Sorry to bother you again with this conversation after 3 months have passed, but this sentence has come back to me a couple of times during this period due to how poorly it was dealt with by me, and just how it crucial it was to our discussion, so I will now attempt to correct that.

Structuralism differs form Marxism in that it tries to take Marxist advancements on sociology and understanding of the structures of society while refuting the knowability of the internal contradictions within said society, therefore negating the existence of the internal contradiction that lead to capitalism’s demise. They claim that the problems of capitalist society are consequences of poor implementation of the system, and consequently believe that with just a change in policies and general politics the problems can be fixed, therefore it is the philosophy which gives birth to reformists.

The way that structuralism achieves that separation from Marxist conclusions is by following the agnostic logic of compromising materialism with idealism, in its specific case, it is Marxist sociology with fichtean subjective idealism, it turns Fichte “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” into reality-ideas-structures.

Out of the top of wikipedia’s page on structuralism: "Structuralism is “The belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations.”. (Things are unknowable but their interrelations are knowable, classic agnostic muddle.)

Out of the top of wikipedia’s page on Post-structuralism: “Structuralism proposes that human culture can be understood by means of a structure that is modeled on language. As a result, there is concrete reality on the one hand, abstract ideas about reality on the other hand, and a “third order” that mediates between the two.” (reality-ideas-structures.)

Looking back in our discussion, you said “I’m not sure there’s much value separating external and internal conditions though as both ultimately feed into the system.”, but to study a thing with Dialectical Materialism it is a necessary step to separate from its current context in order to discover its internal contradictions, which is why in his texts Marx himself does so many abstractions, to allow him to understand the internal movements of things.

The condition that materialism demands of every theory, that it must be put to the test of reality, does not mean that one shouldn’t use abstractions when creating said theory, in fact it is quite the opposite if we look at Marxism.

Looking even further into our discussion, we can see that it went through this contradiction where I was attempting to simplify things in order to make more apparent the differences between philosophies, mentioning eggs, water, etc., while you kept complicating matters by bringing more complex and bigger things, such as society, environment, etc., making the discussion less clear and hiding misunderstandings behind big words.

While it did annoy me at the time, which lead to my last comment, I can now understand that it wasn’t personal, it is of philosophical necessity that agnosticism muddles things, for when the matter being dealt with is clear and simple, the separation that it tries to create between knowable and unknowable loses all reasoning, which is why we can’t just discuss over an egg hatching into a chicken, we must to consider how the “chicken will proceed to eat food, produce waste, and so on. It’s part of the environment, and it has a direct effect on the environment.” and therefore we can only comprehend it as a structure and not its specific parts, as Lenin would say, pure muddle.

Having explained all this, it would be incoherent of me to leave the same books recommendations as I did last time, considering we can now see that the divergence comes before we get to dialectics, it is between materialism and agnosticism, I will then recommend a single book on the matter, Lenin’s “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”. Even though it was written before Structuralism was a thing, it goes on such great detail on the differences between the logic of materialism and agnosticism in general (and idealism as well) that it provides the best method of understanding what separates those fields of philosophy.

May this help you to comprehend the differences between philosophies and the necessity that materialism has of objective knowledge and it’s complete compromise with the truth, Good Luck comrade.

Good answer, comrade 🫡

It is always important to remember to think current situations in a materialistic way, and not fall for the idealistic lie that propaganda alone is able to “brainwash” or “control” people.

Thanks, that’s what I was looking for, crazy that I’ve never heard of it or of the author.

Thanks for the recommendations. I actually started searching for a critique after seeing how many of those philosophers call themselves Marxists or post, all the while covering with the most idealistic BS the advances that Marx brought to Philosophy and Sociology.

Even tough I’m neither a zoomer or have ADHD I can relate with not being able to read Marx’s “Capital”, years ago I also jumped straight into it after only having read the manifesto and as consequence could not make past the 2º chapter.

But that is the “Capital”'s contradiction. It’s such a complete and elaborated description of capitalist economy that you theoretically wouldn’t need any other complementary text to understand capitalism, but as a consequence of that the book is extremely dense, complex and long, so much that if you never read a Marxist book prior you will be encountering new terms and logics in almost every paragraph, making it a very hard and slow read while also likely leading to misunderstandings.

The solution to that is to do exactly what your doing now, which is reading other simpler and shorter Marxists books and increasing your understanding of Marxism in general, before tackling the behemoth that is Marx’s “Capital”. So just remember that you can’t do capital yet, but after finishing your list, if you give it another try maybe you will find out that you actually can do it.

That is a good New Year’s Resolution to have, as it’s always better to know more theory. Personally I always recommend to anyone that is planing to do a deep dive in Marxist theory to start with the philosophy on which the theory itself is based, that means reading books on Dialectical Materialism as the first step.

You already have a couple of them in your list, so my recommendation is to prioritize them over their application in the more advanced books. On that note the only book I would add to your list is M. Cornforth’s “Materialism and the Dialectical Method” which is arguably the book to describe Diamat in the most understandable way for modern readers.

Other than that, I would say after finishing that list it’d be time to tackle the two most important works of Marx and Engels in Engels’ “Anti-Dühring” and Marx’s “Capital”.

Good reading, Comrade.

Well, in the link they mention 5 out 40 in a class, that equals to 12.5% and 2 million out of 22 million in total, that is just over 9%.

Personally, I don’t see the point of going in circles in this discussion, so I’ll just add my two last notes:

First, I want to again make very clear that my entire point since the first comment has been around the misuse of Fichte’s “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” in the place of Hegel’s study of “the inner life and self-movement”, and the consequences of this. I do want to add the if you know a Marxist author that uses the Fichtean method in a book, please send a link to me, for I would definitely need to read it.

Speaking of books, lastly I want to recommend the books that I read that deal with the dialectical method as I’ve been describing: F. Engels - “Socialism Utopian and Scientific”; F. Engels - “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy”; J. Stalin - “Dialectical and Historical Materialism”; M. Cornforth - “Materialism and the Dialectical Method”; Mao - “Five Essays on Philosophy”; V. Adoratsky - “The Theoretical Foundation of Marxism-Leninism”; V.I. Lenin - “Karl Marx”; G. Plekhanov - “Materialismus Militans”; G. Plekhanov “In Defense of Materialism”.

Hopefully you will find within yourself to read, and maybe reread, those books so that the methodological mistake you’ve been making so far may be a thing of the past, good luck on this process comrade.

Actually it’s the other way around, the framework is given by the contradictions and therefore internally, while the pressures that affect them are usually external, the combination of both is what leads the system’s evolution.

I think I understand pretty clearly what you mean, and it’s slightly incorrect, the contradictions are the “tracks” that guide the evolution caused by other forces, and as such the shape of those contradictions is given internally, but the actual “location” within those “tracks” is given mostly externally.

Hence the example from Mao about the egg and the rock, the internal contradictions from the egg are what allow it to become a chicken in the correct temperature (the external influence that leads to that contradiction), but regardless of what you do externally to it, a rock that doesn’t have that internal contradiction will never be able to become a chicken.

I wanted to add a classic example of Marxist contradiction, and thought it would be good to use the contradiction between socialized production and private property of the means of production, that contradiction by itself doesn’t do anything, only when inserted in the capitalistic mode of production that it will cause so that the production as whole creates poor resource distribution, inequality, crisis, etc., so to try and fix the production as a whole we could fix this one contradiction by struggling to change the private property to socialized property. We would then find that although there were improvements, there are still problems (other contradictions) within the system.

So we can see that the answer to solving the internal contradictions within a system lies inside those contradictions themselves, even with those contradictions being only a part of the whole system and the solution of one not leading to the solution of the whole system.

Well, there are philosophies that study things focusing on its context and interconnection with other structures, that’s French Structuralism.

It’s only Dialetical Materialism that requires the investigation of the internal contradictions inherent in everything.

I thought our discussion had already run its course, but only now it came to me just how crucial to the understanding of Dialectical Materialism is seeing the value of separating external influence and internal conditions. In my other comment I said it allows for easier study, but that is very far from being complete, it actually is the pivotal abstraction when studying something with Diamat.

Dialectal Materialism gives internally, through its contradictions, the “possibilities” a thing can be. But only after affected by external influences that it actually becomes one of these “possibilities”. To go back to the Egg example, the egg holds within himself, through its contradictions, the possibilities of hatching, breaking, rotting, etc… But which one will the egg actually become depends now of the external conditions.

I also have to add that throughout our discussion it might have lost its focus, but I see the root of the problem being in what is wrote in my very first comment, of trying to use Hegelian Dialectics in the same way as ancient Greek Dialectics, they may share some terminology, but their movement is entirely different.

In short in Greek Dialectics A vs B leads to a C with characteristics of A and B; in Dialectical Materialism A vs B already have characteristics of each (that’s why they are contradictory) and they lead to B, with the newer one necessarily (given time) triumphing over the former.

I wouldn’t say that changing the contradictions from creators to synonymous with pressures improves the system a lot, I also have to say that there is always value in separating external and internal conditions as they become easier to study as such and greater understanding is always valuable.

And although I don’t have the necessary knowledge in thermodynamics to expand on your argument around it, it does fell to me eerie similar to what the material mechanists did centuries ago when they tried to understand the world through the laws of mechanical physics.

You can get a better understanding of thermodynamics by using Dialectical Materialism to study it, but trying to understand diamat by trying to fit in it laws of any branch of physics can lead to grave mistakes.

And I do recommend those books, they go in with way more detail and knowledge about what we are discussing here.

I think I understand your point of view, your are viewing contradictions as creators of pressures that lead to a instability in the system which must be solved in a way that is in tune with both sides of the contradiction.

But what dialectical method gives us is that those pressures are not necessarily created by the contradictions, they can and, even more when dealing with nature, normally are external, what lies within the contradictory process itself is the answer to those pressures, meaning that one side must triumph over the other for this contradiction to be “solved”.

So basically you are looking for the cause of the “problem” within the system but the answer outside it, when with diamat the cause is always a combination of external and internal conditions, but the solution lies within the system itself.

There is an easy example of this in thermodynamics itself, which is as much as my knowledge on the matter will allow me, that is boiling water: The water has its on internal contradiction between its liquid and gaseous state, when we as a external force apply heat to liquid water we create a rapid change in it forcing it to become, after enough heat is used, gaseous.

So in this case the cause of the change was mostly external, but the result is to be expect within the internal contradiction, as Mao would say: “In a suitable temperature, an egg becomes a chicken, but in no circumstances can a rock become a chicken”.

Also I should have done this earlier, but all the points I made in these comments come from F. Engels’ “Socialism Utopian and Scientific” and “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy”, and sometimes with the help of M. Cornforth’s “Materialism and the Dialectical Method”.

Sorry for the way my comment is structured, it’s already morning here and I did my best to try to get my point through, I haven’t had the time to read the hole text yet, but I did read the 8º Chapter, and I must say that yes, the application of that mistaken dialectical method does lead to some problems when exposed to more abstract matters like society and economy.

I do note now that this mistake comes from attempting to use the dialectical method created by Hegel in the same way that the ancient Greeks used to find better answer through a dialogue between opposing parties, which is where “Thesis”, “Antithesis” and “Synthesis” are used correctly.

But Hegel’s Dialectics is not about two opposing sides culminating in a third one through conversation, but about the better and more developed side, in his idealistic view the big “idea”, and the lesser and flawed side, the reality, struggling and ever changing attempting to reach the former.

Marx then comes and turns it on his feet, as Engels would say, and adapts Hegelian dialectics to the real and material world, consequently changing the cause of development from the contradiction between the idea and the existing, to the internal contradictions present in every existing thing.

Now what this change in method causes can be exemplified in your brothers and bikes problem: Using Diamat for them to be in there would need to be a process which puts them in opposite sides, in this case, “who is the fastest?”, in this process they are in contradiction trying to overtake each other, now one brother has a better bike and consequently becomes the main aspect of the contradiction and therefore “the fastest”, but given time the other brother can struggle in an attempt to improve and surpass the other brother, if he is successful in his struggle, if his struggles were enough, he can then surpass his brother as the main aspect and therefore become the fastest.

What were the differences between methods: 1º: the brothers are not contradictory as a whole with each other, but in a specific process. 2º: No dialogue is necessary, the problem and the changes come from the facts themselves(not saying dialogue doesn’t help). 3º: the resolution to the contradiction do the process is in the process itself, there isn’t necessarily a need for a third party to come and resolve the contradiction. 4º: Struggles are not a negative thing, but the necessary action to bring forth change. 5º: The unity of opposites means that their place in the process is interchangeable, when one becomes the faster the other becomes the slower and vice-versa.

These differences become very important when analyzing more complex situations because the entire Marxist theory is on the bases that the answer the two main contradictions of capitalism, being the private property of the means of production and the socialized production, and the organization of factories and the anarchy of production, lie in themselves, meaning the socialization of the means of production and planned production. And that those changes will only happen when the newer revolutionary class takes the place of the older reactionary class as the leaders of society.

Always good to see someone using a field they are knowledgeable about to explain the Dialetical process imbued in everything, as Engels would say: “Nature is the test of Dialectics”.

I do have something to nitpick though, I have seen it written before here or on Hex about the development being an thesis, anthesis, synthesis movement, and I have never truly understood it and always thought weird that none of the classical authors have ever used those words to describe Dialectics.

Seeing the resume of how you wrote your text, I think I have finally understood what people mean by those words, and in my understanding it’s a mistaken view of Dialectics.

The Dialetical method sees the development of everything that exists by the progress of each things internal contradictions, which when the main aspect of the main contradiction changes from the older to the newer, the thing itself changes from being the previous main aspect to being the new one. Utilizing the same jargon, the “Thesis” itself becomes the “Anthesis” after enough qualitative changes. Which is also why it necessary carries some qualities of the old aspect and it also creates it’s own “Anthesis” that will eventually take its place in the future.

I don’t really know where this “synthesis” came from, but it feels to me like and idealistic view of the Dialetical method where something is born out of the method itself instead of being the process of already existing things.

I think this wouldn’t cause that much difference in your text considering you are studying nature itself when using thermodynamics, but I would this can cause bigger problems when dealing with more abstract things like society or economy.

Extremely good answer comrade 🫡

I’ve have already given this advice IRL before, and considering no one has commented anything similar, I think it applies here as well:

If you’re looking for a introduction to communism and Marxism, you should read the manifesto, it’s cut and dry, short and direct to the point it’s trying to pass, it’s literally made to be understandable by everyone.

But if you want more than that and are looking to actually understand and study Marxism, which I believe is the point of a book club, then you should definitely start reading about the Marxist world outlook, dialetical materialism, most of the mistakes and misunderstandings of leftist both here and IRL come from skipping this crucial step.

So if you are having trouble with the main texts, if you can understand diamat every book of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc., you read afterward will much easier to comprehend. On that note, to me, the best 3 texts about their philosophy are: Mao’s “On Contradiction”; Engels’ “Socialism Utopian and Scientific”; and M. Cornforth’s “Materialism and the Dialetical Method”, which I’d recommend then to be read in this order, and if after that you still want more, Cornforth’s last book ends with further recommendations.

So basically, if you are having trouble understanding Marxism you should start from the very beginning and understand their method before jumping straight to the more famous and much more dense books.

Well, the Nazis also supported Zionism, so that does make sense.

I fell we have lost ourselves in the analysis of the situation and therefore need to take a step back, return to the basics and as MLs remember to use diamat to try and see the big picture.

Since the fall of the USSR in the 90s, the principle contradiction in global economics has been the Us-China one. And for most of this period the Us has been the leading aspect of that contradiction, as it already started as a imperialist potency while China was still in the middle of its poverty alleviation plan, but since the 2008 crisis China has begun a process of reducing its dependence on western economics and preparing itself to take the place of the main aspect in the future.

And in my opinion ever since COVID and the consequences of how each country handled it, China has taken the leading role in that contradiction and consequently it is now what defines the nature of world economics, which is why we are seeing so many changes in geo-politics recently, both from China trying to assert its position with the de-dollarisation of global trade and the increase of allied countries with BRICS, and from the Us reaction with the Ukraine war and now with the government trying to re-invest in its own industry.

Without discussing the important aspect of imperialism and whether or not the Us still has the infrastructure to produce goods at a competitive price with China, the main focus of my comment is to bring attention to the fact that this is all part of a ongoing process with both sides struggling for the leading role in the global economy contradiction. So even tough saying that the Us is collapsing or they are powerless is hopelessly unmaterialistic, we should exalt the fact that China is becoming the principle aspect and that process is only going to keep changing, in both quantitative and qualitative ways, until the Us has no more place in the global economic contradiction.