>here is Edmund
>Wilson, the only writer who has been able to pound some semblence of the
>meaning of "dialectical method" into my methodology-impaired brain:
>
>
>_To the Finland Station_
>
>
>[Marx and Engels] called their philosophy "Dialectical Materialism"
Oh no they didn't. This phrase was first used by Plekhanov.
>The first of these, called by Hegel the *thesis*, is a process of
>affirmation and unification; the second, the *antithesis*, is a process of
>splitting off from the *thesis* and negating it; the third is a new
>unification, which reconciles the *antithesis* with the *thesis* and is
>known as the *synthesis*. These cycles are not simple recurrences, which
>leave the world the same as it was before: the synthesis is always an
>advance over the thesis, for it combines in a "higher" unification the best
>features of both the thesis and the antithesis. Thus, for Hegel, the
>unification represented by the early Roman Republic was a *thesis*. The
>prime unification had been accomplished by great patriots of the type of
>the Scipios; but as time goes on, the republican patriot is to take on a
>different character: this type turns into the "colossal individuality" of
>the age of Caesar and Pompey, and individuality which tends to disrupt the
>State in proportion as the republican order begins to decay under the
>influence of Roman prosperity--this is the *antithesis* which breaks off
>from the *thesis*. But at last Julius Caesar puts down his rivals, the
>other colossal individualities, and imposes upon Roman civilization a new
>order which is autocratic, a *synthesis*, which effects a larger
>unification: the Roman Empire.
>
>Marx and Engels took this principle over,
Oh no they didn't. The only place Marx talks of the dialectic in this way is in _The Poverty of Philosophy_, and his purpose in so doing is to criticise Proudhon's categorisation of the dialectic in that way.
>and they projected its action
>into the future as Hegel had not done. For them, the *thesis* was bourgeois
>society, which had originally been a unification out of the disintegrating
>feudal regime; the *antithesis* was the proletariat, who had originally
>been produced by the development of modern industry, but who had then been
>split off through specialization and debasement from the main body of
>modern society and who must eventually be turned against it; and the
>*synthesis* would be the communistic society which would result from the
>conflict of the working class with the owning and employing class and the
>taking-over of the industrial plant by the working class, and which would
>represent a higher unity because it would harmonize the interests of all
>mankind.
Again, they never presented their dialectic in this way, as a logical syllogism independent of the actual course of history. I might add that it misrepresents Hegel also. For a provocative treatment of this and other aspects of Marx, try _The Postmodern Marx_ by Terrell Carver, just out. -- Lew