Posted on Facebook
April 21, 2016
So now, inspired by Bengaluru, and the evidence of the capacity of the Indian working class for spontaneous large-scale action, and the victory on the EPF issue that they have contributed to, let us move on with dialectics.
Now, despite the history behind the usual presentation of dialectical materialism, I will firmly stay away from the “materialism and matter” together with “dialectics and motion” view, and the historical rationale for this mode.
Instead let me emphasise first, that to speak of “matter”, or “objective reality” (including the natural and social) is to speak of “matter in motion”. The two are not separate, to be brought to together externally. So then what is the issue? The issue is really, how do we understand this objective reality, how do we come to know it and what does knowledge mean? Have we missed out on something, have we forgotten that the point is to “change” the world? No, we have not, because in what we call “to know” we shall make clear the relationship between “knowing” in thought and “knowing” in action, and to “know” for us will mean both, separately and together. We can leave the definitions here if you wish, but this issue is what is meant by dialectics.
Lenin was perhaps the one among the great Marxists who emphasised this really strongly. As he underlines in his Philosophical Notebooks, Vol. 38 Collected Works (available on www.marxists.org), Logic=Dialectics=Theory of Knowledge of Materialism, To quote:
In Capital, Marx applied to a single science logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge of materialism [three words are not needed: it is one and the same thing] which has taken everything valuable in Hegel and developed it further.” (Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works vol. 38, p. 317)
Now of course if you dont want quotations or appeal to authority, well that’s fine too. So what we shall call dialectical materialism or dialectics for short is the question of what is objective reality and how do we come to know it in thought and action. That seems good.
So of course the first question is where do we begin? What presents itself first to human perception is a whole. But this whole where perception and thought begins is an undifferentiated whole, a chaotic (chaotic in the sense of apparently random, uncoordinated and without any order and so on ) pulsating mass of sensations out of which we have to make sense. The recommendation that some philosophers make that this whole is somehow “it” and there is no need to separate out or distinguish things is bogus. If we have a “chaotic” mass in front of us, celebrating that in its own right is a recipe for doing nothing. And especially if you are among the oppressed and exploited celebrating the chaotic present makes little sense and is a recipe not for hope but for despair. So we have to make sense of this chaotic mass of perceptions that confronts us.
And speaking of the first steps towards that end is what we will turn to in the next post.
TJ's BLOG 