A different Outlook: Marxist Philosophy:
An Introduction to Dialectical Materialism
by Robin Clapp
Why have a Philosophy?
"The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is, however, to change
it." (Marx:‘Theses on Feuerbach’)
AT THE dawn of the 21st century, one-fifth of the world’s
population lives in absolute poverty on one US dollar a day or less, while
the assets of the 200 richest people are larger than the combined income
of the poorest 2.4 billion on the planet.
Yet material prosperity has increased by more in the past 100 years
than in all the rest of human history. Thus the basis already exists
potentially for undreamed-of progress of human society, provided the
contradictions created by capitalism itself can be swept away by the world’s
working class.
The capitalists through their control of the judiciary, the military,
education and the media are always seeking to prevent workers and youth
from drawing the conclusion that capitalism can be changed.
In the popular press, commentators occasionally rail against this or
that symptom of the system’s sickness while drumming home the mantra
that market economics represents the only show in town.
At the same time more serious justifications for capitalism are
produced. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-1992 gave a massive
boost to this branch of literary lies, allowing bourgeois philosophers to
claim that capitalism had emerged triumphant in its historic struggle with
socialism.
Every ruling class throughout history has sought to give its regime the
stamp of permanence. Never mind that there have been many forms of class
rule including slavery and feudalism, today’s smug apologists for
capitalism believe their way of running society is best and represents the
Everest of achievement.
Tony Blair has sneeringly denounced Marxism as "an outmoded
sectarian dogma." His sole contribution to philosophy has been to
bestow credit on Anthony Gidden’s Third Way theory – the very old and
discredited idea that there can be a middle way between the market and a
planned economy. Most capitalist leaders believe they don’t require a
philosophy. Making money is all that matters and they embrace the idea
that if it works, it’s good. They are largely empirical in their
approach, responding pragmatically to new challenges and rarely bothering
to understand the relationship and connections between policies and
events, cause and effect. In the spheres of politics and economics, theirs
is the complacent philosophy of thinking that what has gone on before will
continue largely unchanged into the future.
In the 1990s they were sure the dotcom boom would just keep on growing.
When it crashed they were astonished, but learning nothing, scratched
their heads, said they’d predicted it all along, then went back to the
comfort-blanket of believing capitalism would get better again.
This pamphlet will show that having a philosophy that correctly
interprets the world and provides a compass for changing it is
indispensable.
Dialectical materialism, the basis of Marxist philosophy is still the
most modern method of thought that exists.
As Leon Trotsky observed in Marxism in our Time: "…if
the theory correctly estimates the course of development and foresees the
future better than other theories, it remains the most advanced theory of
our time, be it even scores of years old."
Marxism is the science of perspectives - looking forward to anticipate
how society will develop - using its method of dialectical materialism to
unravel the complex processes of historical development.
It endeavors to teach the working class to know itself and be conscious
of itself as a class. Dialectical Materialism – the science of the
general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and
thought – was and remains a revolutionary philosophy, challenging
capitalism in every sphere and substituting science for dreams and
prejudice.
Materialism versus Idealism.
"It is not consciousness that determines
existence, but social existence that determines consciousness."
(Marx & Engels: ‘The German ideology.’)
People have always sought to understand the world they lived in through
observing nature and generalising their day-to-day experiences. The
history of philosophy shows a division into two camps – Idealism and
Materialism. The Idealists argue that thought (consciousness) is paramount
and that people’s actions stem from abstract thought, devoid of history
and material conditions.
It was Marx and Engels who first fully challenged this conception,
explaining that an understanding of the world has to start not from the
ideas which exist in people’s heads in any particular historical period,
but from the real, material conditions in which these ideas arise.
Nature is historical at every level. No aspect of nature simply exists;
it has a history, comes into being, changes and develops, is transformed,
and, finally ceases to exist. Aspects of nature may appear to be fixed,
stable, in a state of equilibrium for a shorter or longer time, but none
is permanently so. For Trotsky: "Consciousness grew out
of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic world
out of the inorganic, the solar system out of the nebulae."
Marx and Engels based their materialism upon the ideas and practice of
the great materialist philosophers of the 18th century. The ‘renaissance’
in the 16th century with its spread of cultural and scientific
enquiry was both a cause of and an effect of the early growth of
capitalism. In Engels’ words: "Science rebelled
against the Church; the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and
therefore had to join the rebellion."
Astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy and physiology were feverishly
developed as separate disciplines, with the consequence that age-old
beliefs in an inviolable god were rocked. Galileo for instance began to
discover some of the physical properties of the universe and revealed that
the planets revolved around the sun. Later, Newton’s theories of gravity
and laws of physical motion uncovered the mysteries of movement and
mechanics.
The philosopher Hobbes declared that it was impossible to separate
thought from matter that thinks. Marx observed that this ‘enlightenment’
had "cleared men’s minds" for the great French
revolution and the age of reason.
But Engels added that "The specific limitation of
this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a
process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted development."
He and Marx were to fuse the brilliant scientific advances of
materialism with dialectical thought, creating the most revolutionary and
far-reaching theory for explaining and changing our world.
The German philosopher Hegel, who resurrected dialectics from ancient
Greek learning in the early 19th century, was a proponent of
the Idealist approach. To him the thoughts within his brain were not the
more or less abstract images of actual things and processes, but on the
contrary, things and their development were only the realised images of
the Idea/God existing somewhere from eternity before the world existed.
Marx turned this confusion on its head. "To me the idea
is nothing else than the material world reflected in the human mind."
Marxism therefore bases itself upon a materialist view of history. The
material world is real and develops through its own natural laws. Thought
is a product of matter, without which there are no separate ideas.
Flowing from this it is clear that Marxism must reject universal
truths, religions and spirits. All theories are relative, grasping one
side of reality. Initially they are assumed to possess universal validity
and application. But at a certain point, deficiencies in the theory are
found. These have to be explained and at a certain point new theories are
developed which can account for the exceptions. But the new theories not
only supercede the old, but also incorporate them in a new form.
For example, in the field of biological evolution, Marxists are neither
biological nor cultural determinists. There is a dialectical interaction
between our genes and our environment.
Recently the ‘human genome project’ has enabled the complete
mapping out of the structure of the genes which are passed on from one
human generation to the next. Some biologists have asserted that this
would reveal individual genes shaping behaviour patterns ranging from
sexual preference to criminality and even political preference!
A consequence would be that a person’s position in society would be
largely pre-determined and unalterable.
However, any attempt to ‘tag’ individual genes for ‘intelligence’
has failed and the attempt to define social position as genetically
determined has been exposed as a pure consequence of the ideology of the
biologists involved.
A breakthrough that has revolutionised our understanding of human
behaviour, scientists recently discovered we possess far fewer genes than
previously thought, revealing that environmental influences must be vastly
more powerful in shaping the way humans act.
What is dialectical thinking?
" Men thought dialectically long before
they knew what dialectics was, just as they spoke prose long before the
term prose existed." (Engels: ‘Anti-Duhring’.)
Dialectics is the philosophy of motion. The dialectical method of
analysis enables us to study natural phenomena, the evolution of society
and thought itself, as processes of development based upon motion and
contradiction.
Everything is in a constant state of flux and change; all reality is
matter in motion.
The roots of dialectical thought can be traced back to the ancient
Greeks who, just because their civilisation was not yet advanced enough to
dissect and analyse nature in its separate parts, viewed nature as a
whole, in its connections, dialectically. Nothing in life is static. In
the words of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: "All things
flow, all change."
Around us in the natural world are illustrations of the dialectical
development of our Earth and space itself. Astronomers are transfixed as
super-telescopes allow us to witness the birth and death of distant stars,
while no geologist or vulcanologist can function without having an
understanding of the basic and interlinked laws of the dialectic – the
law of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites and the
negation of the negation.
In mathematics a dialectical approach is indispensable. In everyday
life we often need to distinguish between curved and straight lines. But
mathematically a straight line is merely a special sort of curve. Both
can be treated using a single general mathematical equation.
We also learn how at a specific temperature, solid ice changes to
liquid water then at a higher temperature to steam – a gas – and that
the three apparently different substances are actually different
manifestations of the motion of the same water molecules.
But though capitalist or bourgeois society uses the dialectical method
in its pursuit of scientific advance, in the fields of philosophy and
economy it stubbornly seeks to refute dialectics, clothing itself in the
straightjacket of metaphysics (formal logic). Metaphysics translated into
politics becomes a justification for the status quo, the idea that
evolution proceeds unchangingly at a snail’s pace.
It is not hard to see why. Explained in a Marxist manner, the
development of all past and present forms of society would show that at
certain periods in history when the mode of production has come into acute
conflict with the mode of exchange, wars and revolutionary movements have
followed. The forms of class struggle have changed through different
historical epochs, but the fundamental struggle over the division of the
surplus value between exploiter and exploited forms a continuous line from
the early slave societies to the present day.
The capitalist class or bourgeoisie (as Marx described it) must
therefore hide the materialist conception of history from us, extolling
instead the acts of great men (and occasionally women!) who it is claimed
have changed history. Great social revolutions are attributed not to the
struggle between classes, but to the mistakes of tyrant kings and tsars
and the bloodthirsty ambitions of ruthless men like Cromwell, Robespierre
and Lenin to name three of their special bete noirs.
Metaphysical thought is often described as the science of things, not
of motion. Basing itself upon rigid classification techniques and seeing
things as static entities, it is a useful tool in our day to day lives,
but does not let us see things in their connections.
The formal logician operates within the limitation of three laws:
The Law of Identity – where A is equal to A
The Law of Contradiction – where A cannot be equal to non-A
The Law of Excluded Middle – where A must be equal to A, or must
not be equal to A.
Formal logic sees cause and effect as opposites, but for Marxists the
two categories merge, mix and melt into each other all the time.
Trotsky compared formal logic to dialectics using the analogy of a
photograph and a moving film. The former has its uses, but as soon as we
go into complex questions formal logic proves inadequate.
For instance we can say ours is a capitalist society and all will
agree.
But viewing it dialectically as a bourgeois society in an advanced
stage of development, we have to add that it still possesses remnants of
feudalism, while more importantly it contains in its technological
potential, the seeds for a Socialist planned economy. This example is not
abstract.
Marxists use the dialectical method in order to clarify perspectives.
All realities have more than one side to them.
What stage has British capitalism reached, what character will the
recession have, how powerful is the working class, what is the role of New
Labour, where and when do we expect big industrial struggles to break out…
all these questions and many more can only be answered by analysing
society dialectically.
The laws of the dialectic
"Dialectics is nothing more than the
science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human
society and thought." (Engels: ‘Anti-Duhring.’)
BASED UPON the laws of motion, dialectics enables us to see things in
their connection. Our bodies and our thoughts are continually changing.
From conception to death there is never a moment when our physical
development is still. Neither are our thoughts and mental growth.
We are always evolving our ideas.
But how specifically do dialectics apply in relation to a study of
society? What are the general laws of dialectical materialism beyond the
primary idea that everything changes? If dialectics is the theoretical
toolkit of Marxists, what do the tools look like and how do they assist us
in challenging capitalism and changing society?
Marx and Engels elaborated three broad and interconnected laws of
dialectics, each of which is continually at work and give us the insight
into how society develops and what theoretical and practical tasks
confront us as revolutionaries seeking to build the forces to overthrow
capitalism.
The law of quantity and quality
Just as a scientist is familiar with the concept of things altering
their quality at certain quantitative points (water into steam at boiling
point), so too an observation of the evolution of class societies
illustrates the same law.
Society does not develop in a slow, evolutionary manner. The friction
between the classes can and does create episodic periods of sharpened
struggle leading to political and social crises, wars and revolutions. For
a whole period the class struggle may appear to be at a low-ebb, low
levels of industrial action, apparent disinterest in political struggle,
etc.
Marxists however view events in an all-sided manner. On the surface
there can be apparent stability, but a quantitative build-up of
frustration and antagonism towards capitalism can break out suddenly,
creating entirely new conditions for struggle and catching the bosses and
their New Labour echoes completely by surprise. This law is vulgarly
recognised by even some bourgeois philosophers who, usually after the
event, refer sadly to "the straw that broke the camel’s back."
It has enormous consequences for Marxists. We analyse the build-up of
class conflict and at all times intervene in the workers’ movement to
build the ideas of Socialism to take advantage of these sudden changes and
sharp turns.
The law does not always denote a progression of course. For many years
we characterised the Stalinist bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union as a
relative fetter upon the growth of the planned economy. By
this we meant that despite the waste and corruption of the bureaucrats,
there was still a potential for the planned economy to grow, albeit less
efficiently than had the working class been in charge. By the 1960s
command-style rule from the Kremlin was struggling to cope with the fresh
challenges of a more technically advanced form of economy. Trotsky’s
maxim that a planned economy needs workers’ control as a body needs
oxygen became more relevant than ever. We observed this change and
concluded that the bureaucracy had gone from being a relative fetter to an
absolute fetter. Quantity had turned into quality.
From a study of all the declining economic statistics coming out of the
USSR we began to draw theoretical rounded-out conclusions.
A society in economic, political and social crisis where the
bureaucratic caste has become absolutely incapable of further playing any
progressive role cannot stay in absolute stasis. A point was being rapidly
reached where either the working class would have to overthrow the incubus
of bureaucracy and carry through a political revolution, or there would
occur a social counter-revolution leading to the restoration of
capitalism; this possibility was predicted by Trotsky over 50 years
earlier. The triumph of the latter with Yeltsin undoing all the remaining
gains of the 1917 revolution marked a qualitative defeat for the working
class in Russia and everywhere else.
The Interpenetration of Opposites
Dialectics applied to the class struggle does not have the same degree
of precision as it does in the science laboratory. The role of
individuals, political parties and social movements is not scientifically
pre-ordained. A trade union leader might be a repected left-winger, but
may capitulate when faced with a determined onslaught from the bosses. A
moderate trade union leader may surprise himself or
herself however and become much more
"militant" than intended, when faced with mass pressure from
below.
There are no absolutes in the class struggle! We often stress for
instance that boom and slump are not antithetical categories as crude GCSE
textbooks proclaim. Within every economic growth of capitalism are the
seeds of future recession and vice versa. It is not slump alone, which
causes workers to rebel against the class system. The very opposite may be
the case, with workers feeling intimidated by the threat of widespread
unemployment.
In a boom, workers can go on the offensive not only in order to
recapture past gains that have been lost, but to win new victories around
pay and conditions.
Trotsky illustrated this law in his analysis of the forces which made
the Russian Revolution in 1917: "In order to realise the Soviet
State, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two
factors belonging to completely different economic species; a peasant war
– that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois
development – and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signaling its
decline. That is the essence of 1917". (History of the Russian
Revolution.)
This "combined and uneven development" illustrates the
complex manner in which societies develop. Application of the law of
interpenetrating opposites is crucial in our clarification of the stage at
which capitalism has reached, its future direction and our responses.
The Negation of the Negation
Described by Engels as "an extremely general, and for this very
reason extremely far-reaching and important, law of development of
nature, history and thought", the negation of the negation
deals with development through contradictions which appear to annul, or
negate a previous fact, theory, or form of existence, only to later become
negated in its turn.
Capitalism’s economic cycle illustrates this law. Great wealth is
created in the boom, only to become partially destroyed by episodic crises
of over-production. These in turn create afresh the conditions for new
booms, which assimilate and build upon previously acquired methods of
production, before once again coming into contact and being partially
negated by the limits of the market economy.
Everything, which exists, does so out of necessity. But everything
perishes, only to be transformed into something else. Thus what is ‘necessary’
in one time and place becomes ‘unnecessary’ in another. Everything
creates its opposite, which is destined to overcome and negate it.
The first human societies were classless societies based on the
co-operation of the tribe. These were negated by the emergence of class
societies basing themselves upon the developing material levels of wealth.
Modern private ownership of the means of production and the nation state,
which are the basic features of class society and originally marked a
great step forward, now serve only to fetter and undermine the productive
forces and threaten all the previous gains of human development.
The material basis exists now to replace the bosses’ system with
socialism, the embryo of which is already contained in class society, but
can never be realised until the working class negates capitalism.
Dialectical Materialism as a revolutionary theory
"Dialectics, so-called objective
dialectics, prevails throughout nature.." (Engels: ‘Dialectics of
Nature.’)
In the realm of science, explicitly or implicitly, the dialectical
method continues to vindicate itself as a vital tool for progress.
Apparently unrelated scientific disciplines have come to share visions and
methodologies reflecting the real connectedness of our living universe.
Even the idealist philosopher Kant, writing before the time of Marx and
Engels and who believed in a supreme being, was forced by experience to
arrive unconsciously at a dialectical position. He argued that if the
earth was something that had come into being, then its present geological,
geographical and climatic states, its plants and animals too, must be
something that had come into being. If this was the case, then earth must
have had a history not only of co-existence in space but also a succession
in time.
In particular, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the revolutionary
significance of which was immediately understood by Marx and Engels, has
itself become enriched and a more profound confirmation of dialectics of
nature as a result of further study and practice.
Darwin demonstrated how evolution develops through natural selection,
creating outrage among those for whom "God" determined all. But
while he argued that "nature does not make a leap", the debates
now raging among neo-Darwinists are about whether or not leaps take place
and the nature of them.
Incorporating the science of genetics, new concepts such as MUTATION
(the spontaneous formation of new variations in genetic make-up), GENE
FLOW (the introduction of new genes into a population by immigration of
breeding individuals) and GENETIC DRIFT (random gene changes in a
population due to its limited size) as well as natural selection, have
begun to be studied.
In a brilliant endorsement of dialectics as the science of sharp turns
and sudden changes as opposed to gradualist development, it is now widely
accepted that rate of evolutionary change can vary enormously. The theory
of PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIA takes this idea a stage forward, maintaining that
the development or appearance of a new species can be, in terms of
geological time, instantaneous breaking an apprarently stable equilibrium.
This theory deals with rapid and sudden speciation and mass extinction
of species, in the same way as Darwin spoke of the struggle for existence
of individual varieties within a single species.
Modern scientific theories rest on a dialectic view
of nature. Quantum mechanics, the theory on which all modern technology is
based, rests on a unification of the two classical (apparently
contradictory) concepts of wave motion and particle motion to produce a
new deeper understanding of the nature of reality.
Theories of fundamental particles find themselves
working on concepts which bridge the contradiction between matter and the
space-time in which matter moves.
Towards a Socialist World.
" …the final causes of all social changes
and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not
in man’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes
in the modes of production and exchange.
They are to be sought not in the philosophy, but
in the economics of each particular epoch." (Engels:
‘Socialism: Utopian & Scientific.’)
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM is not a dull theory to be pondered over by
erudite academics in their studies. It is a guide to action. For young
workers and students seeking to understand capitalism and more importantly
change it, it is an indispensable tool.
The so-called New World Order is daily proving to be less harmonious
than the old one. Of the six billion people on Earth, almost 3.6 billion
have neither cash nor credit to buy much of anything. A majority of people
on the planet remain, at best, window shoppers. Although the development
of giant corporations straddling continents and the existence of computer
technologies underline the potential for the world planning of production
and trade, capitalism remains a system based on wasteful competition
between nation states where rival multinationals fight to improve market
share, productivity and profit at our expense.
Great social revolutions in the past have been carried out by emerging
minorities who best articulated the new economic and political needs of
the rising class. History is made by conscious men and women, each driven
by definite motives and desires. The struggle for Socialism is
qualitatively different as it involves the conscious participation of the
majority – the world’s working class and oppressed masses. Standing in
our way is diseased capitalism.
Our task is to harness the indefatigable energy of the workers
worldwide to throw off our exploitation, through the building of a mighty
Socialist force. The dialectical method applied to every stage of the
class struggle, illuminates our path, assists us in turning our ideas into
a material force and brings closer the day when men and women can pass
over from the realm of necessity into the realm of human freedom.
Reading List
The following works are recommended, the first four being most
accessible.
1. The ABC of Materialist Dialectics (15/12/1939)
from "A Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers'
Party" and An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham
(07/01/1940) both included in Trotsky's collection "
In Defence of Marxism."
2. "On the question of
Dialectics" - Lenin.
3. "An introduction to the Logic
of Marxism" - George Novack.
4. "The part played by Labour in the
transition from ape to man" -
Engels.
5. "Anti-Duhring" -
Engels.
6. "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism"
- Lenin.
7. "Dialectics of Nature" -
Engels.
8. "Fundamental Problems of
Marxism" - Plekhanov
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