06.12.2007
Powerful because it coherently explains
Jack Conrad defends dialectical materialism against positivist critics
Frederick Engels explains in Dialectics of nature (unpublished, 1882) that dialectics are the science of interconnections "abstracted" from the "history of nature and human society". Dialectics are "nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as thought itself". Hence, in the main, dialectics can be "reduced" to three main laws: the transformation of quality into quantity and vice versa; the interpenetration of polar opposites; the negation of the negation or the spiral form of development through contradiction.
Engels readily admits the debt he and Marx owe to Georg Hegel (1770-1831). But, whereas Hegel developed dialectics in an idealist fashion, they took a thoroughly materialist (and necessarily a many-sided approach). Engels for his part undertook an exhaustive study of mathematics and the natural sciences in preparation for writing Dialectics of nature (and Anti-D ühring) and in order to convince himself in detail that dialectical laws underpin events in nature as well as history.
True, the motley little army of Engels' revisionist detractors plumb extraordinary depths of dishonesty in order to 'prove' that Marx disagreed with him on this issue (the tortuous article by Jim Creegan in Weekly Worker November 29 is typical, but adds absolutely nothing to the debate). The problem is that none of them can produce a shred of worthwhile evidence. Along with many other orthodox Marxists, I have argued that everything tells us that Marx and Engels were as one on this, as with so much else.[1]
For example, both Engels and Marx agree Hegel was capable of many insights that wonderfully illustrated the dialectical laws of nature and history. Indeed, Marx writes in his 'Afterword to the second German edition' of Capital that Hegel was "the first to present" the dialectic in a "comprehensive and conscious manner".[2] Nonetheless, Hegel sought to foist dialectical laws "on nature and history", as laws of thought, rather than deducing them from nature and history. By putting things onto their feet, by seeking out the rational kernel of the dialectic, by deriving the dialectic from nature and history and not the other way round, dialectical laws that "look so extremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at once become simple and clear as noonday".[3]
Despite combining the robustness needed to give coherence with the flexibility needed to provide constant stimulation for the inquiring mind (and to boot being aesthetically beautiful), the Marxist dialectic is commonly dismissed as hocus-pocus amongst the usual run of Anglo-American academics. Allegedly it is an obscure metaphysical carry-over inherited from ancient Greeks such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Aristotle by way of Hegel. Obscure, unnecessary, outmoded and, yes, "extremely mysterious", the academics sagely agree and thereby try to gut Marxism of its revolutionary essence.
After all, not a few are prepared to grant that Marxism might have some considerable intellectual merit. Take Karl Popper (1902-94). Born in Vienna and though briefly flirting with Marxism in his youth, Popper formed part of what Perry Anderson calls the 'white migration'. Anti-Stalinist, anti-Nazi, but also anti-Marxist. In 1946 he permanently settled in Britain, gaining a comfortable living teaching at the London School of Economics. Honoured with a knighthood in 1965, Popper advocated "piecemeal social engineering". The dominant bourgeois ideology of the 1950s and 60s.
Perfectly in tune with this soothing mood music, Paul Johnson, the columnist, contrarian and catholic dandy, offers what he doubtless considers the highest praise: Popper was "one of the reasons why the west decided to fight the cold war".[4] In fact, Popper is lauded by the establishment's paid persuaders. He is "the outstanding philosopher of the 20th century, gushes Bryan Magee, the former rightwing Labourite MP and SDP defector.[5] Frankly, a risible assessment.
When he died, Popper was mourned in particular by US neoconservatives. He was one of Margaret Thatcher's intellectual heroes too. That despite the fact that his politics, though increasingly rightwing, would best be described as social democratic.
Undoubtedly, Popper's grossly inflated reputation rests in part on his genuine opposition to tyranny and repression. Ahistorically, he joined together ancient Sparta, Chin China, John Calvin's Geneva and the regimes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Popper is feted, though, primarily - if not only - because of his anti-Marxism. He is credited with having destroyed Marxism's claim to be scientific. Popper was the "man who buried Marx and Freud", blustered the US edition of The Economist (September 1994).
Popper permitted a theory the status of being properly scientific only if it was 'refutable'. Eg, Albert Einstein's wave-particle duality theory of light (1905) predicted, on the basis of an extension of Max Plank's quantum theory, that a beam of light coming to earth from a star would be bent out of a straight line if it passed by a sufficiently massive object. Gravity warping space/pulling light. A phenomenon, Einstein asserted, best observable during a total solar eclipse. If that was not the case, if no such observation could be made, then, a confident Einstein readily admitted, his particular theory would be disproved. In 1919 photographs taken of the eclipse by Arthur Eddington's expedition off the coast of west Africa, on Principe Island, confirmed Einstein's bullish prediction. A headline-hitting incident which became Popper's lasting paradigm for science. Observation, verification and repeatability were cuckooed out in his schema by refutation as the hallmark of hard science.
Yet such a narrow definition of science would immediately beach the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Unless one could rewind the 'tape' of life again and again and under a range of different circumstances, there is no way of refuting Darwin's theory in the Popperian sense. Needless to say, Darwin's theory was never intended to predict. Darwin sought to explain the past and to show that species adapted to changing conditions through the contingent of natural selection. His theory has brilliantly stood the test of time. Not least because it still provides the most realistic, coherent, rewarding and stimulating explanatory paradigm.
Does that mean Darwinism is unproblematic? According to the classic model, as presented by Charles Darwin no less, the fossil record should display a smooth, cumulative, gradualist curve of change from one form to another. Put another way, there ought to be a very tight spacing between one tiny adaptation and another. Species almost blurring one into another. But they do not. The fossil record certainly displays no such evidence. A nagging absence fully recognised by Darwin.
Chapter nine of his Origin (1859) bears the apologetic title, 'On the imperfection of the geological record'. For Darwin the failure to discover the interminable species joining extinct and existing species by the finest gradualistic steps lay in limited geological exploration and frustratingly, even close-endedly, non-preservation. Rock strata having been buried, morphed or destroyed by earthquakes, volcanic eruption, ocean waves, etc.
Against clear evidence pointing to the sudden appearance of species and groups of species, Darwin insisted upon gradualism. Indeed Darwin went so far as to maintain that those who reject gradualism "will undoubtedly at once reject my theory".[6] He was, let us remember, a respectable Victorian gentleman, a committed liberal and as such was haunted by the prospect of a Chartist revival. Revolution, even in the fossil record, horrified him. There existed therefore an ingrained, deep-seated and lasting class bias in Darwin's outlook. A form of psychological blinkering interestingly discussed by John Bellamy Foster.[7]
Since Darwin's time the paleological quest to complete the chain of evidence, link by link, needed to support gradualism, has tangibly failed time and time again. Missing links too often proved to be dead ends. The gradualist chain was broken or cut off by mass extinctions. Excuses multiplied in proportion. In 1972, however, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge convincingly removed the problem at a stroke. Darwin's innumerable 'imperfections' in the fossil record were better explained by their theory of punctuated equilibrium. What Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) called a "paradigm shift" that results from the accumulation of unsatisfactory or inadequate excuses that become increasingly vulnerable to an alternative theory that is more rational, more convincing, more consistent.
Darwin's theory of natural selection does not actually require gradualism. Gould and Eldredge proposed a qualitative shift within Darwinism. Gradualism was replaced by both relative stability on the one hand and revolution on the other. Phenotypes remain more or less stable for three, four or five million years. Hence the moeritherium did not become the woolly mammoth and the African elephant through a series of tiny, almost imperceptible changes. There occurs the sudden, abrupt, sometimes spectacular, branching leaps from one species to another: specisation. A few thousand years would be enough - a blink of the eye in biological/geological terms. Not that Gould and Eldridge thought that their theory could be refuted by observed evidence of gradualism. Their theory "has always, and properly, focused upon issues of relative frequency".[8]
Predictions
Marxism, Popper conceded, began with scientific intentions. But, as Marx's 'predictions' about the future supposedly failed to materialise, one after the other, Marxism retrogressively, defensively, evolved into what Popper called a pseudo-science. Eg, both Marx and Engels were anticipating an imminent general economic crisis in 1856. When it duly arrived a year later, in 1857, they were brimming with confidence and expectation. A revolutionary storm was about to break that would dwarf 1848. That is what they told each other. By the autumn of 1858 it was clear, however, that economic crisis had given way to a new boom.
The idea that an incident such as this should disprove Marxism is ridiculous. Say Einstein's wave-particle duality theory had been shown to be wrong. Would it follow, would it be right, to conclude that the whole of physics must be rejected as falsified? No, surely not. Suffice to say, neither Marx nor Engels made a prediction in 1857 that can seriously be put on a par with Einstein's wave-particle theory. They were speculating, hoping, mentally preparing themselves for another trial by fire. That is quite clear. Comparisons with Einstein in 1905 are therefore completely inappropriate.
Not that physics should be put on a pedestal. Physics deals with matter at its simplest, most basic level and except with subatomic particles follows a relatively straightforward path from cause to effect. By contrast, Marxism pictures, tries to understand, tries to further matter at a much higher level of organisation. The human brain being by far the most complex thing known to us in the universe.
Changing society necessarily involves changing human consciousness. People - with their tumult of emotions, beliefs, needs, ideas, interests and social connections - make history. There is no such thing as history in itself, history with a capital 'H'. With the transition from capitalism to communism the necessity of changing consciousness becomes even more pressing, vital and important. Great revolutions of the past relied on generating intoxicating delusions and concealing the truth behind sanctimonious promises in order to mobilise the masses. Hence what is sometimes called false consciousness. That cannot be the case with the global transition from capitalism to communism.
The communist revolution is not carried out by the majority in the interests of a minority. For the first time it is a revolution carried out by the majority for the majority. Moreover, communism abolishes spontaneous market exchange with planned organisation and the free association of the producers. Society is mastered. So too is nature. A precondition for achieving that towering aim being a mass party and a high level of theoretical education and self-awareness. Without that there can be no decisive forward movement.
Given infinite human complexity, unlike physics, Marxism cannot be expounded in purely mathematical terms. Mathematics being a science of quantity. Of course, Marxism uses mathematics. From the late 1850s till his death in 1883 Marx committed himself to a wide-ranging investigation into mathematics and its applications. Naturally, he instantly recognised algebra's unity of opposites, and he went on to make real strides most notably in the field of differential calculus (at least in the context of the rather sluggish school of English mathematics).
Differential calculus deals with problems of motion, speed, gradients, growth, etc. Marx was grappling with Capital and the movement of commodities from one form to another, the rate and mass of surplus value, and the effects different quantities of fixed and variable capital have on accumulation. He needed therefore to thoroughly acquaint himself with what then counted as advanced mathematics.
Interestingly, in 1873, in connection with his monumental and never finished project, Marx wrote to Engels that despite the increasing difficulties confronted by mathematics - "piling up in an ascending series of leaps from mechanics to physics, from physics to chemistry, from there to biology and onwards to the social sciences" - that does not "entirely block its path", but allows it the "prospect of even determining the main laws of capitalist economic crisis".[9] However, precisely because of Marx's refusal to accept the status quo, his determination to change the world, he mercilessly lampooned the mathematical fetishism practised by the money men, insurance brokers and bond traders in the City of London and Wall Street, and which nowadays constitutes the main output of Anglo-Saxon university economics departments.
Once again, unlike physics, Marxism does not cite impartial observation and experimentation. Marxism is partisan: it adopts the viewpoint, takes up the historic interest that the modern working class has in overthrowing capitalism and winning universal freedom. While striving for objectivity and trying to learn from the past through detailed analysis, we cannot experimentally run and rerun class struggles. As a result of such intentions and inherent limitations Marxist social prediction is self-admittedly far less exact than those of Kepler, Newton, Hubble and Einstein. Marxism is much more concerned with revealing past social forms, tracing the movement of categories and pointing to consequent probabilities and possibilities. And, of course, Marxism should be judged according to its own body of achievement, stated boundaries and ambitions. Not those of mathematics, biology, chemistry " or physics.
Because Marxism is the theory of human self-liberation, it necessarily puts far greater emphasis on explanation rather than prediction. In this context, while not accepting everything he said by any means, it is worthwhile citing the work of the philosopher and logician, Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000). He argued against the privileged position awarded to the possibility of refutability and even observation and verification. Eg, while the ancient Greek assumption that (unobservable) Olympian gods exist is false, and our supposition of (unobservable) electromagnetic waves is true, both paradigms find justification by their ability to explain. What matters, what marks out one explanation from the other is the hierarchy of coherence produced by successive paradigm shifts.
Marxism seeks to explain hugely difficult problems. Problems such as: Why do workers still spontaneously limit themselves to economic demands when their liberation relies on overthrowing the bureaucratic-military state? How exactly does the system of surplus extraction continue to work when productive capital has been eclipsed by finance capital in the US, UK, etc? What was the socio-economic nature of the Stalinite system in the Soviet Union, China and eastern Europe and has capitalism still to arrive at its fully mature stage?
Marxism explains by reference to both observed reality and an unsurpassed body of accumulated theory. A theory that Lenin famously described as beginning with a paradigm-shifting synthesis of German philosophy (Hegel and Feuerbach), British political economy (Smith and Ricardo) and French socialism (Fourier, Saint-Simon and Babeuf). Not that Marxism is finished, complete and therefore inflexible. On the contrary, Marxism is ever eager to question and, whenever necessary, willingly reformulates specific propositions. Hence, it is germane to note that, after the failure of the 1857 economic crisis to produce even so much as a revolutionary whimper, Marx felt compelled to "return to his economic studies" with renewed vigour.[10] He needed to explain capitalism's durability.
Popper's claim that Marxism is irrefutable is therefore obvious nonsense. Specific propositions have proven to be partial, premature, even unfounded. Nevertheless, from such little puddles as 1857 Popper and co find the kind of 'falsifications' they need to dismiss the wide ocean of Marxist thought. 'Outdated' concepts such as capitalist exploitation, the growth of the working class, the inevitability of wars under capitalism and a commitment to revolution in advanced countries are then consigned to the reject bin by the simple device of equating them with a modern form of religious faith.
Why the chicanery, the malign agenda, the downright absurdity? Without doubt, Marxists - genuine Marxists, that is - following the example of Marx and Engels themselves, have refused to throw in their lot with one or another of the great powers: the British constitutional monarchy, imperial Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, the US robocop. By the same measure, Marxists - genuine Marxists, let me once again emphasise - have not become the kowtowing 'partners' of one or another petty bourgeois or bureaucratic anti-capitalism: Tito's Yugoslavia, Castro's Cuba, Chavez's Venezuela, Gerry Adams's Sinn Fein, Tommy Sheridan's Scottish left nationalism, Ken Livingstone's Greater London Authority, Anas Altikriti's muslim activists, etc. So we have not compromised our programme for the sake of a sad, humiliating, albeit sometimes lucrative, personal advancement. Not for us the league of abandoned hope. The paid persuaders thereby know their enemy.
Unsurprisingly, Popper takes the claims of Stalinism to be the Marxism of the 20th century on face value. Ditto the usual run of bourgeois prejudice and fads. Eg, the working class is conveniently defined away as those performing manual tasks in industry. Not, as argued by Marxism, those who rely on the wages fund. Hence the asinine claim that the working class is disappearing and that sooner or later everyone will be contentedly middle class.
There is more than a passing similarity between the ideas of Karl Popper and those of Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), the father of revisionism in German social democracy. In fact there is a striking resemblance. Bernstein proposed to strengthen the "pure science of Marxism" by "stripping" away 'antiquated' notions such as class war, the labour theory of value, relative pauperisation, capitalist crisis and violent revolution.[11]
Popper too expresses his wish to rescue Marxism for the wonders of gradualism in the name of a vulgar economic evolutionism. He writes, in The open society and its enemies (1946): "What I wish to show is that Marx's 'materialist interpretation of history', valuable as it may be, must not be taken too seriously; that we must regard it as nothing more than a most valuable suggestion to us to consider things in relation to their economic background."[12]
Not only economists, but philosophers, historians and sociologists are thereby granted permission, given encouragement, to mine, to rob Marx of selected nuggets and insights. But Marxism as a rounded body of thought, as a method, as a political programme, as a commitment, must be judged as false, as unscientific, because of unfulfilled predictions " and because it uses the dialectic. Popper attacked the Marxist dialectic often and repeatedly. Again there is a distinct similarity with Bernstein. In Evolutionary socialism (1899) Bernstein rejects the dialectic as a "comfortable refuge".[13]
Obviously the dialectical leap from quantity to quality is an affront to all those committed to "piecemeal social engineering". After all, according to the renowned Russian revolutionary democrat, Alexander Herzen (1812-70), the dialectic constitutes "the algebra of revolution". Marx too highlighted its "critical and revolutionary" essence. While recognising the existing state of things, the dialectic is also a "recognition" of an inevitable breaking apart.[14] Everything in existence is for Marx-Engels also a passing away, is fluid, is breaking up, is going from being to nothing. For his part Bernstein doggedly clung to gradualism; even after Germany went through the horrors of World War I and then saw the sudden collapse of the Hohenzollern dynasty.
In What is dialectic? (1937) Popper too reveals an abiding shallowness. Marxist dialectics seek to discover, lay bare and progressively explain mounting contradictions - being the main source of inner motion and development. Popper feels categorically obliged to adopt a stupidly dismissive attitude: "A statement consisting of the conjunction of two contradictory statements must always be rejected as false on purely logical grounds".[15] Elsewhere, Popper writes: "All criticism consists largely in the elimination of contradictions wherever we find them."[16]
As if the fundamental contradiction lodged at the very heart of capitalism, between use-value and exchange-value, can be resolved by the simple device of eliminating it in the mind. Indeed, locating this contradiction theoretically and grasping its real historic movement from one higher, ever more contradictory form to another allows us to understand the past, interrogate the present and even predict how things will be negated in the future. Eg, the rise of capitalism saw the progressive subordination of use-value to exchange-value; the epoch of capitalist decline, marked crucially by the 1917 revolution in Russia, has seen the decay of the law of value and the rise of bureaucratic organisation; communism will necessarily see the end of exchange-value and the organisation of production without bureaucracy in order to directly meet the ever expanding needs of the population.
Popper insists upon gradualism, relativism and the impossibility of arriving at objective knowledge. We must stop creating universal systems and all in all lower our sights - that was his shrunken message. Philosophers were told to study, to adopt, to bow before the "critical methods of science". That siren call was in particular directed at Marxism. Of course. Put another way, Marxism should be separated from revolutionary politics, beginning with the dialectic. Anything remaining could be considered salvage and thereby be safely subsumed by the Anglo-Saxon tradition of positivism.
Popper himself, for all it matters, nominally rejected positivism in favour of what he called 'critical rationalism'. Despite that, he unmistakably operated under its influence and echoed its reformist tropes. Evidently, Popper represented a particularly successful offshoot. He was, after all, a celebrity philosopher.
Coined and first systematised by Auguste Comte (1798-1837), positivism is a philosophical outlook which claims to base itself on the 'positive' discoveries of the natural sciences. Dialectics is bombastically dismissed as 'drivel'. Rather than fighting for universal freedom, programmes for revolutionary transformation and developing a theory adequate to such a world-historic task, positivism, including critical rationalism, offers Gradgrindism. Facts recorded by scientific instruments, facts collected by market surveyors, facts streaming from government departments, facts that can be averaged, facts that can be listed, facts that can be filed, facts that can be profitably used. Adherents of positivism imagine themselves, inevitably, as having moved beyond the 'illusion' that the objective world can be known through analysis. Such 'philosophical speculations' are and must be rejected because they do not count as fact.
Those who believe that they base themselves on facts and facts alone - without the need for interconnecting abstractions provided by dialectics - are more than prone to arbitrary constructions. As Engels wryly observed, positivists take flight into the most extreme forms of "fantasy, credulity and superstition".[17] Delightedly, amusing himself no end, Engels poked fun at the idiotic delusions, mysticism and all-round naivety of eminent scientists such as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and Alfred William Wallace. They were variously convinced of necromancy, astrology and alchemy.
Comte himself tried to straightjacket world history into what he decided were three universal stages - the theological, the metaphysical, the positive - and, to cap it all, he crowned himself the pope of a self-invented new religion of humanity. Toytown Robespierrism.
The notion of 'fact' is itself an abstraction, obviously. No-one has eaten, smelt or touched a fact. And, without exception facts, especially about society, are infused with ideology. Facts do not exist by themselves, in isolation. Facts are only given meaning through the language used to express them and in connection with other facts. Hence the necessity of analysis and building a theory capable of giving coherence, which at the same time is able to grasp the relationship between theoretical abstraction and objective reality. Without that there follows information overload, meaningless white noise and utter incoherence.
Positivism is clearly an outlook almost perfectly suited to the needs of the bourgeoisie in the epoch of a declining capitalism. Technocratic, narrowly practical, unwilling to cross the boundaries of the status quo, positivism also leaves the door wide open to idealism and hence religion. After all, if the objective world is in principle unknowable, that provides ample room for the supernatural.
Academic
Positivism undoubtedly exerts an extraordinary influence. Scientists, especially in Britain and the US, proudly identify themselves as positivists. The well known astrophysicist Stephen Hawkins being one of many. But the influence of positivism extends much wider. From philosophy departments into the media and from there into the heads of millions of people. Self-proclaimed Marxists too have fallen under the dulling spell of what has come to be seen as common-sensical.
To see the sorry results look at the rightwing current in the Second International. Bernstein has already been mentioned. But there were others. Eg, Karl Renner. Nor was Leon Trotsky's so-called Fourth International immune. James Burnham (1905-87) notoriously rejected dialectics as worthless - he dismissively dubbed Hegel "the century-dead arch-muddler of human thought".[18]