29.11.2007

Grander in scope, poorer in content

Were Marx and Engels really at one over the dialectic of nature? US communist Jim Creegan replies to Jack Conrad

Frederick Engels and nature's dialectic' would have been much more convincing had its author, Jack Conrad, made a greater distinction between philosophical argumentation and political polemic (Weekly Worker August 30). Instead, Conrad frames the entire article with imputations of heresy against anyone who dares to question Engels on the dialectics of nature, or who suggests that the works of Marx and Engels constitute anything less than a seamless whole.

Conrad writes that doubters, while they may claim to be Marxists, are engaging in the kind of "dishonest behaviour [to be] expected from sworn enemies"; are "stabbing [Marx] in the back"; are "faddish", exhibit "fickleness", "shallowness" and often end up as "turncoats" - and all this before we get the faintest inkling of what these critics have to say: a subject Conrad never goes into very deeply. Conrad's tone, perfectly appropriate for social democrats who have just voted war credits to the kaiser in the Reichstag, is a little out of place regarding interpretations of the Hegelian dialectic or speculations about the nature of the universe.

Conrad points out that the reinterpretation of Marxism that began in the 1920s, and gained momentum in the 60s, was mainly the work of Marxist academics, who in many cases have since joined the general rightward drift of intervening years. But he fails to appreciate that there was a compelling reason - apart from a desire to be original or respectable - why such a rethinking took place when it did. He does not mention that the entire second and third generation of leading Marxists - Kautsky, Plekhanov, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky - had available to them only a portion of Marx's work. Their principal texts were The communist manifesto and Capital, which focus on the class struggle and political economy; Marx's introduction to A contribution to the critique of political economy sets out the rudiments of historical materialism.

These works do not, however, explicitly address broader philosophical questions - more specifically, the relation between Hegel and Marx. For this, Marxists of the time turned to the only places where these subjects received extensive treatment: Anti-Duehring and Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of classical German philosophy, both by Engels. Principally from these writings, the great Marxists of the Second and Third Internationals derived the world outlook called dialectical materialism, which later hardened into an arid dogma in the hands of the Stalinists.

Yet, in the late 1920s and 30s, a new, previously unknown part of the Marxian corpus began to emerge from Moscow. The Critique of Hegel's philosophy of right, the Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, The German ideology and the Grundrisse - all inaccessible to previous generations - saw the light of print for the first time in these decades, though initially in very limited editions. A pioneering treatment of Marx's philosophical writings, From Hegel to Marx (1936), by the American philosophy professor, Sidney Hook, did not receive the attention it deserved at the time, so pervasive was the Stalinist influence. (Unlike the writers Conrad takes to task, Hook actually did turn his coat, later becoming a fanatical cold warrior; although this does not diminish the importance of his contribution.) Only in the late 1950s and early 60s were Marx's philosophical writings more widely translated and read. And, no matter how disagreeable it may be to Conrad and other keepers of the orthodox flame, the account of the dialectic and the Marx-Hegel relationship they contain is quite different from what was previously the commonly accepted - and often liturgically incanted - Engelian version.

The more recently discovered texts sparked the interest of radicalised intellectuals uninfluenced by Stalinism - some from the Frankfurt school; many associated with the 1960s new left . Whatever the shortcomings of Karl Korsch, George Lichtheim, Alfred Schmidt and others Conrad disparages, their writings are among the first to grapple with this previously little known side of Marx. Many of these writers (though not all) are overly dismissive of Engels and the wealth of knowledge he brought to his collaboration with Marx; some are far too quick to draw a direct line of descent from Engels' rendering of dialectic materialism to its vulgarised Stalinist diamat version. But, for all their faults, the best among these scholars made a contribution to the history of Marxist thought that should not be dismissed.

How to account for the differing philosophical approaches of Marx and Engels, in light of their intimate intellectual relationship, or of the fact that Marx read and pre-approved Anti-Duehring? Conrad correctly points out that there is, neither in the Marx-Engels correspondence, nor in any other biographical information we possess, a hint of serious theoretical disagreement. Yet the texts themselves, rather than biography, must ultimately decide. And it should also be kept in mind that we are dealing here with two contrasting ways of thinking about dialectics that are not, from a strict logical standpoint, mutually exclusive, but have different centres of gravity.

As Lucio Colletti writes, "Given that contradictions are often met within the work of a single author, it is hard to see how they could fail to emerge between two authors who - making every allowance for their deep friendship and the many ideas they shared - remained two distinct people leading very different lives on the basis of different inclinations and intellectual tastes" (introduction to Karl Marx, early writings New York 1975, p14).

No rupture

Much controversy surrounds the birth date of Marxism as a distinct body of theory. So unfamiliar were many of the themes of the early writings that some reacted by attempting to dismiss them as youthful gropings, outside the framework of Marx's more mature thought. This reaction was unfortunately not limited to the guardians of official Soviet orthodoxy. It was embellished in the 1960s by the French Marxist-structuralist philosopher, Louis Althusser, who, in an attempt to rehabilitate Stalinism in Maoist guise, wrote of an "epistemological rupture" between the young and the older Marx. It was joined by many Trotskyists, recoiling defensively against a threat to the Engels-Kautsky-Plekhanov philosophical canon, which had been accepted more or less uncritically by Lenin and Trotsky.

This article proceeds on the assumption that such reactions were misconceived, and that, beginning with the Manuscripts of 1844, we are confronted with a preliminary sketch of an outlook that is distinctively Marxist. Many key concepts are as yet undeveloped in the Manuscripts; many changes of emphasis and language were to occur in the following years. But the themes first enunciated here were refined and elaborated in subsequent works, never discarded. We can hear their unmistakable echoes in Capital. But it is the Grundrisse, Marx's notebooks for Capital, written in 1857-58 - a decade after the Poverty of philosophy and the Manifesto, which supposedly inaugurate the 'mature' period - that decisively refutes all arguments concerning an "epistemological rupture". Here, alienation, a concept first developed in the Manuscripts, emerges as a guiding theme of Marx's critique of political economy.

The dialectic according to Engels

Anyone in the least familiar with Marxist theory knows about Engels' statements that Marx stood Hegel on his feet, or extracted the rational kernel of the Hegelian system from its mystical shell. Most are also aware of the interpretation Engels gave these metaphors. He wrote that he and Marx took what was for Hegel an idealist dialectic - ie, a dialectic of pure philosophical thought - and turned it into a materialist cosmology, in which a universe comprised of matter in motion is governed by three overarching laws: (1) the transformation of quantity into quality; (2) the interpenetration of opposites; and (3) the negation of the negation. These three laws are said to operate in different ways in every sphere of being, from physics and astronomy to the evolution of human society.

Marx never wrote anything directly disputing this account. What he did leave behind, however, is his own interpretation of the 'inversion' of the Hegelian dialectic, which bears little resemblance to that of Engels. Marx's version is contained in his Theses on Feuerbach, which was known to older generations of Marxists, but never fully appreciated due to its condensed, aphoristic form. A much more detailed, if less widely known, account appears in the final Manuscript, entitled 'Critique of Hegel's dialectic and general philosophy'. In order to appreciate the import of these early writings, we must take a brief detour into the dialectic according to Hegel, of which only the barest sketch can be provided here.

Hegel at a glance

Undergraduates being introduced to Marxist philosophy are usually presented with the famous thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, which, without further elaboration, appears highly arbitrary. It only becomes meaningful in the context of Hegel's larger project. The Phenomenology of mind, together with the larger Logic, are Hegel's two most important works. The Phenomenology consists of an odyssey of philosophical consciousness, from its rudimentary beginnings to its final ascent to the summits of Absolute Knowledge.

One of the most baffling things to anyone brave enough to struggle through its forbidding prose concerns the identity of this thing Hegel calls "Mind" or (depending upon the translation) "Reason" or "Spirit". Mind is, for Hegel, universal rational consciousness. It is not the consciousness of actual, flesh-and-blood human beings, but a series of self-generating concepts, from which nature, society and all of what we would call empirical reality is seen as derivative. The notion of unattached reason has its roots in a long-established tradition in western thought, of which we shall say more below.

Hegel's consciousness is profoundly philosophical, struggling at every turn to comprehend reality. But it is never simply passive before its objects. It always possesses a definite notion of what reality is (thesis). Yet, upon further reflection, it comes to notice that that reality is different from its original conception (antithesis). It therefore evolves a more adequate conception of its object in order to resolve the contradiction (synthesis).

The Phenomenology begins with "simple sense certainty", in which we first encounter consciousness immersed in its immediate surroundings, unreflectively accepting as valid all that is given to the senses. Yet even at this initial stage consciousness cannot avoid the realisation that the sensations it encounters do not float freely in space, but are anchored in a subject - the self. Once having discovered itself, this new-found subjectivity is determined to proclaim its identity to the world - 'I am I!' it announces triumphantly. But to the question, 'What are you, exactly?', it can as yet have no answer because, lacking further articulation, it has acquired no distinctive contents. Its declaration, 'I am I', is therefore an empty abstraction, but one that contains a demand for greater concreteness.

Thus the subject's inner nature must be outwardly expressed, or objectified. But expression of one's nature is, by definition, something that takes place in and through other natures (people, things) separate and distinct from one's own. This is the animating contradiction of Hegel's dialectic: things can be what they are only in reference to the things that they are not. Even the most elementary definition must contain a reference to what the object being defined excludes. Everything is itself only as part of a wider relational matrix.

An object can exist only in relation to other objects, the self in relation to other selves (society and the state), and subjective consciousness in relation to the objects it thinks about. The resolution of this contradiction leads to what Hegel calls Absolute Knowledge, in which consciousness realises the necessity of both sameness and difference. It comes, on the one hand, to understand that its own nature is inextricably bound to its objective being, but that, on the other hand, this objective existence - in nature and society - is nothing more than the expression of its own reflective activity.

The path to Absolute Knowledge does not run smooth. It consists of successive phases in which Mind grapples with the contradictions between its subjective and objective sides, passing restlessly from the one to the other. Each stage represents the resolution of the contradictions of a lower one, and gives rise to new contradictions that spur consciousness onward. An essential part of Absolute Knowledge is the memory of the process by which it was achieved. For, unless each lower stage incorporates the contradictions of the previous one, and the knowledge of how they were overcome, consciousness would simply repeat itself. Thus the peculiarly Hegelian notion of Aufhebung (or in English 'sublation'), the process by which the contradictions of a preceding stage are simultaneously preserved and transcended.

Hegel, then, unlike other philosophers, invests knowledge with a historical dimension. This history, moreover, is more than a catalogue of past states of consciousness. Its successive stages correspond in rough outline to phases in the life of the individual, as well as entire historical periods and their prevailing ideas. Each stage is built upon the previous ones in an arc of historical progress.

In a later section of the Phenomenology entitled 'Objective spirit', consciousness finds its necessary realisation in the world of ethics, law and the state: ie, in society. But in a subsection called 'Spirit in self-estrangement' - which broadly encompasses the enlightenment and the era of bourgeois revolutions - Mind finds itself a stranger to the world its labours have summoned up. It realises, on the one hand, that this world is the necessary objectification of its being, but, on the other, experiences custom, law and the entire institutional scaffolding as a series of arbitrary constraints. A period of upheaval follows, in which Mind can only find fulfilment by divesting itself of its particular, accidental qualities and filling itself with universal contents. For its part, the state achieves greater concreteness by becoming genuinely grounded in the subjective will of every citizen.

In a dismal anti-climax to a heroic spiritual epic, Hegel, in his Philosophy of right, discovers the harmonious state of society not in France's First Republic, but in the post-Napoleonic Prussian constitution. Yet this bow to the restoration monarchies did not prevent the Hegelian system, with its dynamism and grand historical and philosophical sweep, redolent of the revolutionary times in which it was born, from becoming the intellectual starting point for the generation of German radicals to which Marx and Engels belonged, or from exerting a lifelong influence on their thought.

The inversion: Marx's version

On one level Marx thinks the Hegelian dialectic is a continuation of the mystifications of the philosophical tradition that began with Plato - a kind of Zen Buddhism of the western intellect.

The Young Hegelian movement, where Marx began his intellectual career, had its origins in the criticism of what it called religious estrangement, in which a divine being consisting of idealised human qualities, was for millennia elevated by its creators into an all-powerful force, towering above them and ruling their destiny. Yet religious estrangement is not the only instance of the domination of the human mind by its own creations. Most of western philosophy is also, in Marx's phrase, "esoteric religion", in which one human quality - the ability to form concepts and engage in rational thought - is elevated above the rest. Reason, which was conceived both by Greek and mediaeval Christian philosophy as representing the presence of the divine in human beings, is detached from real people and endowed with an artificial life of its own.

For Marx, who had embraced Ludwig Feuerbach's naturalist critique of Hegel, reason is only one attribute of real sensuous individuals in their manifold interactions with nature and one another. Yet, for the philosophical tradition that Marx sees as culminating in Hegel, people are reduced to their capacity for abstract reasoning; they are real for Hegel only in so far as they think. Hegel, moreover, separates this rational capacity from individuals altogether, to the point where he regards Mind or Reason as an independent actor - in fact, the only actor he ultimately recognises - performing miraculous feats of conceptual prestidigitation and making its own history.

In the last of the Manuscripts, Marx rejects the Hegelian philosophical standpoint as belonging to the realm of human self-estrangement: "Logic - mind's coin of the realm [for Hegel], the speculative or mental value of man and nature - its essence which has grown indifferent to all real determinateness, and hence unreal - is alienated thinking, and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and real man: abstract thinking" (original emphases, K Marx, F Engels CW Vol 3, New York 1975, p330).

Yet Marx's attitude to Hegel is more than one of simple rejection. As we have seen above, Hegel's consciousness continually finds its objects inadequate to its own knowing activity, and thus seeks to reformulate them; in so doing, it also renders consciousness more adequate to its objects. Marx perceives in this dialectic the logic of human praxis, encrypted though it is in the language of estrangement. What is for Hegel a mere activity of conceiving nevertheless replicates the actual movement by which human beings - forced by material needs to act collectively upon their surroundings - raise nature to a human level, expand their social powers, and, in the process, transform themselves into people who are fit to live in the humanised nature and society they have constructed. In other words, Hegel describes the human labour process, although he can grasp it only as a mental activity. Just as god embodies real human traits in idealised and alienated form, so Hegel's system contains a spiritualised version of the real dialectic of praxis.

In the first of his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx says: "The chief defect of all previous materialism - that of Feuerbach included - is that things, reality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was set forth by idealism - but only abstractly" (original emphases ibid Vol 5, p6).

In other words, while materialism rightly insists on the independence of the objective world, refusing like Hegel to dissolve it into thought, it views that world as existing for human beings solely as an object of their passive perception. In actual fact, human beings stand in relation to nature and society not merely as spectators, but as active agents who must intervene to change the reality they find in existence. They are a part of the natural world in which they exist, and are bound to it by practical activity.

Marx argues that Hegel, in his own idealised fashion, does a better job of capturing the active quality of this relationship than, for instance, British realist-empiricists like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, or the contemplative naturalist, Ludwig Feuerbach - for all of whom man and nature are static opposites.

There is, moreover, a larger truth about human history embedded in Hegel's mystifications. In the final Paris manuscript Marx writes: "The outstanding achievement of Hegel's Phaenomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and general principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man - true, because real man - as the outcome of man's own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being (ie, as a human being), is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers - something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all mankind, only as the result of history - and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement" (original emphases ibid Vol 3, pp332-33).

The above passage can only be understood in conjunction with the theory of alienation developed in the Manuscripts. We saw above how for Hegel consciousness can only realise itself through a process of objectification, and further how this can lead to its domination by its own creations - its negation, so to speak - especially in the realm of society and the state. Absolute Knowledge is achieved when consciousness recognises these objects as its own and reappropriates them for itself - the negation of the negation.

Marx once again emphasises that the above negation of the negation is no negation at all. He says that what Hegel takes for objective reality is not reality, but the abstract concepts distilled from it by philosophy. Because it takes these mental shadows for the genuine article, Hegel's consciousness can only take them back into itself through an act of reflection. The reality from which they derive is left untouched. Philosophy, Marx quips elsewhere, is to real life as masturbation is to sexual intercourse. It is therefore not surprising that Hegel should find in the Prussian constitution the supreme expression of reason in the social/political sphere. In the end, Hegel's wisdom is the same as that of all mysticisms: let it be.

Yet here, too, there is a rational kernel. In a famous passage from his earlier Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's philosophy of right, Marx argues that religious alienation is not merely a mistaken idea, but rather a reflection of real, earthly conditions. If, in previous historical epochs, human beings were helpless and overawed by nature - which they deified - modern society finds itself under the domination of humanly created forces.

In the German ideology Marx and Engels write that "man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him". This crystallisation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now" (New York 1947, pp22-23). Marx would later give a name to humanity's alienated productive powers, which confront it as a force every bit as arbitrary and as tyrannical as nature. He would call it capital.

This alienation of the power of human labour is, for Marx, a necessary moment in history, or rather in the pre-history leading to the birth of a truly human society, in which people are able to master their own productive powers. So long as human life is dominated by nature, as it more or less was in all pre-capitalist societies, human productive power is viewed as an extension of natural forces - waterways, animals and particularly the land - and the products of labour as nature's bounty. The peasants simply come like cows and sheep with the land of a feudal estate, which, Marx says, the lord does not so much inherit as it inherits him. A school of 18th century French economists, the physiocrats, could only conceive of wealth as the produce of agriculture.

The rise of capitalism consists of a process by which a great mass of people are separated from their natural means of production. The result is, on the one hand, a social class - the proletariat - which engages in direct social cooperation, unmediated by particular natural or natural-seeming instruments of production, and can thus become conscious of the productive power of labour. Facing the proletariat and standing over and against it, is capital - the means of production and the social product as a whole, of which the collective worker is expropriated.

According to Marx, only when these two things - labour and its means and product - have been separated from one another over the course of history, and crystallise at opposite poles, can the relationship between them become transparent. Labour is for the first time seen not as this or that particular kind of human labour, but labour in general, abstract labour. And wealth, now more the product of human activity than ever before, can be understood not as a particular kind of wealth, but as wealth in its manifold forms, the result of all the different applications of human labour. Thus alienation is the necessary prologue to the conscious reappropriation of the product and means of labour by the collective producers: ie, to proletarian revolution and communism, the beginning of human history properly so called.

We now have a rough idea of what Marx meant by standing Hegel on his feet. In what Hegel took to be Mind's active relation to the objects of its thought, Marx perceived the dynamic of human material practice - of the labour process; in what Hegel took to be Mind's estrangement in an objective world of its own creation, and its return to itself from this estrangement, Marx discerned a speculative-philosophical rendering of a larger theme of real history - humanity's emergence from nature and self-alienation under capitalism, and the real negation of this negation that communism achieves.

The above, let it be said, is an example of the thing most despised by postmodernists - a so-called grand narrative. And, while it would be facile to impose upon empirical history, with all its contingencies and culs-de-sac, some overly tidy teleological scheme, Marx was committed to the proposition that progress does take place, and that the human chronicle, viewed in widest perspective, somehow makes sense. He was particularly concerned with the question of what the rule of capital signifies on the larger historical canvas. Without grasping this it is impossible to understand his critique of capitalism, which bourgeois commentators, because they treat him as a run-of-the mill economist or sociologist, typically fail to do.

It may also be said that we, at the beginning of the 21st century, seem more trapped within pre-history than Marx thought in the middle of the 19th. Yet, if the solution seems more distant, the problem remains the same. Today more completely than ever, humans are dominated, not by nature, but by this curious self-expanding sum of values called capital, which the ruling classes must possess to exploit workers, as the ruling classes of old had to possess the land to exploit their slaves and serfs, and to whose logic even the owners of capital must subordinate themselves. And, although the power of capital may be viewed today even more than in Marx's time as akin to an unassailable force of nature, what is it in the end but the result of collective human endeavour risen above human control, which will be subordinated to the collective producers if history is to be anything more than the birth pangs of an aborted species?

Dubious dialectics

Where does all this leave us with regard to the dialectics of nature? We think our gloss on the Manuscripts and Marx's other early writings establishes two things:

1. That the dialectic for Marx, while not, as in Hegel, one of pure consciousness, must involve agency - ie, beings who are at least aware on some level of the purposes for which they act. Otherwise, there could be no gap between intention and result, and it is precisely in this gap that the dialectical contradictions Marx speaks of arise.

2. That Marx's dialectic, like Hegel's, is cumulative, which is to say that the contradictions of a lower stage must be resolved at a higher one, in which the memory of the contradictions it resolves is preserved.

We can say further that neither water building up behind a dam, nor seeds and wheat stalks, nor electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom, nor any of the unconscious natural forces that Engels or other champions of the dialectics of nature adduce as examples, possess either agency or a capacity to develop from a lower to a higher stage. Even if Engel's dialectical 'laws' are in some sense true of everything in the universe (a question that was addressed by another writer in this paper, but which we will leave aside), even if slow quantitative changes do result over time in qualitative leaps, or various natural substances interact dynamically upon one another, where, in the end, do such leaps and interactions lead? To a repetition of the same phenomena, with a long-range result that is in itself neutral as regards any notion of higher or lower.

Dialectical materialism has, however, been the basis for infinite pretensions on the part of self-proclaimed Marxists. It has allowed them to elevate themselves above ordinary mortals by claiming to be in possession of some special key to the secrets of the universe. It has also served as a talisman that Stalinists and leftist sect leaders of every stripe have waved before their members in an attempt to mystify and intimidate them. How often have we heard some hapless dissident chastised because his or her thinking was deemed 'undialectical'? And who can forget Gerry Healy's constant invocation of 'Dialectics' (with an upper-case 'D') to convince his followers that the "world situation" was the diametric opposite of what he had told them it was the week before?

Engels certainly never intended the dialectic for such uses, but, as we have tried to show, his claim to have found in Hegel the basis for an ontology that is uniquely Marxist is not supported by anything Marx wrote about Hegel. Marx thought he had culled from Hegel the foundations of his theoretical approach to human practice and its working out in history: a claim which, though sweeping enough in itself, appears modest beside dialectical materialism's claim to have discovered the fundamental logic of all that exists - grander in scope but poorer in content.