dialectics
about six months ago, i said
sorry-not-sorry marxists
this was an off hand flippant response to my own statement
liberation for all requires abandoning the dialectic
recently, i boosted some posts in this thread and @burnoutqueen@tech.lgbt asked me what i meant by it. which i actually think merits a serious answer, despite the flippancy of the statement.
my issues with marxism are a theory quibble. a theory quibble that doesn't actually have anything to do with what anyone who identifies as a marxist believes. but it does impact how they are seen, so worth hashing out.
i and many others see dialectical materialism as a necessary piece of what one would consider marxism. i know many self-proclaimed marxists who, for one reason or another, do not see it as crucial and use the label marxist for other reasons. what those reasons are, are individual. i have no interest in defining marxism for those who use the label. what i am interested in is discussing my issues with dialectical materialism because it's so associated with marxism itself.
i actually personally find dialectics a very useful tool for modeling reality and seeing it through specific lenses. the trouble is, like all models, it's not reality. because i don't think binary categories exist – even on the label of category and its complement. so i don't think “cats” and “non-cats” exist. i think that there is a lot of value in certain circumstances to accept “cats” and “non-cats” as categories, but only when we discard such dialectics when the model interferes with its intended purpose.
similarly, i think looking at things as having fundamental contradictions as dialectical materialism requires is faulty. and furthermore, seeing these resolves through synthesis to thesis is concerning because they take these contradictions as material reality.
particularly, the damage i see in dialectical materialism is setting up things in opposition. even when it's a useful model (and one i engage with myself) i think this intellectual framework feeds an idea of being at odds, of conflicting needs, on a social level that we must dismantle. this is why i brought it up in context of purity culture.
while dialectics are an attempt to understand interconnectedness, they do so through a method of reductionist conflict that ignores the spectra of material reality we trudge through every day. looking at social processes as conflict itself is troubled and a choice. starting framing comes with entailments that are hard to put down once we start with them.
and when i see, time and time again, Leftists chasing some sort of purity culture, trying to out the discord in our ranks of those who are finding the bad takes, who is doing harm, and putting these ideas in terms of conflict, of conflicting needs, of one demographic vs another, what i see is a model that itself has influenced how we think and navigate social systems and processes despite its failure to accurately describe what we need to talk about in order to move towards change.
so not only are dialectics themselves disconnected from lived reality, the entailments that come with dialectical materialism concern me heavily, and feed a culture of conflict over a culture of liberation
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