Hi comrades, how do you go about applying Dialectical Materialism in your daily life? What tasks have you successfully solved using it?
I’m trying to get a deeper understanding of it right now by reading literature on it, right now I’m at Anti-Duhring (excerpts of it). I find it sometimes hard to apply what I’ve learned in personal cases, such as a discussion with someone, and so on.
well given the relationship between base and superstructure, it’s less something people apply daily to their lives, and more it is something that is applied daily, by society’s base, to society’s superstructure, and vice-versa, regardless of whether people are aware of it. I don’t think it necessarily makes sense for an individual apply it to daily life, but I welcome corrections if I’m wrong about that.
Yep, but the elements in the superstructure can have contradictions inherent in them, right? In any case, I heard of people applying it in their daily lives and so on, so I was curious
It’s a good question. I don’t have an answer. I would need to think about it for longer
All elements of both the base and the superstructure are riddled with inherent contradictions, and not just under capitalism (e.g. artistic vision vs market demand) but under socialism and communism as well (e.g. vision of one artist vs another’s). You cannot expect these things to be without contradictions, for the movement that results from the dynamic of contradictions is what keeps them going at all. Sometimes these contradictions are even desirable: You will gain stability and predictability by solving the contradictions, but in e.g. art and culture you need them to keep things interesting. Even things like mathematics, which are at first glance pure and free of any (logical) contradictions, have at their bottom statements that are true but not provable, as suggested by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem; and on a higher level there is also the ever-present (didactic) contradiction between mathematical truth and “common sense”.