The Poverty of Dialectics: Part 3

I touched on this in my very first post on diamat, but at least two aspects of dialectical materialism which boggle the mind to no end, are the ideas that (a) one’s social class background is necessarily connected to one’s thought and (b) that human thought exists as part of an organic, homogeneous, dialectical whole, determining one’s views on everything from politics, to history, to philosophy, to economics, to science, to sociology, with an iron consistency, such that one’s position on one issue necessarily affects one’s position on another. Trotsky expresses this view in In Defence of Marxism, when he issued a biting criticism of Burnham and Shachtman for failing to defend the dialectic in an article they wrote in reply to Max Eastman in the pages of the New International, the SWP’s theoretical magazine. Burnham rejected dialectics outright, whilst Shachtman professed belief in it but argued that it was irrelevant to concrete political questions. This was anathema to Trotsky, who held that the dialectic was indispensable for any kind of thought or practice, for without a guiding philosophy of any kind, one would end up in all sorts of inconsistencies and even abandon Marxism altogether. This he blamed on the middle-class background of Burnham and his followers, whom he labelled a ‘petty-bourgeois opposition’. As Trotsky wrote at the time:

True enough, people are often inconsistent. Human consciousness nevertheless tends toward a certain homogeneity. Philosophy and logic are compelled to rely upon this homogeneity of human consciousness and not upon what this homogeneity lacks, that is, inconsistency. Burnham does not recognize the dialectic, but the dialectic recognizes Burnham, that is, extends its sway over him. Shachtman thinks that the dialectic has no importance in political conclusions, but in the political conclusions of Shachtman himself we see the deplorable fruits of his disdainful attitude toward the dialectic. We should include this example in the textbooks on dialectical materialism.

Last year I was visited by a young British professor of political economy, a sympathizer of the Fourth International. During our conversation on the ways and means of realizing socialism, he suddenly expressed the tendencies of British utilitarianism in the spirit of Keynes and others: ”It is necessary to determine a clear economic end, to choose the most reasonable means for its realization,” etc. I remarked: ”I see that you are an adversary of dialectics.” He replied, somewhat astonished: ”Yes, I don’t see any use in it.” ”However”, I replied to him, ”the dialectic enabled me on the basis of a few of your observations upon economic problems to determine what category of philosophical thought you belong to — this alone shows that there is an appreciable value in the dialectic.” Although I have received no word about my visitor since then, I have no doubt that this anti-dialectic professor maintains the opinion that the USSR is not a workers’ state, that unconditional defense of the USSR is an ”out-moded” opinion, that our organizational methods are bad, etc. If it is possible to place a given person’s general type of thought on the basis of his relation to concrete practical problems, it is also possible to predict approximately, knowing his general type of thought, how a given individual will approach one or another practical question. That is the incomparable educational value of the dialectical method of thought.

Trotsky is not wrong that one’s general worldview will tend to influence their view on any one issue, and that one can infer the former from the latter and vice versa – within limits. He is also right that people tend towards a homogeneity in their views, seeking to resolve any cognitive dissonance by bringing their views into consistency with one another. This is a well-known fact of cognitive psychology, something which we do not need Marxism to know. However, anyone who studies Trotsky’s arguments in IDOM will come to the conclusion that he takes this common sense position to an unpalatable, and totalitarian, extreme, which elevates consistency above everything else, which logically connects class status with a given, wholly consistent and homogeneous world-view, and one’s position on any given topic with that world view. For Trotsky’s position was that those of a certain class background were naturally resistant or drawn to dialectics, and that without accepting the ‘science’ of dialectical materialism, one would inevitably draw ‘incorrect’ conclusions – i.e. conclusions that he did not agree with – and could therefore not be a consistent Marxist. Trotsky linked Burnham and Shachtman’s position on the class nature of the USSR with this. A rejection of dialectics led them to reject a ‘dialectical’ position on the USSR, proclaiming it ‘state capitalist’ or ‘bureaucratic collectivist’ instead of acknowledging the dialectical complexity of this new social phenomenon, a workers’ state born in the context of brutal civil war and economic backwardness, which needed to be given critical support against its capitalist enemies despite the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Trotsky’s conception of the relationship between politics and abstract philosophical doctrines meant, in effect, that a mistaken position or policy by any individual could not be regarded as accidental, but inherent to their whole frame of mind and that of their adherents. Such an absolutist doctrine justified labelling whole groups of people as ‘reactionary’ and enemies of progress, who needed to be cast out of the party to present wholesale degeneration. It was this that led Trotsky to label Burnham’s supporters in the Socialist Workers’ Party as a ‘petty-bourgeois opposition’, who, if their ideas were not countered, would corrupt the entire movement with a false ideology and lead it down the path of renegacy. This was behind Trotsky’s ominous warning, ‘From a scratch to a danger of gangrene’. This has been used by innumerable Trotskyist sects to justify splits and purges of ‘petty-bourgeois’ members in response to the slightest deviation of thought.

Burnham refused to be drawn into discussing the dialectic, despite Trotsky’s demands. Trotsky’s Open Letter to James Burnham of January 1940 reiterated the importance of the dialectic. Burnham had dismissed the dialectic as a form of religion, which it was therefore useless to debate. Trotsky’s argument was that if this was indeed the case, it could not be a private issue, as with some bourgeois intellectuals who renounce religion privately but say it is good for the masses to believe. If dialectics was indeed a religion, then its harmful effects needed to be countered through open and honest democratic debate, not treated as a matter of personal choice, like smoking.

Burnham issued a brilliant reply to Trotsky in ‘Science and Style’, in which he refuted the fundamental bases of Trotsky’s claims. Among the most absurd is the fact that Burnham’s ‘petty-bourgeois’ class background is connected to his failure to absorb the dialectic, something Trotsky thought could be amended by bringing more workers into the party, who were ‘naturally inclined to dialectical thinking’.

You tell us that workers, proletarians, are ‘naturally inclined to dialectical thinking’. Where are these workers, Comrade Trotsky? It seems to me that you are presenting a very damaging advertisement for dialectics. The only workers I, or anyone else, know anything about are these human beings found in the mines of Kennecott Copper, the mills of US Steel, the ships of the merchant marine … These workers, in spite of what has been happening in the world, continue to trust John L. Lewis and Citrine and Jouhaux and Stalin, continue to vote Democratic or Republican, continue to believe in capitalism. I think they will change their thinking, perhaps one day very quickly. But I find their thought, for the most part, false or where not false, confused. If this is what you mean by ‘dialectical thinking’, I can agree with you.

Funnily enough, when I was in the IMT, we were indoctrinated to believe that the working-class was in fact naturally conservative, but that ‘events’ would radicalise them and push them to rebel against the capitalist system, in line with the laws of dialectic. How could both of these things be true? Either the working-class is ‘naturally inclined to dialectical thinking’, that is to say, naturally revolutionary, or it is naturally conservative. It is obviously not both of these things.

Among the proofs Trotsky put forward for dialectics was the example of Marxist intellectuals who remained true to the dialectic and died as faithful revolutionaries, and those who abandoned dialectics and became renegades and apostates from Marxism. Shachtman pointed out that Plekhanov, an advocate of dialectical materialism to the end, ditched Marxism, whilst Liebknecht, who renounced dialectics before his death, died a heroic revolutionary. Trotsky attempted, without much success, to refute this, much to Burnham’s amusement:

But your account of ‘who believed what?’ is, shall I say, a little incomplete. You turn a couple of pages of somersaults explaining away the awkward fact that Liebknecht did not accept dialectics while Plekhanov did. But how about the Mensheviks pretty much as a whole, Comrade Trotsky? I have always read that they devoted as much or more attention to writing about and defending dialectics as even the ultra-dialectical Bolsheviks. And, much more pertinently: what of the Stalinist theoreticians, Comrade Trotsky? The bibliography of Stalinist writings on dialectics would fill a shelf or two, I assure you. And, very conspicuously, the sectarians. Did you know, Comrade Trsotky, that of those who have been in our ranks during the past decade, the one by far most concerned of all over dialectics was Hugo Oehler? (It was Oehler, come to think of it, who was the only predecessor of yours in attacking me for anti-dialectics during a political dispute. That was over the problem of SP entry; somehow, at that time, you, Cannon, and even Comrade Wright, failed to recognise that your bloc with me was unprincipled and that principled politics demanded that you should line up with Oehler until the ‘fundamental question’ of dialectics was cleared up. Instead, we hung together on the ‘conjunctural’, episodic, merely empirical tactic of entry. Fortunately, we have learned principles since that day.) Isn’t it remarkable that when our bookstore, under its new impulse, begins advertising treatises on dialectics, the list is mostly of Mensheviks, Brandlerites, Stalinists even? … And how about Shachtman and Abern, whose dialectics haven’t prevented them from going astray with me? Now I naturally understand that all these turncoats – ‘are not really dialecticians’, are just giving lip-service to dialectics, etc.

Can it be, Comrade Trotsky, that the only really real (conscious and unconscious) dialecticians are: those who agree with you politically!

Still more examples can be added to this. The exiled Mensheviks had a similar position on the USSR’s degeneration to Trotsky. Was their position not ‘dialectical’ in the eyes of Trotskyism? In the IMT, we would boast that whereas our Stalinist and Trotskyist rivals made ‘incorrect’ use of the dialectic, we alone made correct use of dialectics. When we changed our position on something, we were obeying dialectics, which says that things are always changing. When other Trotskyist sects did it, they were guilty of ’empiricism’ – jumping from one position to another with no principled or consistent approach. Who was right? During the Cold War, Maoist China refused to recognise the USSR as a workers’ state following Stalin’s death, whilst the Soviet Union obviously believed it was in fact a workers’ state. Both believed in dialectics. So who was correct, from a ‘dialectical’ point of view? We have no way to tell. This simply demonstrates that the Trotskyist appeal to dialectics is meaningless, because anyone can make use of it to justify their beliefs, regardless of whether they are Trotskyists or not. This pseudo-science does not guarantee that those who make use of it will come to the same conclusions. Quite the opposite – one can almost guarantee that all those who invoke dialectics to justify themselves are likely to be in heated disagreement with one another. For a Trotskyist, something accords with dialectics when they agree with it, and it is ‘undialectical’ when they don’t agree with it. Our friend Farrokh from the IMT demonstrates precisely this phenomenon when he attacks my cult analysis as ‘undialectical’, simply because he doesn’t agree with it. Dialectics is nothing more than a rationalisation for a position he would take anyway.

In fact, we see that belief or non-belief in dialectics has nothing to do with social class, and does not necessarily dictate the conclusions that one draws about politics or about anything else. The absolutist belief that there is only one correct way of thinking is the very basis of totalitarianism:

Comrade Trotsky, you have absorbed too much of Hegel, of his monolithic, his totalitarian, vision of a block universe in which every part is related to every other part, in which everything is relevant to everything else, where the destruction of a single grain of dust means the annihilation of the Whole. I am as opposed to totalitarianism in philosophy as in the state or in the party.

The fact is, Marxists have a terrible understanding of epistemology, based on an extreme and naive Enlightenment rationalism, taken to totalitarian conclusions. Trotsky was correct to observe that all human beings have a basic world-view that guides our thinking, but inconsistency is as much a part of human thinking as anything else. How many European monarchs in the Middle Ages and even early modern period were devout Christians as well as being voracious womanisers? How is it that the medieval kings of Europe could believe in a religion which says, ‘Thou shall not kill’, and then go out on Crusades to slaughter ‘infidel’ Muslims and Jews? How is it that people can deplore theft when committed by private citizens, yet shrug their shoulders when the state uses its armed might to extort money in the form of taxes from the citizenry? How is it that people can deplore murder, but will put on uniforms to go out and kill for governments? Cognitive dissonance plays a central role in human affairs. We are able to compartmentalise our minds so as to hold opinions at variance with each other without too much trouble, rationalising the inconsistency. We do not take things to their logical conclusion, and live our lives in a state of inconsistency, something which is just as well, for human society could not exist in any meaningful way otherwise. As Leszek Kolakowski said in his brilliant essay, ‘In Praise of Inconsistency’:

What is required of a citizen? Consistent loyalty to the state or government. Therefore a consistent citizen will always be proud to cooperate with the secret police, knowing it to be necessary to the existence of the state, to its glory and growth. To prove this is so is the easiest thing in the world, and every citizen who hesitates to write systematically to the secret police informing on his neighbours is surely inconsistent. Let us assume that we consider a certain matter to be the most important in the world; for example, a universal obligation to wear a top hat. Why then, should we object to imposing our idea by means of war, aggression, provocation, blackmail, assassination, intimidation, terror, murder or torture?

…The race of those who vacillate and are soft, the inconsistent people…continues to be one of the greatest sources of hope that possibly the human species will somehow manage to survive. For this is the race of which part believes in God and the superiority of eternal salvation over temporal well-being, yet does not demand that heretics be converted at the stake; while the other part, not believing in God, espouses revolutionary changes in social conditions yet rejects methods purporting to bring about these changes which openly contradict a certain moral tradition in which these people were raised.

Blind consistency is the basis for totalitarianism, as we have seen throughout human history. The Nazis, the Russian Communists and the Maoists in China all created despotisms which enshrined ideological consistency in every area of life. They are the logical conclusion of the striving for consistency and certainty within mankind. The result is that they created monstrous, surreal, anti-human societies that were a grotesque caricature of real human society – societies in which people had to pretend to believe things they didn’t, for consistency’s sake. Even then, homogeneity of thought could only be approximated, not fully achieved.

Cognitive psychology has done much to add to our knowledge on essential points like these, and one can forgive Trotsky, living in the 1930s, for not being aware of these developments, which occurred largely after his death. Had he lived, perhaps he would have read some of the considerable literature produced on totalitarianism and its relationship with human psychological frailties like groupthink, cognitive dissonance, social proof, obedience to authority – all part of an innate human nature that cannot be reduced to class. Then he would accept that the Russian Revolution degenerated not just because of conditions of social and economic backwardness combined with isolation and imperialist encirclement, but human nature itself. Maybe, just maybe, he would have reconsidered his faith. I doubt it, however. What can be said is that Hegelian dialectics, even in its Marxist variety, has added next to nothing of importance or significance to this. We might make exceptions for the odd person – Wilhelm Reich or Erich Fromm – but apart from that, very little.

This naive belief that one’s world-view constitutes a homogeneous force-field of logically connected positions all stemming from a single set of premises is simply nonsensical. This has not stopped both Stalinists and Trotskyists from applying this belief to their analysis of the phenomenon of ‘renegacy’. Whenever Stalin had a particular individual purged from the party, an exhaustive effort would be made to search through their writings for ‘theoretical errors’ which anticipated their break with Marxism. Lenin did likewise when he broke with Kautsky. Having praised him up until the period of WWI, Lenin now claimed to have encountered deviations in his work even prior to that. When I left the IMT, it was asserted by an individual from the American section named ‘Manuel Pala’ (assuming that is his real name) that I was abandoning Trotskyism because of the lingering influence of Christianity on my thought. True, I was raised a Christian growing up, but a religion I abandoned at the age of thirteen can hardly be regarded as decisive in my decision to ditch Marxism, which itself is a form of religion. This is particularly rich when you realise that the IMT worships two dead Jews, Ted Grant and Leon Trotsky, one of whom was brutally murdered like Jesus Christ (surely something that burnishes his halo further), and is led by a Welshman from a Communist family that was steeped in the heritage of Welsh Methodism and who is fond of quoting the Bible at every available opportunity, as was his mentor, Grant. It is an interesting example of Lifton’s ‘doctrine over person’ cult criterion – the renegade is always the one in the wrong, never the cult. No doubt the members of the organisation are busily discussing my past sins and errors (some even made up) that provide the proof that I was never a true Marxist in the first place. My past words and deeds shall be dug up and analysed to see if they contain proof of my future apostasy. Even the thought of this ludicrous exercise cannot fail to spark amusement.

Not only does one’s class background have only a limited amount to do with what views you espouse, but one’s worldview is made up of a whole set of opinions that do not necessarily cohere into a logically consistent whole. People have contradictory views which are shaped through experience and which they only act on when absolutely necessary. Everyone can agree that poverty is bad, but only a very specific event may spur them to do something about it. Of course, it may actually be that people can believe in certain things in the abstract, but fail to act on this when the moment of truth comes. Someone can agree that dictators should always be resisted, but then may slink into sullen compliance if a dictatorship actually takes over their country. Someone can believe that racism is bad, but then behave in a racist manner themselves, or at least hold racist beliefs.

Trotsky was convinced that he had been able to deduce the worldview of the British economist he was speaking with on the basis of a profound ‘dialectical method’. But the truth is that Trotsky’s conclusions were based on that reactionary thing, ‘common sense’. If I come across a random person on the street and discuss politics with them for a few minutes, and they reveal that they are a raving Brexiteer, I will, on the basis of this isolated fact, draw some fairly unpleasant conclusions about that individual and his or her belief system. Of course, this would have more to do with my own prejudice than anything else. They could be a perfectly reasonable person with liberal views and no prejudice towards foreigners at all. But it would be possible for me to walk away from this conversation and, on the basis of this isolated fact, generalise about this person’s worldview, which is probably far less homogeneous than I might like to think. There is nothing profound about such a method of analysis. It is one of the most primitive forms of human judgement that exists. It is the exact opposite of a ‘dialectical’ approach. It is actually very common, very primitive and very practical. My generalisation about the Brexiteer may well be utterly false, but is an educated guess made on the basis of my pre-existing impressions of what Brexiteers are like and what they believe.

Human psychology is a very complex thing. The idea that it can be reduced to one’s class background, or that someone’s worldview can be generalised in a crude manner on the basis of certain isolated beliefs that he or she might express, or that someone’s adherence to a particular worldview necessarily requires them to hold certain positions on certain specific issues, with no risk that said generalisation may turn out to be utterly unjustified, is utterly preposterous. Trotsky expresses a view of human psychology utterly at variance with everything we know about human nature, and reveals a deep flaw within Marxism itself, not simply the Trotskyist variant. Dialectical materialism appears to be nothing more than a tool that allows Marxists to make crude generalisations on the basis of incomplete information about large groups of people, who are appropriately labelled ‘petty-bourgeois’, ‘kulaks’ and ‘reactionary’, and therefore targeted for extermination. Far from being a tool that allows us to understand the ‘complexity’ of the world, it is the perfect instrument for oversimplifying reality.

Let us do the opposite of what Trotsky advised. Let us embrace ‘bourgeois scepticism’, which Trotsky called ‘preparation for desertion’. (Trotsky’s description is revealing, for it equates Trotskyism with blind faith and blind belief, the opposite of ‘science’.) Let us ‘desert’ all forms of dogmatism, absolutism and totalitarianism, and repudiate any belief system which demands our total loyalty and obedience. Instead of blind consistency, let us follow the path laid out by Kolakowski, that of a ceaseless seeking after truth, and a reluctance to draw sweeping conclusions without sufficient evidence. Let us have respect for our critical faculties, instead of ‘sacred texts’ and unfalsifiable doctrines.