Date of Award
8-1-2022
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Philosophy
First Advisor
Frankowski, Alfred
Abstract
As the contradictions of U.S. capitalist imperialism have intensified the hardships of working class and poor Americans, spontaneous mass mobilizations have arisen with more frequency than in decades past. However, these social movements have all fallen with the same speed as they arose, often leaving nothing but hashtags and slogans to account for their existence. In this thesis, I postulate that the futility of U.S. social movements stems from their lack of organization and theoretical guidance. I hold that the U.S. masses’ organization along the lines of a non-dogmatic and non-mechanistic dialectical materialist outlook stands as the precondition for a successful anti-capitalist movement. In light of this, this thesis explores questions and misunderstandings related to the dialectical materialist outlook and creates the conditions for its concise and systematized elaboration, a task which it fulfills in the process of demonstrating its indispensability for revolutionary socialist politics.
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