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What is Dialectical Materialism to a Parrot?

To add a word concerning teaching how the world should be: in any case, philosophy always comes too late for that. As the thought of the world, it always appears only in the time after actuality has completed its process of cultivation, after it has finished.
What is Dialectical Materialism to a Parrot?
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That two times two is four can become untrue, for example, if one has taught it to a parrot and he now “says” so; for what is mathematics to a parrot? [1]

Teleology is the idea that ideas and physical beings develop after some purpose or end. The gospel of Christ has a purpose and end but for the parrot, the second coming of Christ is an unintelligible end even if we teach it to preach. More on that below. Let's think for a moment about Herodotus’s goal in writing history. To preserve the remembrance of what men had done from decay; so, how did we go from remembering the past to using it to predict the future? And how can we teach that to a parrot?

To answer these questions, we should look back to the nineteenth century when the concept of history was given a new purpose. At that point, Hegel used logic to describe the rational development of the historical epochs. For Hegel, history was not the preservation of the deeds of men but the history of the Ideas that guide men. It was for him the development of the consciousness of men, i.e., Spirit. In short, Hegel's claim is that the rational process by which an Idea moves through time is driven partly by the contradictions revealed when individuals act according to these ideas. The dialectic logic [henceforth the logic] was a tool Hegel used to see the change in ideas over time. Hegel gives quite the performance describing this rational process in his Philosophy of Right. Every turn in history is a turn in the ideas that guided the lives of men. In the Philosophy of Right Hegel comments on the limitations of dialectical logic.

To add a word concerning teaching how the world should be: in any case, philosophy always comes too late for that. As the thought of the world, it always appears only in the time after actuality has completed its process of cultivation, after it has finished. [2]

Not long after Hegel came a young man, the son of a lawyer, who was endowed with the mind of a proletariat factory worker, claiming that the logic Hegel had so brilliantly presented had been perverted. According to Marx, Hegel applied the logic upside down, but also underestimated the logic's capacity to predict the future.

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite…[For] me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. [3]

Marx continues,

In its mystified [Hegelian] form, the dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seems to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. [4]

It happens to be that these two competing adaptations of the logic give us vastly different accounts of history. For Marx, history was not the preservation of the deeds of men, nor the development of human consciousness over time, but understanding the relationship determined by classes of people as determined by the material productive forces. What we are talking about t is not merely how to fill a history textbook. What Marx achieved in terms of Hegel's logic was to establish a new variant of it now called dialectical materialism. Using Dialectical materialism Marx set out to do that which Hegel had warned was not possible: predict the future.

Famously, for Marx, the logic is supposed to show that the capitalist mode of production–private property, wage labor, and profiteering– will come to a logical end when it creates a society wherein people are no longer forced to work for the private gain of others.

At this point, we may return to the parrot who cannot speak on the second coming. Today the ends proposed my Marx are parroted by those convinced that all of their ills are due to the financial profit of others. The irony, oh the sweet irony, that the end of capitalism, now “late-stage capitalism,” is awaited religiously by those who do not come close to understanding the logic and those who mock the belief in the second coming of Christ.

For what is christianity to a parrot?

What is dialectical materialism to a parrot?

Here, I only meant to show that believing in an end will always justify present action. Is it because Christians believe in the second coming of Christ that they preach the gospel and love their neighbors. In the same way that the proponent of socialism justifies meddling with the market economy, voting for governmental representatives that govern according to the story of class struggle, whose end is dismantling capitalism.

The economic calculations that allow capitalism to provide for the needs and desires of an ever-growing global population do not make sense under socialism—the abolition of property and profit does not allow money to serve as a medium of judgment and exchange. Thus, socialism will not be able to utilize the empirically verified rational calculations of the market economy in deciding the best way to produce the wants and desires of all. The fruits of these rational calculations are empirically verifiable with population data and standard of living data for nations that have implemented a market economy.

Under socialist economies, the methods used to determine when things are being produced effectively and efficiently are dismantled and replaced with labor value.

And when the socialist society is established throughout the world, there will no longer be men and women, but only working on a footing of equality. [5]

Suppose you understand the dialectic beyond what has been stated here. In that case, you will probably ask yourself why socialists take the working theory of value used in market economics and replace it with an inferior one. Perhaps because their ideology needs to do what Hegel told us it couldn’t do: talk about what the world should be.

Doing away with the rational economic calculation that helps the capitalist bring the best things at the lowest cost to the market has consequences. Since the mechanisms which allowed capitalism to satisfy subjective desires cannot be utilized under socialist calculations, those things will necessarily be produced inadequately, both qualitatively and quantitatively speaking, effectively creating a difference between those who get the enjoyment of something beyond the necessities and those who notice (the disparities between the leaders and citizens) and end up in the gulag. In the end, capitalism’s defense mechanism against abuses in the system is not the abolition of property but the enlightenment of its participants to the ideas of liberty and sound economic policy.

[1] Rosenzweig, F., & Hallo, W. W. (2014). In The Star of Redemption (p. 230). Notre Dame Press. Kindle Editon

[2] Friedrich, H. G. W., & White, A. (2002). In Philosophy of right (p. 10). preface, Focus Publishing.

[3, 4] Marx, K., Engels, F., & Tucker, R. C. (1972). In The marx - engles reader (pp. 301–302). essay, Norton .

[5] de Beauvoir, Simon, Parshley, H. M., (1956). The Second Sex (p 81). Jonathan Cape.