A Simple Summary of Marxian Dialectics.

Full[er] Title:  A Simple Summary of Socialist [Marxian] Dialectics.




Dear Reader,


Here's another try at a simple summary of socialist dialectics --


Dialectics is the name of an advanced kind of thinking.

It is a kind of thinking that goes beyond the EITHER / OR absolute rigidity [never BOTH / AND] of formal-logic thinking.

Dialectics is a kind of thinking that the plurality of humanity will need to master before becoming capable of advancing from the state-capitalist, totalitarian, '''humanocidal''' dictatorship into which capitalisms converge, to equitarian political-economic democracy -- i.e., if humanity is to, first, survive, and then to thrive.

Call dialectic the kind of thinking that emerges in "the dialectical operations stage of adult human cognitive development", after the "formal operations stage of adult human cognitive development" is surpassed.


The best way that I know to briefly express the core principle of dialectic is via the Seldonian -- purely qualitative -- category-notation.


The reality represented by a kind-of-thing category, call it a, interacts with itself, or 'intra-acts' -- in the internal mind, or in the external world, or in both concurrently -- because of its internal strife.

[using a^2 to stand for "a acts on a", "a interacts with a", "a squared", "a in the 2nd degree", "a times itself", or "a of a"] --

a^2   =   a x a   =   a + b   =  a(a)   =  ~(a)

-- where b names a "contra-category" to category a.

This [dialectical] self-negation of a, due to its "internal contradictions", or, i.e., due to its "self-duality", modeled by its self-multiplication, produces a again, as in Boolean logic, but also produces its opposite [a, "plus" its opposite, b, like apples "plus" oranges], unlike in Boolean logic.

For example, a might stand for the "primitive communist" kind of society, with which humanity began.

Then, b might stand for its historical successor and opposite kind of society, society divided-against-itself; class society, culminating in capitalist society.

The "formal operations stage of adult cognitive development" stops its kind of thinking with the irreconcilable, "eternal" opposition of a and b as idea[l]s, and, as realities, demands the complete, absolute dominance of one over the other, including the complete, absolute obliteration/annihilation of the other by the one.

But the "dialectical operations stage" thought-process expects to see [dialectical] negation occur again, "karmically", to the result of that first [dialectical] negation --

a^3   =   a x ( a x a)   =   a x (a + b)   =   a + b + C(a, b)

-- i.e. [using the sign '--->' to stand for the phrase "goes to", or for the word "becomes"] --

a^1   --->   a^2 = aa = a + b   --->   a^3 = aaa =  

a + b + C(a,b)

-- wherein C(a, b) stands for the Combination, "Complex unity", or "dialectical synthesis" of the erstwhile opposites a and b.


Note:   This "category Combinatorics" can continue beyond this third term, C(a, b).


But the most compact "image" of dialectics that I know is:

a   --->   a(a(a))  =  ~(~(a))  =  a + b + C(a, b).




Regards,


Miguel