http://www.f21sc.net/talk_notes/Sustainable_files/dialectic_half.jpg

Anyone care to comment on this?

At first, it seemed to me to be a graphical representation of Chlamor's oft repeated mantra "reform is not possible."

But then I am not so sure. Could it just be that it misses that boogabear we chat on so much, theory?

Could it just be that it misses that boogabear we chat on so much, theory?

It could be that this diagram is shit on a stick.

If more people do show up ask Anax or some other Marxist about the dialectic between these two works:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

Anax is "saving" it so all them doctrinaire orthodox Marxists can show up and throw around quotes ad infinitum and debate insular "canon". I'm going to recruit a bunch of Trotskyites just to see if Anax can run em off with his "petit bourgeosie" line..it'll be awesome. I guarantee it degenerates into an argument about Stalin and, as usual, first one to invoke Hitler loses :)

You wanna know someone obscure as fuck who make a real contribution to the understanding of the dialectic? Evald Ilyenko a Soviet under Stalinism

The obligatory wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evald_Ilyenkov


While Hegel's recording of these facts led him to idealism, Marx and Engels, having considered the real (objective) prototype of logical definitions and laws in the concrete, universal forms and laws of social man's objective activity, cut off any possibility of subjectivist interpretation of the activity itself. Man does not act on nature from outside, but 'confronts nature as one of her own forces' and his objective activity is therefore linked at every stage with, and mediated by, objective natural laws. Man 'makes use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of things as means of exerting power over other things, and in order to make these other things subservient to his aims .... Thus nature becomes an instrument of his activities, an instrument with which he supplements his own bodily organs, adding a cubit and more to his stature, scripture notwithstanding'. It is just in that that the secret of the universality of human activity lies, which idealism passes off as the consequence of reason operating in man: 'The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body - both inasmuch a nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man's inorganic body - nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself the human body.'

The laws of human activity are therefore also, above all, laws of the natural material from which 'man's inorganic body', the objective (material) body of civilisation, is built, i.e. laws of the movement and change of the objects of nature, transformed into the organs of man, into moments of the process of production of society's material life.

In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on another object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties and laws of existence . Marx and Engels showed that the logical forms of man's action were the consequences (reflection) of real laws of human actions on objects, i.e. of practice in all its scope and development, laws that are independent of any thinking. Practice understood materialistically, appeared as a process in whose movement each object involved in it functioned (behaved) in accordance with its own laws, bringing its own form and measure to light in the changes taking place in it.

Thus mankind's practice is a fully concrete (particular) process, and at the same time a universal one. It includes all other forms and types of the movement of matter as its abstract moments, and takes place in conformity with their laws. The general laws governing man's changing of nature therefore transpire to be also general laws of the change of nature itself, revealed by man's activity, and not by orders foreign to it, dictated from outside. The universal laws of man's changing of nature are also universal laws of nature only in accordance with which can man successfully alter it. Once realised they also appear as laws of reason, as logical laws. Their 'specificity' consists precisely in their in their universality, i.e. in the fact that they are not only laws of subjectivity (as laws of the physiology of higher nervous activity or of language), and not only of objective reality (as laws of physics or chemistry), but also laws governing. the movement both of objective reality and of subjective human life activity. (That does not mean at all, of course, that thought does not in general possess any 'specific features' worthy of study. As a special process possessing features specifically distinguishing it from the movement of objective reality, i.e. as a psycho-physiological faculty of the human individual, thought has, of course, to be subjected to very detailed study in psychology and the physiology of the higher nervous system, but not in logic). In subjective consciousness these laws appear as 'plenipotentiaries' of the rights of the object, as its universal, ideal image: 'The laws of logic are the reflections of the objective in the subjective consciousness of man.'