Introduction
A central feature of Marxism (and indeed, Trotskyism) is dialectical materialism. Marx developed his theory of dialectical materialism from his re-interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel borrowed the concept from Heraclitus, an ancient Greek thinker, who famously argued that the world was in flux and contained contradictions. On this basis, he stated that ‘No one steps into the same river twice.’ These apparently banal observations have inspired much philosophical writing ever since. According to Hegel, the world was characterised by the progress of the dialectic, or ‘World-Spirit’, which was the driving force throughout history. The world was in a state of constant transformation, caused primarily by the development of abstract, philosophical ideas and cultural attitudes. The unfolding of history was the result of a series of contradictions being resolved and new ones brought into being. For Hegel, the fundamental battle throughout history had been between the master and the slave. The fundamental contradiction was this – that though the master enjoyed dominion over the slave, he had no one who was his equal and could thereby validate him and confirm his essential humanness. The slave was in a similar dilemma by virtue of being a slave and not having control over the fruits of his own labour. Hegel argued that the ideology of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had changed this situation by bringing about a formal equality between the two, thereby eliminating the master-slave distinction. This had brought about ‘the end of history’, in the sense of the final resolution of the master-slave dialectic. The fundamental contradictions driving human progress had been removed.
Marx rejected Hegel’s belief that the master-slave dichotomy had been ‘resolved’ by the liberal Enlightenment. Marx also rejected Hegel’s belief that ideas were the driving force throughout history – a variation of the philosophical tradition of ‘idealism’, which holds that the world is a product of the mind. This is as opposed to materialism, which holds that the world is the product of matter. Instead, he believed that it was socio-economic conditions that served as the central dynamic in human history. Liberal society was characterised by the distinction between the capitalist class on the one hand, and the working-class on the other. The class interests of the two sides were irreconcilable, and the contradictions within capitalist society were bound to lead to a revolution in which the working-class would seize the means of production and establish a socialist utopia – provided the workers had the political organisation necessary to achieve this. In conjunction with this position, Marx argued against those figures in the ‘Young Hegelian’ movement, like Feuerbach, who held that philosophical and social criticism was the best method of changing society. As Marx famously argued, ‘Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways – the point is to change it.’
During the 1840s, Marx abandoned philosophy, believing it to be a distraction from the task of understanding social and economic issues and organising the working-class. It was left to Friedrich Engels, his close collaborator, to bring Marx’s philosophical views into a more systematic format. This took the form of Engels’ famous polemic Anti-Dühring, published in 1878, in which Engels took on one of Marx and Engels’ chief rivals in the German workers’ movement, who saw his own philosophy as a superior alternative to that of Marxism. Engels continued this work after Marx’s death, and after Engels’ own death in 1895, Karl Kautsky, the chief theoretician of the Second International, took over this role. Together with other figures like Franz Mehring, he popularised Marxism as both a philosophical and a political alternative to liberal capitalism. Prominent figures like Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin etc all received their philosophical education in Engels’ and Kautsky’s Second International. The irony is that whereas Marx had written little on dialectical materialism in his lifetime (indicating that he considered philosophical issues to be of limited importance), his successors elevated his philosophical ‘system’ (largely the artificial creation of Engels and Kautsky) into a religion which supposedly explained every single human and natural phenomenon. (Even the term ‘dialectical materialism’ was coined by Plekhanov, not by Marx and Engels.) Even Marx and Engels would have balked at this attitude – they always emphasised that Marx had merely advanced a hypothesis, and that it was no substitute for close, careful and detailed study of whatever was under discussion. It was Marx, after all, who said ‘Doubt everything.’ This advice was largely ignored. Stalin and his acolytes in the USSR, and Trotsky and his own movement, both treated dialectics as a ‘sacred science’ which gave unique insight into all problems, whether philosophical, political, economic or scientific.
When I was a member of the IMT, dialectics was central to our doctrine (and remains so). Trotsky had a furious polemic in the 1930s with some of his critics in the Trotskyist movement in which he linked their political grievances to their failure to absorb Marxist dialectics, which in turn was linked to their ‘petty-bourgeois’ class origin. It was an ugly and preposterous slander that has poisoned the Trotskyist movement ever since, and been the cause of many a split, sanctified by mountains of quotes from Trotsky’s bigoted and confused but stylistically brilliant prose collection, In Defence of Marxism, published in 1940 and containing an account of the polemical exchanges. The belief among Trotskyists (and IMTers in particular) seems to be that all one has to do in order to win an argument is invoke dialectics, and voila, the opponent’s points dissolve into dust. This has been the attitude of those who have accused my cult analysis of the IMT of being ‘undialectical’. They have not even bothered to explain how this is the case, or even if it is, how it makes my arguments wrong. After all, we learnt in the IMT that even ‘formal logic’, which is often counterposed to dialectics, could be used to come to correct conclusions at least some of the time.
In this post, I aim to make an in-depth analysis and debunking of ‘dialectical materialism’. On closer inspection, it will be revealed that this doctrine is made up of banal observations on the one hand, and outright absurdities on the other. As Leszek Kołakowski explains in the third volume of his three-volume
work, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978):
‘”Diamat” consists of assertions of different kinds. Some are truisms with no specific Marxist content, while others are philosophical dogmas that cannot be proved by scientific means. Others again are nonsense, while a fourth category consists of propositions that can be interpreted in different ways and, according to their interpretation, fall into one or other of the first three classes.’ (p.152)
Do we need dialectics?
Let us look at what Rob Sewell, head of the British section of the IMT, Socialist Appeal, has to say about dialectical materialism in his book, What is Marxism?, available online. Here he explains why dialectical materialism is vital for the salvation of humanity:
Whether we like it or not, consciously or unconsciously, everyone has a philosophy. A philosophy is simply a way of looking at the world. Under capitalism, without our own scientific philosophy, we will inevitably adopt the dominant philosophy of the ruling class and the prejudices of the society in which we live. “Things will never change” is a common refrain, reflecting the futility of changing things and of the need to accept our lot in life. There are other such proverbs as “There is nothing new under the sun”, and “History always repeats itself”, which reflect the same conservative outlook. Such ideas, explained Marx, form a crushing weight on the consciousness of men and women.
… The apologists of capitalism, together with their shadows in the labour movement, constantly assert that their system is a natural and permanent form of society. On the other hand, the dialectic asserts that nothing is permanent and all things perish in time. Such a revolutionary philosophy constitutes a profound threat to the capitalist system and therefore must be discredited at all cost. This explains the daily churning out of anti-Marxist propaganda. But each real step forward in science and knowledge serves to confirm the correctness of the dialectic. For millions of people the growing crisis of capitalism increasingly demonstrates the validity of Marxism. The objective situation is forcing working people to seek a way out of the impasse. “Life teaches,” remarked Lenin. Today, to use the famous words of the Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism.”
It is a banal observation that most people uncritically and unconsciously accept the prevailing ideas in the society that they live in. One does not need ‘Marxist science’ to recognise this simple fact. It is interesting that Sewell asserts that without a coherent, systematic philosophy of its own, i.e. Marxism, the working-class will inevitably accept ‘bourgeois ideology’. But does this not contradict the Marxist belief in the inherent goodness of human nature? Effectively, Sewell is saying that without the tutelage of the ‘Marxist vanguard’, people will inevitably accept enslavement by the capitalist class. Aileen Kraditor, in her book “Jimmy Higgins”: The Mental World of the American Rank-and File Communist, 1930-1958 (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1988), explains the attitude of Marxists on this question:
‘The masses had no antidote of their own, for, as Lenin said, socialist consciousness must be brought to the workers and did not arise spontaneously from their own experience and struggles. The two warring belief systems—the capitalists and the Party’s—both originated outside the working class: the capitalists’ from their class interests, and the Party’s from the scientific generalization, by intellectuals, of the workers’ experience and the data of history. As Lenin said, there was no third ideology, which meant that none could evolve within the people’s own communities. The image of the helpless proletariat was thus intrinsic to the Party’s general belief system.’ (p.203)
Remarking on the American Communist Party’s attempt to minimise the responsibility of white workers for racist attacks on blacks by blaming it on the corruption of bourgeois ideology, Kraditor says:
The problem with this defense of the people, however, is that, if they were so easily influenced from the one side, they should under proper circumstances be as easily influenced from the other. This casts doubt on the depth of their expected conversion to the Party truth. And if they were not responsible for their misdeeds, how could they be responsible for their good deeds?’ (p.205)
Elsewhere, Kraditor notes the dilemma experienced by the party member who believed that human beings were inherently good whilst simultaneously believing that their goodness was dependent upon the Party’s tutelage:
As I suggested in chapter three, the Type 1 member—whose attitude toward the world dominated Party literature—felt a hostility towards proximate reality that caused him to see all external reality as hostile toward him. When this individual perception became embodied in a political theory, he saw himself writ large as “the working class” or “the people.” The victims of this evil ruling class must be good, as he himself was. Yet their goodness, like his own, was not trustworthy, for, as Jimmy Higgins knew from experience, it depended on correct belief. It was so easy to err that even he needed the constant instruction and discipline provided by the Party, to shield him from the enemy’s influence. (p.169)
If Rob Sewell and other Trotskyists are correct about the vital importance of dialectical materialism, if they believe that the workers cannot possibly be free without accepting the ‘science’ of dialectics as understood by the vanguard party, and if they think that the workers are so vulnerable to being led astray by the corruption of ‘alien class ideas’, then we must call into question the inherent ability of the working-class to free themselves from oppression. The whole Marxist theory of human nature should be reconsidered. Clearly the workers are too stupid or wicked to achieve a better world on their own – they need ‘Marxist scientists’ to assist them.
Sadly, despite Sewell’s absurd claims to the contrary, ‘millions’ are not rallying to Marxist ideas. They are stubbornly refusing to join Marxist organisations or accept Marxist leadership. The supposedly indispensable IMT only has a few thousand members worldwide, with national sections numbering a few hundred at most. On the IMT website and the website of other Trotskyist sects, you can find article after article decrying the failure of this or that revolution, or this or that strike, and bemoaning as ever that the outcome could have been so different if only there had been the right leadership, with the ‘correct ideas’, by which they mean, if only their sect had been at the helm. This does not explain their present irrelevance, despite the explosive events that should have shaken the working-class out of its stupor by now. Sewell quotes Lenin’s observation that ‘Life teaches’, suggesting that the daily experience of the working-class will lead them, automatically, to accept the ‘science’ of dialectical materialism proffered by the outstretched hands of the all-knowing vanguard, that alone can pave the way forward to a better world. This is based on the idea that life teaches one, central thing – class struggle. But people can draw many different conclusions from the same event. Moreover, the fact remains that millions have died without believing in dialectical materialism, and millions more will die without believing it or requiring it in their daily lives. Looks like this ‘dialectical’ formula we are being sold as a solution to all human problems is overblown. Anyone who claims that only their ideology constitutes the final solution for all the world’s ills should be immediately suspected of charlatanism.
Banality
Dialectics is sold by Marxists as a solution to the problems of ‘formal logic’, which supposedly cannot explain change. Whereas ‘metaphysical’ or ‘empiricist’ thought can only think in terms of static categories and what is obvious or apparent at any given moment, dialectics is able to understand things in their complexity and transformation. As we would always say in the IMT to counter demoralisation or disappointment, ‘Remember dialectics! Things are always changing!’ Another claim we would make for the dialectic was that only dialectical materialists understood that everything is interconnected. Rob Sewell explains:
Formal logic has held sway for more than two millennia and was the basis of experiment and the great advances of modern science. The development of mathematics was based on this logic. You cannot teach a child to add up without it. One plus one equals two, not three. Formal logic may seem like common sense and is responsible for the execution of a million and one everyday things, but – and this is the big but – it has its limits. When dealing with drawn out processes or complicated events, formal logic becomes a totally inadequate way of thinking. This is particularly the case in dealing with movement, change and contradiction. Formal logic regards things as fixed and motionless. Of course, this is not to deny the everyday usefulness of formal logic – on the contrary – but we need to recognise it limits.
Sewell then quotes Trotsky:
“The dialectic is neither fiction nor mysticism,” wrote Leon Trotsky, “but a science of the forms of our thinking insofar 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 ABC of Materialist Dialectics).
A few paragraphs later, Sewell asserts the following:
It is obvious to most people that we do not live in a static world. In fact, everything in nature is in a state of constant change. “Motion is the mode of existence of matter,” states Engels. “Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be.” The earth revolves continually around its axis, and in turn itself revolves around the sun. This results in day and night, and the different seasons that we experience throughout the year. We are born, grow up, grow old and eventually die. Everything is moving, changing, either rising and developing or declining and dying away. Any equilibrium is only relative, and only has meaning in relation to other forms of motion.
But the idea that things are always changing is a banal observation, not profound science. Note how Sewell himself acknowledges how ‘obvious’ it is, whilst simultaneously believing that ‘only Marxists’ truly understand the world around us. Sure, the world is always changing. True as it may be, it does not follow from this fact that capitalism is destined to give way to socialism. The truth is we have no idea what society will come after capitalism. Marxists, with their pretensions of omniscience, are convinced that the ‘science’ of dialectics allows them to anticipate precisely what will come after the present system. Most people are far more modest about the predictive value of their theoretical models. Not so Marxists. As Leszek Kołakowski explains:
Among the truisms are such “laws of dialectic” as the statement that everything in the universe is somehow related, or that everything changes. No one denies these prepositions, but they are of very little cognitive or scientific value. The former statement has, it is true, a certain philosophical bearing in other contexts, for example, the metaphysics of Leibniz or Spinoza, but in Marxism-Leninism it does not lead to any consequences of cognitive or practical importance. Everyone knows that phenomena are interconnected, but the problem of scientific analysis is not how to take account of the universal interconnection, since this is what we cannot do, but how to determine which connections are important and which can be disregarded. All that Marxism-Leninism can tell us here is that in the chain of phenomena there is always a “main link” to be grasped. This seems to mean only that in practice certain connections are important in view of the end pursued, and others less important or negligible. But this is a commonplace of no cognitive value, as we cannot derive from it any rule for establishing the hierarchy of importance in any particular case. The same is true of the proposition that “everything changes”: cognitive value attaches only to empirical descriptions of particular changes, their nature, tempo, etc. Heraclitus’ aphorism had a philosophical meaning in his day, but it soon sank into the category of common-sense, everyday wisdom.
The fact that truisms like these are represented as profound discoveries, known from no other source, led the adherents of Marxism-Leninism to proclaim that Marxism was confirmed by “science”. Since the empirical and historical sciences are concerned generally with the fact that something changes or that it is connected with something else, it is safe to assume that each new scientific discovery will confirm the truth of “Marxism” as thus understood. (p.152)
The IMT is notorious among all the Marxist sects for its frankly Stalinist efforts to demonstrate that scientific discoveries ‘prove’ the correctness of the dialectic. Alan Woods and Ted Grant, in Reason and Revolt, sought to demonstrate that discoveries such as quantum theory and Darwin’s theory of evolution were confirmations of dialectical truisms like the ones described above. Their belief that Marxist philosophy can inform scientific work led them to make preposterous assertions like saying that the Big Bang was false, and confusing it with a ‘beginning of time’, which no physicist believes in, but which according to Woods and Grant constituted a form of idealism. (The logic goes that if there is a beginning of time, it suggests that time, and indeed the universe itself, was created by a God, which is against the materialist view of the universe. Their belief was that the universe has always existed and will always exist, and did not require an act of creation. They appear to have forgotten that this position is still compatible with belief in a deity, at least if one adheres to some sort of pantheism a la Spinoza.) If the IMT ever seized power anywhere on the planet and had a chance to mess with that unfortunate country’s education system, I think we can imagine absurdities like Lysenko’s biology repeating themselves. Thankfully when I was in the organisation, Woods and Grant’s dogmas were not crystallised into a party line issue, and I knew people in the organisation who openly questioned their bizarre conclusions. As it was not directly political, people were not forced to publicly defend it. An irony too, since Trotsky was indignant when Burnham and the ‘petty-bourgeois opposition’ in the SWP tried to argue that philosophical issues (that is to say, Burnham’s refusal to accept the validity of dialectical materialism) should be regarded as secondary to matters of pressing political importance. It seems even Woods and Grant realised they couldn’t push their pseudo-intellectual eccentricities where science was concerned that far.
A particularly absurd aspect of the IMT’s attitude to this is that we would condemn other Marxists (Stalinists and rival Trotskyists) for ‘not understanding dialectics’, whilst claiming scientific discoveries and ideas by non-Marxist thinkers and intellectuals, and banal popular expressions, as evidence of ‘unconscious dialectics’ and proof of the correctness of Marxist thought. On the one hand, dialectics is supposed to be a profound science which requires diligent and conscious study. On the other hand, it is also common sense. Needless to say, both of these things cannot be true.
Materialism
Sewell goes on to define what Marxists mean by ‘materialism’:
Philosophical materialism is the outlook which explains that there is only one material world. There is no Heaven or Hell. The universe, which has always existed and is not the creation of any supernatural being, is in the process of constant flux. Human beings are a part of nature, and evolved from lower forms of life, whose origins sprung from a lifeless planet some 3.6 billion or so years ago. With the evolution of life, at a certain stage, came the development of animals with a nervous system, and eventually human beings with a large brain. With humans emerged human thought and consciousness. The human brain alone is capable of producing general ideas, i.e. thinking. Therefore matter, which existed eternally, has always existed independently of the mind and human beings. Things existed long before any awareness of them arose or could have arisen on the part of living organisms.
For materialists there is no consciousness apart from the living brain, which is part of a material body. A mind without a body is an absurdity. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is the highest product of matter. Ideas are simply a reflection of the independent material world that surrounds us. Things reflected in a mirror do not depend on this reflection for their existence. “All ideas are taken from experience, are reflections – true or distorted – of reality,” states Engels. Or to use the words of Marx, “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”
…On the other hand, philosophical idealism states that the material world is not real but is simply the reflection of the world of ideas. There are different forms of idealism, but all essentially explain that ideas are primary and matter, if it exists at all, secondary. For the idealists, ideas are dissevered from matter, from nature. This is Hegel’s conception of the Absolute Idea or what amounts to God. Philosophical idealism opens the road, in one way or another, to the defence of or support for religion and superstition. Not only is this outlook false, it is also profoundly conservative, leading us to the pessimistic conclusion that we can never understand the “mysterious ways” of the world. Whereas materialism understands that human beings not only observe the real world, but can change it, and in doing so, change themselves.
Leszek Kołakowski pointed out the severe flaws in Marxist ‘materialism’ better than anyone:
Turning to the category of unprovable dogmas, the first of these is the main thesis of materialism itself. The analytical standards of Marxist philosophy are so low that this thesis is seldom clearly formulated, but its general implication is plain enough. As we have pointed out, the statement that “the world is material by nature” loses all meaning if matter is defined, after Lenin’s fashion, as mere “objectivity” in abstraction from its physical properties, or, as Lenin also put it, as “being, independent of consciousness”. For, leaving aside the fact that the concept of consciousness is thus included in the very concept of matter, the statement that “the world is material” turns out to mean only that the world is independent of consciousness. But this, if applied to the whole universe, is manifestly false—since some phenomena, as Marxism-Leninism itself admits, are dependent on consciousness—and anyway, it does not make the case for materialism, since, for example, according to religious ideas God, the angels, and devils are likewise independent of human consciousness. If, on the other hand, matter is defined by physical properties—extension, impenetrability, etc.—there is reason to think that some of these may not apply to micro-objects, which would thus prove not to be “material”. In its earliest versions materialism assumed that all existent objects had the same properties as those of everyday life. Basically, however its thesis was a negative one, namely that there was no reality essentially different from that which we perceive directly, and that the world was not created by a rational being. This was Engels’ own formulation: the point at issue in materialism is whether or not God created the world. Clearly there can be no empirical proof that he either did or did not, and no scientific arguments can prove that God does not exist. Rationalism rejects the existence of God on the principle of the economy of thought (a principled which Lenin denied), not on the strength of any empirical information. This doctrine presupposes that we are only entitled to accept that something exists if experience compels us to do so. But this stipulation is itself debatable and rests on assumptions that are far from obvious. Without going into the issue here we may take note that the principle of materialism, thus reformulated, is not a scientific but a dogmatic statement. The same applies to “spiritual substance” and the “non-materiality of human consciousness.” Men have always known that consciousness is affected by physical processes: it did not take much scientific observation, for instance, to discover that a man could be stunned by clubbing him over the head, and subsequent research into the mind’s dependence on the body has added nothing essential to our knowledge on the point. Those who believe in a non-material substratum of consciousness do not maintain that there is no link between consciousness and the body (if they do, like Descartes, Leibniz, or Malebranche, they have to devise complicated and artificial ways of accounting for the facts of experience): they assert only that while bodily processes can suspend the operation of the human spirit, they cannot destroy it—the body is a medium through which consciousness functions, but is not an essential condition of its functioning. This assertion cannot be proved empirically, but it cannot be disproved either. Nor is it the case, as Marxists claim, that the theory of evolution has refuted the argument for a non-material soul. If the human organism has evolved from lower forms of life, it does not logically follow that the soul does not exist. If it were so, there could not be such a thing as a consistent theory combing, on the one hand, a modern view of evolution and, on the other, a non-material substratum of consciousness, or even a teleological view of the world. But there have been several such theories, from Frohschammer through Bergson to Teilhard de Chardin, and it is far from clear that they involve any inconsistency. Christian philosophers have also found various ways of immunizing dogma from the theory of evolution, and while these may be open to objection it cannot be said that they are self-contradictory. Judged by the criteria of validity that are applied in scientific work, the materialist thesis is no less arbitrary in this respect than its opposite. (pp.152-154)
Recently, the IMT republished a new edition of Lenin’s infamous and nonsensical book, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, published in 1909, which was a dogmatic restatement of the fundamental terms of dialectical materialism. Alan Woods wrote a bad-tempered introduction ‘defending’ the work from those corrupt bourgeois academic philistines who have ignored the brilliance in Lenin’s book. Woods seriously believes this shoddy text to be a work of genius. Included in this text is Lenin’s infamous theory of ‘reflection’, discussed by Kołakowski:
Among what I have called the nonsensical assertions of “diamat” is the statement that impressions “reflect” things in the sense of resembling them, as Lenin argued against Plekhanov. It is not clear what can be meant by asserting that a process taking place in the nerve-cells, or even the “subjective” awareness of such a process, bears a “resemblance” to those objects or processes in the outside world which, the theory informs us, are the cause of such changes in the nerve-cells. Another nonsensical statement (never specifically endorsed by Stalin, but advanced by Plekhanov and regularly repeated in expositions of Marxism) is that formal logic “applies” to phenomena at rest, and dialectical logic to changes. This absurdity, which is not worth discussing, is simply the result of the Marxist-Leninists’ ignorance and failure to understand the terms of formal logic. (pp.154-155)
Kołakowski deals with this more fully in the second volume:
…Firstly, as already mentioned, Lenin held, unlike Engels and Plekhanov, that “objectivity”, i.e. independence of the subject, was the only attribute of matter that materialists as such were bound to recognize. This statement was evidently designed to free Marxist philosophy from any dependence on changing scientific theories, especially in physics: as “matter” suffered no harm from any attributes that science might bestow or take away from it, science presented no danger to materialism. But this gain was achieved by emptying “matter” of all content. If matter is defined simply by the fact of being something other than the perceiving subject, it is clear that this can equally be said of any “substance” that is regarded as differing from the content of perception. “Matter” becomes simply another term for “everything”, without implying any of the attributes—spatial, temporal, or dynamic—that we generally associate with “materiality”. Secondly, this definition readmits the vague dualism that it purports to exclude. If everything “outside” the subject is material, then either the subject itself is not material or we must extend the definition of matter to comprise subjective phenomena. The formula that “matter is primary and mind secondary” appears to presuppose that mind and matter are different, and is thus contrary to materialist monism. Lenin’s work does not answer these problems or deal with them consistently, and there is no point in trying to probe them more closely: the obscurities of his text are not due so much to inherent philosophical difficulties as to Lenin’s indolent and superficial approach and his contempt for all problems that could not be put to direct use in the struggle for power. (pp.465-466)
So much for the profundity of Lenin’s book on materialism.
Dialectical materialism is composed of three main ‘laws’, described by Engels in Anti-Dühring: quantity into quality/quality into quantity, the unity and interpenetration of opposites and the negation of the negation. We shall look at each of these in turn.
Quantity into quality (and vice versa)
The law of quantity into quality (or vice versa) means nothing more than that a series of quantitative changes leads, at a certain point, to a qualitative change (or the other way round). Among the examples Sewell gives in his book are the Cambrian explosion, when multicellular life suddenly emerged from unicellular life millions of years ago. (Another example of how Marxists abuse science to provide ‘proof’ for their banal observations.) Here Rob Sewell explains:
Just as colossal subterranean pressures that accumulate and periodically break through the earth’s crust in the form of earthquakes, so gradual changes in the consciousness of workers lead to an explosion in the class struggle. A strike in a factory is not caused by outside “agitators”, but is produced by an accumulation of changes within the factory that finally pushes the workforce to strike. The “cause” of the strike maybe something quite small and incidental, a tea-break for instance, but it has become “the last straw that breaks the camel’s back”, to use a popular (dialectical) expression. It has become the catalyst whereby quantity changes into quality.
Note how a few paragraphs earlier, Sewell talked about how dialectics contradicted popular wisdom, which cannot understand the complexity of the world. Now he utterly contradicts himself when he tries to claim a popular expression for dialectics! The notion of the straw that broke the camel’s back is a common-sense observation, repeated all the time to describe this or that phenomenon. It does not constitute profound dialectical wisdom. Another popular example which is used by these people is how water, when heated to a certain point, begins to boil and turn into steam. What a revelation! What an insult to our intelligence! Did these people have any idea how tea is made prior to becoming Marxists? I would be fairly concerned if it turned out that they didn’t.
The unity and interpenetration of opposites
‘The ‘unity and interpenetration of opposites’ simply means that reality consists of ‘contradictions’. As Rob Sewell explains it:
‘The world in which we live is a unity of contradictions or a unity of opposites: cold-heat, light-darkness, Capital-Labour, birth-death, riches-poverty, positive-negative, boom-slump, thinking-being, finite-infinite, repulsion-attraction, left-right, above-below, evolution-revolution, chance-necessity, sale-purchase, and so on.
The fact that two poles of a contradictory antithesis can manage to coexist as a whole is regarded in popular wisdom as a paradox. The paradox is a recognition that two contradictory, or opposite, considerations may both be true. This is a reflection in thought of a unity of opposites in the material world.’
This is one of the many banal truisms of dialectical materialism, truisms representing an absolute insult to human intelligence. It is not a profound observation to say that the world consists of things which are opposite to one another. Sewell suggests that this is not part of ‘popular wisdom’, which could not be farther from the truth. It is peasant wisdom that reality is this way. I do not need some jumped-up Trotskyist ‘theoretician’ with delusions of grandeur to inform me of this simple fact. Truly profound Marxist science. Again, we have Kołakowski to straighten this nonsense out:
Other assertions, as stated above belong to one or other of the first three categories according to how one interprets them. Among these is the “dialectical law” concerning “contradictions”. If, as many Soviet textbooks inform us, this means that motion and change can be “explained” by “inner contradictions”, it belongs to the class of meaningless statements, since “contradiction” is a logical category denoting a relation between propositions, and it is impossible to say what is meant by “contradictory phenomena”. (Impossible, at least, from the materialist point of view; in the metaphysics of Hegel, Spinoza, and some others who identify logical and ontological connections, the idea of Being involving a contradiction is not meaningless.) If, on the other hand, we interpret the statement as meaning that reality must be apprehended as a system of tensions and opposing tendencies, this seems to be no more than a truism with no specific consequences for scientific investigation or practical action. That many phenomena affect one another, that human societies are divided by conflict and discordant interests, that people’s acts often bring about results they did not intend—these are all commonplaces, and to extol them as a “dialectical method”, the profundity of which contrasts with “metaphysical” thinking, is only one more instance of the typical Marxist boastfulness which presents time-honoured truisms as momentous scientific discoveries imparted to the world by Marx or Lenin. (p.155)
The negation of the negation
The negation of the negation is another banal truism, which effectively amounts to saying that nothing in life operates in a linear fashion, but consists of destruction followed by rebirth, regression followed by progress, etc:
The general pattern of historical development is not one of a straight line upward, but of a complex interaction in which each step forward is only achieved at the cost of a partial step backwards. These regressions, in turn, are remedied at the next stage of development.
The law of the negation of the negation explains the repetition at a higher level of certain features and properties of the lower level and the apparent return of past features. There is a constant struggle between form and content and between content and form, resulting in the eventual shattering of the old form and the transformation of the content.
This whole process can be best pictured as a spiral, where the movement comes back to the position it started, but at a higher level. In other words, historical progress is achieved through a series of contradictions. Where the previous stage is negated, this does not represent its total elimination. It does not wipe out completely the stage that it supplants.
Sewell then quotes Marx:
“The capitalist method of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist method of production, and therefore capitalist private property, is the first negation of individual private property based on one’s own labour. But capitalist production begets with the inevitableness of a natural process its own negation. It is the negation of the negation,” remarked Marx in Volume I of Capital.’
Sewell also quotes Engels using examples from the natural world, like how a grain of barley is negated by the growth of a plant, which then produces more grains of barley. A truly profound demonstration of the correctness of dialectics. In our organisation, our response to any setback for the working-class would be to repeat the following: ‘The class struggle does not proceed in a straight line.’ There would be periods of advance, and periods of retreat, but in the long run, victory was assured, for Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky had prophesied so.
Another aspect of this belief is Engels’ observation that truth was always relative and human knowledge always incomplete. So according to Marxists, the mechanical materialism of Newton and others in the early modern period was an advance over the speculative idealism of the medieval period, but was itself negated by Marx’s superior system of dialectical materialism. The intellectual advances of the past are not wholly abandoned or superseded by new information, but incorporated into the new. This, of course, is common sense. Kołakowski gives his take:
To this category also belongs the assertion, discussed in an earlier part of this work, that truth is relative. If this is no more than to say, as Engels noted, that in the history of science received opinions are often not abandoned altogether as a result of later research but that their validity is recognized as limited, there is no reason to dispute the accuracy of the statement, but it is in no way specifically Marxist. If, on the other hand, it means that “we cannot know everything” or “a judgement may be right in some circumstances but not in others”, these again are ancient truisms. We did not, for example, need Marx’s intellect to discover that rain is beneficial in time of drought but not in flood-time. This, of course, does not mean, as has often been pointed out, that the statement “rain is beneficial” is true or false according to circumstances; it means that the statement is ambiguous. If it means “rain is beneficial in all circumstances’ it is clearly false; if it means “in some circumstances”, it is clearly true. If, however, we interpret the Marxist principle of the relativity of truth to signify that a statement, without changing its meaning, may be true or false according to circumstances, then this too belongs to the category of nonsense, assuming that, with Lenin, we take the traditional view of what constitutes truth. If, on the other hand, a “truthful judgement” means the same as “a judgement useful to the Communist party”, then the principle of the relativity of truth once more becomes an obvious commonplace. (pp.155-156)
I remember how in the IMT we would defend any changes in our tactics or doctrine with an appeal to the dialectic. ‘The objective conditions have changed, so we must change our policy.’ Of course, this is simply common sense, but that has not stopped the leadership of Trotskyist sects claiming that their decisions are sanctioned by a profound ‘science’. Life is contradictory, one thing negates another, yada yada. It is all pseudo-intellectual pseudo-profundity. So much for the much-vaunted ‘laws of dialectics’.
Dialectics has been abused in this manner by the Communist and Trotskyist movements through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to defend their endless twists and turns, betrayals and compromises. Tony Cliff was infamous for appealing to dialectics to defend his constant shifts in political tactics. The conformist membership of these organisations, afraid to be exposed as ‘bourgeois empiricists’ for daring to use their common sense, blindly accepted each new shift in position. Those who could not left. The doctrine is so vague that it can be used to defend anything. In the IMT, we would boast that whereas we made ‘correct’ use of dialectics, the Stalinists and rival Trotskyist sects used it cynically to defend unprincipled behaviour. We also distinguished ‘empiricism’, which means zig-zagging from one position to another without any clear vision or systematic doctrine, from dialectics, which, as we always used to boast, was the ‘triumph of foresight over astonishment’. Marxist dialectics allowed us to foresee and anticipate all the twists and turns in the class struggle, and so position ourselves accordingly, unlike the ‘bourgeois empiricists’, the left-reformists and pseudo-Marxists, who were always taken by surprise by events, and could only see what was obvious or apparent at any given moment. If this is the case, then it is unclear why Ted Grant and Alan Woods were unable to anticipate the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, even when Taaffe and his supporters were pointing out what was underway. It took them years before they admitted that they had been proven wrong. It is also unclear why they were unable to anticipate the collapse of Militant and the failure of their endless predictions of revolutionary upheaval and the seizure of power by the vanguard. Instead, the 1980s and 1990s saw the triumph of Thatcherism and neoliberalism and the demise of the far-left. More recently, Socialist Appeal was on the verge of abandoning entrist work in the Labour Party just as Corbyn was elected, having to scramble to correct course when it was clear that the party was shifting left after all. It seems that Alan Woods and his co-thinkers are no better than the bourgeois empiricists they affect to despise.
Dialectics and Politics
Dialectics is so central to Trotskyist doctrine that Trotsky split his movement in the 1930s partly over a fight about dialectical materialism. James Burnham, one of the Trotskyist movement’s leading figures and a member of its leading section, the American Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), rejected dialectical materialism, which he had always regarded as dogmatic and philosophically unsound. Burnham was actually a philosophy professor, unlike Trotsky, and therefore had some idea of what he was talking about. Trotsky, ever the dilletante, was convinced that ‘Marxist science’ gave him more an insight into philosophy than some jumped up, ‘petty-bourgeois’ professor could ever have. A set of furious polemics went back and forth, not just about dialectics but the internal regime of the party, the question of the USSR and others, all of which is collated in the Trotskyist propaganda text, In Defence of Marxism (and largely consists of Trotsky’s replies, with Burnham’s arguments only getting a few pages at the end). A few months before I left the IMT, I read this ‘sacred text’, and at the time I naturally took Trotsky’s side, entirely uncritically. Just before I left, I had second thoughts – second thoughts that would lead me out of the cult and bring me into agreement with Burnham.
Trotsky argued that belief in dialectical materialism was essential to being a Marxist and being a member of his movement. Burnham argued that abstract, philosophical issues should be secondary to political questions, the fundamental one being what was the class nature of the USSR, and was it worthy of being defended? Trotsky took the position that it was a workers’ state and, however ‘degenerated’ it was due to Stalinism, it had to be critically defended against imperialism. Burnham and his co-thinker, Max Shachtman, begged to differ. Trotsky alleged that to label the USSR as ‘state capitalist’, as Burnham did, or ‘bureaucratic collectivist’, as Shachtman preferred to do, was ‘undialectical’ and failed to account for the ‘complexity’ of the USSR. Stalinism was a temporary phenomenon caused by the uniquely difficult ‘objective conditions’ that existed within Soviet Russia – economic backwardness, imperialist encirclement, the devastating civil war – that had allowed a bureaucracy to hijack the regime and act in its own interests. For all its flaws, it remained an advance over capitalism thanks to the nationalised property relations established by the October Revolution. There was therefore a prospect of its transitioning into genuine socialism if the conditions were right. In accordance with the dialectical method, it was vital to give the Soviet experiment, which had then existed for barely twenty years, more time before issuing a definitive judgement and writing it off as a lost cause. (The irony is that Trotskyists never give capitalism the same benefit of the doubt, even though capitalism has lasted merely a few hundred years.) Trotsky was confident that the Soviet working-class would rise up, overthrow the bureaucracy and restore workers’ democracy. He thought this would be in conjunction with a rising of the working-class throughout Europe, likely provoked by the coming world war. He did suggest darkly that he might in fact be wrong, that the bureaucracy might well restore capitalism, and that the hoped for world socialist revolution would fail to arrive, plunging the world into barbarism. However, Trotsky, as ever, brushed aside this possibility and clung to his faith. Trotsky snorted at Shachtman’s concept of a ‘Third Camp’ between the USSR and the capitalist West. There could be no in-between between the proletarian camp, however degenerated it was, and the camp of the bourgeoisie. Trotsky believed that their false analysis of the USSR was linked to their failure to absorb the dialectic, which was down to Burnham’s ‘petty-bourgeois’ background as a middle-class professor. To disagree with Trotsky’s position on the USSR was to reject dialectics and therefore reject Marxism.
It is a well-worn tradition within Second International Marxism (of which Leninism is a derivation) that one’s views on philosophy correlate with one’s politics. It was certainly Lenin’s position (as one can see by his 1908 controversy with Bogdanov and the Machists), and the position of Stalin and other leading Bolsheviks, who quarrelled furiously over abstract philosophical matters – something which is strange, considering that the founder of their doctrine, Marx himself, condemned ‘idealism’ and excessive theoretical debate over practice. Of course, these individuals regarded the correct theoretical or philosophical viewpoint as being essential to practice – also a position which Marx can be quoted to defend. As with so many things, two people can use ‘Marxist science’ to come to diametrically opposed conclusions. This is as opposed to genuine science, in which several people can reproduce the same experiment and come to the same conclusions. Just look at how the Stalinists and the Trotskyists both claimed fidelity to the dialectic, or how the Trotskyist sects accuse each other of not understanding dialectics. It is unclear whether any of them understand it, for if they did, they would realise it is banal nonsense.
Burnham had a good argument for the irrelevance of philosophy to practical politics. The esteemed leader of the Second International, Kautsky, had been a faithful defender of the dialectic, yet had fallen from grace and become a renegade, as had the founder of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov. Meanwhile, Karl Liebknecht, who came to reject dialectics later on in life, was a heroic man of action who gave his life in the cause of revolutionary socialism. The pedant Kautsky, who spent all of his life poring over Marxist philosophy, ended up betraying Marxism, whilst a man who rejected theoretical orthodoxy remained a convinced Marxist to the end. Trotsky tried, unconvincingly, to refute Burnham’s point, but it stands. It is even confirmed by Kołakowski in the second volume of his work on Marxism, when he writes the following at the end of his overview on the philosophy of Kautsky:
‘Kautsky, Mehring and Heinrich Cunow were the most eminent theoreticians of orthodox Marxism as it was understood in their day. During and after the war, however, their political paths diverged. Kautsky maintained his ‘centrist’ position. Mehring declared for Spartacus, and Cunow for the right wing of the party. There was no direct correlation between theoretical orthodoxy on the one hand and politics on the other.’ (p.60)
Even today, we have examples of Marxist revolutionaries like Castro and Mao, who were not sophisticated theoreticians, but successfully established Marxist regimes in their homelands, whilst the ‘theoreticians’ of the Trotskyist sects, those trusty expounders of the dialectic, have remained irrelevant and achieved nothing in eighty years. In the IMT, we would salute Castro as a heroic ‘man of action’, whilst criticising his ‘theoretical errors’ and ‘Stalinism’. I think secretly, at least some of us were perplexed that a ‘Stalinist’ with no deep theoretical understanding of Marxism could be more successful than we, who had the Truth.
Orthodox Trotskyists gloat over the fact that Shachtman became a social democrat, whilst Burnham abandoned the left altogether to become a right-wing conservative and Cold Warrior. Surely, this proves Trotsky correct? The two leaders of the opposition went on to become full-blown renegades. Surely, this proves that abandoning a ‘dialectical’ position (i.e. Trotsky’s position) on the USSR is a prelude to abandoning Marxism altogether?
Well, not quite. First of all, it could justifiably be argued that Trotsky’s own position on the workers’ state was not dialectical. Shachtman and Burnham were not the only prominent figures in the SWP opposition. C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, two critics of Trotsky who remained lifelong Marxists and become theoreticians in their own right, pointed out that Trotsky had committed the undialectical error of fetishizing the economic base of the USSR (‘nationalised property’) and essentialising it, so as to make it the defining characteristic of a ‘workers’ state’. Moreover, they pointed out that Trotsky revised Marxism by separating the ‘mode of production’ from the ‘mode of distribution’. Trotsky argued that the USSR had a socialist ‘mode of production’ and a bourgeois ‘mode of distribution’. Yet according to classic Marxism, a mode of production determines the mode of distribution. Trotsky ignored the ‘dialectical’ link between the two. Additionally, as I have argued elsewhere, Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism ignored the ‘dialectical’ relationship between ‘Bolshevism’, including the ideas and policies of himself and Lenin, and the Stalinist degeneration. This just goes to show that dialectical materialism is so vague that it can be used to defend pretty much anything you fancy.
James and Dunayevskaya went on to write extensively about dialectics over the years. The young Tony Cliff, who was influenced by Shachtman’s position, went on to be one of the most prominent Trotskyist figures in Britain, remaining so until his death. Despite being a heterodox Trotskyist, he retained his faith in revolutionary socialism until the end. He did not follow his hero Shachtman down the path of renegacy. At one point during his ignominious revolutionary career, Gerry Healy was practically obsessed with the dialectic, but few people even in the Trotskyist movement would regard Healy as a beacon of the Marxism. Rather, they would rightly regard him as a monstrous tyrant, liar and demagogue who did more harm than good to the cause of Marxist socialism. It should also be said that there is an influential group of Marxists in academia who reject dialectical materialism, the so-called analytic Marxists. So, disagreeing with Trotsky’s position on the workers’ state is not equivalent to abandoning dialectics, and abandoning dialectics does not entail abandoning Marxism. Of course, one might argue that no one who abandons dialectics can claim to be a ‘true’ Marxist, but who decides who is a true Marxist and who is a heretic? It sounds like a No True Scotsman fallacy to me.
Kołakowski, in the third volume of Main Currents, gives a brilliant example of this fallacious reasoning when applied by the Stalinists to Bukharin:
Later, when Bukharin fell from grace and “mechanism” was officially condemned, it became the task of party philosophers to show that there was a close connection between his “mechanistic” errors and his right-wing deviation in politics, and that his ignorance of dialectic, which Lenin had justly blamed, was the root cause of his defence of the kulaks and opposition to collectivization. This kind of link between philosophy and politics, however, is quite baseless and artificial. The vague generalities in Bukharin’s work do not provide any ground for specific political conclusions, except for such propositions as no one disputed then or later: for example, that the socialist revolution of the proletariat must eventually conquer the world, that religion must be combated, and that the proletarian state must foster the growth of industry. As for more precise conclusions, the most contradictory aims could be and were deducted with equal logic from the same theoretical formulas; doctrine, in fact, was ancillary to politics. If “one the one hand” the base determined the superstructure, but “on the other hand” the superstructure reacted upon the base, then to whatever extent and by whatever means the “proletarian state” endeavoured to regulate economic processes, it would always be acting in accordance with the doctrine…Cohen rightly observes that Bukharin wrote his handbook at a time when he himself exemplified what was called in party language an extremely “voluntaristic” attitude to economic phenomena: i.e. he believed that the whole of economic life could be perfectly well regulated by administrative and coercive means, and that after the victory of the proletariat all economic laws would be dialectically superseded. Later he abandoned his War Communism outlook and became the ideologist of the N.E.P.; but he made no alteration to the thesis of Historical Materialism, and it was therefore absurd to detect in that work the inspiration of his policy in 1929. Nor, for that matter, can the ideas of War Communism be deduced from it either: we can only say once again that such vague philosophical statements can be used to justify any policy or, which comes to the same thing, that they do not justify one more than another. (pp.62-63)
Let us look at the famous case of the 1917 revolution, and what part ‘conscious dialectics’ played in this. On close observation, we will see that it played no part at all. The steeled cadres of the Bolshevik Party, who had spent years absorbing the writings of Hegel, Marx and Lenin, and had mastered the theory of dialectical materialism, were helpless in the face of a revolutionary situation, until Lenin arrived from exile to sort them out. When Lenin arrived, he didn’t read them Hegel’s Logic, he wrote the April Theses. So much for the importance of theoretical education and cadre-training. Lenin himself didn’t even see the revolution coming and was taken aback by events. Like an ‘empiricist’, Lenin had to tailor his strategy on a moment-by-moment basis. The history of the 1917 revolution is one in which the Bolsheviks had to stumble forward like blind men in the dark, advancing here, retreating there, not knowing whether the next few weeks or months would bring black reaction or an opportunity for the seizure of power. The actual seizure of power was a mad gamble, which only succeeded because of the incompetence of the Provisional Government, which no one was willing to die for. Cold War liberal, Stalinist (and some Trotskyist) accounts portray Lenin as a mastermind, who directed the whole operation like a player on a chessboard. The truth is, Lenin had nowhere near as much prescience as he is credited with. He was just a good improviser – the exact opposite of having ‘dialectical’ foresight. It also helps to be lucky. All his life, Lenin had the good fortune to have totally hapless opponents – the arrogant Plekhanov, the brave and principled but tactically inept Martov, the perennial loner and know-it-all, Trotsky, the inoffensive Bogdanov, the too-clever-by-half Kerensky, the incompetent generals of the White Army. The only person who was really a match for Lenin in ruthlessness and tactical skill was Stalin – and even he was only able to get his way thanks to Lenin’s incapacitation and death.
Likewise, Trotsky did not have the ‘dialectical’ foresight to anticipate the eclipse of the Trotskyist movement after WWII. Instead, he assumed, based on his ‘empiricist’ understanding of the situation, that the war would, just like the last world war, see successful socialist revolutions across Europe. Instead, Stalinism took hold in Eastern Europe, and in the West, capitalism enjoyed a golden age. Meanwhile, the Trotskyist movement shrivelled into dozens of fissiparous sects, existing on the fringes of politics. Mandel, Pablo, Grant, Cliff, Cannon – all were at a loss about how to explain the situation. Some doggedly clung to the old perspectives, insisting it was only a matter of time. Others presented new theories, like Felix Morrow, who was driven out of the American Trotskyist movement for questioning Trotsky’s foremost disciple, Cannon, and his insistence that revolution was still on the horizon. He lived out the rest of his long life as a publisher – a much more successful and fulfilling venture than his political career. ‘Foresight over astonishment’ my foot.
Let us look to Hegel himself, and the philosophical movement he spawned. Hegel’s own politics were ambiguous, but after his death, his ideas were claimed by both Left Hegelians and Right Hegelians. Marx was a leading Left Hegelian, who broke with Hegel’s idealism and ‘turned Hegel on his head’ to create the doctrine of dialectical materialism. The Italian fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile was strongly influenced by Hegel. Francis Fukuyama, writer of the notorious book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which asserts that liberal-democratic capitalism is the definitive human society and has triumphed over all its rivals, draws upon Hegel as a central feature of his thesis. Fukuyama’s book is unsurprisingly loathed by Marxists. I remember how Alan Woods would often mock Fukuyama in his speeches and articles. (I would question whether Woods has even bothered to read his work.) Clearly, there is nothing essential about dialectics that requires one to draw certain political conclusions and not others.
In practice, it appears that ‘dialectics’ is little more than a buzzword used by Marxists in general (and Trotskyists in particular) to avoid having to deal with unpleasant, ‘empirical’ facts. How else was Trotsky meant to retain his blind faith in Marxist ‘science’ when the world’s only Marxist state was a monstrous tyranny? Why, by labelling it a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ of course! That way, he could maintain a critical attitude to Stalinism whilst still calling for the USSR to be defended due to its ‘progressive’ features (the ‘gains of October’) which boils down to its having nationalised the means of production. He could have his dialectical cake and eat it too. The irony is that when it suited us, we would denounce Stalinism as ‘not real socialism’, whilst at the same time glorifying the USSR as a noble and heroic enterprise which retained ‘progressive’ features despite its ‘degeneration’ and was thus worthy of being defended. As Kołakowski explains in a discussion of the philosophy of György Lukács:
This rule of Lukacs’s, in fact, is tantamount to a general justification of the typical Communist contempt for facts. Communism is defined in theoretical terms as a higher form of society which will do away with the division of labour, introduce “true” freedom and equality, abolish exploitation, lead to a blossoming of culture, and so on. All these truths are valid a priori, whatever the actual face of Communism may be. The most repellent forms of totalitarian despotism, oppression and exploitation cannot detract from its superiority: at most it may be conceded in after years, when the party allows a measure of criticism, that there have been occasional mistakes or that “survivals of capitalism” were at work. The superiority of socialism is absolute and is not susceptible to empirical proof or disproof. Lukacs’s achievement is to have elevated the practice of contempt for facts as compared “systems” to the dignity of a great theoretical principle, of which Marxism can be justly proud.
…Lukacs also helped to popularize the deplorable misuse of the term “dialectical” either to express a commonplace (as that two phenomena interact on each other, or that in observing an object various circumstances should be taken into account, or that a certain judgement may be right in some conditions and wrong in others), or as a knock-down argument enabling the user to dismiss empirical facts and maintain that “superficially” things may appear thus and so, but “dialectically” the case is the exact opposite. In his book on Lenin, for example, he accuses the reformists of having an “un-dialectic conception of the nature of a majority”, from which it would appear that the “dialectical” sense of this term is the opposite of what common sense or even common arithmetic understands by it. (Since Communism has never, in any situation, had a majority of the people on its side, it is certainly convenient to maintain that it nevertheless commanded a majority in the deeper, dialectical sense–an irrefutable statement in the light of the theory that Communism necessarily stands for the true interests of humanity.) In this and similar cases the term “dialectical” is designed to convey that its user is in possession of a special, profound, infallible method of observing and understanding the world. In an interview given in October 1969 (English text in the Cambridge Review, 28 January 1972) Lukacs even stated that “in Lenin there existed a dialectical unity of patience and impatience. (pp.304-306)
The sense in which Lukacs used dialectics is identical to the way in which we, in the IMT, would use it, even though Lukacs was a loyal Stalinist for decades, whilst we were Trotskyists. The logic is precisely the same. Dialectics provided an answer to everything and a way of explaining away unpleasant facts. Sure, the class struggle was at a low point now, but we had to ‘Remember dialectics’ – things would change, the workers would regain their confidence in struggle, our sect would become more prominent and gain the trust and support of the masses, etc. Sure, the USSR ‘empirically’ appears to have been a monstrous tyranny that had nothing in common with ‘genuine socialism’ and is unworthy of support from any Marxist or socialist. But ‘dialectically’, it was progressive despite this, and worthy of ‘critical support’ against bourgeois critics. So whereas we could judge capitalism as being inherently reactionary, degenerate and unsalvageable after just a few hundred years, we would protest that seventy years of the Soviet experiment was not enough time to judge Marxism as a failure. Likewise, eighty years of non-achievement by the Trotskyist movement was not enough time to write off Trotskyism as a lost cause.
Conclusion
Pretty much every aspect of dialectics as outlined in this post is either a banality, or an unprovable dogma, or nonsense, as Kołakowski himself showed in the second and third volumes of his three-volume work on Marxism. It is clear to anyone who has an unjaundiced mind that there is not an ounce of profundity in this so-called science. It should be said that the way in which dialectical materialism is treated like a religion by Marxists is arguably undialectical in and of itself. (I like to joke about how dialectics sounds eerily similar to ‘dianetics’.) They often forget that even the ‘formal logic’ they so despise can be correct on occasions, as Marxists themselves would admit elsewhere. Every theory has its limits, including dialectics, which, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to have nowhere near as much explanatory value as Marxists would have us believe. Any group, political or religious, which claims that its worldview alone answers all human problems and gives them a unique insight that no one else has, is already exhibiting classic, cultic features. Add in an authoritarian leadership which believes itself to be infallible, the deification of figures alive and dead, ‘sacred texts’, a loaded language, an internal regime of extreme secrecy and deceptive recruiting and fundraising tactics, and you have a veritable cult. Trots can deny being cultists all they like, but the fact remains that almost all Trotskyist sects are like this. If they wish to move away from cultism, they can start by jinxing the pseudo-science of dialectics that claims to explain everything about the world.