I recently read Tristan Hunt’s [now-dated] biography of Friedrich Engels on vacation. I may have also subjected myself to a ‘debate’ on Marxist philosophy between leftish YouTuber Vaush and ML-adjacent anarchist Emerican Johnson (‘EJ’), I’ve been struck how both professional historians such as Hunt and amateurs such as Vaush both deploy a vulgar understanding of Marxist terminology and concepts - a language of modes of production, fixed stages of development, class contradiction and the inevitability of revolution that reflects a good-quality liberal education during which Marx was taught - but never applied. Empty symbols, signifying nothing. But thinkers on the left often do themselves few favours. Academic philosophy is always obtuse and much of Marx’s and Engel’s insight has become ossified and calcified with a century of additions, explanations and assumed knowledge. I have to admit, when someone truly knowledgeable and enmeshed in this way of thought (such as EJ) tries to explain it, I cringe. It’s often incomprehensible, and so removed from conventional Western modes of thought that the left can appear mad, divorced from commonsense notions or isolated in its ivory tower. Classical Marxism is almost, but not quite, crank philosophy.
Nevertheless, as I’ve grown and matured as a writer I’ve found there’s valuable insights in the old texts. Simple awareness of the existence and operation of alternative ontological, metaphysical, epistemological and metaethical assumptions can help us overcome much of the social and interpersonal conflict that those assumptions generate. So this will be a blog about dialectical materialism - the philosophical framework in which Marx and Engels operated. The two founders of modern anti-capitalism are best known as political economists, historians and sociologists, but were first and foremost philosophers. Unhelpfully, their framework was so foundational to their thinking that they never bothered to write it all down in one place. So what we have is mostly snippets, dutifully assembled and given coherence by later scholars [even the name, ‘dialectical materialism’, is a subsequent invention by Karl Kautsky]. These scholars themselves often laboured under tyrannical regimes. It is wrong to claim, as Vaush did, that ‘dialectical materialism’ exists only to justify the behaviour of autocrats. But it is true that Lenin, Stalin and Mao each contributed in some way. Make of that what you will. My case is simply that beneath a century of mystification, there’s still some things worth knowing.
What ‘Dialectical Materialism’ is not
There are several methods by which one might approach large topics: to define a thing by what it is not; to put it in the context of its intellectual history; and finally, to outline what a thing is and what it does. I always find the third approach the most useful, and its where I’ll focus my efforts later, but we’ll start in true dialectical fashion with its negation. Marxists use several pieces of terminology in ways alien to modern philosophers; the most important of these is ‘metaphysics’. Metaphysics is to the modern mind merely the philosophical study of the fundamental nature of reality; so dialectical materialism is simply a branch of metaphysics. But what Marxists counterpose dialectics against metaphysics they mean specifically Western metaphysics, and in particular the mode of thought dominant in post-Enlightenment Europe.
“To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. . . . For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.” [Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific"]
“The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable. . . . Metaphysicians hold that all the different kinds of things in the universe and all their characteristics have been the same ever since they first came into being. All subsequent changes have simply been increases or decreases in quantity. They contend that a thing can only keep on repeating itself as the same kind of thing and cannot change into anything different.” [Mao, “On Contradiction”]
Dialectics and ‘metaphysics’, thus, are put forward as two opposed ways of understanding the world, although they are not exclusive opposites, and most people think at least part of the time in both modes. The metaphysical mode is a world of mental categories, where physical objects and concepts have fixed definitions and argumentation proceeds from axioms in a formal manner. The metaphysician struggles to come up with a working definition of ‘chair’; the dialectician simply notes they’re used for sitting and moves on. Consider whether we can have a fixed definition of even simple concepts such as of ‘woman’, ‘worker’, ‘person of colour’, ‘privilege’; how much easier it is to observe that these are constructs that imply a social relationship: the patriarchy, the wage relation, white supremacy, inequality. There are no hard and fast barriers between categories, no bright lines, only shades of one thing into another.
Classical logic - which is still very influential in analytic philosophy of the American type - has three ‘laws of thought’, all of which dialectical materialism rejects to some degree.
The law of identity (A = A). A thing is always itself. An object is, rather than becomes. But if everything in the universe is on constant motion and interaction, then from moment-to-moment a thing is always different from what it was a moment before. “[T]he plant, the animal, every cell is at every moment of its life identical with itself and yet becoming distinct form itself, by absorption and excretion” [Engels]. Are you the same person you were when you were born? Most of your cells are constantly dying and being replaced, the very atoms that comprise your body being recycled into the environment.
The law of non-contradiction (A ≠ A’). Something cannot be both true and false simultaneously. This is a big one, but as an axiom it’s extremely flimsy. Is a quantum particle over here or over there? It is a particle or wave? Is an object bound in a position by a centripetal force in motion or still? Can a complex system be stable while its constituent elements behave chaotically? Can a person be privileged in some respects while simultaneously being oppressed in others? Can a person be assigned female at birth and yet present as male? The answer to all these questions is yes.
The law of the excluded middle (something is either A or A’). In classical logic, a proposition is either true or false, right or wrong. A category can always be defined as a completely closed system. There is no third option. But to a dialecticion this rigid either/or binary is unnecessary. What is true is contingent, conditional and relational: an individual can be a worker in some aspects of their life and an ‘owner’ in others; a person’s racial or gender categorisation, self-image and/or presentation can shift depending on social (and historical) context. Concepts are not timeless perfect forms but themselves messy, half-formed and incomplete.
The Marxist rejection of much of Western logic and metaphysics has fueled accusations it is anti-Enlightenment, anti-science or anti-empirical; but dialectical material is no less a product of the Enlightenment, the scientific method and empiricism. It merely operates from a different set of assumptions. As I wrote in my second book, ‘Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species’:
“[There is] a broader tradition in philosophy that emphasises the empirical, material and dynamic over the ideal, transcendent and static. In process philosophy, systems are not defined as categories of things but by processes – motion, change and becoming. Stability and harmony are mere illusions, sustained by the dynamic tension of sub-structural forces. In the same way that Marxism is the study of economic and political change via dialectical materialism, evolutionary theory is the study of the emergence of social and biological order through the process of natural selection.”
The second key Marxist negation is of Idealism - which logically enough is counterposed against materialism. This is not merely a rejection of naïve optimism [‘Utopianism’]. But rather a rejection of the reduction of reality to objects existing solely in the human brain. Idealism is no longer considered cutting-edge in Western philosophy, but continues to exert strong influence over the thinking of non-philosophers - especially liberals. Like existentialists, dialectical materialists hold that existence generates the essence of being. Truth cannot be deduced from reason alone. For the Idealist, the course of human history can be charted by the history of ideas that motivated human behaviour, but for Marx: “The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. . . . Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” [“The German Ideology”]
Dialectics: an abbreviated intellectual history
While the ‘metaphysical’ mode of thought is evidenced in history at least as far as Plato, dialectics was also present at the dawn of recorded philosophical inquiry. Heraclitus, the great pre-Socratic cynic, wrote a single, idiosyncratic work (fittingly titled ‘On Nature’), of which only fragments survive. But those cryptic fragments already contain much of the dialectic worldview, as recognised by Marx and Engels nearly 2500 years later. For Heraclitus, all things ‘came into being through strife [the conflict of opposites]’; stability arose dynamically from conflict and tension, and without conflict, the world would cease to move. Heraclitus wrote that the ‘way up is also the way down’, emphasising that the properties of an object were a matter of perspective, and that an object was necessarily both A and not A simultaneously. His most famous aphorism, that ‘It is impossible to step in the same river twice’, illustrates through parable the idea that categories we believe are certain are actually in constant motion - everything changes and nothing stands still. But by the same token, we also change: each time we step into the river we ourselves are also different.
For the majority of Greek philosophers, however, dialectics meant simply a method of reasoning - think of a Socratic dialogue in which two imagined speakers approach the truth by offering each other propositions and counter-propositions in order to identify points of disagreement or contradiction. For millennia, it was taught as the poor cousin of logic and rhetoric, and as late as Kant in in the late eighteen century it was seen primarily as an exercise to expose weaknesses and paradoxes in an argument since in classical logic the exposure of a contradiction could only lead to the utter negation of an argument. Dialectics was not a route to moral or intellectual progress as that would have implied the participants could generate new arguments ex nihilo.
That was where things stood until Hegel at the turn of the nineteenth century. I don’t pretend to understand Hegel and I’ve never read his original work. But, speaking generally, Hegel was a strict Idealist who was interested in understanding the process of Enlightenment. To do this, he revived dialectics: for Hegel, the initial attempt to understand a thing in the abstract is necessarily imperfect; so the categorisation of things necessarily contains self-contradiction (‘negations’). But rather than invalidating the category, the abstract and the negation sublate one another to generate a concrete idea that better corresponds with reality. Rather than being destructive, the messiness and conflict inherent in philosophy was seen as generative, pushing understanding forward [which is clearly true].
In a modern liberal education, this triadic system is often taught as ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’, but this terminology belonged to Kant and Johann Fichte. Hegel in fact rejected any formalisation of the triadic system as a ‘lifeless schema’. Hegel [and as we shall see, his followers] never thought of the negation as being somehow necessarily one of opposition or contradiction - in fact, thinking in such binary terms is strong evidence of ‘metaphysical’ thinking and is often at the root of misunderstandings of Marxist dialectics. Contradictions are not merely a reaction to a proposition - thesis and antithesis come into being simultaneously. Hegel’s system avoided the central paradox of Plato’s dialectics: negation or contradiction does not produce the annihilation of premises but rather their transformation into something new. And new ideas do not show up ‘out of nowhere’, they emerge out of necessity from previous ones which have multiple ideas already embedded in them. They ‘come about of their own accord’, nothing new or extraneous is introduced from outside the system.
Famously, of course, Marx and Engels were ‘young Hegelians’, students of philosophy in Germany of the generation after Hegel, and were greatly influenced by him. However, Marx turned Hegel’s dialectic ‘upside down’ by stripping it of its Idealist trappings:
“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” [Marx, ‘Capital’]
No longer was the evolution of ideas the driving engine of history. Rather, dynamism in the material world - which is unstable and ever-changing - generated other process that could or would operate at different levels of analysis. And these material processes and contradictions were merely reflected in the imperfect and partial models of them in human minds - which subsequent writers have labelled ‘ideology’. Most of Marx’s writings concern the application of this philosophy to history and political economy and it was only later writers who formally distinguished between dialectical materialism as a philosophical method and historical material as the Marxist application of that method to human economic history. One can and should apply to dialectical method to other subjects without invoking categories such as class, mode of production, and political revolution.
The unity of opposites
Dialectical materialism has never really been formalised as complete system, but most who use it as such invoke at least ‘three laws’ - though these are more like general observations than strict axioms (which again, would be ‘metaphysical’ thinking). I think each of these so-called laws carries an important insight, but unfortunately each is shrouded in a layer of mystification and obtuse, specialised terminology. Let us begin with the first ‘law’: the ‘unity of opposites’. For the dialectician, reality consists of objects in motion. But this is not merely movement: ‘the motion of matter is not merely crude mechanical motion, mere change of place, it is heat and light, electric and magnetic, chemical combination and dissociation, life and, finally, consciousness.’ [Engels, Dialectics of Nature] In other words, every object is always moving and interacting with other objects and if we know how and why an object is interacting then we know everything about it. As I put it in my second book, ‘the dynamics of an object shape its properties, not the other way around’.
The second insight of the dialectical method is that the forces that set objects in motion require interaction between objects - masses are attracted to one another, positive and negative attract, the nuclear forces work through the interactions of quarks with bosons etc. As Engels put it, ‘all [motion] in general [is] determined by the mutual action of the two opposite poles on each other, and that the separation and opposition of these poles exist only in their mutual connection and union’. Natural systems, in other words, form an interconnected whole, in which every part may interact with every other part. Objects do not exist in isolation but their properties are mutually constituted through their relationships with other objects. What is true of physical systems, is also true of social ones: capitalism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity all come into being as systems (and in turn form a system of systems). Oppression does not occur owing to the existing of oppressive people, rather oppressor and oppressed come into being at the same time. The proletariat and bourgeoisie cannot be defined as classes in the abstract, but only mutually and through their interaction with one another. ‘The whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies’. [Dialectics of Nature]
Finally, owing to this unity, we observe that the natural and social world relies for its existence on the mutual interpenetration and tension between opposing forces. The continued existence of a system depends on the presence of opposing properties, the interaction of which generates the dynamism which sustains the system. Positive and negative bind matter together, gravity and tension hold objects in place, the delicate colour balance of quantum chromodynamics holds the very atoms in your body together. The last example illustrates that the ‘unity of opposites’ does not imply strict binaries - atomic and social structures both may include more than two forces; the stability of any system is a result of the totality of forces acting. Violence, ideology, legitimation, bribery, coercion, consent - all play a role in maintaining the status quo. But all are necessary. Whether we call it a negation, opposite, contradiction etc, the key takeaway is that the coherence of categories requires the existence of opposing forces. The identity of an object is mutually constituted through the existence of other objects. Natural and social systems are not rigid, timeless hierarchies, but dynamic complex systems.
The transformation of quantity into quality
The second ‘law’ of dialectical materialism is the ‘transformation of quantity into quality’. This is much more straightforward concept and its materialist basis is easy enough to understand. But its application to sociology often eludes modern thinkers who are embedded in the framework of methodological individualism - the notion that the behaviour of the whole must be understood as a product of the behaviour of individual agents. Put simply, this law observes that the nature of an object or category can transform depending on the scale of its interactions, motions or relationships. Subtract heat from a gas, and it is still a gas; substract enough heat, however, and it liquefies, undergoing a phase change into a different object with different properties. A group of cells divides and grows in number until its parts specialise and the whole transform into a new developmental stage of the organism. Similarly, modern urban society is immensely more populous than tribal or agricultural societies, yet we are not simply living in a very large tribe. The sheer number of people organised to live together requires a qualitatively different form of social organisation, which different specialisations in the parts of the whole.
An individual worker may have limited capacity to challenge the powerful; however, when workers combines their efforts the are able to achieve more together than they ever could as individuals. Unions as institutions and labour as a class has more power than an individual worker; similarly, political parties and social movements are qualitative different from individual voters. Attempts to understand social change through analysis through the preferences of individual actors will necessarily fail. Complexity science increasingly uses the concept of phase changes between states to understand why social and biological transformations appear punctuated rather than linear. In evolutionary game theory, cooperative social agents may be individually less fit than competitive ones, but with a sufficient number of cooperative agents working together in close proximity and the game itself changes - now cooperation dominates.
Capital is more than simply an accumulation of surplus value; its mere concentration transforms it into a different category of social relationship. Capitalists are not merely ‘rich people’ who consume more than most; wealth generates social relationships that are qualitatively different from what agents without capital can enter into and it those relationships - not any particular quantity of money - that anti-capitalists must critique. In my first book, “Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder” I already made use of this dialectical concept:
“[I]t is [conceptually] hard to distinguish politically and economically between poverty and inequality. Inequality can exist without absolute poverty, but the opposite is not true. They exist on a continuum and blur into one another. But in a rights-based framework, the distinction is clear. Poverty constitutes a denial of fundamental economic, social and cultural rights. Its existence negates the basic humanity of those affected; poverty is an either/or question. One either has access to adequate housing, education and health care or does not. Inequality constitutes the relative deprivation of those rights; it means that basic human needs are satisfied, but that access to different qualities of grades of that right is dependent on the economic power. Inequality is a distribution problem.”
What I was arguing, and this is a position that I stand by today, is that although there may be a certain distribution of injustice and unfairness in society (individual acts of violence or prejudice, bad luck, poor destruction, market failures etc.), when the quantity of these injustices increases above a certain threshold they can be treated as something entirely different - a systemic injustice. The core conceptual flaw of centrist IDW, ‘classical liberal’ types is their inability to be aware that injustice is more than merely the behaviour of individual bad actors - but rather that on a certain scale it transcends the actions or intent of individuals, and can only be perpetuated - or ended - through collective action. Systemic racism, sexism and transphobia are more than simply ‘lots of prejudice’ or ‘lots of bias’ in a quantitative sense. When prejudice is widespread, it can form a self-sustaining social equilibrium through the mutual constitution of social agents,
The negation of the negations
Finally, the third ‘law’ of dialectical materialism is the one most obtusely expressed, most commonly taught and most frequently misunderstood. The ‘negation of the negation’ simply observes the tendency for contradictions within a category to be resolved or dissolved as a materialist system transitions to a ‘higher’ level of organisation. In historical materialism - Marxism as applied to political economy - this resolution of the Hegelian dialectic represents the moment of revolutionary transition from one form of social organisation to another. Feudalism and capitalism were and are stable social structures, but they are also held together through dynamic tension and contradictions, that can fade away through the transition to a different mode of production. The original negations do not continue in their original form; instead, the new society [which is also a dynamic system] gives rise necessarily to a new a different set of contradictions.
It is important to note that as with all ‘laws’ of dialectical materialism, this is an observation, or an insight, not a prediction. There is a tendency in dynamic systems towards greater scale and complexity - but the timeline on which this occurs is not fixed and relies on both changes in the material environment and the accumulation of a vast number of small changes, that on their own, mean little but which in aggregate build towards an entirely new entity. In evolutionary biology, John Maynard-Smith called these moments of rupture ‘major evolutionary transitions’: think of when amino acids organised themselves into DNA, or proteins into cells, or cells into animals and plants, an individual organisms into complex ecosystems. When a major evolutionary transition occurs, there is a seemingly irrevocable change in the nature of a natural system. At this point, the individual agents which previously had an existence of their own now exist only as parts of a new whole, and can no longer sustain themselves outside of it; in turn, the new organism operates as a unique system in motion at a higher level of analysis.
Dialectical materialism, like evolutionary biology, therefore contains within it the hint of something like the inevitability of Progress (with a capital P) - not so different from Hegel after all. Of course, social and biological change is historically contingent, subject to reverses and unraveling, and operates on exceedingly long time periods. But the moral arc of the universe does bend ever so slightly towards justice, as MLK once famously said. This is because dynamic systems contain contradictions which tend to relax, dissipating the potential energy they contain. And the extinction of contradiction necessarily means the extinction of the order which it underpinned. Heteronormativity required the oppression of LGBT people, who fought to liberate themselves and thereby undermined heteronormativity as a whole, simultaneously liberating the straight majority from its grasp.
Classical Marxists made the understandable (albeit regrettable) mistake of believing that such transitions in human social life were not only inevitable but imminent. Like naïve Darwinists, they conceptualised human history as a series of fixed stages of increasing moral and economic complexity (from higher to lower). This kind of metaphysical, positivist thinking was common in the late nineteenth century - we cannot blame those living in such times from failing to fully escape the grips of the zeitgeist which, in Marxists terms, determined their ideology! Often, critics of dialectical materialism, like critics of social Darwinism, have in mind this sequential, nineteenth-century ideology - which I suspect is also easy for the metaphysician to understand. But the vulgar Marxists who understand dialectical material in these simple, categorical terms are not engaging with it as a method. It is merely sufficient to conclude by noting what Engels himself wrote near the end of his life: ‘For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher’.
Progress, like history, never ends.