On Dialectical Materialism

In order to escape the ranty nature of my most recent posts, and because I used the last rant to blather about the meaning of historical materialism, I have decided to make this post about dialectical materialism, that other part of Marx's methodology, but in a far less polemical manner.  Dialectical materialism is intrinsically connected to historical materialism, after all, and though they are part of the same totality, many theorists and revolutionaries have found it useful to separate these moments, isolating them from each other in order to explain them separately before putting them back together.  And though there is sometimes a danger in dividing them into moments rather than seeing them as part of a whole (i.e. an entirely mechanical approach to this methodology as evidenced by Stalin's Foundations of Leninism), there is still something analytically important about this division.

Ever since this blog has been in existence I have complained about the inability of people to think dialectically; I have especially been annoyed by the practice of spuriously slapping the label dialectical on things that are probably not dialectical.  Yes, I have also been guilty of this practice––and I am glad that I had at least one referee during my dissertation writing days who would circle the word "dialectical" every time I used it in my thesis and demand that I explain how the relationship I was describing was dialectical.  As it turned out, close to fifty per cent of my "dialectical" relationships were decidedly not dialectical.

Dialectical logic, best codified by Hegel in The Science of Logic, is the unity of opposites.  Yes, this is a simplification, but this is a blog entry and here we're all about simplification; otherwise I would end up writing an entire book––but these books have already been written and here I am more concerned with boiling things down to their crudest and simplest logical forms.  So rather than getting into debates about the negation of the negation, and vanishing into the heady realm of the logical process of dialectics schematized in the Logic, I want to point out that, primarily, a logical relationship that is "dialectical" is a relationship that is about the "unity of opposites."  That is to say that the either/or claim essential to some versions of formal logic (A v ~A, something is either one thing or the other [i.e. it is raining or it is not raining, it cannot be both at the same time]) is, while correct on one logical level, ultimately insufficient.  Dialectical logic claims that things can be both either one thing or the other just as––and this is dialectically important––they can also and at the same time not be either one thing or the other (A & ~A).  So either/or and also not either/or.  While it is correct to assert that it cannot both be raining and not raining at the same time at a given moment, once we imagine the fact of raining in a larger process, then the logic of A v ~A, while in some ways correct, is also insufficient.  Is the fact of sleet an instance of raining or not-raining?  Do we not say that sleet is both snow and rain at the same time?  And yes, this is a crude analogy, but all analogies are imperfect––at a later point below I will try to demonstrate the importance of dialectical relationships and process in the context that Marx, the progenitor of dialectical materialism, judged important: the social and historical arena.

[Editorial Note: below in the comments, Neil, whose academic work is on Hegel, has provided Hegel's reasons for the unity of opposites and the extent of what this means for Hegel.  And since he is a Hegelian and I am not, and has probably read the Logic more times than I will (or am willing to) read it, as well as other important things by Hegel––and since he has formulated in a couple paragraphs what would take me pages––readers interested in the Hegelian background should check out that comment.]

Now dialectical logic is one thing, but what do we make of dialectical materialism?  Marx, Lenin, and Mao were wont to return to Hegel's Logic in order to grasp the logical methodology of dialectics before they wrote their great works (Capital for Marx, State and Revolution for Lenin, On Contradiction and On Practice for Mao), but Marx and those who took him as their antecedent were also working in a terrain that was significantly different from the one occupied by Hegel.  Whereas Hegel's dialectical investigation, and all the relationships that formed his world historical philosophical process, concerned thought and ideas as primary (yes, again I am simplifying, but once again it is important to boil things down to their fundamentals), the marxist tradition takes the material and concrete world as fundamental.  Ideas emerge, in the last instance, from the material world rather than vice versa.  History is not thought working itself out (Hegel's Phenomenology), but a thoroughly material process shaped by real human beings living in real historical and social moments.

In his time, Marx was confronted with a line struggle between two traditions emerging from the European Enlightenment: German Idealism best typified by Hegel's dialectical idealism; crude materialism best typified by the English empiricists.  In many ways these traditions were opposites, an either/or competition, but Marx, who was a revolutionary materialist who was always interested in praxis but who understood the importance of Hegel's Logic, audaciously used the logic Hegel had schematized to dialectically unify these opposites.  And once they were dialectically unified they were transformed into something that was no longer the same as they had been before––this was not simply an inversion of Hegel's dialectics but something new.

Louis Althusser, is probably the only philosopher who spent a lot of time trying to make sense of how Marx's dialectical materialism was an utter transformation of Hegel's dialectical materialism.  And though I do not always agree with Althusser, I think that in this area he is probably the only thinker who has been able to explain this transformation:

"That is why materialism is called dialectical: dialectics, which expresses the relation that theory maintains with its object, expresses this relation not as a relation of two simply distinct terms but as a relation within a process of transformation, thus of real production. […] It is in this sense that the Marxist dialectic can only be materialist because it does not express the law of a pure imaginary or thought process but the law of real processes of material nature.  That Marxist materialism is necessarily dialectical is what distinguishes it from all previous materialist philosophies.  That Marxist dialectics is necessarily materialist is what distinguishes the Marxist dialectic from all idealist dialects, particularly Hegelian dialectics." (Louis Althusser, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation)

Even though Althusser also divides dialectical materialism from historical materialism in a complete manner (sometimes it seems as if he sees them as completely distinct rather than part of a whole), and on this I perhaps disagree, he does make a pretty good argument for the utter difference between Marxist and Hegelian dialectics, between dialectical materialism and dialectical idealism.  And rather than explaining this in further detail here, I'll defer the interested reader to Althusser's writing on the subject (most notably the collection Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists which contains the above essay) for more information on that matter.

Rather than get bogged down on philosophical debates about the what of dialectical materialism, I want to focus on the why of dialectical materialism.  That is, why dialectical materialism should be used in conjunction with historical materialism––why a materialist apprehension of dialectical logic is important for the science of history, and why revolutionary communists need to appreciate this––a why that is not really answered by the mechanical schematizations of dialectical materialism best typified by Stalin and Trotsky.  (We can also add Engels' Dialectics of Nature that, despite a few exceptions, does not demonstrate the same sophisticated grasp of dialectics as Anti-Duhring.)  If we keep with the simplicity of "dialectical" as the unity of opposites, and "dialectical materialism" as this logic applied in a [historically] materialist manner, then maybe the entire notion of dialectical materialism will make more sense.  So let's look at some key examples in marxist theory.

1) the material-ideology dialectical relationship: Clearly a revolutionary materialist judges that the material, concrete reality is fundamental, but this does not mean that ideas are simple projections of the material reality.  While all ideas might have emerged at one point from material reality [or, to place it in a subset of this problematic, all ideas in the superstructure are the product, in the last instance, of the "economic" material/social relations of the base], they also influence the material reality.  In The German Ideology Marx and Engels speak of how ideologies, while being organized ideas, are also and at the same time akin to a "material" or "self-determining" force.  In On Contradiction Mao speaks of ideas that might have been produced from a given economic/material moment as possibly "obstructing" later economic/material moments.  But if we think of how things can be both material and ideological at the same time, we don't even have to move to this broader temporal level.  For example, imagine a police officer.  Police are ultimately a material force of real and concrete bodies armed with real weapons, "special bodies" organized to defend the ruling class, but we also provide them authority because of the ideas that structure the meaning of police.  The uniform and the badge do not gain their power because they have a material essence that generates the authority of policing; we understand the meaning of the flashed badge, the idea that people dressed in this uniform knocking at our door possess state authority.  And yes it is true that ultimately this authority is backed by real guns and real military equipment: but this is the last instance.  A police officer is understood and idea-ized as a police officer when s/he flashes her badge, not simply when she pulls her gun or baton.

2) the productive forces-productive relations relationship: Here is a key historical debate in the history of marxist theory.  On the one hand you have people who argue that revolution is produced by the development of forces of production (of the machines and factories) and that socialism cannot be achieved without a certain level of development; on the other hand you have people who argue that revolution can only be produced by relations of production, by intentionally organizing to overthrow a system and that the proper productive relations can be developed afterwords.  This is what is known as the debate between "economic determinism" and "voluntarism".  But if we look at these things dialectically, we can understand that this apparent contradiction exists in unity.  Both productive forces and productive relations are necessary: we cannot just wait for technology to develop and make revolution without organizing and the revolutionary subject; socialist revolution cannot be made without taking into account the forces necessary to produce socialization.

3) the necessity-contingency relationship: In order to make sense of history scientifically, in order to be proper historical materialists, we have to understand the necessities of actually existing history: these things happened because these other things happened.  At the same time, however, history is not planned in stone: things do not necessarily happen because of some metaphysical plan; there was a broader contingency and there is only necessity because we have to understand history as it actually happened.  The necessary rules of history cohere because of contingent moments, but to assume that only contingency reigns and that we cannot understand rules after naming what actually happened as something that produces necessity is to fail to grasp that both contingency and necessity are, though different moments, a unity of opposites.

4) the produced-producing relationship:  In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx speaks of humans as "producing" history, but then adds that this production happens only "in circumstances directly encountered from the past."  As a species we are both historical agents/subjects and the products of past historical agency: we cannot produce history outside of the limits we are given by "the weight of dead generations."  Post-structuralism places the emphasis primarily on the moment of being produced, and philosophies such as existentialism wax eloquent about humans having supreme agency; a dialectical approach unifies both of these moments.  (And here is where I part ways from Althusser who went too far in his necessary rejection of "humanism" and obliterated the agency moment of this dialectical relationship… But that is another quibble for another post.)

5) the internal-external relationship:  In marxist historiography there are often debates over whether change happened because of internal or external pressures.  Take, for example, the debates about the transition to capitalism––some argue that long distance trade and colonialism were fundamental [external relations], others argue that the enclosure of the commons in England and class composition were fundamental [internal relations].  A proper dialectical understanding, however, grasps the unity of the internal and external realities: the class composition and enclosure were what provided the laboratory for transition, but composition and enclosure were affected by and partially driven by the colonialism of the merchant capital period.  Analogously, it makes no sense to think of a chicken hatching into an egg without taking into account the relationship between the egg's internal nature and its external pressures.  The chicken egg cannot hatch anything other than a chicken, but it can only hatch a chicken if it is properly incubated––nor can it hatch a chicken if some external force decides to make it into an omelette.

6) the universal-particular relationship: I have discussed this dialectic at various points on this blog, mainly because I feel the failure to grasp its meaning has resulted in so many dogmatic interpretations of Marx, and have connected it to the sub-dialectic of "continuity-rupture."  Broadly speaking, however, there is often a [non-dialectical] tension between the notion of universality and particularity, especially when it comes to values.  Postmodernists like to argue that it is "totalizing" to imagine a world that possesses any universal concepts or values when we live in world filled with so much difference––thus, they claim, all we can speak of is particularity.  But the dialectical materialist argues that particularities only make sense when judged against historically established universals, and at the same time universals can only be expressed through concrete particular moments.  When we want to speak of a universal concept like class struggle, for instance, we cannot uncritically impose the categories of one socio-historical context on the concrete reality of another.  The universal categories are a guide, but they can only be understood through investigation of a particular and concrete circumstance.  Thus, there is a continuity with the universals of historical materialism between the Paris Commune and the October Revolution, but a rupture between particulars.  And the continuity of the universal only makes sense because of the historical application of the particular rupture.  (But this dialectical relationship has been notoriously hard to grasp.  The failure to grasp its meaning is the reason why so many marxist cults keep arguing that every revolutionary movement has to be identical to the October Revolution, even though this revolution was particularly non-identical to the Paris Commune.)

Obviously my explanations of the above dialectical tensions were far too brief––each one could have been used to produce its own post or multiple posts––but they were intended only to provoke discussion.  The point was to show why an appreciation of dialectical materialism is necessary for those who claim to be revolutionary communists and/or historical materialists.  Moreover, I am also interested in the historical failure that results from our occasional inability to think through problems in a dialectical manner.  So many of us (and I include myself in this category) make hasty and mechanical generalizations that fail to live up to the standard of dialectical nuance.  So many of us use the word dialectical to justify non-dialectical judgments.

And of course, there are other dialectical relationships, as well as sub-relationships, other than the ones listed that underwrite historical materialism.  At so many given moments we have to think through the problem of the unity of opposites, and the process of transformation this unity implies, if we are to make sense of history in a revolutionary manner.  How can one moment contain both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary possibilities at the same time?  How can a policy be both bourgeois and the product of proletarian struggle––and what does it mean to use bourgeois rights in a non-bourgeois manner?  Part of being a proper historical materialist, a revolutionary communist, is to internalize dialectical materialist thinking.  And yes this is difficult, and no I am not claiming that I am even close to internalizing this way of approaching the world… For this world, this nightmare captained by the bourgeoisie at the centres of capitalism, reduces everything to the harsh moment of either/or: either past attempts at socialism worked or capitalism is the end of history; either you accept capitalist logic or you are annihilated.