I myself do not really view “What is to be Done?” as a great beginner work for Marxists, since it mentions a lot of obscure philosophers or groups that a modern audience (with their cursory knowledge of Russian history being from the lips of liberals, or worse, conservatives) would hardly know the context of, and I am reading a version that has notes on these people!
That is not to say that it is not an influential or essential work of Lenin (I think it might be up there with “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” and “The State and Revolution” in terms of either factor), but one has to be willing to trudge through Russian names that you will likely never hear again.
Dialectics is outperformed by alternatives.
People who use dialectics seek to explain reflexive and changing processes. They seek to resist atomization, resist static thinking, and resist linear thinking. I think dialectics succeeds in these tasks, but I think it’s useful to examine how it is often used in practice.
I’ve often seen dialectics used as an assumption (a priori) and to evaluate situations after the fact (post hoc). While this can be problematic on its own, I think the deeper problem is this one: users of dialectics seem to argue that it is an analytical tool that never fails and as a requirement to understand reflexive and changing processes. This combination (universal applicability plus no sense of misapplication) is what I want to examine.
I will evaluate dialectics not as a claim about how reality itself operates. Instead, I am evaluating dialectics as an epistemological tool, a tool to understand the world.
My argument starts here: people routinely use other epistemological tools to understand the world because they are better at that than dialectics.
As an example consider your own practice.
You do not, in practice, reach for dialectical analysis for every problem in your life. No one does. Instead, you reach for whatever tool the problem calls for.
Here are some examples: “My foot hurts but I don’t know if I should go to the doctor or wait and see”. “My friend has 7 of these and I have 13. We will probably need 30, so we have to buy 10 more”. These are trivial examples, so let’s up the stakes: an epidemiologist tracking a pandemic using compartmental models, network analysis, and statistical inference; a clinical psychologist understanding a patient using operant conditioning, cognitive rule analysis, self-narrative analysis, and network diagrams; an evolutionary biologist using genetics, niche construction theory, and multilevel selection.
You may notice that in each of these examples dialectics can still be shoehorned. But that is precisely my point: dialectics can be used a priori and post hoc, without a sense of when it fails or stops being the right tool. On the other hand, pragmatic practitioners are able to see how tools like compartmental models, operant conditioning, and genetics have explanatory power up to a point.
At this point, you may be wondering if, by being critical of dialectics, we are doomed to an atomized, static, and linear way of looking at the world. I don’t think so.
Many tools can help us here. Biologists use complex adaptive system frameworks. Complexity economists use turbulent dynamics described by statistics. Psychologists use process-mapping to understand processes of rigidity and flexibility.
None of these frameworks are atomistic, static, or linear. Instead, they help us understand change, relation, and reflexivity without assuming in advance that every situation reduces to a contradiction.
Crucially, these tools are not used everywhere. When necessary, practitioners adapt and are ready to reach out for better tools. For example, a compartmental model is not useful when well-mixed assumptions fail. Operant conditioning is not useful with rule-governed behavior. Genetic explanation is not useful when cultural transmission takes over.
That is what I ask of analytical tools:
And even when analytical tools are useful, we shouldn’t assume they will apply to all situations. I think we should be willing to adapt our toolset when the problem-space changes or when our goals change.
I do want to recognize that there are many, many ways of looking at dialectics. Maybe there are ways of using dialectics that are more akin to rules-of-thumb and less to finger-wagging. Maybe there are iterations of dialectics that do have precision, scope, and depth. Maybe that’s a productive conversation to have.
Edit: Explained what my view is
Just for one example of why this conclusion doesn’t make sense:
Psychology is not an unbiased, purely neutral field of scientific observation. Bourgeoisie psychology (which tends to be very individualist) is not the same as explicitly working class psychology, for example (which will more so promote the collective). Dialectics helps us look past the pretense of neutrality toward the constant interplay of differing class and caste interests (depending on how / what way a society may be stratified). Without it, class analysis is hamstrung in bougie points of view that pretend to be neutral.
That said, I do think the material out there for understanding dialectical and historical materialism can be painfully hard to follow. A large part of that in English material is probably due to the fact that there hasn’t been a successful proletarian revolution in the English-as-first-language parts of the world (unless I’m forgetting one). That plus the academic watering down of Marxism in the west to make it more acceptable to the ruling classes, can make it feel a bit “ancient text written on scrolls” trying to engage with what it is and how to put it into practice. The main practitioners of it in history are people who also had to test it against reality, harshly, or their revolution might fail and their people could literally die. It was sink and swim; learn to use the scientific tool or be unequipped to meet the moment. By comparison, the theoretical vacuum academic view of it can make it seem almost quaint, like an odd little hobby of a view that you pick up to clarify a few things.
I do think it’s worthwhile examining psychology closely. I don’t doubt at all that psychology has been used to crack open social divisions. We could call this bourgeois psychology. Conversely, we could seek to fix these social divisions with something we call proletarian psychology.
However, bourgeois and proletarian are historically determined categories. They exist today because capitalism exists today. And yet humans have existed before capitalism (and hopefully after capitalism). It was before capitalism that we developed our pre-frontal cortex and our verbal capacity.
We have studied our own pre-frontal cortex and our verbal capacities. And we have consistently found some things to be true about them.
For example:
Again, these mechanisms are not dependent on capitalism. They are not bourgeois psychology. They are not proletarian psychology. They are dependent on our biological equipment, including our recently-evolved cognitive capacities.
Am I pretending these mechanisms are value-free? Not necessarily. These mechanisms determine the playing field. They determine the constraints we have to work with. It’s up to us what we make of them. We could choose to use these mechanisms and our understanding of them to legitimize and bolster class divisions or to critically examine and dismantle them.
Although I’m sure we can isolate some elements of psychology that are more of a universal observation than they are a sociopolitical lens, I would still emphasize that 1) most of psychology is not that degree of truism/universality and 2) dialectical and historical materialism is itself based on scientific observation. Prole and bougie is not what diamat is fundamentally; it’s one historical manifestation of class struggle.
Rejecting diamat doesn’t make scientific sense. Rejecting universally consistent facets of psychology doesn’t make scientific sense either. But, great care must be taken with thinking surrounding truisms and universality. For example, take a thing like “working memory limits”. This is not something that’s been consistently studied throughout history, so data on it is going to be limited. That already means that universality of it across history is difficult to back up. It is nevertheless useful to understanding what they are from the data we do have and whether they can fluctuate and why, but this is not the same as them being static across time and history.
I would also point out, though it’s a bit of a pedantic point, that neuroscience is not necessarily the same as psychology in the meaning of diagnosing reported feelings and thought patterns, and neuroscience can struggle to find the intersection between what it observes and what is going on inside, because of how dependent psychology research is on self-reporting.
So to reiterate, I’m not trying to say we should “throw out the entirety of the current society’s psychology because it is tainted” but rather that it’s rarely as straightforward as naming something as a truism and moving on. And that one of the benefits of diamat is explicitly naming the jockeying behind the scenes that diverts research toward one narrative purpose or another.
Oh this is definitely unpopular I think. The thing is that did not some Marxist philosopher (I feel like it was Mao) showed that dialectics is a part of science? Saying it is not necessary to explain the world is just strange to me (do you think that it is also unnecessary to explain politics)?
Marx and Engels especially tied dialectics to science. See Dialectics of Nature.
Oh thank you for the resource.
No problem!
Dialectical methodology was used by Marx to analyze classical economics, Engels noted evolution as dialectics at work, and psychology can be analyzed dialectically. I am unfamiliar with what you mean by “critical realism” and “complexity science,” but I don’t see why they surpass dialectics. What do you believe dialectics to be, and why do you think these areas are better without dialectics?