[Friedrich Engels’] three classical laws of dialectics [are]…the law of “interpenetrating opposites,” the interdependence of components; the “transformation of quantity to quality,” a systems-based view of change that translates incremental inputs into alterations of state; and the “negation of negation,” the direction given to history because complex systems cannot revert exactly to previous states.
Stephen Jay Gould (1976)
Dialectic training of the mind, as necessary to a revolutionary fighter as finger exercises to a pianist, demands approaching all problems as processes and not as motionless categories.
Leon Trotsky (1939)
More important than the specific histories and theory we read is learning how to think and how to study a problem. Analysis that hones how we understand what we read improves our strategic and tactical decision-making.
For Marxists, this is the dialectical method, rooted in Marx’s theory of historical materialism.
Historical materialism is the simple idea that human history develops based on the ‘objective’ way that human societies reproduce themselves: how they produce the ‘stuff of life’, meaning commodities (food, clothing, medicine, housing, etc.) and the services that modify and distribute those commodities. This does not mean that our economic systems determine everything. That was rejected as an interpretation almost as soon as Marx’s method came into being:
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other 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, [for example]: constitutions…[legal] forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants…philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.
(Engels, 1890)
The outlook that Engels is criticizing here is sometimes called “mechanical materialism” and sometimes “economic determinism,” and is related to concepts like “vulgar Marxism” or “class reductionism,” which ignore the dynamic way that historical materialism considers systems as a whole.
The historical materialist outlook does not deny the influence of peoples’ conscious choices. It just tries to situate those choices within what can logically develop from existing social relations. It assumes that, in the big picture, systems that come into being and survive for any meaningful amount of time must rest on a material base. In other words, human choice and ideas matter, but will be formed in part by, and be constrained by, the material basis of society.
The Method of Motion
The dialectical method takes the world as it is and tries to understand the existing (‘concrete’) structures and relations as processes in constant motion, with ’inherent contradictions’ which will influence their behavior.
Any given factual observation we have of the world is like a photograph: ‘34% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree.’ But a photograph is not only not the full story; to some degree, it is a lie, because the world is always in motion. Its motion defines it. Observing human beings, ecosystems, social groupings, and societies at a given moment does not tell us everything about them, and in fact leaves out the most important things, because they are in a constant state of motion or change.
Nothing in the physical world stays in a steady state, nothing in the world is completely independent, and nothing in the world can ever completely revert to an earlier form. Everything is constantly changing – is always interdependent – and therefore will always look both similar to and different from its own earlier states, along with the world around it. Our experience that things are in a steady state is just the limit of our powers of observation.
We treat a tree as a single object, but in fact a ‘tree’ is incoherent without soil, oxygen, and sunlight; we have labeled a particular observable phenomenon as a “tree” but in fact a tree is just a momentary expression of a physical process we happen to observe in a certain way. If we ‘saw’ in millennia rather than days, we would barely even notice a tree, or a flower, or a person, all of which would briefly flicker into and out of existence; but we could lovingly watch forests, hills, or reefs grow and take shape before they erode and disappear.
Thinking of things as existing in a steady state, as having an ‘absolute’ nature, is sometimes called ‘idealism.’ or ‘metaphysics”; it is a still photograph. Nothing in the physical world, that results from or acts in the physical world is in a steady or static state. Everything has to be understood by how it changes over time, and how it relates to the ongoing processes to which it is connected.
Who are you? You are the culmination of millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of reproduction, your personal experiences, the things you’re observing and learning each day. You’re not exactly the same tomorrow as today. Defining ‘you’ by how you are on any given day actually misinforms.
The dialectical method tries to understand the component parts of social phenomena, while also understanding how those component parts all relate to one another and to other systems. It assumes interdependence, motion, and change. It therefore never assumes anything comes into being on its own, or simply as a result of conscious decisions, but instead that it must have emerged as a result of webs of social relations, historical processes, and even dumb luck.
Evolution and History
The historical materialist and dialectical method have a close relationship with Darwinian understanding of systems.
For example, among the observations of ecological systems that Darwin developed was that at any given moment, any ‘new’ biological species will look, to a significant degree, like its preceding form. This is because every species, while it is ‘evolving’ over thousands of generations, still has to continue to survive in its given habitat. Every change between one generation and the next – between parent and child – will have to be small. Big leaps are unlikely to survive, because every species has been honed over millennia to fit into its ecosystem.
Even after drastic ‘speciation’ (divergence into different species), the similarities to a common ancestor are obvious; bodies retain many of the same structures, because the body has to survive. Consider:
As different as these species are, their forelimbs share all the same parts, but developed slowly over time into different proportions and, eventually, different functions – not by accident, but because they share a common ancestor. Even if the changes happened through accelerated periods, at no point was there some ‘big leap’ where completely new internal structures were introduced.
The dialectic method, too, studies how developments in human societies contain some elements of the systems that came before it, but honed, altered, or developed to accommodate new conditions and the ideologies that accompany those changes. One example is in legal systems. The U.S. legal system is based on the English common law system in place at the time of the American Revolution; although the U.S. Constitution and principles of bourgeois democracy changed much about the existing system, it was still built up from that system. In turn, the English legal system derived from feudal Anglo-Saxon legal concepts, blended with French traditions after the Norman conquest – which themselves came from Roman law and Celtic and Gaulish traditions. This is why legal jargon has so many French terms: mortgage, jury, larceny, parole, estoppel, plaintiff, tort, chattel, and bail are all Norman words.
The history of revolutionary governments is, in one sense, a history of revolutionary parties struggling with how to deal with the fact that a system that currently exists cannot just be rebuilt from scratch, but needs to work with the ‘bones’ already in place. They therefore try to figure out how to apply the correct pressures to change the system rapidly. Again, this is because societies are not steady-state organisms, but systems in constant motion from one moment to the next, needing to produce and consume. They need to change while also continuing to function. Even if you want to radically redesign a creature, it must continue to eat and sleep and reproduce from one day to the next or else it will die out.
None of this means that radical change is impossible. It just means that systems we intend to change rather than destroy will always need to be built up based on what is already there, and that we need to understand their modes of motion, their interdependence with other systems, and their internal contradictions – the adversarial pressures within themselves – so that as we apply force to change them, we are doing so in a way that will develop them in a particular direction (or, in some cases, hasten their destruction).
In short, the dialectical method teaches us how to study the processes of change. It takes nothing for granted; it is infinitely curious about why something came into being, where it came from, what it’s made of, and where it can conceivably go based on how it is composed. It is a science of thinking that rejects the idea that a photograph can tell a whole story, and instead pushes us to study the laws of motion that explain why and how something goes from A to B – and, eventually, to C.
