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A little offtopic, but has there been much discussion about why Marx's theory is called Materialist-Dialectic or whatever? The word "Dialectic" is almost exclusively used by (my) outgroup so I don't care much about what it means specifically -- much of its use is probably shibboleth. Why the word "Materialist?" That Marxists do not believe in God seems unimportant to me. You might as well call wokeness Materialist, or the Nurture Hypothesis also Materialist. Is it too uncharitable if my first instinct is that it is the same phenomenon as postmodern writing appropriating physics terms? That is, using the term "Materialist" makes Marxism sound descriptive and scientific? This wouldn't surprise me, especially since my read of the discussion here is that LTV seems obviously like a moral prescription.
Slightly more on-topic, I think Zagrebbi is more correct than Cofnas. We actually went over this a few weeks ago. The deleted comment in this thread originally linked to here. Perhaps the equality thesis has not been falsified already. But if it ever were, I fully expect those facts to be memory-holed.
I guess that means we should expect the actual undoing (if it should ever happen) of woke will be mocking it and making it low status (somehow? This is left as an exercise to the reader).
The word "dialectic" has had multiple incompatible definitions throughout the history of philosophy. When Marxists use the term, they're using it in the sense that Hegel used it, which is... well, you could argue that even Hegel and his followers didn't have one consistent definition of the term. But I think you can reasonably say that all usages of the (Hegelian) term "dialectical" revolve around the idea of an "immanent internal critique of a concept or position via the concept's internal contradictions". Many common arguments against naive libertarianism could be classified as dialectical (in the Hegelian sense). If you tell the libertarian that libertarianism is bad because freedom is bad, that's an external critique. But many people accept libertarianism's presupposition that freedom is good; they just think that libertarianism fails to live up to its own ideals, that the particular kind of formal freedom offered by libertarianism fails to secure certain actual freedoms that we value. Freedom can in fact give rise to its own opposite, unfreedom (an isolated individual in a pure state of nature is "free", but he's also rather unfree, since the physical world immediately begins to make strenuous demands on him). That's an internal, dialectical critique.
Marxists have a dialectical view of history because they think that the internal (and material, according to them) contradictions of a given mode of production are what give rise to social and historical change.
"Materialism" has two distinct meanings in philosophy. There's materialism as a metaphysical thesis, which is the thesis that everything that exists is material (this is the "God doesn't exist" version), and there's materialism as a sociological thesis, which is the thesis that material conditions are the driving force of social and historical change (as opposed to "sociological" idealism - the thesis that people inventing and adopting new ideas is what drives historical change). In contemporary analytic philosophy, you basically only see materialism/idealism used as metaphysical terms, while in continental philosophy (the tradition that Marx and Marxists belong to), people will freely switch between both usages. The type of materialism that Marxists place the emphasis on is really more of the sociological kind (although they're almost universally metaphysical materialists as well).
See this for an overview of the debate between Marx's sociological materialism and Hegel's sociological idealism.
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Matt Walsh making Robin DiAngelo pay $30 to his black camera man was effective in that even mainstream media talked about the scene and she vanished in shame:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9JSjAnGwzqI
But mocking is difficult, as the superweapon of political correctness was to make mocking cringe, one can’t make deriding jokes of gay/fat/trans/ChingChong/disabled/mentalIllness/unhoused/otherness when it is punching down. Sort of a jiujitsu move: being gay was low status and destroyed careers until coming-out got the quality of braveness. This can be easily transferred to other former icks.
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Marx called his dialectic "materialist" to differentiate it from the Hegelian dialectic that was its philosophical ancestor, and was fundamentally idealist in nature. "Dialectic" in this sense refers to a specific notion of an idea (or material condition) being confronted by its negation and the contradiction between the two being resolved in some further form. For Hegel this generally took the form of some initial idea (thesis) being confronted by its negation (antithesis) and the contradiction between the two being resolved in some further idea (synthesis). Marx intends to ground this process in material conditions (in social classes, or labor relations, or similar sorts of things) rather than in ideas so it is "materialist" in contrast to Hegel's idealism. It doesn't really have anything to do with God or the use of "materialist" in other philosophical contexts.
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Because back in the 1850s there were a lot of non-materialist philosophies so it was actually a meaningful distinction.
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