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Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical Materialism This is a school of thought which emerged from Karl Marx‘s theory of history.
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History
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History is the study of past (and arguably present) ideas, objects, people and events. Scholars usually credit the Greek Heroditus (c. 484 BCE – c. 425 BCE) as the founder of historical writing.
History often involves a particular narrative style that categorizes and describes according to certain time periods and geographical limits. For instance, Lord Kenneth Clark‘s groundbreaking Civilization series for BBC TV pretty much ignored the achievements of ancient China and several other cultures. This is because history must be selective.
Clark was well aware of these shortcomings and, in his view, overcame them by insisting that the series be entitled: Civilization: A Personal View.
More recently, the presentation of history has been popularized by time-charts, point form outlines, multimedia and other innovative techniques which have expanded our definition of the “narrative.”
Feminists often say that history is biased by patriarchy. It’s written mostly by men about men or by men interpreting women’s experiences from a male perspective. Feminists also suggest that female writers of history often adopt a stereotypical male attitude (i.e. sexist).
One strategy that feminists have used to further their agenda is to call history “herstory.” This is an effective contemporary word play, but has been criticized for ignoring the etymology of the word history. The Greek word historia translates to “inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation.”¹
Michel Foucault via Wikipedia (follow link for fair use rationale)
The French postodern thinker Michel Foucault argues that history is about the interpretation of not only discovered but often selected forms of knowledge. For Foucault, past events and items are often selected and interpreted to make them seem significant for the benefit of those with social power, while other events and items that would challenge their power are routinely ignored.
According to this view, history is a kind of collective myth. Or more correctly, it’s an ongoing struggle for legitimacy among several competing discourses (a popular term among postmoderns) of power. So in a nutshell, the cleverest myth-makers benefit most.
On the other hand, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung says that myth is history because it depicts mankind’s collective psychological past.
Two important points to consider with regard to the postmodern view are:
- Are the best mythmakers conscious of being such, or do they, perhaps, simply create and perpetuate relative “truths” out of ignorance.
- Not entirely unlike Karl Marx‘s notion of false consciousness, postmoderns believe that prevailing social myths spread throughout a culture so that even those who don’t benefit will believe in and espouse those social “fictions,” as Foucault once put it. And some may believe in a culturally relative discourse which is actually harmful to them.
A good example for #2 would be gays and lesbians before the American Psychiatric Association voted in 1974 that homosexuality wasn’t a mental disorder.² Prior to that time, many gays and lesbians would no doubt have questioned why they were apparently “wrong,” blindly believing in the psychiatric biases of the day.
Related Posts » Archaeology, Counter-discourse, Dialectical Materialism, Forces of Production, Hegel (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich), Intercession, Jewish Mysticism, Joachim of Fiore, Language, Lévi-Strauss (Claude), Moses and Monotheism, Myth, Nietzsche (Friedrich), Occam’s razor, Relations of Production, Scholarship, Sign
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¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History
² Chuck Stewart, Homosexuality and the law: a dictionary, p. 41.
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Marxism
KarlMarx3 via Wikipedia
Marxism is a scary word for some who believe in capitalism. But it could be argued that no one knows just what Marxism really is because Karl Marx didn’t express his ideas in a coherent, systematic manner.
Countless writers on Marx have tried to provide the analytical rigor which many claim is lacking in his work. The result is an equally countless number of interpretations of Marx’s ideas.
On a theoretical level, Marxism has been adapted and expanded to account for political and economic phenomena that Marx didn’t adequately address, some of which were nonexistent in his time.
As for the implementation of his ideas into real social practice, parts of the so-called Third World have adapted his ideas to mostly agricultural forces of production, often combined with militaristic relations of production.
According to G. A. Cohen the relations of production refers to the uniquely social aspects of production in a given society, usually the legal or brute force mechanisms of exploiting labor, extracting surplus and maintaining a state of social dominance of the few over the many.
And Cohen says that the forces of production refers to the way a given society actually produces commodities. The forces of production include raw materials, tools, technology and knowledge of how to organize labor power and use available tools. While some writers use the term ‘economics’ to include the forces of production, Cohen and other theorists say that economics more properly refers to the relations of production.
In both the so-called Third World and the economically wealthy G8 countries, Marx’s analysis doesn’t adequately account for the possibility of various forms of corruption.
Search Think Free » Dialectical Materialism, False Consciousness, Ideology, Lenin, Religion
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Marx, Karl
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Karl Marx (1818-83) was a German social thinker and the founder of international communism.
Marx held a dim view of religion, a point that upsets many religious people. Nevertheless, one could say that his ideas were well-intentioned and humane.
He advocated equal wages for equal work and decried the exploitation of workers by the owners of the means of commodity production.
His labor theory of value maintains that products contain a use value, an exchange value and a surplus value.
Use value is the practical utility of a commodity or service.
Exchange value is a commodity or service’s value as compared to other goods and services. Marx expresses this as a ratio. For instance, a chocolate bar at $1.50 would have an exchange value of 1:2 with a hamburger costing $3.00.
The surplus value is the amount over and above both the exchange and use values which the owners of the means of production procure for themselves (i.e. corporate profit).
The communism we see today has little to do with Marx’s original vision.
Marx believed that human history went through an inevitable sequence of four socioeconomic types:
- Primitive Communism
- Feudalism
- Capitalism
- Communism
For Marx, Capitalism inevitably passes into Communism. But this apparently ‘universal law‘ has clearly been refuted by China, which developed somewhat in the reverse. The People’s Republic turned to a form of Capitalism after a long spell of Communism. And China is fast becoming an economic leader, loosening rigid local laws and opening the door to international markets.
As for religion, Marx says it is the “opiate of the people” because he believes that false otherworldly beliefs sway public attention away from the real issues of social, political and economic oppression. In other words, fantasy obscures reality.
Marx was extremely popular in universities from the 1960′s to early 80′s but was supplanted by the likes of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, these thinkers representing the somewhat voguish development called postmodernism.
One could argue that some of the intricate, esoteric arguments of postmodernism, couched in specialized, elitist language, represented a new master paradigm for intellectuals in the late 20th century. Its abstract intellectualism recalls the complex arguments of medieval schoolmen. But there’s one huge difference: God and God’s powers are either entirely ignored or obscured by the ambiguous language of much postmodernism.
Today, however, postmodernism is being applied within theology, as we find with ‘postmodern theology.’
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Creed
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A creed (Latin credo: I believe) is a general or precise set of religious beliefs which (apparently) are written in unambiguous language.
The philosopher of religion Thomas McPherson maintains that saying
I believe in God
is quite different from saying
I believe that God exists
The former statement, he argues, avows an attachment, commitment and basic trust in the subject matter. It’s a statement of faith. The latter statement is simply a neutral opinion or, if not perhaps neutral, it’s certainly a cooler, less emotionally involved statement.
By way of contrast, consider
I believe in my country
as compared to
I believe that my country exists
McPherson says these statements are similar to the pair of statements about God’s existence. But he also claims that saying you believe in your country doesn’t entail the same degree of involvement as saying that you believe in God.
McPherson’s claim that saying “I believe in God” reveals the most passionate of all beliefs is questionable. Dialectical materialists forwarding in the work of Karl Marx, for instance, sometimes seem tremendously passionate about their “faith” in the object of their belief.
Roland Barthes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A good example of a dialectical materialist who seems to “believe in” Marx’s ideas with great intensity can be found in J. D. Bernal, whose Science in History, Vols. 1-4. follows the Marxist ideology pretty closely.
But not only Marxists can get passionate about their beliefs. Social thinkers like Roland Barthes have argued that American patriotism, particularly during the 1950s, arguably had all the intensity of a religious faith. That is, the idea of the American Spirit connoted a intense set of beliefs about the superiority and moral goodness of America.
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