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Torsion & Tension [Chapter Three, PDF download]

I probably should have made this available days ago, since the copy-editing was finished a day after Chapter 2 was downloaded, but my initial plan was to have another post finished on the whole "free speech" topic (based on all the recently weird and liberal comments that have appeared on my old posts on this topic, and the misunderstandings generated by those old polemic entries) between this serialized mini-manual's entries.  Moreover, and I'll write more on this later, one of my manuscripts was accepted for publication by Zero Books and I have a Monday deadline to prepare said manuscript into the publisher's format guidelines so it can go to the editor––this has dominated my free this week and will also over-determine my weekend.



Here is the Table of Contents with the entries to date:

Introduction
Chapter One: The Meaning of Dialectical Materialism
Chapter Two: Dialectical Logic Defined
Chapter Three: Pseudo-dialectics
Chapter Four: Unity of Opposites
Chapter Five: The Fundamental Contradiction of Dialectical Materialism
Epilogue

So today's entry is on "pseudo-dialectics" and is probably the most polemical of the entries.  Mainly, it is an objection to the way in which dialectical materialism is treated as a natural force rather than a logic by the tradition.  This will explain my complaints about Dialectics of Nature, and though some internet marxists have complained about my dismissal of this text by Engels (as if I'm some arrogant asshole for disliking an old text that, if you have a particular view, is part of a set of religious texts), I would like to remind people that Lenin was also opposed to this approach in both Engels and Plekhanov.  Even still, one of the aspects with which I express misgivings in my last entry (i.e. the whole "being" thing) rears its head fully in this chapter and you can be the judge with whether my complaints about this ontological language were justified.

The next two chapters are my favourite, though, and possess elements I will most probably mine for other projects, so if this one isn't to your taste then I promise the next one will be more interesting.

Download Torsion & Tension (Chapter 3)

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