I had this question proposed to me recently, and thought I would give it my best shot. I would love any input you guys have on how I can refine this further, make it more clear, more accurate, more succinct, all that.
Also, this is specifically geared towards Marxist-Leninists and Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, and that understanding of dialectics, just to be clear. I’m not interested in the hyper-orthodox understanding of dialectical materialism.
I don’t understand the ins and outs of gravity perfectly, but here goes.
Internal contradiction is what drives all things. This is true for gravity, as much as anything in the world. Gravity could then be analyzed in the framework of the contradictor forces within gravity. What would those forces be?
Well, Einstein’s general relativity is probably the best place to start. I will outline the two contradictory forces below.
Again, I don’t know a ton about the in’s and out’s of it, but the way I see it, there are two sets of contradictions at work in “gravity”.
First, the contradiction of Mass and Spacetime Curvature. We have the force of attraction, where masses attract each other, but contradictory to that, we also have the resistance of compression, where the curvature of space resists this attraction.
Second, we have the contradiction of Inertia and Graviational Pull. Objects resist changes to their existing state of motion, but the force of attraction seeks to change the motion of objects
In the case of general relativity, I would say the first contradiction is the primary one, since that relationship is what defines the attraction between masses, and the resistances between each one. I would say the second contradiction is the secondary one, since it’s still crucial for understanding how gravity works, but, it explains the result of gravitational attraction, rather than the fundamental cause of it.
In the case of the primary contradiction, I would say that the force of attraction is the primary aspect of the contradiction, over resistance to compression, since the attraction of mass to itself is the fundamental reason why spacetime is distorted in the first place. In the secondary contradiction, gravitational pull is of course, the primary aspect there.
Let me know what you think, and thank you.
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What do you mean? Beside the OP text, does not the notion that internal contradiction drives change explain a lot in physics?
The same with the unity of opposites?
And the insistence that all subject matter is relational?
Is not the contradiction between electrons and protons dialectical? Engels talked a lot about the dialectics of natural science. Obviously he’s not up to date, but are you suggesting he was wrong to do that?
No. electrons and protons dont attract because they have a history or because of the conditions surrounding them they do so because of intrinsic properties of themselves they didnt arrive to their current situation thru a struggle or process of any kind they just are the way they are, and dialectics tells u nothing about how electrons and protons will behave. Dialectical materialism is just one way to look at the world and it is good and accurate when used to describe somethings and useless when used to describe others, its a model like any other, it is more dear to our hearts than most models but that doesnt make it perfect or a theory of everything.
Also Engles can be wrong and infact im sure he was about many things and so was Marx and so was every other theorist.
You’re mixing up dialectical and historical materialism. Dialectics is an effective outlook for interpreting science. Engels didn’t think he knew everything about science, but he saw trends in its progression.
There seems to be quite some confusion as to what dialectics is in this thread. I wonder if it comes down to those who accept that everything is contradiction and those who say that dialectics is just a good heuristic. I’m with you in the first group, I think.
I think you might be right. That’s what I was trying to hint at with my blurb about the orthodox marxists and their understanding of Dialectics versus what I have observed as the ML/MLM understanding of dialectics.
It is impossible to accurately describe physics thru dialectics, u cant make predictions about what will happen when particles collide for example using dialectics or anything else for that matter, u can describe surface level understandings of things we already know using the language of dialectics but u cant advance physics with it.
Also trends in the progression of science could be dialectical, science itself, as in the thing that humans do to understand the world is a dialectical processes but the things science describes are almost all not dialectical.
Sure dialectics isn’t going to make a mathematical discovery, but it’s a very helpful worldview. A metaphysician sees the world as compartmentalized, binary, and static. This is what led to the errors of mechanism and other errors of thinking long ago and today. In Lenin’s Materialism and Imperio-Criticism he observes the latest discoveries of physics around electrons and shows how that does not invalidate materialism as his idealist opponents said, but shows the error of metaphysics, and that science is moving toward dialectics unconsciously, and it would help them to know it consciously. In science it is true that all things change, have antagonistic parts, must die, and are connected.
What are you even talking about, yes they do. Two particles will interact if their shared history (light cone) includes them being in the right conditions (like proximity to each other, opposing charge, etc.) for that to happen.
Their intrinsic properties are part of the conditions that cause any given particles to behave the way they do. The environment they find themselves in, such as what other particles they are in the presence of, very obviously plays just as much an important part of the role in determining their behavior as their intrinsic properties. And those conditions at any point in time exist because of the history that led to those conditions - which is just as true of leptons and bosons as it is of kings and peasants.
Yes, they absolutely did! “Struggle” would be an inappropriate (but still not necessarily inaccurate) term for it just because it carries the implication of intent and human emotions. But dialectical materialism, which is a metaphysical framework, absolutely does not rely on intention in any way - in fact it’s largely defined by the fact that it does not rely on intention since that would be idealism. But that’s just a matter of odd phrasing, because if you take the word “struggle” out, and just say “they didnt arrive to their current situation thru a process of any kind,” you would be completely, even incomprehensibly wrong. Of course they arrived at their current situation through a process. It could be any measure of complexity in the process that led to their conditions, but at it’s most simple, it’s literally just cause and effect. True of human society, true of particle physics.
As is literally everything else.
Dialectical materialism is a metaphysical framework. The issue here is not that we have to use it to describe particle interactions or predict their outcomes, but that particle physics and dialectical materialism are absolutely compatible with one another. It is even perfectly reasonable to look at the interaction between electrons and protons through a dialectical materialist lens, as @[email protected] pointed out, by considering that interaction as a contradiction and resolution relationship, (law of unity and conflict of opposites), even negation of the negation.
It’s political inadequacy aside, let’s just take a look at the first few sentences of wikipedia’s entry on Dialectical Materialism
It’s way too much to quote, but also please note the section on Lenin’s contributions to dialectical materialism, and note how it relates to physics. I do not mean this in a mean-spirited way, but you don’t seem to understand either physics or dialectical materialism. Almost everything you’ve said indicates a deep misunderstanding of both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism#Lenin’s_contributions