karl marx 200th birth anniversary
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by T.andradi
KARL MARX
200th birth anniversary
Today -5th of May,2018 - marks the 200th birth anniversary of one of the greatest personalities in the annals of humankind who bequeathed to the working class and all the downtrodden masses throughout the world an immense intellectual heritage, understanding of which is indispensable in their struggle for political, economic and human emanicipation. He did this without having any kind of supernatural miraculous powers or claiming to have any such powers. In contradistinction to religious leaders who claimed to have come into the world with a predestined mission, he came into this world as each and every human being came into this world from the very beginning of the human race up to now , accidentally and naturally.Yet the definite historical conditions prevailed at the time in the country to which he was born and in the countries to which he was forced to flee, contributed to what this person has eventually become -the founder of scientific socialism and the guiding light of the international working class ,even after 200 years, notwithstanding all the vilifications and the prophecies about the final collapse of teachings which bears his name. This person is none other than KARL MARX ,whose 200th birth anniversary is celebrated today throughout the world by class- conscious workers and various sections of the world population actively fighting to change the rapacious capitalist system and bring about a world socialist system ,popularly expressed as "better world''.
Throughout the human history there were many great persons who contributed immensely in various specific fields and even today they are honoured for their contributions ,notwithstanding their mistakes which were due to the prevailing conditions at the time.Some of them lived not centuries earlier ,but millenniums earlier.While their contributions to the understanding of the world is so immense and influenced in various ways the later thinkers including Karl Marx, what distinguishes him from other thinkers is the all-embracing nature of his thinking and the world-wide influence and repercussions it had since its inception. As anyone can see, the influence of all such thinkers were confined to their specific fields and to their countries , the influence of Karl Marx is such that there is no field or country that can be immune to his ideas.While this is self-evident, it is not out of place to quote, not from a committed Marxist but from a distinguished capitalist scholar- G.K.Galbraith whose following summary that need no elaboration:
Nothing has ever been so badly understood as the influence of Marx.That he seized the minds of millions is, of course, is agreed.But it is widely supposed that Marx's influence ends with these faithful.In the conventional wisdom his ideas a kind of infection like smallpox.Either men get it and are permanently scarred , they escape it because of effective inoculation and are untouched.Nothing could be futher from the truth.Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system.His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it. n part this was the result of the breath-taking grandeur of Marx's achievement as an exercise in social theory. No one before, or for that matter since, had taken so many strands of human behaviour and woven them together - social classes, economic behaviour, the nature of the state, imperialism, and war were all here and on a great fresco which ran from deep in the past to far into the future. On class conflict, or imperialism, or the courses of national war, Marx was bound to be influential, for he was the only man who had offered an explanation which was at all integrated with the rest of human experience. Thus all American thought has been deeply influenced by a Marxian view of imperialism. It could not be otherwise....His goals were those of a revolutionist, but his method was that of a scholar and scientist.Accordingly his concepts helped all social scientists in their perception of reality.
( The Affluent Society - G.K.Galbraith - pp. 62/63)
Marx's way of thinking is valid even today notwithstanding all the positive as well as negative developments since his death, precisely because his thinking is not just a set of ideas, but essentially a methodology. It is not a dogma to be learnt by rote and quoted on every occasion out of context, but a a method to understand the world, taking into consideration all the relevant factors of a given phenomena or situation in its development and their interconnections.
This methodology is DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM which was developed by Karl Marx with the intellectual collaboration of FREDRICK ENGELS in transcending Dialectical IDEALISM of Hegel, whose dialectics, notwithstanding its huge revolutionary potential had to culminate in idealizing the utterly reactionary absolute monarchy of Prussia, for the simple reason of his fundamentally wrong idealist philosophy. It was the Materialist dialectics which paved the way to the Marxist movement to base itself on a firmly scientific basis, fighting all along against the idealist views in whichever form they emanated.
Marx was born on5th of May1818 in Germany, only 3 years after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. At the time, in Europe , the reactionary forces were on the ascendancy. Germany was not a nation at the time but a conglomeration of petty states.The social system was feudalism with an absolute monarchy at the helm.It was in such a context young Marx had to start his work. The only sphere of world-importance that was developing in Germany was Philosophy.It is not for nothing Marx once said that ' the emancipation of Germany is the emancipation of the human being.The head of this emancipation is philosophy'. There were number of philosophers of world-repute in Germany at the time, beginning with Kant and culminating with Hegel. So it is not an accident that Marx started his tryst with destiny by studying philosophy. His doctoral dissertation was on Differences between the Democritean and Epicurean philosophy of Nature.Written in 1840 it was dedicated to his father calling him ''dear fatherly friend'' and calling his dissertation ''an insignificant brochure'', yet again demonstrating his unusually close and friendly relationship with his father as well as demonstrating how really great men even at their younger days consider their academic successes so humbly.
Marxist philosophy has not come into being just out of his head, however much this most remarkable head proved to be.It was the result of a continuous struggle to grapple with the philosophical problems that were under discussion in Germany at the time. Marx himself was a follower of Hegel once.While discarding idealism of Hegel in the process of these debates , Marx not only accepted and acclaimed his revolutionary philosophy of dialectics. He even went to the extent of defending Hegel despite his erroneous idealism , precisely because of his revolutionary dialectics.On the other hand, there was a philosopher at the time who developed materialism to an extent hitherto unknown. He was Ludwig Feuerbach. His masterpiece, The Essence of Christianity had a profound liberating effect on Marx. He acclaimed Feuerbach's achievements despite his non-dialectical shortcomings.In his philosophical itinerary Marx did not stop at praising Hegel and Feuerbach , but went to the extent of transcending both of them with dialectical materialism. In this endeavour he was influenced by the intellectual atmosphere prevailing at the time , which included scathing criticisms levelled against religion by various other thinkers. Marx transcended all these philosophers and thinkers, not by debunking them wholesale, but by subjecting them to severe criticism while giving them their due share. Two of his main books - The Holy Family and German ideology - attest to that. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 which was published only in 1933 amply demonstrates to what an extent Marx was concerned with the plight of human kind even at the age of 26 and how profoundly he philosophized on the alienation, estrangement , etc.
If Marx was confined to Germany, he could not have become what he eventually has become. Given the intellectual atmosphere prevailing at that time in Germany , it was totally unthinkable that he could have written a world-shaking economic treatise such as DAS KAPITAL, grappling with the laws of capitalism, for the simple reason that Germany was not even a nation at the time, let alone a capitalist country.In fact the paucity of economic literature in Germany was self-evident. Even to grapple with socialist ideas he had to go beyond the confines of Germany, because it was essentially a country of philosophy where socialism was rarely discussed.So he had to cross the frontiers. The opportunity was provided by dictatorial absolute monarchy which , through its repressive actions, compelled him , not only to leave Germany, but also to leave whichever country he had to go. That's how he ultimately had to domicile in England.
Thus he was fortunate enough to combine German philosophy, French socialism and English political economy , which were characterised by Lenin as the three components parts of Marxism.In studying and assimilating philosophy, socialism and political economy Marx was unique among all the thinkers of Europe at the time. No one among all the prominent thinkers at the time, for that matter even now, has no record of writing on all these matters. Marx, on the contrary, has a written on all the fields, not just books, but world shattering books,read even now, not only by Marxists, but also by scholars as well as class conscious workers, not only in one country, but throughout the world.Not only that. Even books, sometimes big volumes, are written explaining, commenting and attacking his books. It is indeed astonishing that Karl Marx, who had a very rudimentary knowledge of economics ,if he had any, when he left Germany at the age of 22 could attain such a mass wealth of knowledge on economics without going to any educational institution, let alone a university, so as to write the most thoroughgoing critique of capitalism ever written, finding a place among classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc.While those economists made great contributions towards the understanding of capitalism and ,in fact, paved the way for Marx himself to transcend their findings, it is a well known fact that their books are rarely read even among academics, while Marx is read not only by well known academics, but also and above all by thousands upon thousands of activists who are fighting to change for a 'better world' and his books are translated into hitherto untranslated languages even after proclamation of final collapse of Marxism by prophets of capitalism, Sinhala translaltion ,by the way, being the latest example.
DAS KAPITAL is not the only economic writing of Marx. While preparing for his magnum opus , in 1859 he published a concise treatise entitled A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. GRUNDRISSE which was published in 1939 (English translation in 1973) shows conclusively how methodically he prepared for his final contribution.
What should not be forgotten and what should be emphasized in this regard is the fact that this world-shaking book was written not by a man isolated himself from the world.Oh no! He was very much in the midst of each and every political and social struggle that convulsed Europe. Revolutions spreading throughout Europe in 1848 was the focal point of his activities at the time.In fact another world shattering document , THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, was written as the clarion call of the Communist League which was preparing for the impending revolutionary storm.The explosive revolutionary nature of this Manifesto, which has no comparable document in the past and since then, exerted such an unimaginable influence among the downtrodden masses throughout the world that it was called the Bible of the working class, notwithstanding its superstitious connotations.Among other books he has written during this period include such monumental books such as Poverty of Philosophy, The Civil War in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
It should be emphasized that this genius who was contributing these big tomes has not confined himself to writing alone.Of course not. In fact all his writings inextricably linked to his revolutionary activities. He was true to his world-famous historic saying that "the task of philosophers is not to interpret the world but to change it.' To change the world he whole heartedly and most vigorously participated in the revolutionary working class movement of the day by organizing the Communist League in1848 and the First International in1864.It Is not surprising that he could not complete his magnum opus -CAPITAL - during his lifetime. What is most surprising is that he could contribute such a monumental work amidst all the hectic revolutionary activities in addition to living in abject poverty, even losing some of his children prematurely. Any other intellectual would have given up but he persevered and bequeathed to the world such intellectual wonders. It is not for nothing that Engels once wrote regarding his death that 'mankind is shorter by a head and by the most remarkable head of our time.''
It is this head that nourished many other heads throughout the world and later paved the way for the victory of the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky, bringing the working class into power, shattering the world capitalist system and bringing the most powerful dictatorial dynasties to their knees and making them disappear from the history for ever.Not a single philosopher, thinker, political scientist, or anyone for that matter, has been able to inspire a movement of such world- historic proportions.The inspiration and guidance of Marx did not stop at the frontiers of Russia. It embraced the whole word and enabled parties claiming to be Marxists, despite their Stalinist distortions, to establish workers states, however deformed they were.Even today, when the invincibility of the globalized liberal democracy is proclaimed by bourgeois ideologues, whenever and wherever capitalism is confronted with crises , even the bourgeois ideologues as well as politicians were and are compelled to resort to Marx' s teachings not only to find a way to solve them , but also to understand the root causes of the crises. Such is the strength of his ideas even after 200 years since his birth.
As far as the world working class is concerned, studying and assimilating Marx's ideas is not a task that could be consigned for an emergency situation, but a day-to-day task if it were to capture power and replace the rapacious capitalist system with a democratically planned and democratically managed socialist system, dumping Stalinist dictatorial brutality for ever.
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Why Marx is great - PLEKHANOV
A great man is great, not in his personal features lending an individual complexion to historic events but in his possession of traits which makes him the most capable of serving his time's great social needs, which have arisen under the influence of general and particular causes. In his well-known book on heroes and hero worship, Carlyle calls great men Beginners. This is a very apt description.A great man is precisely a Beginner because he sees farther than others do and his desires are stronger than in others.He solves scientific problems raised by the previous course of society's intellectual development; he indicates the new social needs created by the previous development of social relations; he assumes the initiative in meeting those needs. He is a hero, not in the sense that he can halt or change the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of that necessary and unconscious course.Therein lie all his significance, all his power. But it is a vast significance, and awesome power.
(On The Individual's Role In History - Geogi Plekhanov- Selected Philosophical Works-Vol.2-p.314 - Progress Publishers, Moscow -1976 )
From an opponent of Marx
Science progress through trial and error.Marx tried, and although he erred in his main doctrine, he did not try in vain.He opened and sharpened our eyes in many ways.A return to pre-Marxian social science is inconceivable.All modern writers are indebted to Marx, even if they do not know it.This is especially true of those who disagree with his doctrines, as I do; and I readily admit that my treatment , for example of Plato and Hegel , bears the stamp of his influence.
One cannot do justice to Marx without recognizing his sincerity.His open-mindedness, his sense of facts, his distrust of verbiage, and especially of moralizing verbiage , made him one of the world's most influential fighters against hypocrisy and pharisaism.He had a burning desire to help the oppressed, and was fully conscious of the need for proving himself in deeds, and not only in words.His main talents being theoretical , he devoted immense labour to forging what he believed to be scientific weapons for the fight to improve the lot of the vast majority of men.His sincerity in his search for truth and his intellectual honesty distinguish him, I believe, from many of his followers.. Marx's interest in social science and social philosophy was fundamentally a practical interest.He saw in knowledge a means of promoting the progress of man.
(Karl Popper - The open Society And its Enemies -Vol. 2 - p. 90- Routledge 2003 )
Engels On the Historic Role of Marx
Just as Darwin discovered the laws of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the laws of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat,drink,have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion etc; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by given people or during a given epoch from the foundation upon which the Engelsstate institutions, the legal conceptions, art and even the ideas on religion of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must therefore be explained, instead if vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.
Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated - and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially - in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made an independent discoveries.
Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force.However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general....
For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another. to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and needs, conscious of the conditions of its emanicipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival...
His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work!.
( Engels- Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx- Marx/Engels Selected Works -Vol.2 - pp.167/69 - (1883)
Marx on Marx
My favourite virtue..............................Humanity
My favourite quality of man.................moral courage
My favourite Quality of woman............devotion
Ideal of Happiness.............................
Ideal of misery...................................
The vice I excuse................................Prodigality
The vice I detest................................Envy
My aversion.......................................Knights,priests,soldiers
Favourite occupation........................Reading
Characters of history I most dislike..Bonaparte and his nephew
Favourite poet.................................Shakespeare
Favourite prose writer.....................Cervantes
Favourite composer.........................Handel,Beethoven,Wagner
Favourite colour..............................Red
Favourite maixim...........................''To thine own self be true ''
Favourite motto.............................All for one and one for all
(Franzisca Kugelman -Marx and Engels Through the Eyes of Their Contemporaries - p.188)
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Somewhat different version appears in the biography of Marx by Francis Wheen. It is as follows:
Your favourite virtue Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman Weakness
Your chief characteristic Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness To fight
Your idea of misery Submission
The vice you excuse most gullibility
The vice you detest most Servility
Your aversion Martin Tupper (popular Victorian
author)
Favourite occupation Book-worming
Favourite prose writer Diderot
Favourite hero Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine Gretchen
Favourite flower Daphne
Favourite colour Red
Favourite name Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish Fish
Favourite maxi Nothing human is alien to me
Favourite motto Everything should be doubted
(Karl Marx --A life - Francis Wheen -pp.387/888)
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LET'S LEARN MARXISM
Part 1
Historical Materialism
The conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term ''civil society'' , that, the anatomy of this civil society, however has to be sought in political economy...the general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, become the guiding principle of my studies can be summarized as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite social relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.The change in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic- in short, ideological forms in which men became conscious of this conflict and fight it out.Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs making progress in the economic development of society.The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individual social conditions of existence- - but the productive forces developing within the bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism.The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.
Marx - (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy -pp.20/22 -1859)
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The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their lives, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.
The first premise of all human history is , of course, the existence of living human individuals.Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.Of course we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself - geological, oro-hydrographical, climate and so on. All historical writings must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life. The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the means of subsistence they actually find in existence and have to reproduce.
(Marx- German Ideology - Marx/Engels Collected Works (MECW)- Vol. 5 - p.31 (1845 )
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The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men- the language of real life.Conceiving,thinking, the mental intercourse of men at this stage still appears as the direct efflux of their material behaviour.The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms.Consciousness can never be anything else than the conscious being, and the being of men is their actual life process.If in all ideology of men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura , this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical process as the inversion of objects on their retina does from their physical life-process.
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descend from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of descending from earth to heaven. That is to say, not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagines, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh; but setting out from real active men, and on the basis of their real life process demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes 0f this life-process. The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life- process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter,along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. For the first manner of approach the starting point is consciousness taken as the living individual; for the second manner of approach, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their conscio usness.
( Marx- German ideology - MECW -Vol. 5 _pp.36/37 (1845 )
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The materialist Conception of history starts from the proposition that the production ( of the means to support human life ) and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged.From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in man's brain, not in man's better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in the changes in the modes of production and exchange.They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason , and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange, changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented, spun out of the head, but discovered with the aid of the head in the existing material facts of production.
(Engels -Ani-Duhring.- pp.365/66 -(1878)
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There has also been a discussion in the VOLKSTIBUNE about the distribution of products in future society, whether this will take place according to the amount of work done or otherwise. The question has been approach very '' materialistically'' in opposition to certain idealistic phraseology about justice. But strangely enough it has not struck anyone that, after all, the method of distribution essentially depends on how much there is to distribute, and that this must surely change with the progress of production and social organisation, so that the method of distribution may also change. But to everyone who took part in the discussion. '' socialist society '' appeared not as something undergoing continuous change and progress but as a stable affair fixed once for all, which must, therefore, have a method of distribution fixed once for all. All one reasonably do, however, is
1) to try and discover the method of distribution to be used at the beginning, and
2) to try and find the general tendency of the further development.But about this I do not find a single word in the whole debate.
In general, the word ''materialistic'' serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is labelled without further study, that is, they stick on this label and then consider the question disposed of.But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh; the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce from them political, civil-law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them. Up to now but little has been done here because only a few people have got down to it seriously. In this field we can utilize heaps of help, it is immensely big and anyone who will work seriously can achieve much and distinguish himself. But instead of this too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase historical materialism ( and everything can be turned into a phrase) only in order to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge - for economic history is still in it swaddling clothes! - constructed into a neat system as quickly as possible, and they then deem themselves something very tremendous.And after that a Barth can come along and attack the thing itself, which in his circles has indeed been degraded to a mere phrase.
(Engels to C.Schmidt - Marx/Engels - Selected Correspondence (MESC) -pp.415/16 (1890)
Misconceptions of historical materialism
According to the materialist conception of history , the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of life.More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (this is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible ) the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary.Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.
We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one...
In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant - the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition.For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion.But from the fact that the wills of individuals - each of whom desires what he is impelled to do by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances ( either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general )- do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.
I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources and not at second hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a most excellent example of its application.There are also may allusions to it in Capital. Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science and Ludwig Feuerbach and The End of Classical German Philosophy, in which I have given the most detailed account of historical materialism which,as far as I know, exists.
Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it.We had to emphasize the main principle vis-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or opportunity to give their due to other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without much ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly....
(Engels to J. Bloch - (MESC ) pp.417/19 (1890))
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As to the realms of ideology which soar still higher in the air -religion, philosophy, etc.,- these have a prehistoric stock, found already in existence by and taken over in the historical period, of what we should today call bunk.These various false conceptions of nature, of man's own being, of spirits, magic forces, etc., have for the most part only a negative economic element as their basis; the low economic development of the prehistoric period is supplemented and also partially conditioned and even caused by the false conceptions of nature. And even though economic necessity was the main driving force of the progressive knowledge of nature and has become ever more so, it would be surely be pedantic to try and find economic causes for all this primitive nonsense. The history of science is the history of the gradual clearing away of this nonsense or rather of its replacement by fresh but always less absurd nonsense. The peple who attend to this belong in their turn to special spheres in the division of labour and appear to themselves to be working in an independent field. And to the extent that they form an independent group within the social division of labour, their production, including their errors, react upon the whole development of society, even on its economic development. But all the same they themselves are in turn under the dominating influence of economic development. In philosophy, for instance, this can be most readily proved for the bourgeois period. Hobbes was the first modern materialist in the eighteenth century ) but he was an absolutist in a period when the absolute monarchy was at its height throughout Europe and England entered the lists against the people. Locke, both in religion and politics, was the child of the class compromise of 1688.The English deists and their more consistent continuators - the French materialists- were the true philosophers of the bourgeoisie , the French even of the bourgeois revolution. The German philistine runs through German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. But as a definite sphere in the division of labour, the philosophy of every epoch presupposes certain definite thought material handed down to its predecessors, from which it take its start. And that is why economically backward countries can still play first fiddle in philosophy: France in the eighteenth century as compared with England, on whose philosophy the French based themselves, and later Germany as compared with both. But in France as well as Germany philosophy and the general blossoming of literature at that time were the result of a rising economic development. I consider the ultimate supremacy of economic development established in theses spheres too, but it comes to pass within the limitations imposed by the particular sphere itself.. Here economy creates nothing anew, but it determines the way in which the thought material found in existence is altered and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly, for it is the political, legal and moral reflexes which exert the greatest direct influence on philosophy.
(Engels to C.Schmidt - MESC- pp.423/24 (1890)
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
Concept of Matter
Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which bis given to man by his sensation, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them. Therefore to say that such a concept can become ''antiquated'' is childish talk, a senseless repetition of the arguments of fashionable reactionary philosophy.Could the struggle between materialism and idealism, struggle between the tendencies or lines of Plato and Democritus in philosophy, the struggle between religion and science, the denial of objective truth and its assertion, the struggle between the adherents of super sensible knowledge and its adversaries, have become antiquated during the two thousand years of the development of philosophy?
Acceptance or rejection of the concept matter is a question of the confidence man places in the evidence of his sense organs, a question of the sources of our knowledge, a question which has been asked and debated from the very inception of philosophy, which may be disguised in a thousand different garbs by professorial clowns , but which can no more become antiquated than the question whether the source of human knowledge is sight and touch, hearing and smell.To regard our sensations as images of the external world, to recognize objective truth, to hold the materialist theory of knowledge - these are all one and the same thing.
Lenin - Materialism and Empirio-Criticism -Collected Works -Vol.14 - pp.129/30 (1909)
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The Machists ( the followers of Ernst Mach ) contemptuously shrug their shoulders at the ''antiquated'' view of the ''dogmatists'', the materialists who still cling to the concept matter, which supposedly has been refuted by ''recent science'' and ''recent positivism''. We shall speak separately of the new theories of Physics on the structure of matter. But it is absolutely unpardonable to confuse, as the Machists do, any particular theory of the structure of matter with the epistemological category, to confuse the problem of the new properties of new aspects of matter (electrons, for example ) with the old problem of the theory of knowledge, with the problem of the sources of our knowledge, the existence of objective truth, etc.,.. Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensation, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensation while existing independently of them.
(Lenin - Materialism and Empirio-Criticism- Collected Works - Vol.14 - pp.129/30)
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Materialism and idealism differ in their answers to the question of the source of our knowledge and of the relation of knowledge and of the ''mental'' in general) to the physical world; while the question of the structure of matter, of atoms and electrons, is a question that concerns only this physical world.'' When the physicists say matter 'disappears'' they mean that hitherto science reduced its investigations of the physical world to three ultimate concepts; matter,electricity and ether; now only the two latter remain.For it has become possible to reduce matter to electricity; the atom can be explained as resembling an infinite small solar system, within which negative electrons move around a positive electron.. ''Matter disappears'' means that the limit within which we have hitherto known matter disappears and that our knowledge is penetrating deeper; properties of matter are likewise disappearing which formerly seemed absolute , immutable and primary...
... the recognition of immutable elements, ''of the immutable essence of things'' and so forth, is not materialism, but metaphysical, ie, anti-dialectical materialism...
But dialectical materialism insist on the approximate,relative character of every scientific theory of structure of matter and its properties; it insists on the absence of absolute boundaries in nature, on the transformation of moving matter from one state into another, that from our point of view is apparently irreconcilable with it, and so forth.
(ibid- pp.260/61)
Matter and Motion
`
Motion in the most general sense, conceived as the mode of existence, the inherent attribute, of matter, comprehends all changes and processes occuring in the universe, from mere change of place right up to the thinking.The investigation of the nature of motion had as matter of course to start from the lowest, simplest forms of this motion and learn to grasp these before it could achieve anything in the way of explanation of the higher and more complicated forms....
All motion is bound up with some change of place,whether it be change of heavenly bodies, terrestrial masses , molecules, atom or ether particles. The higher the form of motion, the smaller this change of place.It is in no way exhaust the nature of motion. It, therefore, has to be investigated before anything else.
It already becomes evident here that matter is unthinkable without motion. And if, in addition, matter confronts us as something given, equally uncreatable as as indestructible, it follows that motion also is indestructible. It became impossible to reject this conclusion as soon as it was recognized that the universe is a system, an inter-connection of bodies.
( Engels -Dialectics of Nature - pp.70/71 )
Time and Space
Recognising The existence of objective reality, ie., matter in motion,independently of our mind, materialism must also inevitably recognise the objective reality of time and space, in contrast above all to kantianism, which in this question sides with idealism and regards time and space not as objective realities but as forms of human understanding.... There is nothing in the world but matter in motion, and matter in motion cannot move otherwise than in space and time.Human conception of space and time are relative, but these relative conceptions go to compound absolute truth. These relative conceptions, in their development, move towards absolute truth and approach nearer and nearer to it. The mutability of human conceptions of space and time no more reputes the objective reality of space and time than the mutability of scientific knowledge of the structure and form of matter in motion refutes the objective reality of the external world.
(Materialism and Empirio-criticism- Lenin - collected works - Vol.14-pp.175 (1909)
Dialectical Method
What Marx and Engels called the dialectical method - as against the metaphysical - is nothing else than the scientific method in sociology, which consists in regarding society as a living organism in a state of constant development ( and not as something mechanically concatenated and therefore permitting all sorts of arbitrary combinations of separate social elements ) and organism the study of which requires an objective analysis of production relations that constitutes the given social formation and an investigation of its laws of functioning and development.
(What the Friends of the People Are? - Lenin - Collected Works - Vol.1 .p.165 )
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The Greek Philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic intellect of them, had already analysed the most essential forms of dialectical thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (e,g. Descartes and Spinoza ) had especially through English influence, become more and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning , by which also the French of the eighteenth century were almost wholly dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectics. We need only call to mind Diderot's Le Neveau de remeau,and Rousseau's Discourse Sur L'origine et Les Fondaments de L'inegalite Permis les Hommes.
(Engels- Anti-Duhring - PP.32/33 )
But you ought on no account to read Hegel as Herr Barth has done, namely in order to discover the paralogism and rotten dodges which served him as levers in construction.That is pure schoolboy's work.It is much more important to discover the truth and the genius which lie beneath the false form and within the artificial connections.Thus the transitions from one category or from one contradiction to the next are nearly always arbitrary, often made through a pun.
Hegel's dialectics is upside down because it is supposed to be the ''self-development of thought '' of which the dialectics of facts therefore is only a reflection, whereas really the dialectics in our heads is only the reflection of the actual development going on in the world of nature and of human history in obedience to dialectical forms.
(Engels to Schmidt -MESC - pp.438/39 (1891 )
Marx's Dialectics
My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, ie., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ""the Idea '', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the the external form of the idea '' With me, on the contrary, the idea is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
The mystifying side of the Hegelian dialectic I criticized nearly thirty years ago, at the time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of Das kapital'' it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre... who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mandelsohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, ie., as '' a dead dog.'' I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectics suffering Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational within the mystical shell.
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to borgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing imposes upon it,and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
(Marx - Capital- Afterword to the second German Edition - Vol.1 - pp.19/20 (1873 )
It is ,therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development , as well as thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three
the law of transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
the law of interpenetration of opposites;
the law of the negation of the negation
All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought: the first, in the first part of his Logic, in the Doctrine of Being; the second fills the whole of the second and by far the most important part of his Logic, the Doctrine of Essence; finally, the third figures as the fundamental law for the construction of the whole system. The mistake lies in the fact that these laws are foisted on the nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them. This is the source of the whole forced and often outrageous treatment; the universe, willy-nilly, has to conform to a system of thought which itself is only the product of a definite stage of evolution of human thought.If we turn the thing around, and then everything becomes simple, and the dialectical laws that took so extremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at once become simple and clear as noonday.
( Engels- Dialectics of Nature - pp.63/64 )
One could perhaps present these elements in greater detail as follows:
1) the objectivity of consideration ( not examples, not divergence) but the Thing - in- Itself.
2) the entire totality of the manifold relations of this thing to others.
3) the development of this thing (phenomenon, respectively), its own movements, its own life.
4) the internally contradictory tendencies ( and sides) in this thing.
5) the thing (phenomenon etc.,) as the sum and unity or opposites.
6 the struggle, respectively unfolding, of these opposites, contradictory striving,etc.
7) the union of analysis and synthesis, the breakdown of the separate parts and the totality, the summation of these parts.
8)the relations of each thing (phenomenon, not only manifold, but general, universal.) Each thing (phenomenon, process,etc.,) is connected with every other.
9) not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, - quality, features, side, property into every other ( into its opposite? )
10) the endless process of the discovery of new sides, relations, etc.
11) the endless process of the deepening of man's knowledge of the thing, of phenomena , processes,etc., from appearance to essence and from less profound to more profound essence.
12) from co-existence to causality and from one form of connection and reciprocal dependence to another, deeper, more general form.
13) the repetition at a higher stage of certain features, properties, etc., of the lower and
14) the apparent return to the old (negation of the negation )
15) the struggle of content with form and conversely. The throwing off of the form, the transformation of the content.
16) the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa (15 and16 are examples of 9
(Lenin- Collected Works - Vol.38 _ pp221/22 )
Ludwig Feuerbach
Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious,critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field.He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite attitude ( of the others )
Feuerbach's great achievement is:
1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, ie, another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence eqally to be condemned.
The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of ''man to man'' the basic principle of the theory;
3)His opposing to the negation of negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.
Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting out from the positive facts which we know by the senses ) as follows.
Hegel sets out from the estrangement of substance , from the infinite, the abstractly universal ) - from the absolute and fixed abstraction; which means, put in popular way,that he sets out from religion and theology.
Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and posits the actual, sensuous, real, finite particular ( philosophy, annulment of religion and theology.)
Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction. the finite - restoration of religion and theology.
(Marx- Economic and philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 - MECW -Vol.3-pp.328/29 )
Then came Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. With one blow it pulverized the contradiction, in that without circumlocutions it placed materialism on the throne again.Nature exist independent of all philosophy.It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflections of our own existence. The spell was broken: the ''system'' was exploded and cast aside, and the contradiction, shown to exist only in our imagination, was dissolved. One must himself have experience the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it.Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians. How enthusiastically Marx greeted new conception and how much - in spite of all critical reservations - he was influenced by it, one may read in the Holy Family.
Even the shortcomings of the book contributed to its immediate effect. Its literary, sometimes even high-flown, style secured for it a large public and was at any rate refreshing after long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianising. The same is true of its extravagant deification of love, which, coming after the now intolerable sovereign rule of ''pure reason '' had it excuse, if not justification...
But what we must not forget is that it was precisely these two weaknesses of Feuerbach that the '' true socialism '', which had been spreading like a plague in ''educated'' Germany since 1844, took its starting point, putting literary phrases in the place of scientific knowledge, the liberation of mankind by means of ''love'' in place of the emanicipation of the proletariat through the economic transformation of production, losing itself in the nauseous fine writing and ecstasies of love typified by Herr Karl Grun.
Another thing we must not forget is this : the Hegalian school disintegrated, but Hegelian philosophy was not overcome through criticism... Feuerbach broke through the system and simply discarded it. But a philosophy is not dispose of by the mere assertion that it is false. And so powerful a work as Hegaelian philosophy, which had exercised so enormous an influence on the intellectual development of the nation, could not be disposed of by simply being ignored. It had to be '' sublated'' in its own sense, that is, in the sense that while its form had to be annihilated through criticism, the new content which had been won through it had to be saved.
But in the meantime, the revolution of 1848 thrust the whole philosophy aside as unceremoniously as Feuerbach had thrust aside Hegel. And in the process Feuerbach himself was also pushed into the background.
( Engels - Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy - MESW -Vol.2 - pp.367/68 (1888)
Hegel Was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the appreciation of necessity. '' Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood.'' Freedom does not onsist in the dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends, This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves - two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore, the freer a man's judgement in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content this judgement will be determined: while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control.Freedom therefore consist in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development. The first men who separated themselves from the natural kingdom were in all essential as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom. On the threshold of human history stands the discovery that mechanical motion can be transformed into heat; the production of fire by friction; at the close of the development so far gone through stands the discovery that heat can be transformed into mechanical motion: the steam engine.
Real natural science dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and thence onward it had advanced with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of nature into its individual parts the grouping of the different processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal antomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms - these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature that have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of work has also left usas legacy the habit observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.
To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other, and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once and for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antithesis.'' His communication is 'yea' yea, nay, nay;' for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.'' For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stands in a rigid antithesis one to the other.
At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense, only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, reatricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things , it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets yhe begining and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees. For everyday purposes we know and can say. e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgeled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyon which the killing of the mother in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.
In like manner, every organic being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without, and get rid of other matter; every moment some cells of the body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organic being is always itself, and yet something other than itself...
Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed and despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.
none of these processes and modes of thought enters into yhe framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin , and ending...
( Engels - Anti-Duhring - pp.34/36 (1878 )
( Lenin - Collected Works - Vol.1 - pp.163/64 (1894 )
Human thought then by its very nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth , which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths. Each step in the development of science adds new grains to the some of absolute truth, but the limits of the truth of each scientific proposition are relative, now expanding , now shrinking with the growth of knowledge..
From the standpoint of modern materialism,ie., Marxism, the limits of approximation of our knowledge to objective, absolute truth are historically conditional, but the existence of such truth is unconditional , and the that we are approaching nearer to it is also unconditional.The contours of the picture are historically conditional, but the fact that this picture depicts an objectively existing model is unconditional. When and under what circumstances we reached, in our knowledge of the essential nature of things, the discovery of alizarin in coal tar or the discovery of electrons in the atom is historically conditional; but that every such discovery is an advance of ''absolutely objective knowledge'' is unconditional. In a word, every ideology is historically conditional, but it is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology, ( as distinct, for instance from religious ideology ) there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature.
(Materialism and Empirio-Criticism- Lenin -Collected Works - Vol.14 - pp.135/36 (1909 )
Firstly,Engels at the very outset of his argument recognizes laws of nature,laws of external nature , the necessity of nature- i.e., all that Mach, Avenarius, Petzoldt and co. characterise as '' metaphysics''...
Secondly, Engels does not attempt to contrive ''definitions'' of freedom and necessity the kind of scholastic definitions with which the reactionary professors (like Avenarius and their disciples (like Bogdanov ) are most concerned. Engels takes the knowledge and will of the man, on the one hand, and the necessity of nature, on the other, and instead of giving any definitions, simply says that the necessity of nature is primary, and human will and mind secondary. The latter must necessarily and inevitably adapt themselves to the former, Engels regards this as so obvious that he does not waste explaining his views..
Thirdly,Engels does not doubt the existence of'' blind necessity.''He admits the existence of a necessity unknown to man... The development of the collective knowledge of humanity as a whole present us at every step with examples of the transformation of the unknown ''thing-in-itself '',into the known ''thing-for-us'', of the transformation of blind unknown necessity, ''necessity-in-itself'' into the known '' necessity for us.''
Fourthly, in the above mentioned argument Engels plainly employs the salto-vitale method in philosophy , that is to say, he makes a leap from theory to practice. Not a single one of the learned ( and stupid ) professors of philosophy, in whose footsteps our Machists follow, would ever permit himself to make such a leap, for this would be disgraceful thing for a devotee of ''pure science '' to do. For them the theory of knowledge, which demands the cunning concoction of ''definitions'' is one thing, while practice is another. For Engels, all living human practice permeates the the theory of knowledge itself and provides an objective criterion of truth.
(Trotsky - Culture and Socialism - Problems of Everyday Life - p.233 )
Dialectical Thinking
Dialectic is neither fiction nor mysticism, but a science of the forms of our thinking in so far as it is not limited to the daily problems of life, but attempts to arrive at an understanding of more complicated and drawn-out processes. The dialectic and formal logic bear a relationship similar to that between higher and lower mathematics.
The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion. Dialectical thinking gives to concepts, by means of closer approximations, corrections, concretisations, a richness of content and flexibility. I would even say a succulence which to a certain extent bring them close to living phenomena. Not capitalism in general, but a given capitalism at a given stage of development. Not a workers' state but a given workers' state in a backward country in an imperialist encirclement, etc.
Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality. Hegel in his Logic established a series of laws; change of quantity into quality, development through contradictions, conflict of content and form, interruption of continuity, change of possibility into inevitability, etc., which are just as important for theoretical thought as is the simple syllogism for more elementary tasks...
We call our dialectic , materialist, since its roots are neither in heaven nor in the depths ofour ''free will'', but in objective reality, in nature. Consciousnessgrew out of unconscious, psychology out of physiology, organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of nebulae. On all rungs of this ladder of development, the quantitative changes were transformed into qualitative. Our thought, including dialectical thought, is only one of the forms of the expressions of changing matter. There is place within this system for neither God, nor Devil , nor immortal soul, nor eternal norms of laws and morals. The dialectic of thinking, having grown out of the dialectic of nature,possesses consequently a thorough materialist character.
( Trotsky - In Defense of Marxism -pp.49/51 (1939)
(Leon Trotsky _ In Defense of Marxism - p.45 - (1939)
Dialectics and Pragmatism
It is absolutely necessary to explain why the American ''radical'' intellectuals accept Marxism without the dialectic (a clock without a spring. ) The secret is simple. In no other country has there been such rejection of the class struggle as in the land of 'unlimited opportunity . ' The denial of social contradictions as the moving force of development led to the denial of the dialectic as the logic of contradictions in the domain of the theoretical thought. Just as in the sphere of politics it was thought possible that everybody could be convinced of the correctness of a ''just'' program by means of clever syllogisms and society could be reconstructed through ''rational'' measures, so in the sphere of theory it was accepted as proved that Aristotelian logic, lowered to the level of ''common sense,'' was sufficient for the solution of all questions.
Pragmatism, a mixture of rationalism and empiricism became the national philosophy of the United States. The theoretical methodology of Max Eastman is not fundamentally different from the methodology of Henry Ford - both regard living society from the point of view of an ''engineer''....Historically the present disdainful attitude toward the dialectic is explained simply by the fact that the grandfathers and great grandmothers of Max Eastman and others did not need the dialectic in order to conquer territory and enrich themselves. But times have changed and the philosophy of pragmatism has entered a period of bankruptcy just as has American capitalism.
Dialectical Method
What Marx and Engels called the dialectical method - as against the metaphysical - is nothing else than the scientific method in sociology, which consists in regarding society as a living organism in a state of constant development ( and not as something mechanically concatenated and therefore permitting all sorts of arbitrary combinations of separate social elements ) and organism the study of which requires an objective analysis of production relations that constitutes the given social formation and an investigation of its laws of functioning and development.
(What the Friends of the People Are? - Lenin - Collected Works - Vol.1 .p.165 )
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The Greek Philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic intellect of them, had already analysed the most essential forms of dialectical thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (e,g. Descartes and Spinoza ) had especially through English influence, become more and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning , by which also the French of the eighteenth century were almost wholly dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectics. We need only call to mind Diderot's Le Neveau de remeau,and Rousseau's Discourse Sur L'origine et Les Fondaments de L'inegalite Permis les Hommes.
(Engels- Anti-Duhring - PP.32/33 )
Hegel's Dialectics
But you ought on no account to read Hegel as Herr Barth has done, namely in order to discover the paralogism and rotten dodges which served him as levers in construction.That is pure schoolboy's work.It is much more important to discover the truth and the genius which lie beneath the false form and within the artificial connections.Thus the transitions from one category or from one contradiction to the next are nearly always arbitrary, often made through a pun.
Hegel's dialectics is upside down because it is supposed to be the ''self-development of thought '' of which the dialectics of facts therefore is only a reflection, whereas really the dialectics in our heads is only the reflection of the actual development going on in the world of nature and of human history in obedience to dialectical forms.
(Engels to Schmidt -MESC - pp.438/39 (1891 )
Marx's Dialectics
My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, ie., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ""the Idea '', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the the external form of the idea '' With me, on the contrary, the idea is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
The mystifying side of the Hegelian dialectic I criticized nearly thirty years ago, at the time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of Das kapital'' it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre... who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mandelsohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, ie., as '' a dead dog.'' I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectics suffering Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational within the mystical shell.
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to borgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing imposes upon it,and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
(Marx - Capital- Afterword to the second German Edition - Vol.1 - pp.19/20 (1873 )
The Most General Laws of Dialectics
It is ,therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development , as well as thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three
the law of transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
the law of interpenetration of opposites;
the law of the negation of the negation
All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought: the first, in the first part of his Logic, in the Doctrine of Being; the second fills the whole of the second and by far the most important part of his Logic, the Doctrine of Essence; finally, the third figures as the fundamental law for the construction of the whole system. The mistake lies in the fact that these laws are foisted on the nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them. This is the source of the whole forced and often outrageous treatment; the universe, willy-nilly, has to conform to a system of thought which itself is only the product of a definite stage of evolution of human thought.If we turn the thing around, and then everything becomes simple, and the dialectical laws that took so extremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at once become simple and clear as noonday.
( Engels- Dialectics of Nature - pp.63/64 )
Elements of Dialectics
One could perhaps present these elements in greater detail as follows:
1) the objectivity of consideration ( not examples, not divergence) but the Thing - in- Itself.
2) the entire totality of the manifold relations of this thing to others.
3) the development of this thing (phenomenon, respectively), its own movements, its own life.
4) the internally contradictory tendencies ( and sides) in this thing.
5) the thing (phenomenon etc.,) as the sum and unity or opposites.
6 the struggle, respectively unfolding, of these opposites, contradictory striving,etc.
7) the union of analysis and synthesis, the breakdown of the separate parts and the totality, the summation of these parts.
8)the relations of each thing (phenomenon, not only manifold, but general, universal.) Each thing (phenomenon, process,etc.,) is connected with every other.
9) not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, - quality, features, side, property into every other ( into its opposite? )
10) the endless process of the discovery of new sides, relations, etc.
11) the endless process of the deepening of man's knowledge of the thing, of phenomena , processes,etc., from appearance to essence and from less profound to more profound essence.
12) from co-existence to causality and from one form of connection and reciprocal dependence to another, deeper, more general form.
13) the repetition at a higher stage of certain features, properties, etc., of the lower and
14) the apparent return to the old (negation of the negation )
15) the struggle of content with form and conversely. The throwing off of the form, the transformation of the content.
16) the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa (15 and16 are examples of 9
(Lenin- Collected Works - Vol.38 _ pp221/22 )
Ludwig Feuerbach
Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious,critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field.He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite attitude ( of the others )
Feuerbach's great achievement is:
1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, ie, another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence eqally to be condemned.
The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of ''man to man'' the basic principle of the theory;
3)His opposing to the negation of negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.
Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting out from the positive facts which we know by the senses ) as follows.
Hegel sets out from the estrangement of substance , from the infinite, the abstractly universal ) - from the absolute and fixed abstraction; which means, put in popular way,that he sets out from religion and theology.
Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and posits the actual, sensuous, real, finite particular ( philosophy, annulment of religion and theology.)
Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction. the finite - restoration of religion and theology.
(Marx- Economic and philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 - MECW -Vol.3-pp.328/29 )
Feuerbach's Historic Role
Then came Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. With one blow it pulverized the contradiction, in that without circumlocutions it placed materialism on the throne again.Nature exist independent of all philosophy.It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflections of our own existence. The spell was broken: the ''system'' was exploded and cast aside, and the contradiction, shown to exist only in our imagination, was dissolved. One must himself have experience the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it.Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians. How enthusiastically Marx greeted new conception and how much - in spite of all critical reservations - he was influenced by it, one may read in the Holy Family.
Even the shortcomings of the book contributed to its immediate effect. Its literary, sometimes even high-flown, style secured for it a large public and was at any rate refreshing after long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianising. The same is true of its extravagant deification of love, which, coming after the now intolerable sovereign rule of ''pure reason '' had it excuse, if not justification...
But what we must not forget is that it was precisely these two weaknesses of Feuerbach that the '' true socialism '', which had been spreading like a plague in ''educated'' Germany since 1844, took its starting point, putting literary phrases in the place of scientific knowledge, the liberation of mankind by means of ''love'' in place of the emanicipation of the proletariat through the economic transformation of production, losing itself in the nauseous fine writing and ecstasies of love typified by Herr Karl Grun.
Another thing we must not forget is this : the Hegalian school disintegrated, but Hegelian philosophy was not overcome through criticism... Feuerbach broke through the system and simply discarded it. But a philosophy is not dispose of by the mere assertion that it is false. And so powerful a work as Hegaelian philosophy, which had exercised so enormous an influence on the intellectual development of the nation, could not be disposed of by simply being ignored. It had to be '' sublated'' in its own sense, that is, in the sense that while its form had to be annihilated through criticism, the new content which had been won through it had to be saved.
But in the meantime, the revolution of 1848 thrust the whole philosophy aside as unceremoniously as Feuerbach had thrust aside Hegel. And in the process Feuerbach himself was also pushed into the background.
( Engels - Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy - MESW -Vol.2 - pp.367/68 (1888)
Theses on Feuerbach
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism- that of Feuerbach included - is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or contemplation, but not as human sensuousness, activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism - but not abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really differentiated from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence in the Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of 'revolutionary', of 'practical-critical' activity.
1) The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking.The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
2)The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. Hence this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts,of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example )
3) Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular foundation detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm is really only to be explained by the self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself, therefore, first be understood in the contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance , once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be criticized in theory and revolutionize in practice.
4) Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous contemplation ; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.
5) Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.
Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled:
i) To establish from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract - isolated -human individual.
ii) The human essence, therefore, can with him be comprehended only as ''genus'', as an internal, dumb generality which merely naturally unites the many individuals.
6) Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the '' religious sentiment'' is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs in reality to a particular form of society.
7) Social life is essentially practical, all mysteries which mislead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
The highest point attained by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism, which does not understand sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in ''civil society.''
9) The standpoint of the old materialism is ''civil'' society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or socialized humanity.
10)THE PHILOSOPHERS HAVE ONLY INTERPRETED THE WORLD IN VARIOUS WAYS ; THE POINT, HOWEVER , IS TO CHANGE IT.
(Marx - MESW -Vol.2 - pp.403/05)
Limitations of the 18th Century Materialism
The materialism of the last century was predominantly mechanical, because at that time, of all natural sciences, only mechanics, and indeed only the mechanics of solid bodies -celestial and terrestrial - in short, the mechanics of gravity, had come to any definite close. Chemistry at that time existed only in the infantile, philogistic form. Biology still lay in swaddling clothes; vegetable and animal organism had been only roughly examined and were explained as the result of purely mechanical cause. What the animal was to Descartes, man was to the materialists of the eighteenth century - a machine. The exclusive application of the standards of mechanics to process of a chemical and organic nature - in which processes the laws of mechanics are, indeed, also valid, but are pushed into the background by other higher laws - constitutes the first specific but at that time inevitable limitation of classical French materialism.
The second specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the the universe as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development. This was in accordance with the level of the natural science of that time, and with the metaphysical, that is , anti-dialectical manner of philosophizing connected with it. Nature,so much was known, was in eternal motion. But according to the ideas of that time, this motion turned, also eternally, in a circle and therefore never moved from the spot; it produced the same results over and over again. This conception was at that time inevitable. The Kantian theory of the origin of the solar system had been put forward but recently and was still regarded merely as a curiosity. The history of the development of the earth, Geology , was still totally unknown, and the conception that the animate natural beings of today are the result of a long sequence of development from the simple to the complex could not at that time scientifically be put forward at all. The unhistorical view of nature was therefore inevitable. We have the less reason to reproach the philosophers of the eighteenth century on this account, since the same thing is found in Hegel. According to him, nature, as a mere ''alienation'' of the idea, is incapable of development in time - capable only of extending its manifoldness in space, so that it displays simultaneously and alongside of one another all the stages of development comprised in it, and is condemned to an eternal repetition of the same processes.
( Engels- Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy- MESW -Vol.2- pp.373/74 (1888 )
Real and Rational
No philosophical proposition has earned more gratitude from narrow minded governments and wrath from equally narrow minded liberals than Hegel's famous statement:'' all that is real is rational; all that is rational real''. That was tangibly a sanctification of things that be, a philosophical benediction bestowed upon despotism, police government, Star Chamber proceedings, and censorship. That is how Fredrick William iii and his subjects understood it. But according to Hegel certainly not everything that exists is also real, without further qualification. For Hegel the attribute of reality belongs only to that which at the same time is necessary: " in the course of its development reality proves to be necessity. '' That which is necessary, however, proves itself in the last resort to be also rational; and, applied to the Prussian state of that time, the Hegelian proposition, therefore, merely means: this state is rational, corresponds to reason, in so far as it is necessary; and if it nevertheless appears to be evil, but still, in spite of its evil character, continues to exist, then the evil character of the government is justified and explained by the corresponding evil character of its subjects. The Prussians of that day had the government that they deserved.
Now, according to Hegel, reality is , however, in no way an attribute predicable of any given state of affairs, social or political, in all circumstances and at all times.On the contrary. The Roman Republic was real, but so was the Roman Empire, which superseded it. In 1789 the French monarchy had become so unreal, that is to say, so robbed of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be destroyed by the Great revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. In this case, therefore, the monarchy was the unreal and the revolution the real. And so, in the course of development, all that was previously real becomes unreal, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its rationality. And in the place of moribund reality comes a new, viable reality - peacefully if the old has enough intelligence to go to its death without a struggle; forcibly if it resists this necessity. Thus the Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself: All that is real in the sphere of human history becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality; and everything which is irrational in the minds of men is destined to become real' however much it may contradict existing apparent reality, In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition; All that exists deserves to perish.
But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy.. that it once for all dealt the death blow to finality of all products of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching , by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained. And what hold good for the realm of philosophical knowledge hold good also for that every other kind of knowledge and also for practical action. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society a perfect ''state'' are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin.But in the face of new higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses its vitality and justification. It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honoured institutions; so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final,absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it (dialectical philosophy) nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away,of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side ; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far; The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute - the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits.
( Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy- MESW - Vol.2 - pp.361/363 )
Freedom and Necessity
( Engels _ Anti-Duhring - p.157 (1878)
Negation of the Negation
... Thus, By characterizing the process as the negation of the negation, Marx does not intend to prove that the process was historically necessary. On the contrary: only after he has proved from history that in fact the process partially already occured, and partially must occur in the future, he in addition characterizes it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law. That is all. It is therefore once again a pure distortion of the facts by Herr Duhring when he declares that the negation of the negation has to serve here as the midwife to deliver the future from the womb of the past...
(Engels - Anti-Duhring - p.185 (1878)
Dialectical and Metaphysical Reasoning
To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other, and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once and for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antithesis.'' His communication is 'yea' yea, nay, nay;' for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.'' For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stands in a rigid antithesis one to the other.
At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense, only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, reatricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things , it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets yhe begining and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees. For everyday purposes we know and can say. e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgeled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyon which the killing of the mother in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.
In like manner, every organic being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without, and get rid of other matter; every moment some cells of the body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organic being is always itself, and yet something other than itself...
Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed and despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.
none of these processes and modes of thought enters into yhe framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin , and ending...
( Engels - Anti-Duhring - pp.34/36 (1878 )
On Hegelian Triad
Engels says that Marx never dreamed of'' proving''anything by means of HEgelian triad, that Marx only studied and investigated the real process, and that the sole criterion of theory recognised by him was its conformity to reality. If, however, it sometimes happened that the development of some particular social phenomenon fitted in with the Hegelian scheme, namely, thesis- negation - negation of the negation, there is nothing surprising about that, for it is no rare thing in nature at all.And Engels proceed to cite examples from natural history..and the social sphere. It is clear to everybody that the main weight of Engel's argument is that materialist must correctly and accurately depict the actual historical process , and that insistence on dialectics, the selection of examples to demonstrate the correctness of the triad, is nothing but a relic of Hegelianism out of which scientific socialism has grown, a relic of its manner of expression. And, indeed, once it has been categorically declared that to ''prove'' anything but triad is absurd, and that nobody even thought of doing so , what significance can attach to examples of ''dialectical'' processes?( Lenin - Collected Works - Vol.1 - pp.163/64 (1894 )
Absolute Truth And Relative Truth
Human thought then by its very nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth , which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths. Each step in the development of science adds new grains to the some of absolute truth, but the limits of the truth of each scientific proposition are relative, now expanding , now shrinking with the growth of knowledge..
From the standpoint of modern materialism,ie., Marxism, the limits of approximation of our knowledge to objective, absolute truth are historically conditional, but the existence of such truth is unconditional , and the that we are approaching nearer to it is also unconditional.The contours of the picture are historically conditional, but the fact that this picture depicts an objectively existing model is unconditional. When and under what circumstances we reached, in our knowledge of the essential nature of things, the discovery of alizarin in coal tar or the discovery of electrons in the atom is historically conditional; but that every such discovery is an advance of ''absolutely objective knowledge'' is unconditional. In a word, every ideology is historically conditional, but it is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology, ( as distinct, for instance from religious ideology ) there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature.
(Materialism and Empirio-Criticism- Lenin -Collected Works - Vol.14 - pp.135/36 (1909 )
Engels and theory of knowledge
Secondly, Engels does not attempt to contrive ''definitions'' of freedom and necessity the kind of scholastic definitions with which the reactionary professors (like Avenarius and their disciples (like Bogdanov ) are most concerned. Engels takes the knowledge and will of the man, on the one hand, and the necessity of nature, on the other, and instead of giving any definitions, simply says that the necessity of nature is primary, and human will and mind secondary. The latter must necessarily and inevitably adapt themselves to the former, Engels regards this as so obvious that he does not waste explaining his views..
Thirdly,Engels does not doubt the existence of'' blind necessity.''He admits the existence of a necessity unknown to man... The development of the collective knowledge of humanity as a whole present us at every step with examples of the transformation of the unknown ''thing-in-itself '',into the known ''thing-for-us'', of the transformation of blind unknown necessity, ''necessity-in-itself'' into the known '' necessity for us.''
Fourthly, in the above mentioned argument Engels plainly employs the salto-vitale method in philosophy , that is to say, he makes a leap from theory to practice. Not a single one of the learned ( and stupid ) professors of philosophy, in whose footsteps our Machists follow, would ever permit himself to make such a leap, for this would be disgraceful thing for a devotee of ''pure science '' to do. For them the theory of knowledge, which demands the cunning concoction of ''definitions'' is one thing, while practice is another. For Engels, all living human practice permeates the the theory of knowledge itself and provides an objective criterion of truth.
(Materialism and Empirio-Criticism - Lenin- Collected Works - Vol.14 -pp.188/190 (1909)
Dialectical Materialism
Dialectics and materialism are the basic elements in the Marxist cognition of the world. But this does not mean at all that they can be applied to ant sphere of knowledge, like an ever-ready master key. It has to be deduced from facts and from their nature and development. Only painstaking work on a vast amount of material enabled Marx to advance the dialectical system of economics to the conception of value as social labour. Marx's historical works were constructed in the same way and even his newspaper articles likewise..Dialectical materialism can be applied to new spheres of knowledge only by mastering them from within.The purging of bourgeois science presupposes a mastery of bourgeois science. You will get nowhere with sweeping criticism or bold commands.Learning and application here go hand in hand with critical reworking. We have the method, but here is enough work for generation to do.(Trotsky - Culture and Socialism - Problems of Everyday Life - p.233 )
Dialectical Thinking
Dialectic is neither fiction nor mysticism, but a science of the forms of our thinking in so far as it is not limited to the daily problems of life, but attempts to arrive at an understanding of more complicated and drawn-out processes. The dialectic and formal logic bear a relationship similar to that between higher and lower mathematics.
The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion. Dialectical thinking gives to concepts, by means of closer approximations, corrections, concretisations, a richness of content and flexibility. I would even say a succulence which to a certain extent bring them close to living phenomena. Not capitalism in general, but a given capitalism at a given stage of development. Not a workers' state but a given workers' state in a backward country in an imperialist encirclement, etc.
Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality. Hegel in his Logic established a series of laws; change of quantity into quality, development through contradictions, conflict of content and form, interruption of continuity, change of possibility into inevitability, etc., which are just as important for theoretical thought as is the simple syllogism for more elementary tasks...
We call our dialectic , materialist, since its roots are neither in heaven nor in the depths ofour ''free will'', but in objective reality, in nature. Consciousnessgrew out of unconscious, psychology out of physiology, organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of nebulae. On all rungs of this ladder of development, the quantitative changes were transformed into qualitative. Our thought, including dialectical thought, is only one of the forms of the expressions of changing matter. There is place within this system for neither God, nor Devil , nor immortal soul, nor eternal norms of laws and morals. The dialectic of thinking, having grown out of the dialectic of nature,possesses consequently a thorough materialist character.
( Trotsky - In Defense of Marxism -pp.49/51 (1939)
Dialectics and the petty bourgeois intellectuals
To demand that every party member occupy himself with the philosophy of dialectics naturally would be lifeless pedantry. But a worker who has gone through the school of the class struggle gains from his own experience an inclination toward dialectical thinking. Even if unaware of this term, he really accepts the method itself and its conclusions. With the petty bourgeois it is worse.There are of course petty bourgeois elements organically linked with the workers, who go over to the proletarian point of view without an internal revolution. But these constitute an insignificant minority.The matter is quite different with the academically traied petty bourgeoisie. Their theoretical prejudices have already been given finished form at the school bench. Inasmuch as they succeeded in gaining a great deal of knowledge both useful and useless without the aid of dialectic, they believe that they can continue excellently through life without it. In reality they dispense with the dialectic only to the extent they fail to check, to polish, and to sharpen theoretically their tools of thought, and to the extent that they fail to break practically from the narrow circle of their daily relationships. When thrown against great events they are easily lost and relapse again into petty bourgeois way of thinking.
(Leon Trotsky _ In Defense of Marxism - p.45 - (1939)
Dialectics and Pragmatism
It is absolutely necessary to explain why the American ''radical'' intellectuals accept Marxism without the dialectic (a clock without a spring. ) The secret is simple. In no other country has there been such rejection of the class struggle as in the land of 'unlimited opportunity . ' The denial of social contradictions as the moving force of development led to the denial of the dialectic as the logic of contradictions in the domain of the theoretical thought. Just as in the sphere of politics it was thought possible that everybody could be convinced of the correctness of a ''just'' program by means of clever syllogisms and society could be reconstructed through ''rational'' measures, so in the sphere of theory it was accepted as proved that Aristotelian logic, lowered to the level of ''common sense,'' was sufficient for the solution of all questions.
Pragmatism, a mixture of rationalism and empiricism became the national philosophy of the United States. The theoretical methodology of Max Eastman is not fundamentally different from the methodology of Henry Ford - both regard living society from the point of view of an ''engineer''....Historically the present disdainful attitude toward the dialectic is explained simply by the fact that the grandfathers and great grandmothers of Max Eastman and others did not need the dialectic in order to conquer territory and enrich themselves. But times have changed and the philosophy of pragmatism has entered a period of bankruptcy just as has American capitalism.
(Leon Trotsky - In Defense of Marxism -pp.43/44 (1939)
Alienation
Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain t to us.It expresses in general abstract formulas.The material process through which private property actually passes and these formulas it then takes for laws.It does not comprehend these laws, i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labour and capital, and between capital and land.When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalist to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain.Similarly, competition comes in everywhere.It is explained from external circumstances.As to how these external and apparently accidental circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing.. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed and the war among the greedy- competition.
Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of freedom of the crafts to the doctrine of the guild, the doctrine of division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate - for comprtition, the freedom of the crafts and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as accidental, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, of the guild system, and of feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences.
Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, avarice, the separation of labour, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and and the devaluation of men, of monopoly and competition, etc.- we have to graspthis whole estrangement connected with the money system.
Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce - namely, the necessary relationship between two things - between, for example, division of labour and exchange.Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of man; that is,he assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained .
We proceed from an actual economic fact.
Thw worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increase his power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity, the more commodities he creates.The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.The labour produces not only commodities ; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity - and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.
This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces -labour's product -confront it as something alien , as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become material; it is the objectification of labour.Labour's realisation is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realisation of labour appears as loss of realisation for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.
All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object.For on thi premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself - his inner world - becomes, the less belongs to his as his own. It is the same as in religion.The more the man puts into God, the less he retains himself. The worker puts his life into the object, but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object.Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects.Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not.Therefore the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him.It means hat the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.
( Marx - Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 - MECW -Vol.3 -pp.270/72 )
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Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production. It is true that labour produces wonderful things for the rich - but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces - but for the worker - hovels. It produces beauty - but for the worker - deformity. It replaces labour by machines, but it throws one section of the workers , back to a barbarous type of labour, and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence - but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism...
Till now we have been considering n the estrangement; the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects,i.e., the workers relationship to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but also in the act of production, within the producing activity itself. How could the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity, of production. If then the product of labour is alienation. production itself must be active, alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarised the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself.
What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour?
First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely in his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor.It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and human heart, operates on the individual independently of him, that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity- so in the worker's activity, not his spontaneous activity.It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
As a result, therefore, man ( the worker ) only feela himself freely active is his animal functions - eating, drinking, procreating, or atmost in his dwelling and in dressing -up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.
Certainly eating drinking, procreating,etc., are genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions.
(Marx -Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 - MECW -Vol.3-pp.273/75 )
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