Monday, September 02, 2013

Dialectics vs. "Complexity Theory" -- Excerpts from a Recent Web Dialogue.


Dear Readers,

Below is an excerpt from the edited transcript of a recent internet dialogue in which I participated, and that I thought you would enjoy, regarding the ideological science of "Complexity Theory" vis-a-vis Marxian-Dialectical Science.


Regards,

Miguel



 . . .

[Respondant]:  "The key thing is to make socialist and then communist revolution worldwide. Studying dialectics can help us but it doesn't outweigh determining a plan and set of positions which serve as the basis for creating a party, and based on the plan and party doing agitation and propaganda and organizing among the everyday masses and the advanced masses."

[M.D.]:  On the contrary:  accession to "the dialectical operations phase of adult human cognitive development" among a significant proportion of the global working class is a key to the capability of that class to produce a successful revolutionary transition to democratic-communism, i.e., to political-economic democracy.

Dialectics is precisely what we need to become capable to frame a successful revolutionary strategy, plan, and program.

Otherwise, would-be revolutionaries are all too prone to make catastrophic mistakes -- to succumb to capitalist ideology -- especially under conditions where the level of the social forces of production is not sufficient to support the transition beyond capitalism.

More specifically, without dialectical cognitive capability, workers cannot achieve escape-velocity from their present imprisonment in capitalist ideology -- including in the Leninist and Stalinist state-capitalist ideologies of totalitarian, police-state dictatorship, under the despotic rule of a state-bureaucratic ruling-class -- thereby also discrediting the Marxian revolutionary movement in the eyes of the global working class for generations, by equating it to fraudulent, state-capitalist "Marx-ism", and setting the stage for the regression into the ideologies of the Dark Ages religions worldwide.


It is especially through the systematic, dialectical, immanent critique of capitalist ideologies -- especially of capitalist-ideology-compromised sciences, like the "science" of classical political economy that Marx subjected to dialectical, immanent critique in the four volumes of Capital, etc. -- that we can raise ourselves to that level of freedom from capitalist ideology in theory, that can render us capable to lead ourselves along the right paths to real freedom in practice.

. . .

[Respondant]:  "Further the science of the motion and development of reality includes dialectics, but also includes complexity theory. And you lower your cognition of reality by ignoring this."


[M.D.]:  Your comment, above, is a case in point:  In your ad hoc, eclectic positing of “complexity theory” as a peer of dialectics, you have uncritically embraced "complexity theory", failing to detect the capitalist ideology that pervades and compromises the science of that theory.

The Foundation has done anything but "ignore" complexity theory, and its root source in nonlinear dynamical systems theory, throughout its long history.

One of the Foundation's earliest public documents both summarized, and outlined a dialectical, immanent critique of -- plus a corrective, dialectical extension of -- that theory, as a fruition of that critique.


-- pages 63-68.



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