On Dialectical materialism


(extracted from exchanges on internet mailing lists)

Very good debate on dialectical materialism.
I just want to state my position on it in a few brief notes.

1. On the position of Marx himself

I think that, for anyone minimally familiar with Marx’s intellectual biography, there can’t be any reasonable doubt that he approved wholeheartedly applying the dialectical approach to the natural sciences and he saw no fundamental epistemological discontinuity between them and what we now call social sciences. Anti-Dühring is not a independent work by Marx, whose philosofical “excesses” Marx was too shy to criticise. This is simply ridiculous. I don’t want to sound hagyographical, but these guys are giants. They’re on the top of the world and they know it. They are forging weapons to turn the entire human termitary upside down. And they were together on it, shoulder to shoulder, to the last minute, in this unparalleled human venture.

Anti-Dühring was a work commended by Marx against a german professor of that name who was having a massive success in the german socialist movement of the 1870’s. Marx ressented this, as he often did similar affronts. He certainly had his character weaknesses and, moreover, he was generally wrong measuring what was his (and his adversaries’) time. Anyway, Marx’s idea was, once again (after Proudhon, Lassalle, Bakunin, etc.), to combat what he saw as pernicious ideas developing within the workers’ movement, spreading his own scientific conception in their place. Engels found Dühring terribly boring but he completed his work, in close contact with Marx, while the old man worked on Capital. Eugen Dühring was a blind man and he was immensely popular, a kind of Stevie Wonder of the german Academy and socialism. Engels’ attacks were very badly received at the time. Anti-Dühring sketches the general philosophical outlook of marxism. It’s a work requested by Marx, developed between the two friends in close contact, and conceived from the beginning as a tool for marxist theoretical warfare. To say Marx had nothing to do with it is totally preposterous.

Marx (and not Engels by his grave) was the one who greated Darwin’s ideas euphorically, trying to integrate them on his general conception of the world. He worked on mathematics and had plans for a brief handbook on dialectics, whose rational kernel he had rescued from Hegel’s idealism, puting its feet on the ground. If Engels was a XIXth century scienticist, Marx was certainly no less one. So whoever wants to make fire on dialectical materialism has better aim at the old man himself and stop playing games around. I’m not sure he would appreciate such charitable and overflattering amputations of his thought.

2. Stalinist “proletarian science” was indeed a joke, the most famous tragi-comic episode being the Lyssenko disaster. This fiasco had its roots in a mechanicistic approach and in a methaphisical reification of dialectics that can be traced, but not entirely atributed, to Engels’ Dialectics of Nature (a incomplete work first published by Riazanov in 1927) and Lenin’s Materialism and Empirocriticism. This is the a-historical, naturalistic dia-mat. Stalin himself wrote a little handbook about it. It’s a curious relic. You can shoot it at will, but I don’t think there’s much point in doing it anymore. That’s certainly not what I would call a present day priority for us, from a class-struggle perspective.

3. Chronic abuse of Engels ensued, beginning in the 60’s, with a majority of the western marxists dumping dialectical materialism altogether and saying that marxism had, after all, nothing to say about the natural sciences, as it hadn’t about art, literature, etc., etc.. These currents are normally trying to integrate marxism in the bourgeois democratic tradition (humanism, rationalism, analytical philosophy, etc.) and, therefore, attack all these so called totalitarian outlooks, associated with stalinism. Pluralism and pragmatism are other temptations. More recently, post-modernism started talking of the demise of grand narratives (Lyotard) and making the case for a weak (Vatimo), localised, contingent, ironic thought.

4. Marxism however is a complete weltanschaung. It’s the world conception of the proletariat on the rise for its class emancipation. It opposes itself entirely to the bourgeois science and ideological conceptions. It’s not dialectical materialism who is incommensurable with historical materialism. This is just a tentative to divide our camp and integrate marxism in the bourgeois academy as some kind of sociology, theory of history, etc.. Trying to make Marx fit on one or maybe two of the bourgeois separate disciplines of knowledge. It’s the bourgeois entire world conception who is incommensurable with the proletarian one. Between these two outlooks there is an epistemological break, as Althusser would put it. And class struggle alone will bridge them. A true historicist will have no problem understanding this.

It’s not that physical reality itself is dialectical. This is a useless mystical (pantheistic) claim that will only drag us into a logical short circuit, what the latins called a petitio principii. We live in a post-critical (kantian) world - that’s in fact what dia-mat ignored, regressing into XVIII century materialism. There is no pure reality out there, independent of the (socially constructed and historically situated) human act of its knowledge. Dialectical materialism is itself a dialectical process. It’s the mode of production of knowledge characteristic of a specific social class: the proletariat. I’m not always very precise in this philosophical subtleties (and that gets worse using a foreign language), but I think this gives roughly the picture as I see it.

5. Finally, after decades of being the underdog, developments in science recently just keep on coming Engels’ way, correctly understood and on its fundamental lines. Whoever tries to reflect globally on natural sciences these days, finds the dialectical method looking stronger and stronger. Think of astrophysics, evolutionary theory, biology, thermodynamics, chaos, fractals, GUT’s, etc., etc.

Not being a specialist in the philosophy of science (besides reading piles of scientific popularization works with great enthusiasm) I will not try to develop this claim. I recommend an article by Paul McGarr, ‘Engels and the natural sciences’, in International Socialism, nº 65 (special issue on Engels) published in December 1994. A vast a comprehensive work on this subject can be found here on the web. It’s 'Reason and Revolt-Marxism and modern science', from Alan Woods and Ted Grant. It’s in http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~zac/maindex.htm .

6. There’s another, immedialely political reason why I find this subject of dialectical materialism so decisive. I don’t think we should just confidently wait for the forces of production to naturally mature themselves to the point of requiring a revolutionary overthrow of the relations of production. To be sure, this may well happen that way, because the bourgeoisie is simply unable to act as an historically conscious class or is just not shrewd enough to avoid its fate. However, as things are at the moment, the bourgeoisie has the absolute monopoly of scientific research and development, manipulating it at will. I think we should bring class struggle well within the walls of the city of science (this should not be understood literally - good science can be made in popular clubs, worker comittes, etc.). We should have our own rookie geniuses and cyber-punk kids placed there. This will probably anticipate the development of the forces of production our way, creating possibilities for the emergence of more worker-friendly environments.

Now, for waging class war within the bourgeois science we will be needing two things: 1) a sharpening of class struggle on society in general; 2) this irreplaceable weapon that is dialectical materialism, not of course as a set of rigid principles to be imposed on reality but as a general guide for thought and action.

(...)

Andrew,

I'm sorry to tell you this, but you seem to be suffering from a serious cognitive malfunction. For those of us who appreciate marxism straight, your "debunking" of dialectical materialism is alarming at first sight. Then, finally, your relentless undertaking of the generous task of saving Marx from himself (and us marxists of our blindness) is nothing but cause for timely and hard won amusement.

Andrew:
> A pains the empirical manifestation of time? (On a metaphorical level
> this works well, almost poetic, but as physics?)

Yes, Andrew, PHYSICS. All your bio-chemical functions are supported by the laws of physics: gravitational, nuclear, electromagnetic. And all of this organic complex your mother gave birth to evolves dialectically following the arrow of time. It's called irreversibility. Heraclitus knew something about it. Your cells die out and are replaced by new ones. Your body grows, then starts to decay and finally dies. All this is written into your genetic code. Do you think DNA would stand without the laws of physics? Do you think any law of physics (or indeed any law or anything at all) would function without time. Finally your body will be fed to the vermin and enter in the ecological cycle. And, while your relatives mourn you, the arrow of time proceeds totally indifferent to whether they go on living in hunter-gathering, feudal, capitalist or communist society. Do you think that, without time out there in the physical world, you would ever get to have a mind to speculate about how time-space are social constructs and other social-solypsist arguments?

Time has been studied (rather speculatively) in a little discipline called thermo-dynamics, thanks mostly to a man: Ilya Prigogine. But in fact it is nothing but physics, only the physicists can't handle it from within their bourgeois weltaschaung. Like matter, time has its origins in the initial singularity. This much most physicists are willing to admit. But they can't address it on their "grand unification" schemes. Or rather, physics as we know it can't address it.

(...)

Andrew, try to understand this: humanity and nature are ONE. Man has a material tool called conscience that (mainly) performs cognitive tasks. OF COURSE, all science is a social construct. You don't need, among marxists, to be constantly repeating this like an old parrot. But what you see is what you get. For a given human historical horizon, what we know is roughly all there is about for us to know. It puts breakfast on our tables (not all) and hopes for a better future.

Now, out there, there is all this vast ocean of matter, independent of our conscience and knowledge of it. This material world has a history of its own (whether we know it or not and in whatever concepts we historically organize that knowledge). That history of matter INCLUDES AND ENCOMPASSES all the history of mankind (which, though highly complex, is in fact a ridiculously minuscule fraction of it).

We, dialectical materialists, say that the history of matter, the history of human societies and of the history of thought are ONE. The main and more general cognitive instruments (concepts) we use to study one of them are the same that we use to study any of the others. This doesn't put dialectics in the core of a stone, nor anyone here, I believe, has such pantheistic claims. These concepts we use to describe these processes are surely in our head, but they are extracted from reality as we can see it through our material and historically situated cognitive practice.

What it means is that WE, THE ASCENDANT PROLETARIAT, KNOW OUR OWN HISTORY, THE WHOLE HISTORY OF MANKIND AND THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE AS A SINGLE PROCESS THAT WE DESCRIBE AS MATERIALIST AND DIALECTICAL. This is all there is for us to know and how we know it. Hopefully, others will do better - far better - in the future, if there is any future for us earthians.

Got it? This is the philosophical outlook of Marx, as it is of both Engels and Lenin.

Of course, dialectical materialism faces one main danger: reductionism. From physics to history, material processes are superimposed one over another and they are organized on different levels of complexity. Analogies are dangerous and a-critical transfer of analytical tools from one discipline to another usually causes disaster (we are tired of seeing this in bourgeois science itself). But that doesn't mean we shouldn't face all material processes as, ultimately, ONE SOLE PROCESS, governed all over it by the same essential laws. On that respect, there is absolutely no insurmountable boundary between the so-called social and natural sciences. The caution and vigilance over hasty generalizations must be equal between these two groups of sciences or within one of them.

Another question is why should we stick to a dialectical materialist approach when, on some sciences, it has, as yet, failed to prove to be productive. By the contrary, it has even produced its own blunders, having time and again been proved to be easy prey for the irresistible temptation of reductionism.

First and most of all because, as a social class, DM is our conception of the world. We must never give up on it. In the future, hopefully in a classless society, DM will be surely substituted by a more powerful and encompassing method. For the time being, it is our tool and our weapon. That's why we must say no to Andrew's insistent call for unilateral disarmament, paralyzed as he appears to be by fear of ridicule and discredit on the bourgeois intellectual establishment. He wants to be a marxist, but a respected one, a "western" one that is.

Take note of this, Andrew (this is very important): we are never, ever going to convince the bourgeoisie that marxism is respectful science (in fact, to even attempt this, by mixing it with such quintessentially bourgeois philosophy as american pragmaticism is tantamount to class collaboration in the theoretical practice). We are going to open their skulls (in a metaphorical sense) with it, by our own revolutionary practice. In due time, they will notice it.

This is Marx's way, as I'm sure he would terminantly refuse to be a (western or whatever) "marxist" in your sense.


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