Soviet Logic
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- Опубліковано 29 лип 2024
- Dialectical Materialism offered a unified system of thought in which all parts were logically linked, all areas of knowledge were covered, all oppositions were integrated, and clear answers were given to the question of the origin and goal of history and the position of man in it.
This video attempts to give a small insight into the practices of totality in the Soviet One-Party-State.
main source:
Groys, Boris; "The Communist Postscript"; 2005
(However this video is not a complete summary of the book. I think that the main topic of Groys essay is Stalin's philosophy of language which is not mentioned at all in the video)
Timestamps:
0:00 intro
1:03 What is Dialectical Logic?
3:04 Paradoxes of the Catholic Church
4:24 Lenin's Strategy
5:04 Stalin's Politics
6:29 Science and Dialectical Materialism
10:48 The Heavens of Totality
12:01 What Happened to Dialectical Logic?
I think dialectical materialism is still quite widespread in the Eastern European and Central Asian academia, even after the dissolution of the USSR.
It's just that it lost most of its ideological/political connotations, because the academics are strongly discouraged agsint criticizing the ruling elites.
Many still view history through the lense of dialectical materialism, but when it comes to more modern events, our academics tend to turn a blind eye and go 100% into idealism (thus many of them are basically robbing themselves of intellectualism).
I am a Marxist who arrived back at Dialectical Materialism through Ilyenkov and Boris Groys, and it is very impressive you grasp this. But I think you should study Chinese Marxism-Leninism to see how the logic of totality corresponds to, as with Deng’s reforms (and beginning with Mao’s break with the Soviets), a politically decentralizing tendency (to the point of building a market economy). Stalin’s plans to democratize the State and relegate the Party to an advisory or even spiritual role and his defense of the kolkhoz system against the universalization of sovkhozes is a forerunner to this. This decentralization corresponds to a more concrete totality of the state.
☀️🦍
Dialectism in a nutshell
Two friends visit a rabbi to solve a dispute.
First enters the room, explains his position and the rabbi tell him, yes you are right
Second friend enters the room, explains his position, and the rabbi tells him, yes you are right.
The rabbi wife tells him, but both can't be right, to which the rabbi replies, and you are right too.
And that is why a rabbi is a rabbi, which is what is all about. To remain a rabbi.
Another way to phrase it.
I am not against you because I am with you.
But if you are against me, you are against everybody.
How dare you be against me?
How can you argue with someone who claims to hold all positions, including yours?
1) claiming to hold all positions is different than claiming to integrate new positions as you're exposed to them
2) maybe arguing isn't the most useful way of approaching such a conversation -- you could expose the person to new ideas, you could expose them to alternate ways of integrating ideas that they had previously integrated differently, and you could explore whether the ways they've previously integrated your ideas appear to have merit
does anyone have recommendations for channels who make similar videos to this channel?
fascinating video. Will need to watch twice in order to fully understand.
I majored in philosophy as an undergrad. I have never heard such a clear description of dialectical reasoning. All of the Marxist "experts" on social media do Marxism a great disservice by not clearly understanding that dialectical reasoning contains its own objections, and is therefore at least one step ahead at all times. To not understand how one can object to a claim is to not understand that claim in the first place!
Super well done video. Subscribed.
9th grade debate clubs make students argue for positions that they disagree with. In other words, 14 year old kids in American public schools understand what you're saying. It's really not that deep.
@Stevie-J I was in a high-school debate club and I can tell you that the students in it are smarter then 90% of the adult american population.
@@danielbased5769 haha fair enough
Thank you. That was very interesting.
Well-made and informative video. I hope this comment helps the algorithm
Great channel.
Please more videos
good work
A disgrace of a video, I recommend having more than one source to diversify the sophistry.
Dialectical materialism acknowledge objective truth. The law of physic. Natural selection. Logic and mathematical axioms. Otherwise it would not be materialist, because materialism is the acknowledgement that material form the world, and that is an objective assertion.
What makes dialectical materialism separated from metaphysical (vulgar) materialism is acknowledging that many observation is relative truth, and it's no point of see this observation in abstract, but to think of what context makes it correct, and what makes the opposite of it correct. (Ex: Human are wage slave. It's only true in capitalism, and not true in feudalism or communism). And more radically, being is also relative (Ex: My ancestors are human. False, because from Darwin we know apes is humanity's ancestors)
It is not that both statement are valid because "the totality" (the typical boogyman used by anti-communists) demands unity, but for those who assert that a truth (relavtive as most social truth are) can't one day turns into it's opposite, they are doom to dogmatism.
You lost the plot.
The Material world is the shadow cast by the mind of the absolute Ideal.
We don't live in the Material world. We live in objective reality.
Thus We also do not need to Transcend ( dialectically ) the Material world.
Sorry, no Socialist Megazord Species Being for you.
Objective reality doesn't work that way, regardless of what you may dream up dialectically.
@@dwwolf4636 ??? material world IS objective reality. tf?
@@andriaabashidze2497 yes
2:25 the beards are slowly disappearing 😅
Liked and subscribed. Love to feel like a 20th century peasant being lured to my doom
Have to really get into Ilyenkov to understand why it failed in the USSR, and why it was reborn anew in China where Mao developed it further. It stagnated as an abstraction of itself which lead to historical nihilism.
No, it did what it was designed to do.
*Let's see if you can tell which view is from a National Socialist, "Nazi", "Facsist", ect. and which is from a International Socialist, "Marxist", "Neo-Liberal", "progressive", ect*
*1:* "Equal liability of all to work."
*2:* "The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically."
*3:* "We demand the nationalisation of all associated industries."
*4:* "Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State."
*5:* "We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press."
*6:* "We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens." Abolition of unearned incomes.
*7:* "Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery."
*8:* "We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare"
*9:* "The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we possess. They will have an ideal that will make killing worth while."
*10:* "I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years… Just put them there and say, ‘Sir or madam will you be kind enough to justify your existence… if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.'"
Aside from the National Socialists, "Nazi's" being obsessed with race, their political programs were quite similar. A fact that J. Goebbels even acknowledge in a 1920's speech. Yes, the National Socialists "Nazi" beat up on the Marxist International Socialists. But all Socialists have their infighting! We see some of the same fault lines in the Democratic Party today, with one part sticking to its traditional race-based victimization theory, while the other side is fighting for a class-warfare argument. This is a classic dichotomy.
Answers:
-25 Point National Socialist (Nazi) Program: 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8
-The Communist Manifesto: 1, 4
-H.G. Wells: 9
-George Bernard Shaw: 10
Damn
What?
This sounds complicated.
that's intentional because its ultimately meaningless
Well, diamat has really fallen outta grace here, in post-USSR, but truth be told.... USSR had utterly failed in educating diamat. Soviet philosophers, let alone teachers barely understood the principles of dialectical thought, and general populus had only retained the ideas of absolute and relative truths through two termins (истина и правда). People mostly saw this amazing philosophy as a ritual, or worse, a mandatory, forced insanity.
Despite all that, when I crawl outta my CIS-lair into the western web and communicate with the western leftists, it really shocks, how badly they lack any substantial logic at all. In the best cases they are somewhat adequately educated with formal, and communism requires dialectical thinking for it's arguementation. Post-soviet sphere is better philosophically educated in general, and in therms of diamat vastly in particular
What a mess
It became clear that the soviet experiment failed and the brabble about dialectical materialism became more about power and ordinary people did not really care much.
However you can think and try to apply dialectical materialism especially in the field of science. Science is inherently a materialist enterprise (except maybe psychology). And there the dialectical method allows for thinking with contradictions.
Why is this great? I do think a great example where non dialectical thinking fails is ecology. When a company produces a fertilizer that kills all plants that dont have a specific gene to protect the crops that have been engineered to have the gene, then this is very reductionist and does not think with contradictions. Instead it sees a problem and a simply solution.
However it is clear to everyone that this type of solution for crops is not good. Dialectical materialism provides us with a framework to view processes in nature not only in reductionist terms but tries to synthesize the phenomena to the whole that they are.
At least that would be my interpretation of it and Engels even wrote a unfinished work on Dialectical Materialism in Nature/Science
To me it is a tragedy of history that this was not developed further
Lenin wrote Marxism and Empirico-Criticism (quoted somewhat in this video) as a response some idealist in his party, there he dive into a lot of various contemporary physic topics. I found it fascinating that some Marxist has a wide grasp of knowledge in natural science. And if my memory serves me right, Engels wrote somewhere in the vein of "The condition of capitalism freed to the natural sciences from feudalism, and the future socialist revolution will likewise free the social sciences". Capitalist states don't teach dialectical materialism, and it's not hard to see the logic here. You don't teach people what they would use to overthrow you
It is particularly ironic, that dialectical materialism in the whole span of sciences, besides philosophy, is now only officially established in psychology in a form of DBT.
But it is modern. It was developed in the late 90s and is only booming rn!
Great video. Although I think the totality within politics at least is rather the centralism of democratic centralism, as not all contradictions are to be solved; some are antagonistic. These contradictions reflected class warfare in the USSR and its eventyual corruption towards capitalism as revisionists reintroduced market elements and linked themselves more to IMF etc. Perhaps an interesting topic for another video!
............ Makes no sense to me. Just word salad
because you are uneducated😂
Your brain is salad.
how much effort people make to justify Hegelian schizophrenia!
Soviets and logic now THERES a thesis/antithesis.
More people should watch this so as to better understand Russian thinking well engrained long before Lenin. They do not know anything else just like the Chinese.
Before Lenin it was a Tsarist state. Wtf are you talking about?
@@waltonsmith7210 I would say this to help clarify your confusion.
The Tsarist state, which we could understand as oppresive towards the Russian people. And, in general, for that matter, in any state, there always exists a tension (contradiction) between the state and the people this state is supposed to represent. Therefore, we could say this way of thinking was always present in the people, but was merely surpressed by the Tsarist state, Lenin gave a voice to this way of thinking to the Russian people already present, but hidden in the people.
We could also argue, that that is not the case, that Lenin got his thinking and ideas from mostly German thinking, which would include both Hegel and Marx.
A Communist is someone who reads Marx and Engels.
A Capitalist is someone who understands Marx and Engels.
No, a capitalist is someone who employs capital, it’s an economic category, not something you identify as. Identifying with your master and advocating their interests is incredibly cucked. Read Marx and Engels.
Dialectical materialism is not anything, it has no real content. There are lengthy works on the subject. But non of those works have any relevance to real world matters. It’s a specific word salad philosophy that the non-working class leadership of Marxist groups or states use as a means of shutting down really rivals and their political ideas. Engels basically lifted a bunch of text from Hegel and shoehorned some Victorian day science writing around those stolen Hegelian ideas. Plekhanov coined the term dialectical materialism and imported the idea into the Russian middle class revolutionary circles he was part of. Lenin took Plekhanov’s words about dialectical materialism as an unquestionable truth. The majority of works on dialectical materialism came about during periods following massive failures in the movement, it acts a bit like a comfort device (like how Marx viewed religious ideas). Contemporary Marxist groups still follow Lenin’s example of using dialectical materialism to shut up rivals or to comfort cadre after a defeat/split etc. Leninist groups nearly all operate as small businesses, often their self perpetuating leadership are actually owners of the LLC etc in which the organizations’ cash flows through. Following the Stalinist model of a slate system of ‘election’, even the Trotsky wing of Leninism follows this model, small business owners conduct a cadre organization of not only free labor but charge regular dues and purchases of merchandise. The pantheon:Marx Engels Lenin (then decide if: Stalin, Trotsky, Mao etc ) the elected slate of leaders for life (or until a split) are the earthly divinations here to interpret the gods and the Dialectic for the subject proletariat.
What
@@alexyoung6371bro uses word salad to divide marxists. Ignore this comment. If you wanna learn about dialectical materialism read from a marxist source.
What no material analysis does to a mf
@@EnverHalilHoxha1917 you find my comment incomprehensible?
@@yawnandjokeohYou're largely dealing with tankies (i.ie red fascists) who think the USSR, DPRK, and PRC are or were communist paradises. And even using the word "think" in association with their ilk is way too generous. DM is a lense through which one can analyze the world and make evaluations but, unlike an actual lense which simply bends light, the brain has to act as the sense and perform an analysis which is subjective.
It'd be nice if communists like them stopped trying to skip to end game and actually put in the work to better society in their lifetimes. But no. They scream about incrementally and how all their enemies will be less alive after the glorious people's revolution. . . which just installs another dictator to tell the masses how stupid they are. It's. . . exhausting because Marx had a lot of useful insights without people utterly twisting his writings.