The paragraphs that follow will require you to engage your entire brain. They are incredibly dense. Have patience with yourself and with the text. You will have to reread it 4 or 5 times to understand it. It is the culmination of the entirety of human philosophical and scientific progress, the intellectual heritage of the entire human species. You are about to stare into the abyss, and you will find that the abyss will stare right back. You and the abyss in fact form a pair of opposites which find their reconciliation and interpenetration in the staring contest.
Before what follows, we must understand the fundamental dialectic of logic itself. It goes like this:
With that said, the following, if the doctrine is correct, ought to be a verifiable dialectic structure detailing a connection between base and superstructure, given in abstract, mathematical form; it is the dialectic of materialist and idealist philosophy. If we have succeeded, then we have successfully reconciled all of the soft and hard sciences into a unified whole. We are currently in the process of verifying it practically, first through criticism of the pen, and tomorrow of the sword:
The first step that follows is forming the thought abstract from the thought concrete. We will start with the thought concretes of mechanistic (i.e. metaphysical) materialism, dialectical idealism, and dialectical materialism. We will abstract away their qualitative aspects, leaving behind only their quantitative ones, reducing everything down into math formulae.
At this point one may realize this procedure is following a dialectical motion: 1. This conception of the dialectical movement is one-sided, only quantitative, not qualitative, therefore a pure thought-abstraction. 2. Therefore it will become negated, the qualitative aspect reaffirmed. 3. The quantitative elements will then be reconciled with the qualitative elements, resulting in the following conclusions:
1234 is the bourgeoisie, since it incorporates both metaphysical materialism and dialectical idealism. 3212 is the proletariat since it incorporates metaphysical materialism and dialectical materialism (this is in fact the project we are currently involved in right now as a party: the movement away from metaphysics by combining the metaphysical sciences into an interconnected whole). 2321 has the same elements as 3212 but in a different sequence. (32)=(23),(12)=(21) via permutation. They are therefore identical and yet opposites. We have therefore the proletariat (3212) in the process of abolishing itself on the one side and the communist humanity (2321) of the future in the process of birthing itself on the other, and they become unified in the process of communist revolution and the abolition of classes. In a word, proletariat is the mediating agent between bourgeois society and communist society. In fact, it would be relatively trivial to prove that all classes are mediating agents; all social development is mediated by class struggle. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Manifesto).
By doing this, moreoever, we have given dialectics a mathematical form, and have therefore reconciled the soft and hard sciences. We propose that the mathematical form of dialectics is set theory. Moreover, Bertrand Russel has already demonstrated how one can derive the entirety of modern mathematics out of the null set. Therefore we have derived mathematics from dialectics; we have dialectically reconciled mathematics and materialist dialectics.
The mathematical operations are therefore association (composition of sets), dissociation (decomposition, breaking down of sets, which in itself is a form of composition insofar as it creates new sets) and permutation (changing the order of sets and their elements); they are the operations governing the interconnection between concepts.
Dialectics has arrived at communist conceptions through sheer mathematics; we have mathematically derived the possibility of communist revolution via the operations of set composition, decomposition and permutation upon the concepts of metaphysical materialism, dialectical idealism, and dialectical materialism. This works because concepts are a mirror reflection of the real world and therefore contain a kernel of real world inside of them.
What is left to be tested is whether we can carry the revolution through, whether we can bring it to completion, or whether we will face total annhilation as a species. We remain cautiously optimistic, for now at least, however the authors have the suspiscion that as capitalism enters its totalitarian phase in the wake of the crisis of overproduction of 2008, the bourgeoisie will encounter an ever worsening governmental crisis. What we are seeing in the United States right now is probably only the beginning of this, as the means of production and of communication become increasingly incompatible with the state machinery and cause it to become increasingly dysfunctional, bureaucratic and top-heavy, in a word too cumbersome to use to successfully beat back the vengeful and ruthless hammer blows of the international proletariat.
Let us now turn our eye towards the dialectic motion: association - dissociation - permutation - association - permutation - order. This will be our next project, and it will require a study of set theory to fully wrap our minds around. After that we ought to move on to study the algebraic structure of this dialectical system and arrive at its categorization. We may then be able to apply category theory to dialectics.
We propose that, since they are only three elements and not 4, accident, necessity, and freedom are composite ideas. In fact we have already shown this: choice (2) which does not recognize its constraints (1) is the accidental - lack of choice (4) which recognizes its constraints (3) is the necessary - choice (4) which recognizes its constraints (1) is the free.
We propose what determines the order of numbers in the linguistic presentation, as opposed to the mathematical presentation, of dialectics is to be derived from the relationship between the nouns (choice, lack of choice) and the adjectives/relative clauses (which does not recognize its constraints, which does recognize its constraints). What ought to be seen is what goes on with the relative clauses, how to relate relative clauses to adjectives; we hope eventually a reconciliation will be met and a higher order conception of their relationship achieved.
We propose moreover that it may (we are saying this with extreme uncertainty) be possible to predict the general features of the next theory of physics, the theory of quantum gravity, via the same method of breaking down, constructing, and reconstituting. The authors however do not pretend to know what the hell they are talking about in that regard.
| ABSTRACT | → | NEGATIVE | → | CONCRETE |
| ↕ | ↕ | ↕ | ||
| AFFIRMATION | → | CRITIQUE | → | CRITICAL REAFFIRMATION (CRITICAL CRITIQUE) |
| ↕ | ↕ | ↕ | ||
| FRIEND | → | FOE | → | COMRADE |
| ↕ | ↕ | ↕ | ||
| ANCIENT COMMUNISM | → | CLASS SOCIETY | → | INDUSTRIAL COMMUNISM |
Dialectical criticism, dialectical logic, is the mental recognition of the material dialectic; it is a mental reflection of material processes, of material activity and practice, of material interaction with the world. In fact, all capacity for logic is cultivated, a production of human activity; logic is unreasonably good at explaining reality because it is derived from engagement with that very reality itself.
It makes sense then that dialectical criticism would emerge (or rather: be produced) only alongside the emergence of the elements of a new communist society within the old capitalist society (Manifesto, ch. 2). These elements are, on the one hand, communist productive forces (industry, science, communications technology), as developed and expressed by capitalist society; on the other hand, communist relations of production, as developed and expressed by the International Communist Party in the form of organic centralism (the communist party derives its form of organization from its communist essence). Communist society is the fusion of the communist party with modern industry. "Socialism = soviet power + electrification" (Lenin).
In the first phase, we have the affirmation of an abstract, one-sided concept (the abstract). In the second phase we have the negation of that concept through criticism, the emergence of the opposite one-sided concept (the negative). In the third phase the criticism turns back upon itself, becomes critical of itself (critical critique), and by so doing returns back to the original concept, the original affirmation, but in a higher, more concrete form, by reconciling the two (the concrete).By this motion, the two sides of the argument are fused together into an organic whole, a double-sided, dialectical conception. Abstract and concrete are opposites, however, and thus necessarily compose another unity; therefore the concrete becomes abstract once again and the cycle begins anew. Because of this, perfect knowledge of the world is impossible; knowledge is always perfectible. There is no such thing as absolute knowledge.
We use the word "dialectical" here to mean the result of a dialogue between two opposite, one-sided components which have become reconciled and thus have become indentical with each other. And thus we have arrived at the unity, the identity, the equality, of opposites.
Dialectical critique then simultaneously provides its target with its logical justification and its logical condemnation in the same breath. This is incredibly counterintuitive for most people. The result is the death of all moral thinking. Good and bad transform into each other and through reconciliation disintegrate into a rational comprehension of the world. A dialectician moralizes about the universe and its contents (including society) about as much as the nuclear physicist moralizes about the structure of atoms, that is: not at all.
Since logic is a reflection of reality, dialectical motion also affirms itself in physical processes, not just mental ones. Moreover, it is precisely one-sided activity which results in the production of one-sided concepts. In the very first forms of human social organisation, we had only two forms of activity: gathering food and sex. Hence we formed one-sided conceptions of the world. These conceptions were, at base, irrational conceptions, passionate rather than logical products. But with the development of human society, the passionate begets the logical, and the logical conditions the passions. And so, under class society, activity, labor, has been divided, resulting in professions, in specializations, which produce one-sided conceptions, one-sided knowledge, one-sided theories. The professor always looks at reality from the lens of their own narrow field of research. It is for this reason that Quantum Mechanics and Relativity theory are irreconcilable.
The friend is the affirmer, the foe is the criticiser, and the comrade is the critical critic. Under communism there will be no friends nor foes, only critical critics, only comrades. The formation of the friend begins with the very beginnings of social organisation, in the primitive communist society of hunter gatherers. The enemy emerges alongside private property in class society; it reflects the "contradiction" (incompatibility between limitations) between relations and forces of production. The material constraints under which production is carried on are no longer compatible with each other and so the entire system begins to break down. The comrade emerges with the death of private property, with the reaffirmation of the communal way of life filled with a higher, industrial and scientific content.
Here we will include notes about the fundamental workings and principles of dialectical and historical materialism. Understand that this entire body of work, this entire materialism index, cannot be comprehended without all of its parts. The historical side is integral to understanding the theoretical side, and vice versa. This in fact applies to all subject matters. Focusing solely on the theoretical side will provide you only with a one-sided conception (in the quite literal dialectical sense) just as will focusing solely on the historical side. The two must be comprehended as an organic unity. "We know only one science: the science of history" (Marx).
With that said, we will now present you with the dialectical kernel of historical materialism. This is the entirety of the historical process distilled down into a single dialectic:
We will now abstract away the concrete aspects of the base and superstructure to distill them down to their general concepts.
The logical movement so far then:
We can now distill the final moment down via abstraction, cosi':
Therefore, the movement is:
Finally, social reproduction presupposes social breakdown, and so we arrive at the final moment: SOCIAL REVOLUTION. And so by this method, we have reached the conclusion that, "When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence" (Communist Manifesto, ch. 2).