By james o’toole
”When he directs his keenest arrows against our dialectic system, he is really attacking the specific mode of thought employed by the conscious proletariat in its struggle for liberation. It is an attempt to break the sword that has helped the proletariat to pierce the darkness of its future. It is an attempt to shatter the intellectual arm with the aid of which the proletariat, though materially under the yoke of the bourgeoisie, is yet enabled to triumph over the bourgeoisie. For it is our dialectical system that shows to the working class the transitory nature of this yoke, proving to workers the inevitability of their victory and is already realising a revolution in the domain of thought.”
Rosa Luxembourg on Bernstien
In the above quote Rosa Luxembourg defends the Marxist use of ’dialectics’ against attack by the revisionism of the reformist Bernstien of the German SPD in the early 1900’s. Throughout the history of Marxism as a movement and body of thought there have been attempts to ’remove’ the dialectic from marxism, to label it as an influence of the Idealist German philosopher,Hegel, or to label Marx’s use of dialectic terms in the writing of his major work ,’Capital’, as ’flirtation’ with Hegelian phrases for the purposes of poetical flourish. Right up to the present there are those who insist that the dialectic is not integral to Marx’s method. This is just not true, the dialectic is central to marxist theory and practice.
There have been many ’dialectic’ logics throughout history. In classical philosophy the term ’dialectic’ meant a form of argument based on the presentation of a particular ’thesis’ to which is then contrasted a counter-argument or ’counter-thesis’ and finally there results a ’synthesis’ which may contain elements of truth from both sides of the dialogue. Different versions of dialectic logic developed through the ages from Plato down through the Middle Ages finally obtaining it’s fullest expression in the systems of the German Idealist philosophers of the early 19th Century, especially in the works of G.F.Hegel.
”Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are
conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.”
Here Engel’s clearly defines the huge difference between static and dialectic views of how change occurs, how seemingly opposed entities ’inter-penetrate’.
Hegel’s ’Notion’....
Hegel lived through the period of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and was witness to the epic Rise and Fall of that entire historical movement. This period of economic and political, and thus philosophical, turmoil gave an enormous stimulus to thought. Germany at the time of Hegel’s birth was not a nation state, it existed as hundreds of small kingdoms, imperial free cities and petty principalities under the Hapsburg Crown. Despite being ’backward’ in comparison with French, and especially, English economic development, there was the emergence of capitalist forms of enterprise. Saxony, for example, had a mining industry which pre- dated the Reformation and various towns were engaged in iron founding, engineering etc. But the Bourgeois or Capitalist ’middle’ class were weak
economically and dependent politically.
There was another sort of ’middle’ class who were more forthright in their demands - there were 37 universities in the Holy Roman Empire, 3 in Saxony alone, and in every petty court a series of clerks, lawyers, intellectuals and artists. It was this layer that created a
period of boom for intellectual debate.These lawyers, lecturers and artists were capable of seeing in the French Revolution the ’master theme’ of the epoch but their own protests
never successfully extended beyond the realm of thought.
Hegel’s Dialectic emerged from German Idealism’s attempts to solve problems inherited from Kant and this period of immense upheaval and change. Social institutions, such as the French Monarchy, collapsed only to be replaced by other institutions which themselves fell in quick succession, things seemed to melt into their opposites. Napoleon marched across the continent uprooting feudalism and instituting the ’code napoleon’. It seemed as if the old world had been ’stood on it’s head’.
Hegel’s ’Phenomenology of mind’ ....
The ’phenomenology of mind’ was completed in 1806 in the town of Jena, which had been a centre of the ’storm and stress’ movement in art and literature. Napoleon was engaged in battle with Prussian troops on the plateau outside the town as Hegel was finishing the manuscript. This work takes us on a journey from the most basic forms of consciousness, such as sense- certainty (a form of consciousness which only grasps that which is directly given), and demonstrates how these consciounesses are self contradictory and necessarily move through contradiction to ever more complex relations of consciousness to itself, the subject, and to the object.
The ’phenomenology’ is famous for it’s Introduction where Hegel relates the need for a ’ladder to science’, that the whole of the ’phenomenology’ was a critique of various forms of thinking about the world which inexorably progress through their failings toward the need for dialectical thinking as the highest form of understanding. Hegel referred to the dialectic method as ’the Notion’.
”The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we
might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the
fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s
existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom.
These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being
incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent
nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not
merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the
other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby
the life of the whole.”
Here some important aspects of Hegel’s thought emerge, different philosophical systems and scientific positions are understood not in terms of some ’objective’ incorrectness but as ’true’ in a relative sense, as different ’moments’ of an organic ’totality’ or whole in a constant process of transformation. They are analysed in terms of their origin, development,
inter-relationships (to other parts and the whole) and their cessation. Everything is in a process of coming to be and ceasing to be. The whole cannot be reduced to any of it’s constituent elements, and the whole is more than just the sum of the constituent parts. The whole and the parts form a ’unity of opposites’.
They call it ’Master and Servant’
One of the most famous sections of the ’phenomenology’ is Hegel’s description of the ’master slave’ dialectic. Hegel begins with two subjects struggling for ’recognition’, this battle for recognition leads to a ’life or death’ struggle, after which, one consciousness is Master and one is Slave. The Master is the dominant consciouness whose whole existence is ’being-for-self’, while the Slave is ’being-for-another’. The Slave exists only to fulfill the Master’s desires. The Lord can only achieve the ’negation’ of things, that is, he only consumes, whereas, the Slave works on the world to produce the things the Master needs.
So the Slave affirms himself as capable of altering the world.
”work… is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing”
In fashioning things the Slave gains an awareness of the fact that he exists in his own right and in his work, where before, he only had an alienated existense, he acquires a mind of his own. The situation first found ourselves in is reversed. The Master now only exists through
another, through the labour of the Slave, whereas, the Slave has now achieved power over the objective world though his labour, has gained a ’mind of his own’. It’s important to note that the change or advance in consciousness goes through the mind of the Slave and not the Master. It’s also worth noting that for Hegel all that changes is the consciousness of the Slave. Hegel’s dialectic starts with the Slave’s consciousness, posits the world of labour and then returns to a transformed consciousness leaving reality unchanged. For Marx we
start with material reality, consciouness attempts to understand that reality and then, finally, we transform reality.
Hegel’s ’Science of Logic’....
Hegel begins his Science of Logic with the most basic and fundamental of all concepts, that of ’being’. Every thing ’is’, that is everything has ’being’. Every determinate thing has this property, it has ’being’. But Hegel asks what is ’being’ itself? What is ’being’ as opposed to
every determinate thing? The table has ’being’ in that it exists, the cup has ’being’, but neither of these particular things is ’being’ itself. It seems that ’being’ itself is ’nothing’. We see that the attempt to grasp ’being’ leads to it’s opposite, ’nothing’. But ’nothing’ has at least the property of being defined.We can describe ’nothing’ as the lack of determinate particular ’being’. We end up in a situation were the attempt to grasp one melts into it’s
opposite before once more returning to itself. Hegel’s solution is the category of ’becoming’, he captures the ’movement’ between both poles in a higher category which captures the existence and dissolution of both previous categories, that captures their ’coming to be’ and ’ceasing to be’. That captures their self movement.....
This may seem like pointless philosophising but has it’s uses as the processes of actual life move in a dialectic manner as opposed to the cause and effect mechanical schemas of most science and philosophies. Lenin remarks upon reading this part of the Logic ’ shrewd and clever! Hegel analyses concepts that usually appear dead and shows movement in them’.
It’s always important to keep in mind that for Hegel the movement of concepts governs the movement of the real world, this suited a german middle class who never practically achieved their ’bourgeois’ revolution, as opposed to the French who achieved a Revolution in reality. But in a way the enthusiastic declaration of the power of human thought to shape the world was progressive in relation to the eternal order of the feudal world with its never
changing orders of bishops, priests, princes and kings. Marx himself in his ’theses on feuerbach’ pointed out that although materialism had investigated the objective world, it never grasped the objective world ’subjectively’, in terms of human pratice.This side was developed by idealism. Unfortunately the only practice Hegel knew was the labour of philosophy but in Marx we find a materialism that acknowledges nature and the objective world as the basis of all human thought and action but is a ’dialectic’ materialism, a materialism that understands objective history as the product of the labour of a human subject.But Engels here captures the positive side of Hegel’s thought-
”In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the
first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented
as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation,
development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that
makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point
of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless
deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature
philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as
the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect
to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and
to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental
phenomena.”
’The sword of the proletariat’....
Marx once wrote that he wanted to write ’3 sheets’ that would explain the materialist application of the Dialectic. He never did, but the dialectic method was central to all of Marx’s works, and the works of all the major Marxists to follow. To quote Trotsky, Marxism without the Dialectic is ’a clock without a spring’. Marx completely transformed the categories of the dialectic in relation to Hegel, in Marx the dialectic becomes ,not the self-development of the ’Idea’ captured in categories that develop through their own inherent contradictions into one another, but, a dialectic of real material change, a
dialectic drawn from the actual contradictions of the objective life process of humanity, from the actual material of history.
The world had changed since Hegel’s death in 1831, the working class, who had formed a wing of the capitalist class in the French Revolution, were beginning to make their own demands. There had been a worker’s uprising in Lyons in 1834. The working class was stirring,in Britain and across the Continent, and beginning to make demands that pointed beyond the limits of the bourgeois system. Marx began his work as a journalist and activist on the left of the democratic movement, but in the course of his investigations and in the face of severe censorship, he undertook anew a study of French politics, British economics and a critique of German Idealist philosophy.
For Marx capitalist society forms a ’totality’, an organic whole in a constant process of change where ’all that is solid melts into air’, but a totality torn by contradictions.”In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of thier will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of the material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society…on which arises a legal and
political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of consciouness…at a certain stage of development , the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or- this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms- with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their
fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution”
It’s a natural law that we must labour on nature to provide ourselves with food, shelter and clothing and that in the ’social production’ of life we enter into certain ’relations’ with one another. These ’relations of production’ give rise to certain forms of thought which correspond to certain roles in the productive process.
Social consciouness is determined by social being. The ’contradiction’ at the heart of this totality between ’forces of production’ (tools, technology and the labour force) and ’relations of production’ which gives rise to an era of conflict, of potential revolution, is no automatic process, this is a conflict that can result in the reconstitution of the society at large or in the ’common ruin’ of the classes in conflict. The battle engendered by the fact of social production and private appropriation of profit, the war ,sometimes hidden sometimes open, between the classes has to be fought out, everything can be lost, or won. And we must emphasise that Marx never adhered to a ’refection’ view of knowledge,he never stated that knowledge was just the automatic reflex of the social process. As Engels often pointed out, the economy creates no body of ideas ’a novo’,from scratch. But as the italian marxist, Antonio Labriola, pointed out , nothing comes to us in a dream and ideas dont fall from heaven either. This shows how , in Marx, the dialectic is no dead formalism, has no relation to determinism nor is it in any way idealist.The two ’poles’ of any dialectic contradiction, it has to be remembered, should never be seen as external forces acting upon one another like billiard balls, it’s important to see each part as grounded in the substance of the whole. Franz Jakubowski gives a good description of the dialectic of consciousness and being-”Consciousness no longer stands outside being and is no longer seperated from it’s object.conciousness is determined by the transformations of being; but, as the consciousness of acting men, it in turn transforms this being. Consciousness is no longer consciousness above an object, the duplicated ’reflection’ of an object, but a constituent part of changing relations, which are what they are only in conjunction with the consciousness that corresponds to material existence. Consciousness is the self-knowledge of reality..”
Social consciousness and social being are distinct but also form a unity, which cant be reduced one to the other, although the economic basis takes precedence, new ideas and the transformation of old ideas is a complex organic process which is ’mediated’ e.g. even legal terms, which Marx viewed as a direct expression of economic and property relations, because they have to remain logically consistent, cant be a mere reflection of a
contradictory reality.
As the division of labour becomes more and more complex and people are appointed, more and more, to limited tasks the view of the ’whole’ is lost. This loss of a view of the whole as an organic social process is made worse by the dominance of the market (see article ’c is for commodity fetishism’). As each seperate sphere develops it’s own body of thought, these
bodies of thought tend towards internal coherence, they develop their own ’laws’. Ultimately they have their basis in economic development but they are more and more ’mediated’.
Quantity and Quality
Suppose you add one degree of heat to water, nothing at all happens. Add another degree and another, still nothing. It seems that these small ’quantitative’ changes in temperature have no overall effect. Eventually we reach 99 degrees and the addition of one more quantity or degree of heat leads to a transformation, a qualitative shift. The water has changed ’form’ it has become steam. The transformation of quantity into quality is an important aspect of dialectic analysis as it demonstrates how a political or economic
’leap’ can develop unseen beneath the surface and then suddenly a new formation emerges or suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of a crisis. It’s vital we grasp and understand how development proceeds ’gradually’ and in ’leaps’.We revolutionary party has to understand these developments, has to prepare for the ’leap’.
Marx also notes how the qualitative is transformed into the quantitative in a commodity economy, the concrete or particular labour of each individual commodity producer only realises it’s ’social’ aspect by becoming ’abstract’ labour, that is, labour that can be equalised on the market, through money, with any other product of labour, and thus, through the products of labour, with all other forms of particular or concrete labour. The
’quantity’ of exchange-value is indifferent to the concrete labour, to the ’quality’, to the particular labour i.e. whether you make shoes or cars they all become equalised in exchange, as commodities, through money with all other forms of labour. The material-technical content (concrete labour which produces use-values i.e, useful objects) takes on a social form (abstract labour which determines exchange value). The qualitative becomes quantitative.
Negation of the negation
In Hegel the ’negation of the negation’ was a means of asserting the rule of thought over the objective world. For Hegel the ’real’ world was the world of alienation, that any objectification (to make an object) was to alienate oneself. Hegel never saw alienation in terms of a specific mode of production under which the labour of one class in appropriated by another, where the rule of things grows in proportion to their labour. Hegel starts with, for example, a form of consciousness about the world ,say religion, then ’negates’ that in the name of objective reality (which he sees as alienation) and then restores the realm of thought by ’negating the negation’.Thereby leaving religion intact. The whole movement starts with the ideal and ends with the ideal, the real world is nothing but an alienated realm and thought just has to realise this ’other’ as it’s own creation.
Marx completely transformed ’the negation of the negation’ in his application of the Dialectic. In Hegel this ’law’ of the dialectic justifies what exists- the state, christianity etc. Marx and Engels start with real social contradictions, they dont force a preconcieved logic onto any given situation but from any given situation they work out the actual conflicts that are ’going on under our noses’.
”The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour reach a point where they become incompatible with thier capitalist integument. The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated'
Conclusion
Attempts to remove the dialectic method from marxism are attempts to disarm the working class intellectually, the dialectic is the method that finds movement in all things, to the dialectic thinker capitalism is just one passing stage in the development of mankind. It realises in thought what the working class according to it’s nature must realise in practice- the dissolution of class rule. The marxist dialectic is not just a scientific method it is also an ’art’ and must be ’practiced’, it must develop in a tight relationship with an actual working
class movement. As Marxism is the theoretical expression of working class activity it is both educating and educated by the working class. We are living right now in a period of great change and great danger, institutions falling, war on the increase, rising racism and a threat to the natural world upon which our whole existence depends, but also, a period of resistance, of questioning and hope. More than ever we have to prove the ’this sided-ness’ of our thinking, to put our ideas to the test. Social theories which rupture the unity of the living process of society suffer from a lack of engagement with a living breathing working class movement which posits itself as the subject and the object of the historical process, this lack of involvement leads to determinism and fatalism or idealism and mysticism (or systems which eclectically contain elements of both). To quote Trotsky in response to members of the U.S left who dismissed the dialectic-.... ”The struggle against materialist dialectics… expresses a distant past conservatism of the petty bourgeoisie, the self-conceit of university routinists and . . . a spark of hope for an afterlife.”....
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