George Novack
An Introduction to the Logic Of Marxism: LECTURE VIII
“Hegel, in his Logic,” wrote Trotsky, “established a series of laws: change of quantity into quality, development through contradictions, conflict of content and form, interruption of continuity [discontinuity], change of possibility into inevitability, etc., which are just as important for theoretical thought as is the simple syllogism for more elementary tasks.” (In Defence of Marxism, p. 61.)
Every one of these logical laws is organically connected with the others. Not, as Hegel believed, because each one is a specification of the Absolute Idea, i.e., a product of thinking, which he identified with the ultimate being of things, but because each one corresponds to some particular phase or aspect of the material reality of the universe. It is therefore possible to approach these laws as a whole through consideration of any of them, just as it is possible to discover much about the general conditions of the earth through study of a particular area.
In this discussion we shall approach the laws of dialectics through a consideration of the relations between essence and appearance. Like quantity and quality, form and content, and similar pairs of ideas, these categories of thought are consciously or unconsciously used all the time by all of us. They are indispensable instruments of knowledge and action. That is why it is so important to have a correct conception of these logical categories.
Let us begin by examining the category of essence. Formal and metaphysical thinkers maintain that the essence of a thing is distinguished from its appearance by the fact that the inner nature of an object is utterly different from and absolutely opposed to its outer appearance. The essence of a thing, they claim, must be something absolute, fixed and finished, while its diverse appearances are relative, fluctuating, fundamentally incomplete, mutable. They cut essence off from appearance by an impassable boundary, an insurmountable opposition. What is essential is not apparent; what is apparent is non-essential. Such is the line of their reasoning.
There is a contemporary current of philosophy, of which George Santayana is a good representative, which even transmogrifies each and every appearance into an essence of this type. They picture essences as “eternal objects” existing in a supernatural realm of their own, apart from and opposed to the ordinary world of human activities. These essences have the attributes of spirits. “Essence has no genesis,” writes Santayana in Scepticism and Animal Faith. “Essences are absolutely immutable in their nature.” In themselves they have no real historical development and therefore cannot arise, be altered or perish. It is only our fugitive attempts to obtain an intuitive grasp of these “eternal objects” that produces the illusory appearance of change in the procession of essences.
This part of Santayana’s theory of knowledge (his full position is highly eclectic) is actually a re-edition of Platonism. Its underlying aim is to save by metaphysics as much as possible of the teachings of idealism from the march of modern science and materialism.
Although Santayana does not make any original contribution to philosophical thought, his viewpoint on this matter has the merit of rendering explicit in regard to essence what less consistent thinkers leave muddled and unclear. Moreover, Santayana’s erroneous conception of essence is shared, not only by idealist philosophers, but also by many people who lack philosophical knowledge and dialectical training.
This problem of essence especially puzzles those whose minds have become somewhat sophisticated or adulterated by contact with philosophy as taught in the colleges. They too think of the essence of a thing as something absolutely permanent, fixed and final, as radically different from the appearances of the same thing. Incidentally, that is one reason why these two particular categories have been chosen for analysis; the problems they present have been and remain today of the highest philosophical importance.
In reality, the essence of any thing does not and cannot come into existence all at once and remain there in immutable form, like Minerva who sprang from the forehead of Jove, fully armed, and remained a goddess thereafter. Such a notion is mythological, even if it is garbed in glittering philosophical terms. The essence of a thing develops and is realised along with the process of development of the material thing itself. It is an integral and inseparable aspect of the object, sharing all the vicissitudes of its history.
Consequently, essence in general, and each particular essence, has, like everything else in this world, a material and historical character. It comes into being under specific conditions, develops into and through various forms, and eventually goes out of existence, together with the perishing of the thing itself.
Moreover, its course of development has a dialectical or contradictory character. The essence of a thing never comes into existence by itself and as itself alone. It always manifests itself along with and by means of its own opposite. This opposite is what we designate by the logical term appearance. It is through a series of relatively accidental appearances that essence unfolds its inner content and acquires more and more reality until it exhibits itself as fully and perfectly as it can under the given material conditions.
The essence of a thing is what is necessary for its appearance, the totality of qualities without which it could not exist.
At the start of a thing’s development, its essence may be almost wholly submerged in that particular appearance, and superficial people will tend to identify the two as an indivisible whole. In natural science, electricity was identified with the property of magnetism, in connection with which it was first detected and studied. In the political development of the working class, the leadership of the international socialist movement was identified with the First, Second or Third Internationals.
But with its subsequent development, the thing sloughs off its original form and assumes new, different, and even contradictory appearances. Here the necessity for distinguishing between essence and appearance, the relatively permanent core and changing surface of things, becomes a theoretical and practical problem. Here also is the source of the error of metaphysicians. They see the need for distinguishing essence from appearance and separating them from each other. But they are blind to the equally urgent need to see their unity, their interconnections, and their conversion — under certain conditions — into one another.
Hegel expressed this in an unforgettable formulation: “In essence everything is relative.” Whereas, in appearance, regarded in abstraction from essence, everything is immediate or absolute.
Let us take, as an example, the human being. The human being first appeared, not in its fully developed essence, but as an animal hardly distinguishable from its immediate ancestor — a man-ape. In the further course of biological and social evolution, the man-ape turned into an ape-man. Since then the human species has more and more discarded its apelike characteristics and acquired its own distinctive ones. We are in many respects different from the Neanderthal cave-dwellers.
Where, then, is the essence of humanity to be found? It is present and operative in differing degrees in all the past stages of human growth as well as in its prevailing form.
And yet its essence is still in the midst of realisation. In fact, we are only at the beginning of that process. We display in class society only a small and stunted fragment
of man’s essence. This can burgeon only under the more favourable conditions of the future communist society. Possibly even mankind, as the highest prevailing form of earthly life, will evolve into something still higher.
Essence and appearance are identified with as well as opposed to each other at every stage in the development of a given material movement. But their respective relations can become reversed in the course of development. In the initial phase of a thing, the appearance usually tends to subordinate the essence to itself. Along the way, the two diverge to the point of opposition; and then, at the height of a thing’s development, its essential nature most transparently shines forth in triumph over its various appearances. Essence and appearance commingle at the peak as they did at the beginning. But in the latter stage essence dominates appearance.
Marxism, for instance, was relatively realised in each of the first three internationals, realised with ascending grades of perfection. It is being more thoroughly realised through the Fourth International, which is being created at a higher stage of working-class struggle and bases itself upon the enduring achievements and a critical appraisal of its predecessors. Will the Fourth International be the final and essential form of the international socialist party? We shall strive to make it so.
But the consummate embodiment of an essence is by no means the end of the matter. It is in fact but the middle of the process. For no sooner does the essence of a thing manifest itself most directly and coincide as fully as possible with its appearance, than the thing itself, having realised its possibilities, having unfolded its inner content to the utmost, begins to move toward and to pass over into something else. In other words, the essential starts upon a descending path to be transformed again into the less essential and eventually into the non-essential. Such is the dialectic of any essence.
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In the light of these considerations, let us consider the concrete example of the evolution of money, a thing which is so essential, as we well know, to the operations of the capitalist system. Money is not an accident but a necessity under capitalism. We are every day reminded that without it we cannot live.
There was a time when money did not exist. In primitive societies, where all production is for the use of the community and none of the products of labor enters into exchange, money is unnecessary and unknown. It came into existence only with the regular exchange of a diverse multitude of commodities and the extensive development of trade relations, when the need arose for a general equivalent through which all other commodities could express their exchange value.
Money originated, not in a form appropriate to its essence, but in a disguised form imposed by the conditions of its birth. Money made its first appearance as one commodity among others, as a money-commodity, just as man first emerged as an ape-man. That commodity which was singled out and elevated to serve as a medium of circulation and a measure of value for other commodities has assumed many different concrete guises in the historical development of commodity producing and exchanging societies, of which capitalism is the supreme expression. Cattle, iron, slaves, furs, wheat, rice and many other material substances have acted as money-commodities.
The commodity passed through three stages to achieve the essence of money and to make its form coincide best with its content. So long as exchange relations were restricted and the market was small, all sorts of commodities could play the role of general equivalent.
The qualitative jump from the commodity to the genuine money form of value occurred when the precious metals took over the money functions. Money-commodities such as cattle maintained their natural uses while serving as general equivalent; their functions in the process of circulation were subsidiary to these other uses. The cattle which were a measure of value could be slaughtered, their meat eaten, and hides dressed for various purposes.
The precious metals had a different status. Once they were stamped as coins by some public authority, their ole use was to serve as general equivalent for the mass of commodities. At this point the general equivalent became a universal equivalent and the essence of money in the shape of coins and ingots asserted itself in its own right.
The development did not stop there. Ultimately gold became the supreme embodiment of the universal equivalent.
It may be asked: Which of these diverse appearances of money is really and truly money in itself? In logical terms, where is the essence of money to be found among all these diverse manifestations of the money-relation? The first answer is that in a certain measure and under certain circumstances of economic development, all of these various material appearances have been and can be money. They have each proved in practice, which is the ultimate test of truth, that they can perform the basic functions of the money-commodity.
This then means that each of these historical incarnations of money contains to some extent its qualitative essence. Money in general is relative to each of its various concrete manifestations. Cattle, shells, furs, precious metals, and so on, must have partaken of the essence of money or else they could not have appeared or functioned as media of circulation. Else they would either be simply the material objects or the particular kind of commodity they happen to be. They could not have served as money without really being in essence the kind of economic relation which money is.
But that is only one side of the matter. It is obvious that, if each and every one of these forms of money contained some part of the essence of that economic relation, no one of them contained the entire essence of money. Each, taken by itself, embodied no more than a share in the essence of money, just as each stockholder holds only a given portion of a corporation’s stock. Each individual money-commodity is essentially, of necessity, no better than a defective, superficial, episodic representative of the economic relations and functions exhibited in and through the money form.
On the other hand, since each in its own way and according to its capacity incorporated and carried on some of the essence of money, we must recognise that all the constituent members of this series of money forms have contributed to the realisation, the clarification and perfection of the essential money form. They constitute transitional forms in which the essence of money makes its appearance, the accidents which go to make up its necessity.
So we see that essence, instead of being something fixed and simple in nature, is composed of various grades, which constitute a hierarchy of essence. We can proceed, and things in their evolution progress, from the less essential to the more essential. In other terms, the quality of a given essence can become quantitatively greater or smaller. It can grow in extent and in content; it can, step by step, become defined or determine itself into different grades or forms of its being.
The essence of a thing always manifests itself inextricably intermingled with its opposite, which is one or another of its appearances. In general, the more essence, the less appearance; the more appearance, the less essence at hand. These two united determinations of reality and thought appear together — but in inverse ratio to each other.
Money in the shape of cattle, for example, had only begun to differentiate itself from and oppose itself to the mass of other commodities. It is little more than one commodity standing slightly above other commodities. The essence of money makes only a feeble appearance in this embryonic form of money in uncivilised societies. It is not until money assumes the form of coin, and finds a material embodiment in the precious metals, that its essence begins to predominate over its appearance and the general equivalent graduates to a universal equivalent.
How clearly and thoroughly can essence show itself, detach itself from mere appearance? The purity and perfection of the realisation of any given essence depends upon the material circumstances governing the development of the thing in question. In the case of money, its essence has succeeded in disclosing itself with great clarity and definition, thanks to the evolution of commodity-producing societies into capitalism.
As a result of the development of commodity production and exchange, one particular kind of money has shown itself to be the most essential or necessary embodiment of money. That is gold. This is one of Marx’s important discoveries, sneered at as “Hegelianism.” Gold has established its superiority over all earlier forms of money in practice, as the outcome of the most severe competition covering hundreds of centuries of commerce and industry.
No person and no political power arbitrarily selected gold as best suited to embody and exercise the functions of money. That status was fundamentally determined by an extensive series of economic processes and causes, whose result political authorities had to ratify in their legal codes and everyone else had to recognise in everyday economic relations. Gold has deposed all rival monies because it has proved itself to be a more powerful, more real, more essential physical form of the money relation.
The example of gold demonstrates that, for all its absoluteness, essence remains relative to the less essential, or non-essential, forms of money. Gold, the most essential money form, arose historically out of less essential forms and maintains today definable relations to them as well as to the whole world of commodities. Silver exchanges, for example, in specific amounts with gold.
What is or appears essential at one stage in the development of a relation — and every single thing is either a relation or a constellation of relations — becomes non-essential or less essential at another stage of development. Earlier in economic evolution it looked as though silver might be the money commodity par excellence and that gold would have to take second place. Silver WAS then more valuable than gold. But with subsequent changes in technological and economic conditions this relationship between silver and gold became conclusively reversed. During the nineteenth century it was proved that not silver but gold was supreme. Silver turned out to be but a passing and subordinate representative of the money relation and receded into the background with its obsolete predecessors.
Today gold is absolute monarch, not only in respect to money forms, but also in respect to the entire world of commodities under capitalism. Every other commodity is inferior to gold and must bow down before it. Gold is Value Incarnate. Gold will hold this high and mighty position for the historical epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism. “In the transitional economy, as also under capitalism, the sole authentic money is that based on gold,” wrote Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed.
But this position of absolute economic power held by the money form, which spans so many different organisations of society, is likewise relative and limited. It too will endure for no more than a passing stretch of historical evolution. In socialist society money will begin to lose its magic powers and tend to disappear. “The death blow to money fetishism will be struck only upon that stage when the steady growth of social wealth has made us bipeds forget our miserly attitude toward every excess minute of labor, and our humiliating fear about the size of our ration. Having lost its ability to bring happiness or trample men in the dust, money will turn into mere bookkeeping receipts for the convenience of statisticians and for planning purposes. In the still more distant future, probably these receipts will not be needed. But we can leave this question entirely to posterity, who will be more intelligent than we are,” Trotsky observed.
Then, as Sir Thomas More predicted and Lenin hoped, men will use the gold which has been identified with so much happiness and misery in the past as trimming for bathroom fixtures.
The precious metals, and gold par excellence, were especially suited to monopolise the role of money because of their physical properties. They were malleable, ductile, highly divisible, homogeneous, durable, readily portable and easily recognisable. Even more, because of their relative rarity, they represented a large amount of exchange value in a small volume. They incorporated a great deal of labor in highly condensed form.
Many people mistakenly believe that such conspicuous physical properties by themselves make these metals into precious objects with miraculous powers. That is the appearance, not the reality, of the matter. Money is a highly developed form of value which exists only in commodity-producing societies. Thus, in the last analysis, money is a thing which represents specific economic relations between people. These relations constitute the essence of money. And when an economy of abundance and equality will fundamentally transform the relations of men, the need for money will dwindle and disappear, while all the physical properties of gold and silver will endure.
Is essence something abstract or concrete? The example of money shows that it is both. Money always exhibits itself in some one specific form. But no one of these concrete manifestations of money contains its entire essence. The essence of money is therefore both present and not present in any of its particular forms.
Without the serial development of the various concrete forms of money, it would have been impossible to realise in social economy the essence of money in its purest form of gold bullion. It would likewise have been impossible for the economists to have conceived through their scientific investigations a correct understanding of the inner nature of money.
Thus we see that the essence of a thing is an abstraction from its diverse concrete material forms conceptually expressed in a generalisation taken from its particular instances. The abstract and the concrete, the general and the particular, the essence and the appearance, are essentially interrelated and interconvertible categories. The one is never found without the other. “In essence,” as Hegel says, “all things are relative.”
These opposites are continually becoming transformed into each other. This coin, for example, looks extremely concrete and so it is from the standpoint of its material composition. But from the economic standpoint it is not at the moment so concrete. As it now exists, it is only partially and potentially money. It is money in the abstract. It can be used under normal circumstances as a medium of circulation. This coin really and truly becomes money and realises itself as such when I buy some commodity with it. In that transaction it loses its abstract, i.e., ideal, money character and becomes money in the concrete. When it comes into the hands of the commodity-seller, it once again assumes its more abstract character.
This transmutation of predominant features goes on perpetually in the process of commodity circulation. It is the same with all other categories in all other domains of existence.
Let us examine the relations between the categories of quantity and quality through this example. Money has as its starting point, not money (it is its destination to become money), but something other than money, its own opposite, commodities. The “ground” of money, as Hegel calls it, is its own opposite, commodities. Without commodities, that is, labor products which are exchanged, money cannot begin to become itself, cannot realise its peculiar essence.
How does a commodity transform itself into money, which is the opposite of the commodity form? A multitude of acts of exchange of goods must take place before the need for a particular commodity to serve as a medium of circulation makes itself felt. This need is satisfied by selecting one commodity to serve as this medium. This is usually, as Marx points out, the most important commodity, such as cattle, grain, or furs.
A specific quantitative development of exchanges is therefore the prerequisite for the qualitative generation of money as a new economic property. The new quality of money appears as the necessary result of the quantitative accumulation of acts of exchange. The production of this new economic quality occurs in a revolutionary way and has revolutionary results. It more and more splits the world of commodities into two opposed poles: into particular commodities on the one hand and the money-commodity, which is their universal equivalent, on the other. The ultimate result of this split is exhibited in the crises of capitalism where commodities cannot be exchanged for money on a world scale.
This leap from quantity into quality is no fiction but a true logical expression of what actually occurs in real processes. The germ of the money relation is latent in the existence of commodities. As soon as men begin to say in the market place, “This is worth that,” and exchange the products of their labor on equivalent terms, the preconditions for the production of money are generated. This possibility becomes transformed into necessity with the increasing quantity of such transactions. The social need for an independent measure of value, a standard of price and a means of reckoning brings money into existence.
Given a sufficient quantity of different commodities and number of acts of exchange, it is eventually necessary to find one commodity among the many to serve as money. When men say, “This is worth that,” then they soon find that they must have something of which it can be said, “All things are worth that.” This commodity becomes the money commodity. When national paper currencies became valueless during the Second World War, cigarettes temporarily acquired the functions of money.
The dialectical process of development does not end with the transformation of quantity into quality. That is only one of its lawful manifestations. The process continues in the opposite direction and converts the new quality into a new quantity. Once the quality of money makes its appearance in society, it tends to spread indefinitely, to penetrate everywhere, and to transform all other economic relations. This quantification of the money quality reaches its high point under capitalism where every product of labor and, above all, labor power itself, necessarily becomes exchangeable for money.
This quantification in turn leads to the production of a new economic quality. Money transforms itself into capital, which is a higher form of money. This new quality of money, its capital form, also grows and assumes diverse forms: usurious, commercial, manufacturing, industrial and finance capital.
With the socialist revolution this capital form of money will wither away, as will many other forms and functions of money, in the course of time. As Trotsky pointed out, with the establishment of socialist relations, money will become transformed into mere bookkeeping receipts.
Thus we see that there is a ceaseless process, a never ending round, of the transformation of quantity into quality and quality into quantity, of possibility into inevitability and inevitability into possibility. Money which is inevitable under our economic system was not possible under primitive tribal collectivism which preceded commodity production and will no longer be necessary under the communism of the future.
This path of development is extremely contradictory. Money comes out of commodities and always remains a commodity, just as man came out of the animal species and always remains an animal. Yet money is more than and is other than a commodity, just as man is more than and other than his fellow mammals. Money develops its contradictory characteristics to the point that, under capitalism, money, which is the sole means of unifying and realising the value of commodities, stands in absolute opposition to the world of commodities. Without money, no commodity can realise itself as a commodity; conversely, without commodities, money cannot realise itself as money.
This contradiction most conspicuously manifests itself in capitalist crises, when the money which originated and functions as the sole medium of circulation becomes the principal and insuperable barrier to the circulation of commodities. This is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism which will bring about its downfall.
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The evolution of money from its origins to its prospective dying away exemplifies the dialectical nature of appearance and essence, quantity and quality, possibility and inevitability, content and form, relative and absolute, accident and necessity, the abstract and the concrete. Such correlative categories make up the content of dialectical logic. They are indispensable conceptual tools for analysing the contradictory characteristics of reality and its modes of development.
This dialectical and materialist view of appearance and reality clashes with the conceptions of other philosophical schools such as the agnostics and the empiricists. The agnostic theory of knowledge, as put forward by Kant, makes an absolute disjunction between subjective appearances and inner substance, things “for us” and things “in themselves.” It asserts that men can experience only phenomena and cannot penetrate to the essence of things. Therefore reality is unknowable through either the senses or reason, though it may be intuited by faith.
Empiricism tends to subordinate essential relations to the sensuous or subjective appearances of things and to take, or mistake, their superficial aspects and immediate manifestations for their fundamental content.
Both theories of knowledge err in divorcing phenomena from essence and disregarding or denying their necessary interconnection as opposing poles of a unified whole.
The divergence and coincidence of appearance and reality are especially important in understanding how knowledge progresses from everyday experience to scientific insight and foresight. Things as they are first manifested to us have contradictory and confusing characteristics which are both leading and misleading. Their immediate presentation can conflict with their real state. At the same time these phenomena provide clues which can expose the deceptiveness of the outward show and open the way to a grasp of their basic content, since essence presents itself in and through diverse appearances.
One familiar instance of this divergence between appearance and reality is the relation of the earth to the solar system. The sun seems to be revolving around the earth whereas we now know that the earth, like the other planets, is orbiting around the sun. The discovery by Copernicus of the rotation of the earth on its axis and its motion around a fixed sun opened the modern epoch in astronomy.
At the same time it is understandable why the other celestial bodies seem to be moving around the observer situated on earth. In the scientific picture of the solar system, both the apparent and the real motions are interconnected and explicable.
One of the main aims of science is to resolve the conflicts between the outward forms and the inner reality of things by demonstrating their dialectical unity. Knowledge advances by probing beneath, behind and beyond appearances to ever deeper levels of real existence.