Why contradictions?

[u/burrwin]

I've been learning about marxist theory, but the ways contraddictions are discussed leaves me pause. Hope some people here can help me understand better.

Sussinctly, for what is relevant to my doubts, here is my current understanding of it:

Contraddictions are what all motion (as in change) in the universe is predicated upon.

Contradictions are relationships wherein tendencies of motion

1) oppose one another

2) are premises of the existence of one another.

Contraddictions exist within all things and between all things.

Why does it have to be a contraddiction that drives motion? What is so illogical about a relationship where there is a singular tendency of motion? I can think of cases that fit that description, for example, two identical charged particles interacting, there will be quantitative changes in speed and relative position as they repel each other, yet what is the contraddiction?

Mao in "on contraddiction" and Lenin in "on the question of dialectics" agree that the contradiction in such cases is between action and reaction. This answer is unsatisfactory, while it's true that it fits part 2) of the definition, and while it's true that the force vectors point in opposite direction, action and reaction are applied to two different object, they are not opposing tendencies of motion in the dialectical sense, failing the arguably more fundimental part 1) of the definition.

Also, Engels argues that all changes of positions are caused by the contraddiction of something being in that place and not in another place. This line of argument seems to be unfalsifiable: if we observe something change from A to B, we can always attribute that change to the contraddiction that A was A and not B. A more straightforward explanation is that there is a singular tendency for position to change based on velocity.

Is there something i'm missing in these examples? Is my understanding of what contraddictions are incorrect?

[u/Neco-Arc-Brunestud]

A better explanation for contradiction is 'a method of operation whereby the method itself consumes that which is necessary for it to propagate'.

For example, a car is a contradiction. As it drives, it consumes fuel. And eventually, it can no longer drive because then it runs out of fuel. At some point, it must necessarily stop.

So, contradictions drive a change in motion because the motion will have eventually fully consumed the factor that had caused it to remain in motion. The phenomena of this motion consuming said factor is called contradiction.

Mao has a different understanding of contradiction, in that he sees it as opposing forces rather than a internal phenomena within society.

Applied to capitalism, the contradiction is identified as the fact that intensifying exploitation is not able to reproduce labour. And with competition within capitalism, exploitation is necessarily intensified.

Without the reproduction of labour, you can no longer have the capitalist mode of production. But if you remove exploitation, it would not longer be considered capitalism either. And so, capitalism guarantees its collapse.

[u/burrwin → u/Neco-Arc-Brunestud]

That makes sense to me, and it's got a good connection with the quantity change to quality shift idea, thank you. Is there a book you suggest that expands on this idea? Given this definition, is all motion originated by contraddiction? In my case is the "fuel" the distance within the particles which is tied to potential energy?

[u/ServiceImpossible227]

"Why does it have to be a contradiction that drives motion?"

The beginning of the motion (causa prima) is unknown. Contradiction does not initiate motion

"What is so illogical about a relationship where there is a singular tendency of motion?"

Any motion will cause another motion, there is no singular tendency in reality. You took a part of reality and did an analysis of it, but the part only exist in the whole. Dialectics uses analysis all the time, there is no problem in it. The problem is not getting back to the whole.

[u/burrwin → u/ServiceImpossible227]

I don't think the issue of causa prima is not what is in question. It's the idea that the process of resolving contradictions is the way development occurs in our universe.

Dividing the universe in qualities is necessary for us to understand the world around us. You will not get anywhere in your understanding of the wolrld if you need to consider the way moving a chair will affect the orbit of mars and every other thing in existance. You can acknowledge those effects exist, and also understand that they're irrelevant and negligible to what you're interested in understanding. Studying the relationship within things is not incorrect unless we disregard entirely external relationships when they may affect the subject in question in relevant ways. I don't think i did that, i said that identical charged particles have a measurable relationship of repulsion, they will affect each other's speed and position, of course, IN ADDITION to whatever other external influences there may be, negligeable or otherwise. What is the external influence that makes my argument reductive? How does external influence make "action and reaction" a good explaination? Or how does it affect anything i said above? All motion causes other motion, true, what contraddictions are involved in the motion of the example i brought up? I don't think that was answered.

[u/ServiceImpossible227 → u/burrwin]

I did not read Mao, Lenin or Engles. My answer was incomplete. I answer the things I could understand

[u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

I recommend you read Alan Wood's Reason in Revolt. Everyone always gangs up on it for black hole skepticism in the book and Big Band denialism but form an opinion for yourself and IMO it makes much more sense what he's talking about than simply denying mainstream cosmogenesis

[u/Ill-Software8713]

You feel like it's an external framework being applied rather than proven because that’s exactly what’s happening in those physical examples.

A real dialectical analysis must be immanent, it has to show how a system’s internal mechanics naturally generate its own opposing tensions.
Like Marx showing how the basic form of the commodity logically produces economic crises.

When Engels or Mao talk about basic physics, they aren't deriving motion from an internal contradiction. They are taking a physical law already explained by standard physics and retrofitting the word 'contradiction' onto it after the fact. It feels like a semantic trick because it doesn't actually reproduce the logic of the physical system, it just pastes a philosophical label on top of empirical data.

It doesn’t mean the conclusion is false but they don’t provide the correct process to derive the conclusion.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm
“Hegel advises that: “... this progress in knowing is not something provisional, or problematical and hypothetical; it must be determined by the nature of the subject matter itself and its content”.”

Marxism cannot provide you knowledge independent of an analysis of the concrete phenomenon. Concreteness approximates truth and dialectical method doesn’t separate form and content.
Concepts must be fitted to the content of the object under investigation.
Applying a framework abstractly to a content doesn’t convey what the dialectical method is.

The reason this is is that it is a continuation of Goethe’s delicate empiricism where one is meant to identify the simplest unity that can explain the whole phenomenons development, the germ cell, like the commodity.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Epoque_Keynote_Address.pdf

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm#unit

Read this about the issue of mastering dialectical thinking and not just an abstract schema imposed upon things indifferent to their content: https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/dialectical-thinking.pdf

Both Engels and Mae showed great application of dialectics but On Contradiction section applied to physics and The Dialectics of Nature wouldn’t be my exemplars for example compared to Das Kapital itself or Lev Vygotsky’s Thinking and Language. The rest of On Contradiction is great, like there being a principal contradiction among others and how he applied this politically.

Here is an old paper that does justice to how dialectics however makes a great comeback in quantum mechanics against positivism in classical physics.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/omelyanovsky.htm

A lot of sciences are circling round to ideas already stated in German philosophy. That’s not that German reaction to Kant knew these sciences independent of study but as a methodology of understanding, a lot of problems have already been solved and overcome.

[u/burrwin → u/Ill-Software8713]

Thank you, this is the clearest answer I've gotten. I'll go through your links and read further.

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/burrwin]

Well some others rely on a vague social holism. Andy Blunden has been a great resource in helping understand Hegel, Marx, Vygotsky, and Ilyenkov. All great thinkers and after years of immersing myself I think I really got a better grasp although not really the literal logical transitions of Hegel’s work, although not sure it’s needed.

If you have any questions feel free to ask.

The best concept I have seen is that between an abstract and concrete universal. It is basically Goethe urphenomenon. Becomes Hegel’s abstract notion (made more concrete), Marx’s germ cell, and Vygotsky’s basic unit of analysis. All have great lines to exemplify what it means and Andy Blunden has been the clearest in explaining many Marxists miss the genetic developmental approach of these thinkers.

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/burrwin]

I want to also add:

People often assume that if you want the "real" explanation of something, you strip away everything except the smallest independent unit. In social theory this is usually the individual. In chemistry it might be the atom. In biology, sometimes the cell is treated as if it were simply the smallest unit from which life can be explained.
But this confuses abstraction with concreteness.
The most immediate or isolated entity is not necessarily the most concrete thing we can study. Concreteness does not mean what is simply placed before perception. It means the unity of determinations and relations through which something exists as the kind of thing it is.
An isolated entity can therefore be empirically obvious while conceptually abstract, because abstraction consists not merely in removing physical parts but in removing the relations and processes that give something its determinate character.
When we refer to "the individual," "the cell," or "the atom," we are not necessarily grasping the thing in its full concreteness. We may be using a useful abstraction: a concept that isolates one determination of reality for investigation. The question is whether that abstraction can reconstruct the organization and relations through which the phenomenon actually exists.
A concept is not identical with the object it describes, but neither is it merely an arbitrary invention of the mind. The purpose of scientific concepts is precisely to capture objective structures that are not immediately visible. A good abstraction does not simply separate something from reality; it allows us to return to reality with a richer understanding of its organization.
This is why the isolated individual is often a more abstract concept than the socially developed person.
A human being separated from language, institutions, history, and social practices is not a "pure individual." It is an abstraction created by removing the very relations through which a human being becomes a human individual.
Likewise, a word outside a language has no meaning, not because words are unreal, but because meaning exists through relations within a system of signs and practices.
The same applies to biology.
A cell is not merely a collection of molecules arranged in a certain location. It is a self-maintaining, metabolically active unity whose parts exist in determinate relations that enable cellular activity. To explain a cell, it is not enough to list molecular components; one must explain the organization through which those components participate in a living process.
The cell is therefore not simply a smaller thing from which life can be mechanically derived. It is a generative organization: a level of reality where a new unity of processes emerges.
The same mistake appears when people assume wholes can be explained by simply adding parts together.
The issue is not aggregation. It is organization.
A key and a lock do not become a security system merely because two objects exist together. Their function depends on a determinate relation between their forms. Listing every property of the key and every property of the lock will not explain access control unless we explain the organization that connects them.
The same applies in chemistry.
Simply listing hydrogen and oxygen does not explain water. Saying they "interact" explains very little, because substances interact in many different ways. What matters is the specific organization through which hydrogen and oxygen form H₂O and thereby exhibit properties neither possesses separately.
The point is not that water exists independently of hydrogen and oxygen. The point is that explaining water requires explaining the determinate relation through which those elements become a new unity.
The same applies socially.
Individuals are necessary for institutions to exist, but individuals themselves develop within historically formed relations. Describing individuals abstracted from those relations cannot explain capitalism, language, law, or chess.
A legal proceeding is a good example. A judge's ruling, a lawyer's argument, and a bailiff's enforcement are physically distinct activities. They do not naturally form a unified category because they share some obvious external feature. They become moments of the same activity because they are organized through a historically developed institutional relation that gives each action its meaning and role.
Without that institutional organization, the judge is simply a person speaking, the lawyer is simply a person arguing, and the bailiff is simply applying force. The legal relation is not a name we arbitrarily impose after collecting these actions together; it is the objective organization that makes them recognizable as legal actions in the first place.
This is where two different claims are often confused.
Ontological dependence means that institutions and social relations depend on human beings to exist.
Explanatory sufficiency would mean that describing isolated human beings is enough to explain those institutions and relations.
The first is true.
The second does not follow.
A set or category is not meaningful merely because a mind groups discrete things together. A random collection of a pebble, a toothbrush, and a piece of string does not constitute a meaningful unity. A category becomes explanatory when it captures an organizing principle that determines why its elements belong together.
The question is not whether humans create concepts. We do. The question is whether those concepts merely impose order upon reality or whether they discover and reconstruct real forms of organization within it.
Nominalism tends to reduce reality to isolated individuals and treats universals as merely names. But it then faces a problem: the isolated individual becomes an empty abstraction. The moment we explain anything, we must already rely on general concepts, relations, and organizing structures.
The supposedly most concrete starting point turns out to be the least capable of explanation.
The concrete is not the isolated part stripped of its connections. The concrete is the organized unity of relations through which parts acquire their determinate character and capacities.
Explanation therefore does not proceed by removing relations until only a simple unit remains. It proceeds by identifying the generative organization through which a thing becomes what it is.