Here’s a quote by Lenin I just got from Wikipedia:
As the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development, and the richest in content, Hegelian dialectics was considered by Marx and Engels the greatest achievement of classical German philosophy… “The great basic thought”, Engels writes, “that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things, apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away… this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that, in its generality, it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But, to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words, and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation, are two different things… For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it, except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy, itself, is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain.” Thus, according to Marx, dialectics is “the science of the general laws of motion both of the external world and of human thought”.
how does a dialectical understanding of social change lend itself to a left view?
I just, yeah, I can only grasp vaguely at any idea of what you’re saying by that, so a more thorough explanation by someone with a better understanding would be cool
I kind of got a sense of what you said as a more nuanced/less sophistic version of the idea of reality skewing to the left
(idk if that idea is sophistry or if the dismissals of the idea were right wing without me realising)
and the quote you posted adds to that
but then I am wary and sure that I am just not quite grasping this, still.
I think I’m uncertain if what your saying is something mostly pertaining to philosophical discourse, or something that has been fully adapted into modern life?
So to me this agrees with what I was saying, in that dialectics, including Marxist dialectics, are agnostic to political interpretation and that you can apply a ‘Marxist’ approach while inhabiting any point on the political spectrum. So, to take the point at hand, Adam Curtis can be a Marxist in approach but a libertarian in ideology, for example.
This is presented as conjecture by the way, not me stating facts - I want to know more.
Hegemonic power has to justify its existence, and it does so by creating an ideological framework that justifies the current power relations as fixed or natural (a process called reification). Dialectics (well dialectical materialism is the marxist form of dialectical analysis, but as per the quote above it can be applied just as easily to thought as to the material world) exposes power relations as a product of social forces, meaning that existing power relations are simply things that have come into being at a point in time, and will continue to interact to produce new relations in the future with a new configuration of power. So the relations that have become reified, meaning assumed as a natural order, are instead exposed as historical in nature.
There are very few forms of social analysis that are inherently dynamic in their structure, most struggle to incorporate time comfortably into their analysis. But as the movement of time is built into a dialectical analysis, the historical antecedents for current power relations are exposed, which inevitably leads to analyses where those power relations are critiqued (since the dialectical analysis will just expose the fact that hegemonic power is never begotten in a fair or just way, which for example undermines liberal calls, by people like John Rawls, for a ‘social contract’ based on static, abstract thought experiments about justice)
nice, thank you. I think that’s what my mind was grasping towards, pretty much.
it only entrenches my confusion about/distrust of his aims, though - not in the sense I am confused about what he’s doing, but more in the sense that this ^ clarification lends itself to what the critical piece linked to above says about Curtis’s disregard for the victims of these power structures
seems like there’s a disconnect, and I worry that his docs and blogs and etc entrench such privileged, academic exploration of ideas
Looking at the Pandora’s Docs article it looks like it’s by someone called Stephen Bond.
Someone on Cooked and Bombed says he’s the author of ‘Rameses’ Link to Forum posts but I can’t actually find much about that.
They also point to this article
which cites the Pandora’s Docs thing but claims it’s by “Laurence Tennant” but it seems like it was just hosted on his site because it’s still in a subfolder called ‘bonds’.
Also I find it a bit weird that it’s been deleted. It’s quite a detailed piece to have let die out but maybe it’s just a victim of not being hosted anywhere particularly.
His stuff is really too dense for me to get a handle on. I feel like I’m swimming in a doctrine I don’t know enough about but it’s very compelling the way he threads his narrative. I’ve only seen bits of stuff though. No idea when the latest one is hitting Aus.
To me, those quote are akin to criticising an OpEd column as if it’s a news article.
I don’t know if I’m looking at things the wrong way, but I always watch his shows with a massive pinch of salt, and also more for the overall outline of it than specific details.
If Curtis were actually presenting the 9 o clocks news with this tenor, it would be another issue, and maybe that criticism would be fairer, but I dunno…
Tbf there’s lots more to it than I’ve said above and I’m definitely not an expert! Like one of the main things I didn’t mention is how it’s an analysis where change is understood as the product of conflict. Classic Hegelian dialectics describes ideational conflict, and characterises it as “thesis, antithesis and synthesis,” where the synthesis then forms a new thesis and the process renews (though people often mistakenly think the synthesis is supposed to be a sort of amalgamation or mid-point between the thesis and antithesis. Where really the synthesis is just the product of the conflict between its antecedents)
Marxist dialectics applies the same principles but applies it to social forces. The most obvious way it does this is when discussing class conflict, describing how the conflicts of different epochs produced the outcomes that led to new epochs e.g how the tensions inherent within the feudal class system led to capitalism
Just watched these and I preferred them to his recent doc. I like that it was more traditional and had some good interviews. His latest feels a bit more style over substance than these older ones, though that might be just because I didn’t really understand his latest.
The most recent one is 100% style over substance tbh, hardly anything was backed up by a quote or interview or piece of relevant documentary footage. I thought Hypernormalisation was great though, it was far less cavalier with that sort of stuff.
I realize I posted this elsewhere but it seems quite relevant wrt to some of what’s being said in this thread
I wouldn’t go as far as calling Curtis a conservative although as an aside, it’s interesting that he allegedly applied this term to himself (or specifically a neoconservative) in an interview back in 2014.