I think my understanding of dialectical/historical materialism is quite good, but I don’t get the whole quantitative and qualitative growth thing.

In general what is it and what are examples of it? And wasn’t there something about Mao and how he disagreed with Marx?

  • @lxvi
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    62 years ago

    Quantitative and qualitative are scientific terms quantitative refers to numbers while qualitative refers to qualities.

    For instance I added 5g of substance to 500g clear aqueous solution. After five minutes solution became light brown and formed blue precipitate. Temperature increased 10 C. I extracted the precipitate it was hard and brittle and weighed 7g after drying.

    The numbers are quantitative measures. The quality changes are a change in color and the forming of precipitate. Hard and brittle are qualitative descriptions, that it weighed 7 grams is quantitative.

    1. When speaking dialectically we usually would mean one as opposed to the other. Quantitative changes will be qualifiable just as qualitative changes will be quantifiable. When we say quantitative changes lead to qualitative outcomes what is meant is that many small invisible changes bring about all at once an apparent result.

    For instance when performing titration you are performing small quantitative changes to a solution until you reach an immediate qualitative change of the solution. The quantitative change here is a single drop of acid into a liter of solution. Drop by drop nothing happens until eventually all at once a visible transformation occurs. The solution changes color, a solid precipitates, or it starts to boil. Each drop alone did nothing but a combination of them all lead to a visible outcome.

    In the case of titration the drop is quantitative because it is a known quantity of quantified properties.

    This process of quantitative changes leading to qualitative outcomes is what is being referred to.

    There are a lot of small things happening all the the time all around us. We don’t notice them. The world seems permanent and unchanging. Then all of the sudden it changes. It was changing all along but we never saw it.

    I try to open a stuck jar. I try and try and nothing happens until it opens. It wasn’t the very moment the jar opened that I opened the jar. It was the sum of my trying to open it that opened it.

    My car is making strange terrifying noises. I ignore them. For one year I continue to drive my car until one day it breaks. It didn’t break at the moment of it’s breaking. That was the change in quality of my car from a working car to a broken one brought about by a year of misuse.

    1. The quantitative changes dialectically speaking are brought about through contradictions in the social order. This contradictions persist for a duration until they bring about qualitative change.

    For example, I must have shelter. In order to have shelter I must pay the landlord. The domicile for me is a form of shelter while for the landlord it is a means of extracting wealth from the social order. This one object exists as two entities each one in contradiction with the other the true nature of the object lies in the contridictory relation of the two entities in opposition. It draws in the social relations concerned with it into it’s contradiction. In other words, the house is one thing to me and to my landlord another. This difference in vision is so fundamental that there can be no resolution. I and my landlord are speaking different languages based on different virtues, but because we both need the house we cannot break away from each other. We are trapped together by the house which we both cannot let go of without some fundamental transformation. Either I have to become homeless or the landlord must cease to be a landlord.

    Because we are trapped in opposition we are in a constant struggle even though that struggle may for the most part be invisible, but because of an inbalance of power quantitative changes occur. The water gets governed, repairs aren’t made, the rent gets raised. All of this happens year after year until the changes lead to visible transformation. Tennant unions form, people are evicted. As the tennants seek to fight back the landlords feel their way of life is under threat and become more hostile. As the homeless population rises what was once easily ignorable becomes a visible presence within society. The state is forced to react.

    But as the house so too the state is of dual contradictory entities. To us it is a democracy, a neutral arbitor of justice, but to the landlords it is the means of power they use to maintain their identity. The contradictions of a lower order have risen to aggrovate the contradictions of a higher order. The contradiction present in the house have aggrovated the contradictions present in the state.

    I’m noticing this is becoming fairly long and want to close despite feeling there is more to say. I hoped this has been helpful

    • RuheForstOP
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      32 years ago

      Thanks that helped me a lot and was interesting to read

  • @guojing@lemmy.ml
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    fedilink
    42 years ago

    Quantitative growth: something gets bigger (eg more people join a party)

    Qualitative growth: something gets better or more capable (eg party members how to carry out their work more effectively)