1 Universal motion
If we go back over the fifteen preceding chapters and try to sum up their content in one formula, we can arrive only at this: everything changes and is in perpetual motion.
Humanity moves from primitive classless society to a society divided into classes; this in turn gives way to the classless socialist society of tomorrow. Modes of production succeed one another; even before disappearing, they are subject to constant changes. Today’s ruling class is very different from the class of slave-owners who dominated the Roman Empire. The contemporary proletariat is totally different from the medieval serfs. There is a whole world of difference between the small manufacturing capitalist of the early Nineteenth Century and Mr Rockefeller or the boss of the Rhone-Poulenc trust today. Everything changes, everything is in perpetual motion.
We find this universal motion at all levels of reality, not just that of the history of human societies. Individuals change, subject to an inexorable destiny. They are born, grow, mature, become adult, then they start to decline and finally they die. This destiny affects living species as it affects individuals. The human species has not always existed. Species which populated our planet a long time ago, like the giant reptiles of the tertiary period, have disappeared. Other vegetable and animal species are disappearing at this moment under our very eyes, partly as a result of the anarchic and barbarous disturbances that the capitalist mode of produc- tion has brought about in the ecology of the Earth.
Our planet itself will not survive for ever. The law of energy loss condemns it to inevitable disappearance some day. It has not always existed. It will not always exist. It is the product of an inter-planetary constellation which is itself only one of countless similar constellations in the universe.
Motion, universal evolution, governs all existence. This is material. The basic component of matter is the atom, which is itself composed of even smaller particles. Atoms in combination form molecules, which together form the basic elements of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. For instance, oxygen and hydrogen combined together in a determined form, H20, constitute water; other molecules form the metals, acids and bases.
In a determined set of conditions, the evolution of inorganic matter brought about the birth of organic matter. This produced the evolution of the vegetable and animal living species. In the course of this evolution higher living species, the mammals, have evolved. One of the mammal species, the simians, has gone through an evolution culminating in the birth of a new species, the human species.
2 Dialectics, the logic of motion
Since universal motion governs all existence it would seem possible to find common characteristics in the motion of matter, that of human society, and that of human knowledge. In fact, the materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels claims to reveal these common characteristics.
The dialectics or the logic of motion is manifested on three levels:
•The dialectics of nature, which are entirely objective – that is, independent of human plans, intentions and motivations. This does not negate the fact that with the development of the productive forces, humanity can use the laws of nature to improve its conditions of survival, reproduction and self-fulfilment.
• The dialectics of history, which were at first largely objective, but in which the eruption of the revolutionary project of the proletariat to reconstruct society according to a predetermined plan constitutes a revolutionary change – although the elaboration and realisation of this project is linked to objective and already existing material and social conditions, independent of human will.
• The dialectics of knowledge (of human thought), which are object/subject dialectics, the result of the constant interaction between the objects to be understood (objects of all the sciences) and the action of the subjects who try to understand them (and who are conditioned by their social situation, the means of investigation at their disposal – their instruments of labour as much as their thought concepts – the transformation of these means by current social activity, etc.).
Inasmuch as the discovery of the objective dialectic is itself a phase in the history of human thought and knowledge (the dialectic was first elaborated by Greek philosophers such as Heraclites, then taken up by Spinoza and perfected by Hegel and Marx), one could be tempted to reduce all dialectics to the object/subject relation. This would be an error. It is true that everything we know, including our knowledge of the dialectics of nature, we have learnt through the intermediary of our brain and our social praxis. It is also true that our ideas and our social praxis are determined by our social conditions of existence. But this obvious fact does not prevent us from knowing – verifying and seeing confirmed by many practical proofs – that life is older than human thought, that the Earth is older than life, that the universe is older than the Earth, that this motion is independent of human action, thought or existence. This is the precise sense of the notion of objective materialist dialectics.
As our knowledge is extended and becomes more scientific; as it comes closer to reality (total identity of knowledge with reality is impossible, mainly because the latter is in perpetual motion), its progress follows more closely the objective motion of matter. The dialectics of our scientific thought, materialist dialectics, can grasp reality precisely because its own motion increasingly corresponds to the motion of matter. In other words, the laws of knowledge and the method of understanding reality employed by materialist dialectics increasingly correspond to the actual laws governing the universal motion of objective reality.
It is necessary to point out an important difference between the development of the natural sciences and that of the social sciences, by which we mean knowledge concerning social life as the object of research, taking in our understanding of the origins and the dialectics of development of all the sciences, including the natural sciences. For the development of the natural sciences is also historically and socially determined. Even the most intrepid geniuses can only pose and resolve a certain number of scientific problems in any one epoch. They are the offshoots of received ideas and education. New problematics appear in this context, in relation to material transformation, especially with regard to labour, instruments of labour, tools of scientific investigation, etc. This is, however, a question of indirect determination, not immediately mediated by material class interests.
It is rather different with the social sciences. These are much more deeply related to the organisation and structure of class society. Here the weight of ‘received ideas and education’ is much greater, in that these ideas are simply the expression, on the ideological level, of the interests of either social conservation or social revolution, interests which can be reduced to antagonistic class positions. Without wishing to transform philosophers, historians, economists, sociologists and anthropologists into deliberate ‘agents’ of this or that social class, engaged in a ‘conspiracy’ either to defend the established order or to ‘organise subversion’, it is evident that the social determination of the development of the social sciences is much more direct and immediate than that of the natural sciences. In the same way, and because of the way things are, the object of the social sciences is much more immediately determined by the structure and history of the societies to which the facts studied refer, which is not the case with the object of the natural sciences.
3 Dialectics and formal logic
Dialectics, or the logic of motion, is distinct from formal or static logic. Formal logic is based on three fundamental laws:
(a) The law of identity: A is equal to A; a thing is always equal to itself.
(b) The law of contradiction: A is different from non-A; A can never equal non-A.
(c) The law of exclusion: either A, or non-A; nothing can be neither A nor non-A.
A moment’s reflection will allow us to conclude that formal logic is characterised by the thought process which consists of putting motion, change, into parentheses. All the laws enumerated above are true,so long as we abstract from motion. A will remain A so long as it does not change. A is different from non-A so long as it is not transformed into its opposite. A and non-A exclude each other so long as there is no movement which combines A and non-A, etc. These laws are obviously insufficient if we consider the transformation of the chrysalid into the butterfly, the passage of the adolescent into the adult, the movement of life into death, the birth of a new species or a new social order, the combination of two cells into a new one, etc.
From two points of view it is useful to abstract from motion, transformation and change: firstly, to be able to study phenomena continually in an isolated state, which allows us to improve our knowledge of these phenomena; secondly, from a practical point of view, when the changes taking place are of an infinitesimal nature, and can therefore be neglected by ordinary practice concerned with them.
If I buy a kilo of pre-packed sugar at the grocers, the equation of balance ‘one kilo of sugar = one kilo’ is of value to me, given the practical purpose of my purchase. When sugaring my coffee or balancing my housekeeping money, the fact that the real weight of such a packet may not actually be 1 kilo but 999.8 grammes, and the weight of another packet 990 grammes, is of no importance. From a practical point of view, such small differences can well be neglected.
That is why formal logic continues to be used in both theory and practice. That is why materialist dialectics does not challenge formal logic but absorbs it, seeing it as a valuable instrument of analysis and knowledge. It is valuable as long as we are clear about its limits, as long as we understand that it cannot be applied to phenomena of motion, to processes of change. As soon as we are dealing with such phenomena, the use of dialectical categories, those of the logic of motion, different from the categories of formal logic, is imposed on us.
4 Motion, a function of contradiction
By its nature, movement is passage and overtaking. From a static point of view, an object cannot be in two different places at the same moment (even if it is an infinitely short moment). From a dynamic point of view, the motion of an object is precisely its passage from one point to another.
The dialectics or logic of motion therefore study primarily the laws of motion and the forms adopted by it. These are examined from two aspects: motion as a function of contradiction; motion as a function of totality.
All motion has a cause. Causality is one of the fundamental categories of dialectics, as it is of all sciences. In the final analysis, to deny causality is to deny the possibility of knowledge.
A fundamental cause of all motion, all change, is the internal contradictions of the changing object. In the final analysis, every object, every phenomenon, changes, moves, is transformed and modified under the influence of its internal contradictions. In this sense, dialectics has often been correctly called the science of contradictions. The logic of motion and the logic of contradiction are two practically identical definitions of dialectics.
The study of every object, phenomenon or set of phenomena ought to have as its aim the discovery of its constituent contradictory elements, and of the motion and dynamic unleashed by these contradictions.
Thus, throughout this little book, we have indicated at what point class struggle, resulting from the existence of antagonistic social classes within society, governs movement, change, in societies divided into classes. On a larger scale, encompassing primitive classless society, society divided into classes, and the future socialist society, we can say that the contradiction between the level attained at certain epochs by the development of the productive forces (the degree of human control over nature) and the relations of production (social organisation), which in the last analysis arises from the previous levels of development of these same productive forces – that this contradiction governs the evolution of humanity.
By simplifying, we can discern the following basic laws of motion, the principal forms they take and which constitute the fundamental categories of dialectical logic, the logic of motion:
(a) The unity and contradiction of opposites. Motion is contradiction. Contradiction is the co-existence of elements opposed to each other, simultaneous co-existence and opposition between these elements. If there is integral homogeneity, a total absence of elements opposed to each other, there is no contradiction, no motion, no life, no existence.
The existence of contradictory elements includes both their co-existence in a structured totality, in a whole in which each element has its place, and the struggle by these elements to break up this whole. Capitalism is not possible without the simultaneous existence of capital and wage labour, of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The one cannot exist without the other. But this in no way means that the one is not constantly trying to throw off the other, that the proletariat is not trying to suppress capital and wage-earning, trying therefore to supplant capitalism, that capitalism has not the tendency to supplant living labour (wage labour) by ‘dead labour’ (machinery).
(b) Quantitative and qualitative change. Motion can take the form of changes which maintain the structure (or the quality) of the given phenomenon. In this case we talk about a quantitative change, which is often imperceptible. The structure remains in equilibrium. At a certain threshold, quantitative change is transformed into qualitative change. Beyond this threshold, change ceases to be gradual, and appears in the form of ‘leaps’. Equilibrium gives way to disequilibrium, evolution to revolution, till a new equilib- rium is reached. A new ‘quality’ appears. A small village can gradually change into a big village, and even into a small town. But there is not merely a quantitative difference between a large town and a village (number of inhabitants, amount of built up area), as a result of the ‘urban revolution’. There is also a qualitative difference. The professional activity of the majority of the inhabitants has been altered. The largest group no longer consists of agriculturalists, but of artisans, merchants, functionaries. A new social milieu is formed, posing social problems which had hitherto not existed in the village: problems of transportation, communication, social services, ‘specialised’ areas, etc. New social classes appear, with new contradictions between them.
(c) Negation and surpassing. All motion tends to produce the negation of certain phenomena, tends to transform objects into their opposite. Life produces death. Heat can only be understood in relation to cold. ‘Every determination is a negation’, stated that great dialectician Spinoza. Classless society produces class society, which in turn produces a new classless society on a higher level. But we must distinguish between ‘pure’ negation and ‘negation of the negation’, that is, the transcending of the contradiction, which implies at the same time negation, conservation and elevation to a higher level. Primitive classless society had a high level of internal cohesion, which was precisely a function of its poverty, its almost total subordination to the forces of nature. Society divided into classes is a stage in the growing domination of the forces of nature by humanity, paid for at the cost of a profound contradiction and tearing apart of the social organisation. In the future socialist society this negation will be transcended. This time, even higher mastery of humanity over the forces of nature will be combined with an equally superior form of social cohesion and co-operation, thanks to the existence of a classless society.
5 Some further problems of the dialectics of knowledge
(a) Content and form. All motion necessarily takes successive forms (structures) which can vary according to a large number of circumstances. It cannot automatically throw off any form previously adopted. The form resists. This resistance must be broken. The form should correspond to the content, and up to a certain point it does. But its more petrified nature opposes any absolute and permanent correspondence with movement, which is itself the opposite of anything which is fixed and constant.
A good example of this contradictory relationship between form and content is furnished by the dialectic between the relations of production and the productive forces. In order to develop, the productive forces must necessarily be inserted in certain forms of human social organisation: slave, feudal, capitalist relations of production, etc. At first, each new form of the organisation of labour and production (superior to the preceding form from the point of view of the average productivity of labour) stimulates the growth of the productive forces. But at a certain stage it becomes itself a hindrance to further growth. It must, therefore, be broken down and replaced by a new set of relations of production which are superior again, in order to pave the way for a new ‘great leap forward’ in the material and intellectual progress of humanity.
(b) Cause and effect. All movement appears to be a tangled chain of causes and effects. At first glance, an inextricable interaction mixes them up together. The wage-earning proletariat develops because of the private appropriation of the means of production, which have become the monopoly of one social class. But this monopoly is maintained as the result of the existence of the wage-earners.
Their wages do not permit the workers to acquire the means of production. The wage-earners produce surplus value which is appropriated by the capitalists and is transformed into the bourgeois ownership of even more means of production. And so it goes on, turning cause into effect and effect into cause. In order to emerge from this imbroglio and to avoid falling into pointless eclecticism, we must apply the genetic method, that is, look for the historical origin of the movement in question. Thus one finds that capital and surplus value do in fact pre-date the wage-earning proletariat, and were developed outside the sphere of production; that there was a primitive accumulation of capital which breaks up the apparent vicious circle: wage-earners – capital – wage-earners.
(c) Means and goals. All conscious movement or activity is directed towards the realisation of a certain goal. Thought processes are instruments for attempting to eliminate obstacles on the road towards such goals. Efficient thought processes (from the simplest ‘individual’ solution of daily practical questions to the highest forms of ‘pure science’) are in the last analysis measured by the degree to which they enable one to approach or to realise the given goal.
But there is an obvious dialectical interaction between means and goals. All individual and social actions have innumerable effects. While some of them have been foreseen, others have not. Some of the unforeseen effects might very well make the realisation of the given goal more difficult instead of facilitating it. Only certain means, the sum total of whose effects will actually bring us nearer to the goal, are efficient from that point of view. And the very goal might become transformed by sticking to means which push the realisation of the initial goal further and further into the future (the historical tragedies of reformism and Stalinism in the organised labour movement are excellent illustrations of this law).
Furthermore, means and goals of social action are not arbitrarily arrived at by humanity, and of ‘pure free will’. They emerge under given social and material constraints, in function of given social interests. Goals are fixed in function of needs which are not independent from the social framework and the material infrastructure. Means are chosen in function of experience and invention (imagination), which likewise are not unrelated to social conditions and activities. Both the capacity for fixing goals (including inventing new ones), and the constraints which imprison the choices of goals and means, characterise the dialectics of knowledge (see Chapter 17, Section 5, for an application of this general rule to the problem of socialism).
(d) The general and the specific. Each movement, each phenomenon, has characteristics which are specific to it. At the same time, and in spite of these particularities, no movement or phenomenon can be grasped, understood and explained except within the framework of larger and more general entities. British Nineteenth Century capitalism is not identical to British capitalism in the second half of the Twentieth Century, nor the American capitalism of today. Each one of these represents a specific social formation with a specific insertion in a world economy which has greatly changed in the course of a century. Nevertheless, neither British capitalism of the Victorian epoch, nor the decadent British capitalism of today, nor contemporary American capitalism, can be understood outside of the general laws of development which characterise capitalism as a system. The dialectic of the general and the specific is not just a matter of ‘combining’ the analysis of the ‘general’ with that of the ‘specific’. It also tries to explain the specific in relation to the general laws, and modifies the general laws through the intervention of a certain number of specific factors.
(e) The relative and the absolute. To understand motion, universal change, is also to understand the existence of an infinite number of transitory situations. (‘Movement is the unity of continuity and discontinuity.’) That is why one of the fundamental characteristics of dialectics is the under- standing of the relativity of things, the refusal to erect absolute barriers between categories, the attempt to find mediating forces between opposing elements. Universal evolution implies the existence of hybrid phenomena, of situations and cases of ‘transition’ between life and death, between vegetable and animal species, between birds and mammals, between apes and humans, which render the distinctions between all these categories relative.
However, dialectics has often been used in a subjectivist manner, as the ‘art of confusion’ or the ‘art of defending paradoxes’. The difference between scientific dialectics, an instrument for the understanding of objective reality, and sophistry or subjective dialectics, is mainly that the relativity of phenomena and categories in itself becomes something absolute with the sophists. They forget, or pretend to forget, that the relativity of categories is only partial relativity and not absolute relativity, and that, in turn, it is equally necessary to make relativity relative.
According to scientific dialectics, the ‘absolute’ difference between life and death is negated by the existence of transitory situations. Everything is relative and hence also the difference between life and death, reply the sophists. No, answers the dialectician: there is also something absolute and not just something relative in the difference between life and death. We should not come to the absurd conclusion which denies that death is the negation of life, by using the undeniable fact that there are many intermediary stages.
6 Motion as a function of totality – the abstract and the concrete
We have seen that all motion is a function of the internal contradictions of the phenomenon or set of phenomena under consideration. Each phenomenon – whether it be a living cell, a natural milieu where various species exist, a human society, an interplanetary system, or an atom – contains an infinite number of aspects, ingredients and constituent elements. These elements are not assembled by chance in a constantly changing manner. They constitute structured wholes, a totality, an organic system constructed according to an intrinsic logic.
For instance, within bourgeois society, the mutual and antagonistic relations between capital and labour have nothing to do with chance. They are determined by the economic obligation of the wage-earners to sell their labour power to the capitalists, the owners of the means of production and subsistence, which have both taken the form of commodities. Mutual relations qualitatively different to these structure other societies based on exploitation, which are therefore not capitalist societies.
Materialist dialectics must absorb each phenomenon, each object of analysis and comprehension, not just in order to determine the internal contradictions which determine its evolution (its laws of motion). It must also attempt to approach this phenomenon globally, to grasp it in all its aspects, to consider it in its totality, to avoid any unilateral approach which isolates in ar1 arbitrary manner a particular aspect of reality and no less arbitrarily suppresses another, and is hence incapable of grasping the contradictions in their entirety, and therefore also of understanding the movement in its totality.
This ability of dialectics to integrate the universalist approach into its analysis is one of its principal merits. ‘Logic of motion’, ‘logic of contradiction’ and ‘logic of totality’ are practically synonymous definitions of dialectics. It is when they close their eyes to certain contradictory elements of reality which they think would make analysis ‘too complex’ that undialectical thinkers pass from the total to the partial, throwing out both contradiction and totality at the same time.
Of course, a certain amount of simplification, a certain ‘reduction’ of the ‘totality’ to its decisive constituent elements, is inevitable as the first step in approaching any phenomenon for scientific analysis, which is at first always necessarily abstract. But we have to remember that this inevitable process of abstraction also impoverishes reality. The nearer one approaches to reality, the nearer one comes to a totality rich in an infinite number of aspects that scientific analysis, knowledge, should explain in both their reciprocal relations and their contradictory relations. ‘Truth is always concrete’ (Lenin). ‘Truth is the totality’ (Hegel).
7 Theory and practice
Dialectics is a method, an instrument of knowledge. Historically, one can define materialist dialectics as the proletariat’s theory of knowledge (this in no way questions its objectively scientific character, which also requires constant verification on the scientific terrain as well). Every theory of knowledge is put to an implacable test: that of practical experience.
In the last analysis, knowledge itself is not a phenomenon which is detached from the life and interests of humanity. It is a weapon in the conservation of the species, an instrument which enables humanity the better to dominate the forces of nature, to understand the origins of the ‘social question’ and the ways to solve it. Knowledge is, therefore, born of the social practice of humanity; its function is to perfect this practice. In the last analysis, its effectiveness is measured by its practical results. Practical verification remains the best final weapon against the sophists and the sceptics.
That is not to say that the theory disappears into vulgar short-sighted pragmatism. Very often the practical effective- ness, the ‘true’ or ‘false’ character of a scientific hypothesis, does not immediately appear. It needs time, feedback, new experiences, a successive series of ‘practical tests’, before it proves itself effectively in practice. In spite of the best intentions and convictions, many men and women, impressionistic prisoners of appearances, of a partial and superficial view of reality, of a temporary view of the historical process (which is itself finally determined by the ideology of non- revolutionary classes and social layers), may doubt the bourgeois character of parliamentary democracy, doubt the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the need for a victorious international revolution to complete the con- struction of a truly socialist society in the USSR and any other country.
But, in the end, facts will confirm which theory was really scientific, capable of grasping reality in all its contradictions, in its movement as a totality, and which hypotheses were wrong, capable of grasping only parts of the reality, isolating them from the structured totality, and therefore incapable of grasping the movement in the long term in its fundamental logic.
The victory of the world socialist revolution, the arrival of a classless society, will confirm in practice the validity of revolutionary Marxist theory.