I had this question proposed to me recently, and thought I would give it my best shot. I would love any input you guys have on how I can refine this further, make it more clear, more accurate, more succinct, all that.
Also, this is specifically geared towards Marxist-Leninists and Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, and that understanding of dialectics, just to be clear. I’m not interested in the hyper-orthodox understanding of dialectical materialism.
I don’t understand the ins and outs of gravity perfectly, but here goes.
Internal contradiction is what drives all things. This is true for gravity, as much as anything in the world. Gravity could then be analyzed in the framework of the contradictor forces within gravity. What would those forces be?
Well, Einstein’s general relativity is probably the best place to start. I will outline the two contradictory forces below.
Again, I don’t know a ton about the in’s and out’s of it, but the way I see it, there are two sets of contradictions at work in “gravity”.
First, the contradiction of Mass and Spacetime Curvature. We have the force of attraction, where masses attract each other, but contradictory to that, we also have the resistance of compression, where the curvature of space resists this attraction.
Second, we have the contradiction of Inertia and Graviational Pull. Objects resist changes to their existing state of motion, but the force of attraction seeks to change the motion of objects
In the case of general relativity, I would say the first contradiction is the primary one, since that relationship is what defines the attraction between masses, and the resistances between each one. I would say the second contradiction is the secondary one, since it’s still crucial for understanding how gravity works, but, it explains the result of gravitational attraction, rather than the fundamental cause of it.
In the case of the primary contradiction, I would say that the force of attraction is the primary aspect of the contradiction, over resistance to compression, since the attraction of mass to itself is the fundamental reason why spacetime is distorted in the first place. In the secondary contradiction, gravitational pull is of course, the primary aspect there.
Let me know what you think, and thank you.
You’re mixing up dialectical and historical materialism. Dialectics is an effective outlook for interpreting science. Engels didn’t think he knew everything about science, but he saw trends in its progression.
There seems to be quite some confusion as to what dialectics is in this thread. I wonder if it comes down to those who accept that everything is contradiction and those who say that dialectics is just a good heuristic. I’m with you in the first group, I think.
I think you might be right. That’s what I was trying to hint at with my blurb about the orthodox marxists and their understanding of Dialectics versus what I have observed as the ML/MLM understanding of dialectics.
It is impossible to accurately describe physics thru dialectics, u cant make predictions about what will happen when particles collide for example using dialectics or anything else for that matter, u can describe surface level understandings of things we already know using the language of dialectics but u cant advance physics with it.
Also trends in the progression of science could be dialectical, science itself, as in the thing that humans do to understand the world is a dialectical processes but the things science describes are almost all not dialectical.
Sure dialectics isn’t going to make a mathematical discovery, but it’s a very helpful worldview. A metaphysician sees the world as compartmentalized, binary, and static. This is what led to the errors of mechanism and other errors of thinking long ago and today. In Lenin’s Materialism and Imperio-Criticism he observes the latest discoveries of physics around electrons and shows how that does not invalidate materialism as his idealist opponents said, but shows the error of metaphysics, and that science is moving toward dialectics unconsciously, and it would help them to know it consciously. In science it is true that all things change, have antagonistic parts, must die, and are connected.