• tags :: dialectics

A common complaint of reading Marxis that he does not define his terms upfront. According to Derrick Varn, Marx said that "he did not want to write a single sentence that could be left for interpretation." The joke is on him.

Dialectics in the ancient Greek world was not about defining terms, because a dialectic was used when the term itself was in question. The result of the dialectic was supposed to be axiomatic logic.

For Hegel dialectics became something where terms could emerge out of. Marx makes use of this in nearly all of his later writing, where he does not define terms like "capitalism" and "working class" but instead describes them. Capital Vol. 1for example does not contain many definitions outright, but an intense interrogation of terms.