I'm sorry GH, but I have to agree with David f.
For someone criticising someone else's understanding of the dialectic, your examples were poor. Far safer I think, to stick to examples in politics, such as the current state of our own country.
David f, at the risk of appearing pedantic, while I agree the case of the rabbits would never stabilise (in the absence of predation) I doubt the population would continue to oscillate for very long (in evolutionary terms).
Using the logic of 'the drunkard's walk' , sooner or later a low point in the population oscillation would coincide with a natural catastrophe, such as drought or disease, resulting in extinction.
As an admirer of Hegel, I fear Mr Holmes has done him no favours with this piece.

I'm sorry, grok, but I'm going to have to take issue here with your fanboyish adulation of Marx: 'however, was so brilliant and accomplished, it is on record that not only is he widely considered to have been the best 'philosopher' of the Modern Era, bar none; but that essentially he and Aristotle are seen as the two top thinkers of all time'.

Oh, come on! This is as foolish as the loons who acclaim Ayn Rand as the greatest thinker of all time.

Marx didn't even finish his own magnum opus, and spent most of his life leeching off far more successful and accomplished people like Engels.

ear Gilbert Holmes,

The dialectic is a human description of a process. Whether it is a valid description or not a human description cannot be anything but a product of the human intellect.
Posted by david f, Monday, 27 September 2010 6:36:33 PM

A very fair description.

And a wall is not a wall with out a wall.

Thank god for the righteous one's.

And divided humans will always be.

But a very good read.

Thank you.

TTM

Dear Grim,

About 48 years ago while working at the Johnson Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania I programmed a computer simulation of a simple ecosystem with data from the Canadian Arctic. The system consisted of fox, rabbit and grass. The resulting picture of the variation of the fox and rabbit population were two almost perfect sine waves out of phase with one another.

And that's very nice wording, I am impressed.

TTM

> The problem with dialectic and its Marxian offshoots is that it is
> unfalsifiable. Since anything can be described as a 'swing' between
> two 'extremes' -- especially when you get to pick the 'extremes' --
> there is no way that any claims made for a particular 'dialectic' can
> ever be proven false.

Ridiculously untrue -- not to mention a conscious lie in some people's mouths (you're just credulously passing it along as wholecloth of course, like most people). Dialectical-/historical- materialism is actually, in fact, the very essence of the scientific method extended to human society; even into the psychology and subjective life of individuals (as any real science must at some point) -- tho' much work remains to be done. Scientific socialism is very much a work-in-progress, being a part of the never-finished scientific revolution in general.

What is to be falsified? Marxism interprets the processes of the world in a scientific manner -- which are as open to experiment as appropriately as any branch of the more basic sciences like physics or chemistry. It simply makes extended claims in the social sphere: which are as hard to 'experiment' on as any social science; and so relies more on experience and becomes, in practice, as much an 'art' as any difficult, non-linear scientific undertaking.

> Although this sounds good -- and it certainly sounded good to Marx
> -- more competent philosophers like Popper have shown that claims
> which cannot be disproven contain no information: they do not tell
> us anything we didn't know already. Marxism, like Freudianism,
> environmentalism and religion, cannot be falsified: not because it
> is true, but because it says nothing meaningful.

You can say that a jillion times (and the bourgeois mass-propaganda media certainly tries to) but you can't make it true.

As for Herr Popper: the World Socialist Web Site (certainly the best source of daily marxist analysis on the Internet) has a few things to say about him... Here is perhaps the best refutation on their site: <http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/le4-all.shtml>. Kinda brief, unfortunately.