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philosophy of marxism
PART ONE - Dialectical Materialism
In the first place, we need to know what is meant by materialism.Materialism, like everything in this world, is best understood by contrasting it with its own opposite-which is called idealism. These are philosophical terms, which have different meanings than in their everyday sense. They are labels, as it were, of diametrically opposed conceptions of reality.
The essential philosophical difference between materialism and idealism can be given in two short sentences:
· The materialist sees the material universe as the substance of reality, and sees ideas about concrete reality as its reflection inside the human brain.
· The idealist, conversely, sees ideas as the insubstantial substance of reality and sees the material universe, outside one's brain, as its reflection. As you can see, it's reality turned upside down.
The ultimate test of any philosophy, of course, is how well it accords with experience and how well it serves to advance our day-to-day class interests, and the interests of humanity as a whole. So let's take a closer look at these opposing philosophical conceptions:
The idealists believe that the source of all knowledge exists in the form of the absolute idea, from which all reality springs. According to idealist philosophers, the absolute idea exists somewhere out there in the universe, but cannot be known, or understood by ordinary mortals.
In the materialist world we all inhabit, however, a hypothesis about how things work has value only as a guide to the truth. But a hypothesis has no independent viability unless it is supported by observation and experiment.
That's why rational juridical systems are based on the principle that a person accused of a criminal act is innocent until proven guilty. Why? Simply because it's sometimes impossible to prove a person innocent of a crime. Only the evidence presented by the accuser can be proven to be true or false; while the innocence of the accused in all too many cases is very difficult or impossible to prove.
So the juridical principle of innocence until proven guilty is entirely in accord with the scientific method, whereby any alleged truth about how nature works must be based on material evidence before it has any claim on truth.
Mechanical materialism
There are, however, two contradictory conceptions of materialism. The most familiar version, Mechanical materialism, is in accord with the laws of nature according to Isaac Newton and pre-20th-century science. Newton's materialism, as we shall see, is based on formal logic-otherwise known as common sense. But as we shall also see, dialectical materialism is in accord with the laws of nature according to Albert Einstein and 20th-century science.
Newton's materialism is most often likened to the workings of a clock or to billiard balls colliding and rebounding according to the laws of classical mechanics. But there are many forces operating with measurable effect on the scale of the very small and others on the scale of the very large that were not known until the latter part of the 19th century.
Clearly, the most brilliant scientists of Newton's time could not even dream of the new conceptions of reality flowing from the leaps in scientific discovery that began to flower at the start of the 20th century.
It's important to also note that Newton, like other scientists and philosophers of his time, had a dualist conception of reality, which was an attempt to reconcile materialism and idealism.
(Let me explain: Dualism is the view that there is one set of laws that affect everything in the universe and that these laws are all capable of being comprehended by the human mind. But dualists believe that there is another world that is entirely inaccessible to the understanding of human beings.
Thus, on the one hand, Newton proved that a single gravitational law governs all matter on earth and in the heavens. And he proved that these laws governing matter in motion and gravity-from the fall of an apple, to the trajectory of a ball shot from a cannon, to planets orbiting around the sun-consistently explained the strictly lawful movement of matter in the entire universe.
But, on the other hand, Isaac Newton and his peers also believed that God set it all into motion by the force of His will.
Newton's contribution to science, however, represented a giant leap for mankind toward an ever-deeper understanding of the universe and how it works.
But how is the inconsistent dualist philosophy of Newton and his followers to be explained? The simplest and most reasonable answer to that question is that they, like all of us throughout history, are creatures of the times in which we live. Even a genius like Newton could not rise above his times and go beyond the given level of human culture-in the broadest sense of the term-reached at that time in world history.
Moreover, Newton's dualism was a quite logical deduction based on what was then known about the natural world. He and his peers perceived their clockwork universe as flawlessly and perfectly balanced. It seemed to them entirely logical that their perception of an infinitely perfect universe implied a "designer" of infinite perfection.
From this conception flowed the logical deduction that the perfect designer and infallible master mechanic of a perfect universe had no need to intervene further by regulating His creation.
Or to put it in the language of religion: God had no need for further miracles after the miracle of creation. After all, unlike mere mortals and the lesser gods of mythology, Newton's God makes no mistakes and allows no accidents.
But by any measure, with or without God's help, Newton's historic contribution was based on the highest intellectual conquests of 17th century science. The achievement is underscored by the fact that Newton's laws of nature-laws that are valid, for the most part, to this day-prevailed for over 300 years.
Dialectical materialism
We come now to dialectical materialism, which lies at the heart of Marxist philosophy.
In the first place it's important to understand at the outset that historical and dialectical materialism are organically interconnected. In other words, dialectical materialism is historical and historical materialism is dialectical.
Dialectical materialism perceives all things in nature to be in motion; that is, undergoing a process of uninterrupted change. Everything, consequently, has a history-individuals have a history as does society, biology, geology, astronomy, and cosmology-to name just a few of the spheres of knowledge undergoing permanent change. And everything changes in time-you, me, society, and all those other spheres of study.
To put this idea in philosophical terms, everything is what it is and what it is becoming.
Lenin put it most simply and clearly when he said: The essence of the dialectic "is the cognition of the one and its division into antagonistic parts." That is the dialectical law of the unity of opposites. Or as Trotsky put it, the evolution of all things "proceeds through the struggle of antagonistic forces; that [is] a slow accumulation of changes at a certain moment explodes the old shell and brings about a catastrophe, revolution ..."
Dialectics deepens the meaning of materialism. It is founded on the proposition that the universe is knowable, and that while we will never know everything, there is nothing that cannot be known.
The conquests of 20th century science provide a rich supply of evidence confirming the infinitely contradictory and dialectical nature of matter in motion. It reflects the precept that the more we know, the more we find out how much we don't know.
Contradictory nature of reality
The two most outstanding conquests of 20th century science, relativity and quantum theory, transcend the limits of formal logic and mechanical materialism. And by so doing, they provide a deeper explanation of how nature works.
For instance, physicists disputed whether light was a particle or a wave for more than 200 years. Isaac Newton believed it to be a particle, and other physicists during his time and until the beginning of the 20th century believed it to be a wave.
The reason they couldn't agree was because in some ways light acts like a particle and in other ways like a wave. And, of course, according to the logic of common sense, it can't be both a particle and a wave at the same time.
This dispute over the nature of light continued until Einstein's Special Relativity theory proved, among other things, that light was both a wave and a particle. Its waveness and particleness have been repeatedly confirmed to be two opposing sides of a single thing-a unity of opposites called a photon-that is, a particle of light.
Einstein's theory of General Relativity, published after his Special Relativity theory, further overturned previously accepted concepts that also went beyond the limits of common sense. For instance, matter and energy, and space and time, rather than being absolute and discrete phenomena, were proven to be relative and interconnected.
In other words, matter and energy are two contradictory forms of existence of the same thing. Energy is the massless substance of matter, and matter is the congealed substance of energy.
Similarly, space and time are also two interconnected aspects of the same thing. Furthermore, according to general relativity, space itself is inwardly curved, or compacted by matter as well as by matter in motion.
Thus, the greater the mass, the more dense is the space around the massive object. And, on the one hand, the closer a material object approaches the speed of light, the more massive it becomes and the shorter it is in the direction of motion. And on the other as mass and/or velocity of the given body in motion approaches the speed of light, time itself dilates.
In other words, twins, one on earth and the other on a space ship traveling at close to the speed of light, grow older at different rates so that when the space voyager returns he or she is younger than his or her twin that remained in the space-time continuum on earth.
There is no mystery in dialectics
The main reason for the mystery that appears to enshroud dialectical materialism derives from the idealist dialectics of Hegel, the late 18th century and early 19th century philosopher who initiated the dialectical revolution in logic. Hegel took the elements of dialectics familiar to Aristotle and other ancient philosophers and developed it into a coherent and consistent system.
Hegel had made a huge impact on Marx and Engels and both considered themselves his students.
But the mystery of dialectics derives from Hegel's idealist interpretation of the science of logic. Although he buttressed his case for an essentially contradictory nature of reality with evidence from the real, concrete world, his fundamental premise that reality was the reflection of the absolute idea was in conflict with the way the universe works.
Marx and Engels perceived the mystical side of Hegelian dialectics as a source of confusion because it was reality turned upside down. One of the great contributions by the founders of scientific socialism boiled down to turning Hegel rightside up.
Intuition and counter-intuition
There is another factor that contributes to the seeming mystery of dialectics. It's what scientists call intuition and counter-intuition. These two things, like everything, are organically connected.
Some of the confusion comes from everyday usage of the often vaguely perceived phenomenon called intuition. Many people who use the term believe it to be a mode of thought derived from something beyond experience-that is, it is perceived by some as a form of extrasensory perception.
Scientists, in contrast, see intuition as a subtle form of reasoning based on the half-digested experiences we accumulate in our memories every day of our lives. From these experiences we draw conclusions, some of which lie in the area between the subconscious and the conscious. As it happens, the mass of our experiences-many of which are barely perceived and half remembered by our conscious minds-often give us an accurate feel for what is true and what is not true.
When a thing looks right and experience proves it to have been right, that is an example of a valid intuitive judgement confirmed by experience-not extrasensory perception. But intuition must certainly be considered tentative, at best, until passing the test of experience.
In fact, even theories that have successfully met all experimental and observational tests are still, in a sense, tentative. Science says that any physical theory is provisional, in that no matter how many times evidence confirms the theory, you can never be sure that something will not come along that contradicts it.
And when when new evidence contradicting the theory is confirmed, the theory must be modified or abandoned, and replaced by one in closer accord with all the evidence.
On the other hand, every time a theory is confirmed by new evidence, confidence in the theory grows. That, by the way, is the basis of our confidence in Marxism. It has repeatedly passed the test of events. That's why after over 150 years, Marxism-to paraphrase the opening words of the "Communist Manifesto"-remains a specter haunting world capitalism to this day.
Let's take a look at how ordinary everyday experiences stored in the semiconscious regions of our brains provide the raw material for what is called intuition.
For instance, it's a widely accepted fact among biologists today that all living matter was originally inanimate or dead matter. That means that lifeless matter, under the right conditions, can and does become living matter.
That conception, most of us would agree, however, is counter-intuitive. It goes so much against our intuitive sense of what is possible and what is not possible, that it tends to require a pretty heavy dose of factual evidence before most people will accept it as true.
In fact, in the 19th century, the rush of scientific progress and the growing influence of materialism, led some careless scientists to mistakenly believe that life originates from dead matter in a process they called spontaneous generation-that is, they believed that complex living organisms-worms, bugs, and other things-were spontaneously generated from non-living matter under special circumstances.
Today, of course, scientists believe dead matter becomes alive, but under very special conditions and on the most elemental scale of the simplest of organisms. Thus, some scientists believe that viruses are close to the first forms of life.
A virus, which happens to be one of the most graphic examples of the unity of opposites is, in a sense, half alive and half dead: When outside a microbe, a virus appears to be an inert crystal that can remain dormant and unchanging indefinitely. But after penetrating into the nucleus of its host microbe, it takes over the microbe's reproductive machinery and reproduces itself repeatedly-doing a lot of damage along the way.
To be sure, that may be too big a jump from inanimate to animate matter. The actual first living thing or things may be a whole lot simpler.
On the other hand, everyone knows that living matter can die and return to its inanimate form of existence. But that is so obvious that it is considered to be just plain common sense. That is, it is supported by such an abundance of evidence that it is generally considered to be a simple fact of life and death.
But formal logic tells us that a thing is either alive or not alive, and that it can't be both alive and dead at the same time. In a sense, that notion is true. But it is only half true, and therefore it's false.
Just a slightly deeper look at the matter of life and death will easily show that it's not a one-way proposition in which living things die and become inanimate, but inanimate things can never become living things.
In fact, the overwhelming abundance of facts are to the contrary; plants live and grow by taking in the lifeless elements in the soil, air and water. And then powered by the sun's energy, life is infused into lifeless matter.
Besides, all we animals eat living, dying and dead things in order to live, grow and reproduce the living tissue of our bodies. In other words, we routinely bring life to the lifeless matter we consume. And while much of the dead matter animals consume is burnt in their internal heat engines to keep them alive, another part of the dead matter consumed serves as the raw material that is transformed into new living matter.
But even more convincing of the dialectical materialist thesis that living matter is merely a special form of inanimate matter is the fact that the billions of living cells that make up an organism like one of us are composed of molecules containing chemicals that in and of themselves are not alive. Even the molecules that make up the DNA and RNA in the genomes of living organisms are certainly complex organic molecules, but they are not alive, in and of themselves.
This complex interrelationship between the lifeless molecules of matter that make up a living organism is summed up in the simple maxim-the whole is qualitatively greater than the sum of its parts. That's also in line with the dialectical principle that quantity changes into quality. And what can be more of a qualitative transition than dead matter changing into living matter, and vice versa?
As medical science progresses, the realization grows that the dividing line between life and death is a highly ambiguous one. At one time the line between life and death was generally considered to be when an animal, like one of us, stopped breathing or its heart stopped beating. Today, however, it is generally believed to be when the brain ceases to function.
Furthermore, whatever criterion is used to determine the moment of death of a living organism, all its organs and all its cells do not cease functioning-that is die-at the same time!
And finally, medical science is creeping ever closer to transforming in the laboratory ordinary living human cells into entire organs to replace those in a sick person-a living, beating heart, for instance, to replace a dying heart.
Viewed in this light, the dialectical conception-that a living organism can be both alive and dead at the same time-is not at all difficult for people with normal intelligence to grasp.
The birth and death of suns
But inanimate matter also undergoes a process of evolution from what it is to something else. Some of these transformations of things from what they are to what they are not takes too long to be perceived in a single lifetime. Other transitions, however, happen fast enough to be perceived in a moment or two.
For instance, striking a cold match produces a hot flame in an instant. Frying an egg taken from a hen takes a minute or so to change from an egg to an omelet, that is, from a living organism to dead matter.
But other things, such as stars like our sun, take billions of years to be born, more billions of years burning nuclear fuels, and more billions before dying. Thus to talk of the life and death of a sun may certainly be counter-intuitive, but it is a fact just the same. And the seeming incredibility of suns being born and dying disappears when the facts are known.
Similarly, the evolution of a living cell from a single microscopic organism to the simplest collection of cells; that is, into a qualitatively new species, illustrates one of the simplest evolutionary transitions from the simplest to ever more complex organisms-and back again. Evolution is not a one-way proposition, it's not like a ladder, it's more like a bush with its parts growing in all directions.
Evolution is a process that never ends and has produced such a diversity of billions of species from viruses to clams to fishes, to reptiles, to mammals, to apes to homo sapiens. Consequently, evolution is also counter-intuitive, but it is a fact nonetheless.
And while the evolution of human social organization is recorded in history books and in archeological and anthropological artifacts, the conception that human society has been in transition for over ten thousand years from what it was to what it became and is becoming, is also far from something that is readily apparent.
As we can see, all that has been said here about life and death and of matter changing in form adds up to a dialectical conception of reality. However, it is also understandable in terms of ordinary common sense! After all, I am not talking in "dialectese." My language, your language, is the language of common sense!
Leon Trotsky put it simply, but to profound effect in a wonderful little book on the dialectic as applied to the analysis of a serious political problem that divided our movement in 1940. In the book, titled, "In Defense of Marxism," he made this insightful observation:
"The dialectic and formal logic bear a relationship similar to that between higher and lower mathematics."
Trotsky also noted in the same book-and this may boggle your mind-that even foxes are unconscious dialecticians. Listen to what he had to say about that:
Every individual is a dialectician to some extent or other, in most cases, unconsciously. A housewife knows that a certain amount of salt flavors soup agreeably, but that added salt makes the soup unpalatable. Consequently, an illiterate peasant woman guides herself in cooking soup by the Hegelian law of the transformation of quantity into quality. Similar examples from daily life could be cited without end....
Thus a fox is aware that quadrupeds and birds are nutritious and tasty. On sighting a hare, a rabbit, or a hen, a fox concludes: this particular creature belongs to the tasty and nutritive type, and-chases after the prey. ... When the same fox, however, encounters the first animal which exceeds it in size-for example, a wolf-it quickly concludes that quantity passes into quality, and turns to flee.(!)
But once again, intuitive dialectical reasoning is not enough. We require more than what foxes are capable of. We require conscious application of the dialectical mode of analysis and reasoning.
Conscious dialectics is indispensable for understanding the way things work. And that includes everything-mechanics, natural science, the social sciences and the science of revolutionary Marxism.
