that relate to the questions. So here we go.
In the time Marx lived and struggled and in specific when he wrote Capital, the world was smaller, in population, and also scientific knowledge of the world itself. Since then sciences such as anthropology a
The contradiction of data ownership between programs.
Summary: Programs seem to be instruction sets that are limited by a contradiction in data ownership.
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2/1 (CONTRADICTION DIALECTICAL-MATERIALISM DATA OWNERSHIP) A noticeable inner contradiction between programs is in data ownership. Programs must maintain ownership of their data to maintain stable; otherwise their data (and by extension code) could be arbitarily modified, thus destabilizing the system. (Binary data is publically accessible through a controller, so the program itself will not be the only subject.) The data ownership contradiction can only be formed when two or more programs exist in the environment. Zettelkasten NIL An example of the data ownership contradiction <zettelkasten:2/1> is a program being executed through a program read-eval-print-loop (abbreviated to REPL, also termed a "shell"). There is an inner contradiction of control between the program REPL and the executed program; the executed program commonly mai
Nations and Soviets: The National Question in the USSR
Skip to a section: The prison house of nationsDawning of a new eraSocialism against oppression
Lenin: 3 sources and component parts of Marxism
I wanted to see what others thought when reading the introduction. I immediately thought of all the "science" done in the US that said smoking wasn't bad for you or that climate change wasn't caused by human activity. I'm sure there are many other examples, but Lenin is specifically talking about social sciences. Does anyone know of any examples of this? I like to try to connect theory to historical or current events because it helps me understand better, but I'm drawing a blank right now. I've included the intro that I'm talking about below.
"Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war o
Study Group Planning
Posting in response to interest shown in this thread. I will fill out structure here later today, but let us use this post as a provisional place to plan a study group.
Questions to consider:
