George Novack
An Introduction to the Logic Of Marxism: LECTURE IX
The elements of dialectical logic can be learned by anyone with a determination to study them. The acquisition of any science requires the expenditure of considerable labor-time and mental energy. It was long ago pointed out that there is no royal road to knowledge. Capitalists acquire profits without personal labor. But do workers who earn a living and strain to learn the operation of a new and complex machine need to be told that they must also exert effort to learn something new or to acquire knowledge of a new instrument of thought?
Since thinking deals with obscure events and complex processes studied by natural and social scientists, there are fields in which logic requires specialised knowledge and training. But we all think about matters close at hand and perfectly familiar to everyone. By the same token dialectics as a science of thought, as a logic, also deals with the most commonplace affairs.
To be sure, dialectical logic approaches these affairs in a somewhat unusual way. We propose to show how dialectics arises out of the everyday life and struggles of the workers; how it reflects the workings of their minds in the various aspects and successive phases of their class experience; and finally, how any thinking worker can verify the origin of these logical ideas and the operations of the laws of dialectics by reflecting upon and analysing his own intellectual and political development from a “working stiff,” or even “scissor-bill,” to a revolutionary-minded worker.
In order to become a Marxist every worker has to revolutionise his political mentality. This change in his thinking does not and cannot take place all at once. It comes as the climax of a protracted process of development that includes manifold experiences in the class struggle and passing through various stages of political understanding. The worker begins, as a rule, with complete ignorance of the real nature of capitalist society and of his position and prospects within it. He has gradually to extend and deepen his insight into the capitalist system until he clearly comprehends the mainsprings of its operations and the necessity for the proletarian struggle against it.
We propose to analyse this process of political development, this passage from a lack of class consciousness to a scientific understanding of capitalism and a revolutionary attitude toward it, in order to disclose its logical, that is, its essentially dialectical characteristics.
For purposes of illustration, let us trace the career of a worker named John. John enters a Detroit auto plant at 18 with the ideas of an average middle-class American, implanted in his mind by his family, school or church and carefully cultivated by the press, radio, television, pulpit, movies, etc. Chief among them is the axiom that there is and should be perfect harmony between his employer and himself, between the working and capitalist classes. If he works hard and honestly enough, John is told, he in turn may some day become a multimillionaire like Ford or Chrysler, or at least a highly paid director of production, like Knudsen.
John as a wage-worker and the corporation that buys his labor-power are bound together by the social tie of exploitation. Nevertheless this economic relationship and all the other relations of class rule based upon it seem to .them natural. inevitable, even beneficial. The worker who so unquestioningly and wholeheartedly accepts this bourgeois view of society and conducts himself accordingly has as yet no glimmer of class consciousness. He is objectively a proletarian by virtue of his economic status. But subjectively, i.e., in his mind, he is completely dominated by capitalist ideas. John is nothing but raw material for capitalist exploitation.
John does not yet realise what a contradiction there is between his class position as a proletarian and his complete enslavement to capitalist ideas. This contradiction flows from the opposition between his interests as a wage-worker and his employer’s interests as a capitalist. Nor, so long as he remains satisfied with things as they are, does he suspect how deep and irreconcilable is the latent antagonism arising out of their contradictory class relations. This underlying reality can be brought out into the open, rendered explicit, only as a result of their subsequent dealings with each other. These objective contradictions remain hidden from John’s sight. What is in reality divided and opposed appears to John unified and identical; what is in constant movement, change and conflict seems to him fixed, harmonious and unalterable; the appearance of their relationship at this most primitive stage of its evolution seems to correspond to its actual substance.
Such is the egg out of which the revolutionist is, and is to be, hatched. To use Hegel’s terms, in this state of undeveloped being the worker exists in himself but not yet for himself. He does not have a self-dependent existence but lives and works for the sake of another, his exploiter. He is utterly ignorant of the true conditions of his existence, the victim of illusions and lies disseminated by the capitalists and their agents. The practical consequence of this lack of class consciousness is absolute subservience to the boss. The worker is a wage-slave pure and simple at the mercy of the capitalist monarch. Such was the state, and the state of mind, of many Ford workers before the CIO victory. The worker submits, knowing no better, to the employer in the factory and to capitalist influences elsewhere. He votes for capitalist candidates and parties at elections and thinks uncritically and acts automatically along capitalist lines.
But this primitive condition of class “harmony” cannot be indefinitely sustained. The underlying socio-economic antagonisms are stronger than the goodwill of individuals on either side of the class line which really separates the worker from his boss. Their original unity based on a seeming identity of interests must sooner or later be disrupted by the normal course of capitalist production. That event occurs when John and his boss clash over an important issue involving the material interests of both sides: an attempted wage-cut by the corporation, resistance to speed-up by John and his shop-mates, etc. In the ensuing controversy the formerly benevolent employer, either directly or through his underlings, shows himself to be hostile, brutal, selfish, denying the just claims and flouting the grievances of the workers.
This reaction generates not only indignation in John but some illumination in his mind about the real state of affairs. The shock of conflict dispels his blindness and makes him realise for the first time that there is an opposition of interests leading to sharp conflict between himself and his employer. He discovers for himself part of the contradiction within their mutual relations. John finds that his employer is not what he thought him to be, a friend, but something quite different, an enemy.
John himself then begins to change into a different person. He is ready to take his first step toward class consciousness. His ignorance begins to be transformed into knowledge. As a thoughtful man, he generalises from his experience. This can be done only in a logical way. The line of his logic follows and is determined by the facts of his vital struggle. He forms a judgment upon the basis of what has just happened. He concludes: this boss of mine is an oppressive exploiter of myself and my fellow workers.
In logic this kind of conclusion is called a singular judgment. A singular judgment is one that applies only to a single thing. This is the simplest form of judgment. Some singular thing is identified with a general group, some general property ascribed to a thing. In this instance the employer is identified with the class of exploiters. We make similar judgments when we note, “This grass is green,” or “The Democratic Party is a capitalist party.”
The singular judgment John has made is only an isolated one. Yet if suffices to initiate the process of conscious differentiation between himself and his boss and to give an impulse to his self-determination as a worker. This judgment provides John and his fellow workers with the theoretical basis for practical action. It serves as a logical guide to their unified class action. The negation of their original relation of submission to the boss becomes quickly transformed into a positive policy for independent class action in opposition to him.
The workers in the shop immediately feel the need for an organisation of their own to protect and promote their common interests. They apply for a CIO charter and present the boss with demands for higher wages and better working conditions. Their demands are denied; their union representatives given the run around. The most militant stewards are fired. The split deepens. The judgment is confirmed and tends to become a conviction. John, elected an officer of his local, attends a conference of delegates from all the organised shops in Detroit to consider strike action. John discovers that workers throughout the industry have the same grievances as himself.
At this point John is ready to draw a further conclusion: All heads of the auto corporations exploit their workers. This is an extension, a development of his previous judgment, arising out of the extension, development and confirmation of his experiences in the class struggle and his understanding of them. In logical science such a judgment is called a special or particular judgment. A particular judgment is one that applies to a group of things or individuals bearing the same general characteristic. This group may embrace a few, a large number, or all of a given kind.
But a particular judgment does not necessarily apply to all members of a given class. It may be an accidental and passing rather than an essential and permanent feature. Some may possess it and not others, or all may possess it at some stage because of specific causes and later divest themselves of it. In this case exploitation may not be an essential and defining, a necessary and universal characteristic of the capitalist class. Under other circumstances, thinks John, and at another time when things become better for the capitalists, they may act differently toward their employees.
The highest form of special or particular judgment is a general judgment which does apply to all members of a given class. John is ready to arrive at this stage of understanding the nature of the capitalist class when his union votes to strike. During the strike he sees all the auto magnates and their hirelings line up against the workers, combine to break their strike, and try to force the men back to work with their demands unsatisfied.
From these events John decides that the auto bosses as a class are in league against the workers. He makes the general judgment: All auto bosses are exploiters. But this judgment, although unconditional and universal in form, remains restricted in content. It rests upon too narrow and empirical a basis. John as yet knows no compelling, incontrovertible reason why all bosses, as well as the auto barons, must be exploiters. Nor, on the other hand, does he know why they cannot sometimes act otherwise than as exploiters. For this kind of categorical and necessary judgment, John needs a broader and deeper view of social relations. This can come only from a wider range of experiences and a more penetrating and comprehensive body of generalisations drawn from experience.
The trade unions are the elementary schools of the working masses. Here workers like John learn their first lessons about the nature of capitalism, begin to clarify their class consciousness, take the first steps toward class organisation. Here for the first time John and his fellow workers feel their opposition to the capitalists and act upon it. But they do not yet realise that this is a polar opposition arising out of an irreconcilable contradiction in their class interests. The various compromises and agreements of the unions with the employers serve to mask the depth and extent of that contradiction, to mitigate its severity and sharpness, and prevent it from developing to the full.
All contradictions take time to assert and to reveal themselves fully. They must pass through various stages before they unfold the full content of their determinations and the breaking point between their conflicting tendencies is reached. Singular and particular judgments arise out of the initial phases; general judgments in form reflect and reveal the subsequent intermediate and transitional stages in the process of the development and intensification of the unity of opposites which constitutes the original contradictory state of being. But none of these are yet full-fledged judgments which disclose the essential and necessary character of the phenomenon in question. They are partial truths, based upon partial evidence. They are not yet the whole or the fundamental truth. The full truth, or innermost reality of any phenomenon, cannot be known until its essential contradictions are completely exposed, comprehended in their broadest scope, and developed to the breaking point.
To the average trade unionist or union-minded worker the class conflict appears to be located or concentrated in the economic arena, or confined to a single industry or country, or to this particular time or place. They oppose the bosses in industry, but not yet in political or cultural life. The worker’s comprehension of the class struggle is limited to those times and places where it first and most forcibly manifests itself and impresses its truths upon the workers’ minds. This is natural.
In all sciences it is known that the place of manifestation is not necessarily or even usually the place of causation. These episodic manifestations of the class struggle have to be traced back to their roots and the intermediate levels between the various consequences and their basic causes uncovered before the worker becomes a conscious socialist revolutionist.
At this stage of his class consciousness the worker still .mistakenly believes that while his interests are opposed and even irreconcilable on the elementary economic plane, they can be reconciled on some higher level of society in the political, fraternal or religious realms. He sees the need for his class economic organisations but not for an independent labor party. This is the state of mind which the bulk of industrial workers have attained today in the United States. They know and they feel that they cannot get along without their trade unions. Yet they illogically believe that they can get along without a militant labor party. They place their political trust, not in their own elected representatives, but in capitalist politicians big and little.
Workers in this stage of their march toward revolutionary class consciousness seek salvation from the evils of capitalism primarily by economic means. The most persistent and powerful form of this phase in the United States was the policy of pure-and-simple trade unionism pursued by the Gompers school of the AFL. Anarcho-syndicalism, of which the IWW was the native branch in America, was essentially a more radical expression of this same anti-political position.
These two apparently irreconcilable movements were fundamentally the opposing poles in the same general anti-political tendency proper to that particular phase in the evolution of the mentality of the mass of American workers.
Although workers then engage in organised struggle in the economic arena, they fail to generalise that class struggle by extending it to other spheres of social life. Industry however does not operate in a vacuum. It is interlinked with the rest of national life as well as with world conditions. The trade unions discover that their advances along purely economic lines become more and more restricted as they run up against political, cultural and world conditions which circumscribe their economic activities and gains. Pure-and-simple trade unionism is too narrow in its basis and outlook to cope in theory or in practice with
these environing forces which hem in the trade unions on all sides and which, at bottom, determine the extent and direction of their development.
This becomes most manifest in times of economic and political crisis, such as the world crisis of 1929-1933, which exposed the bankruptcy of the traditional AFL policies and led to the rise of a new trade unionism. It is even more conspicuous during wartime when all trade union activities are dominated by governmental agencies and international conditions. It is equally evident in the helplessness of trade unionism by itself to repel the menace of fascism and less virulent types of capitalist reaction.
To preserve and advance what they conquered in the economic field, the workers are obliged to lift themselves above pure-and-simple trade unionism (which was never pure and never simple in the first place!) and climb to a higher level of class understanding, class action and class organisation. Above economics stands politics, above politics stands class theory and class culture. These are the heights the mass of workers are driven by objective conditions to aim and aspire towards.
By demarcating themselves from their bosses, by establishing their trade unions, by participating in strikes, the workers have considerably changed themselves and their outlook. But they have not yet politicalized, much less revolutionised, themselves and their ideas. At this juncture of their development, there exists an underlying contradiction and continuous conflict in each worker as well as in the ranks of the working class between their trade union mentality and the objective conditions of their struggle. This manifests itself in the trade union movement by a continual conflict between the more backward and progressive sections. The bureaucrats lean upon the first while the revolutionists seek support and strive to clear the road for the second.
Every contradiction presents an opportunity, no less than an obstacle, if it is properly understood and handled. The crying objective contradiction between the organisation of the workers for independent action on the industrial arena and their political subordination to capitalist parties and policies provides the motive force for the next stage of their development. How is this great contradiction to be overcome? That is the theoretical question, posed in and by practice, which confronts the mass of American workers today.
Thanks to a series of practical experiences, John and his fellow workers become convinced that their problems cannot be solved by economic organisation and action alone. They try to supplement this by political action and through political organisation. In conformance with their original, i. e., primitive outlook on life, they first turn toward the capitalist parties for help. They attach themselves to the Republicans who sell them out, as in 19291932. They conclude: This party is no good. And upon the basis of this particular judgment the majority of the workers swing over to the Democratic Party.
They have still to generalise their disillusion with and opposition to capitalist parties and politics. It requires far more experience and far more profound experiences to come to the conclusion that both capitalist parties and all boss politics are bad for us.
The preliminary expression of this new attitude takes the negative form of theoretical disillusion and political passivity. The disappointed workers think: All politics are bad; all politicians are lousy betrayers; to hell with politics.
But this negative attitude toward capitalist politics has within its shell a progressive kernel. A break with the capitalist parties is the prerequisite for a different kind of party and politics. It is a negative indication of the positive fact that the workers are driven to realise that they need and want their own class party. They are beginning to move toward a declaration of political independence.
At this stage the most militant workers return to action on the political field but upon a higher level of class consciousness. They demand, create, establish their own class labor parties, as they have done in England and Europe. Just as previously they broke their economic bondage to the capitalists by organising independent trade unions, they now emancipate themselves from company-union politics by launching their mass labor party.
That is the stage American workers are approaching. But the evolution, the heightening of their class consciousness does not stop at this point. On the contrary, the formation of their own class party speeds up the expansion of their class thinking and radicalises their class action all along the line. The dialectical development which led the workers from capitalist political organisations to their opposite, labor political organisations, reasserts itself at the subsequent stage, not upon the organisational plane, but upon the far higher plane of class policy and perspectives.
In the initial phase of independent labor politics the mass labor parties may have organisational autonomy but pursue class collaborationist policies, like the American Labor Party in New York. This is inescapable under the given conditions of development. Here we find that labor politics have an independent form but no essential independence because they identify themselves with or yoke themselves to capitalist parties, just as the ALP was the tail to Roosevelt’s kite.
At the next stage of struggle, a break must occur on this question, though not yet a decisive and irreconcilable break. This is the stage of the predominance of centrist politics and politicians who waver between the reformist and revolutionary roads.
In the final stage of the struggle there comes a complete break with capitalist parties and politics. The working masses have already made the judgment: Every class struggle is a political struggle. On top of that they make the further judgment: Our political struggle must be revolutionary, directed to the conquest of supreme power by the workers. At this point the workers, individually and collectively, have revolutionised their mentalities. They are ready to join the revolutionary socialist vanguard.
Their development does not, of course, end here. Thoroughly class-conscious workers then actively intervene in the class struggle on a national and world scale, striving to lift the international revolutionary movement to ever higher levels.
The actual development of any individual worker from capitalist darkness to socialist enlightenment, or the political evolution of the working masses, does not, of course, proceed in strict conformity to this abstract logical scheme. Living reality is full of countless combinations, zigzags and contradictions. Every case has its peculiarities, since the path of development is determined by material conditions and not by logical patterns.
But each individual instance, however peculiar its features, represents only a different and more complex combination of these basic laws and distinct stages of dialectical development.
A timetable enables us to follow the route, arrival and departure of trains, even though some are late, others arrive ahead of schedule, and some never reach their destination. Just so does such an abstract outline enable us to follow the general course of development. Adjustments must be made in unusual cases to fit specific circumstances.
Let us note some of the important aspects of this process from the standpoint of logic.
1. The process developed by way of contradictions, as a whole and in each separate phase. The entire process was a contradictory passage from complete identity of interests to absolute opposition, and from ignorance to scientific knowledge. The mentality of the workers became transformed into its opposite through the objective unfolding and the corresponding intellectual recognition of the existence of opposing and irreconcilable class interests.
2. The various forms of judgment reflected successive stages in the comprehension of the real facts formulated in the logical categories and represented a widening and deepening of real social relations together with the knowledge of them. They were both objective and subjective in nature.
3. These forms of judgment, which reflected the successive stages of social and mental development, issued out of one another in a reasonable manner according to the extent and depth of the experience involved. From an isolated case, to a group of cases, then on to the whole class, then from the whole class inward to a grasp of the social basis and material interests of that class. Such was the process taken on the plane of social development.
This objective social process had its logical expressions in the singular, the particular, and the universal, and ultimately the crowning judgment of the necessary and universal law. The serial phases of social development of the class and its consciousness has its corresponding reflections in the process of logical thought. These two processes are essentially interlinked with each other.
4. These judgments provide the basis for practical activity. “Theory is a guide to action.” There can be no revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory.
5. Dialectics is the highest type of scientific knowledge of real processes. On the practical side it is the consummation and condensation of the rich and ripe experience of the working-class movement, embracing the widest range of forms and phases of the concrete struggles and experiments. On its theoretical side it is the highest product of scientific brainwork and investigation. Such knowledge comes as the reward of struggle and of labour.
The process of social and mental evolution which has here been ascribed to an individual worker likewise occurs among the entire class of workers, especially in its most advanced sections. Through their struggles the working masses become progressively aware, as they pass through rising levels of comprehensiveness, of their real relations to the capitalist exploiters. At any given moment in this process, different parts of the same class stand upon different heights of consciousness. While the most backward can remain stuck at the stage of class collaboration, the most advanced can have marched forward under the spur of necessity and reached, and even surpassed, the point of irrepressible revolutionary conflict. The Russian as against the American workers in 1922, for example; the Cuban versus the American people in 1962.
When a sufficient number of workers emerge from the primitive state of absolute subservience and begin to differentiate themselves in theory and in practice and to oppose themselves to the capitalists, a change begins to take place in the social and political consciousness of that class. But for the class as a whole there has not yet occurred a qualitative leap in their political mentality. There is progress toward that end — but not yet enough change to produce a revolutionary transformation into its opposite.
Such a revolutionary change in class consciousness takes place only when the dominant section of the workers, aided and led by the Socialist Workers Party, becomes convinced of the utter incompatibility of their vital interests with the capitalist regime and proceeds to act upon that theoretical conviction. At a certain point in the development of the class struggle and in the class education of the workers, this critical point is inevitably attained. Then a qualitative change in the class consciousness of the workers, a revolutionary leap, takes place. From having been more or less capitalist-minded, the advanced workers become really proletarian-minded; from having been more or less reactionary, they become revolutionary in thought and deed. This is the necessary law of the class struggle manifesting itself inexorably during this death agony of capitalism.
At a specific stage in the course of this process a dialectical reversal takes place. What had been an effect of the class struggle, the growing class consciousness of the workers’ vanguard, expressed in the growth of the revolutionary party and its influence, becomes in turn a cause of the acceleration and maturing of the class struggle. The objective logic of events is made explicit and realised through the conscious understanding and political intervention of the socialist-minded workers. Their subjective grasp of the logic of events, produced by their experiences in the class struggle and by their Marxist education, becomes an effective and indispensable link in the chain of causes leading to the socialist revolution.
The class struggle between capital and labor thus proceeds together with the workers’ comprehension of its meaning through an interlocked series of events. Starting in the most advanced countries, it spreads throughout the world. Beginning in a single plant or industry, it seizes all the economic life of the country. Starting on the lowest level of theory and organisation, it rises through successive stages, twistings and turnings, spurts and setbacks, first in episodic form, on to limited generalisations and then in a fully generalised form, until it reaches the peak of revolution. And then the process continues to develop dialectically — but upon a new and superior material social basis.
That is what is meant by the logic of history. This is an outline of the dialectics of the class struggle in our time, which moves from one stage to the next until it results in the revolutionary overthrow of the old world and the creation of a new social system. The materialist dialectic we have been studying derives its importance from the essential part it plays in this world-historical process. The abolition of capitalism through the triumph of socialism will be the final vindication of the truth, the power and the glory of materialist dialectics, the logic of Marxism. The task of revolutionary socialists is to realise this in life.