The Poverty of Dialectics: A Debunking of Dialectical Materialism Part 2

I made a post a while back lambasting dialectical materialism as a set of banalities and absurdities which had nothing profound to teach us. I just realised that I failed to mention one of the most fascinating inanities of them all.

In our sect, we were fond of saying that ‘Dialectics involves looking at the relationship between the part and the whole.’ In other words, looking at things in context. When I debated the issue of the USSR’s degeneration with the full-timer for my region, he invoked this dialectical point against me. I was guilty of taking Lenin and Trotsky’s actions out of context and using the approach of formal logic in my understanding of certain policies like War Communism. I was putting too much blame on ideology and ignoring the ‘objective conditions’.

Of course, this is at odds with another dialectical truism that was inculcated into us, which is that ‘Dialectics involves separating the essential from the non-essential.’ That is to say, looking at things analytically requires a certain degree of divorcing something from context. Marxists themselves do this all the time. When they talk about ‘capitalism’ as an abstract, world-historical source of human ills, they are talking about a highly reified concept which takes the essential aspects of capitalism in all times and places, independently of context, and merges these into a construct called ‘capitalism’. This does not take into account the differences between Japanese capitalism, American capitalism, Chinese capitalism, British capitalism etc. It is all ‘capitalism’ to Marxists. Marx did precisely this in Capital. What he was critiquing in this famous work was not any real example of capitalism, but an imagined version which took everything that liberal economists had said about how the system worked literally. Marx wanted to show that even a perfect capitalism would degenerate into chaos and misery for the toilers and for those capitalists unable to survive the periodic crises and crashes of the system. Marx’s analytical model was constructed in such a way that it can be applied to all capitalist economies regardless of the context. Marx took British capitalism as the basis for this analytical model, and made it into the archetypal form of capitalist society – a method which has its strengths as well as its flaws. This is based on the idea that British capitalism was the most developed form of capitalism and the form that all developing economies would end up approximating.

Naturally, Marx was only able to do this by stripping British capitalism of all its context and assuming that it was the ‘natural’ form of economic development in all times and in all places. That is to say, he divorced the essential from the non-essential. The uniquely ‘British’ aspects were not essential to Marx. What was essential was the broad, world-historical, socio-economic development, which Marx believed all countries would have to go through.

Even today, social scientists debate the whole idea of the analytical versus the empirical. It is clear that any meaningful analysis requires an analytical model abstracted from reality on the one hand, and empirical foundation on the other. An excessive reliance on analytical models means building empty categories with no empirical content and immune to falsification, whilst relying purely on empirical data without making any effort to categorise and organise it prevents us from saying anything meaningful about the world. This is not an issue unique to Marx and Marxists, but their ‘science’ of dialectical materialism would have you believe otherwise. Their doctrine covers all bases by insisting that diamat involves simultaneously studying things in context (‘the relationship between the part and the whole’), whilst simultaneously studying things out of context (‘dividing the essential from the non-essential’). In other words, it is set up to be unfalsifiable. Anyone can claim that they are using dialectics, even if they are doing opposite things! It is another example of how meaningless this ‘science’ really is.

At least one IMTer has asserted that my cult analysis is somehow ‘undialectical’. After all, he protested, cult analysis does not take into account the fact that so-called cults actually have a lot in common with ‘normal’ organisations, meaning that the word cult is entirely subjective and my use of it politically motivated. Little does he know that I was doing nothing more than making use of dialectics by divorcing the essential from the non-essential. What cults have in common with normal organisations is inessential. What is essential is what makes them unique, and that is what I have chosen to focus my analysis on. This does mean separating cults from context only in the sense that this analysis overlooks any relationship they may have with other forms of human organisation. This separation is justified because cults are unique entities and cannot be meaningfully compared to other groups. They must be studied in their own right. That does not prevent analysts from putting cults on a spectrum, with healthy groups at one end, and destructive cults on the other, with more benign cults in between.

So there you have it, IMTers. I am actually using ‘dialectics’ in my cult analysis!