The Alchemy of the Dialectic

New Discourses

Education

4.8 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2025

⏱️ 79 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 186 The dialectic is ultimately the engine of all Marxist and Hegelian thought and also underlies Fascism and the conflict between Fascism and Marxism. It is also fundamentally Sociological Alchemy, as the Soviets both knew and admitted. Based on Marx's ideas about dialectical materialism as the fundamental law of all of Nature, including Man, the Soviets outlined three key dialectical laws and taught them to every school child and party member. First, there is the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice-versa. Second, there is the struggle and unification of opposites. Third, there is the "negation of the negation," which most people know as "problem, reaction, solution" in practice. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay introduces these three dialectical laws of Marxist and Soviet thought and brings them alive for you while comparing them to the social alchemy of George Soros and the ancient wizardry that tried to turn lead into gold. Latest from New Discourses Press! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2025 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #alchemy

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone. This is James Lindsay, and you are listening to the New Discourses podcast.
0:25.6	And what we're going to talk about today is dialectics. I know that I've kind of shied away from getting into the whole Hegelian thing.
0:32.2	I'm not going to dive into the deep Hegelian side of this. I want to present the three dialectical laws that the Soviets believed in.
0:42.1	This I think will be a somewhat shorter episode. I tried to go back and forth as to whether or not
0:46.8	to make this a new discourses bullet or a new discourses podcast. And it's going to be right in that
0:52.5	kind of middling range of length.
0:54.7	But I think it's better as a podcast. So as you know, as we've talked about in great detail,
1:01.0	especially back if for those of you've been following me for long enough to know, back in
1:05.0	2022 and 2023, I was putting a lot of effort into exposing the dialectical roots of Marxism.
1:12.8	And I don't think it's possible to understand Marxism outside of those dialectical roots.
1:18.4	There's a reason that they called their whole belief system dialectical materialism.
1:24.1	They believe that we live in a material world.
1:26.7	But that material world actually is being idealized. They claimed that they rejected idealism, but they believed in an ideal reality that they were trying to achieve. In the process of achieving the ideal reality, if you will, notice that that's like two opposite things coming together.
1:46.9	The way that you would achieve that is by this process of dialectical materialism,
1:52.6	which, by the way, the communists understand as the law of the universe. It's how everything works.
1:59.7	You have to understand that to be able to compare it to other belief systems.
2:03.6	It's like how in Islam the belief is that when everybody submits to God or Allah,
2:09.6	as described in the Quran by Muhammad, then there will be peace.
2:14.6	So when you've heard Islam as a religion of peace, when it's very obviously
2:18.7	a religion of struggle and submission, very much like communism, that seems kind of confusing.
2:25.2	Well, the reason is because when everybody submits, that's the belief, when everybody submits
2:29.8	and submits correctly, then there will be peace, and then there will be prosperity, and then there will be
	...

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