"We want to create well-equipped revolutionists who know enough not to be captivated by passing fads"

....The doctrines upon which our movement is based are not named scientific socialism without good and sufficient reason. Our party endeavors to educate its members in all aspects of Marxism from the most general problems of theory to everyday tactics. We want to create well-equipped revolutionists who know enough not to be captivated by passing fads. We have to polish the tools of thought given by Marxism and keep them sharp by continuous application.....

"In Defence of Engels" (1975)

Polemics in Marxist philosophy by George Novack

"Society is key": Notes on Chapter One on Anshen's Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory (2017)

Reading notes on: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory by David Anshen (2017)

* * *

1. The Basics of Marxism and Marxist Literary Theory

INTRODUCTION: THE SPECIFICITY OF MARXISM FOR LITERARY AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS AT THE PRESENT TIME

....literature and the world are interconnected.

....Marxist approaches have gone the furthest, in my view, in exploring the complex and variable nature of the connection between literature and the world.

....The same economic determinants that block our understanding can become the basis of our understanding.

....historicise the object and methodology of analysis while necessarily retaining the conviction that cultural interpretation can be true, valid and reflective of reality, provided one recognises that significant changes in reality continually unfold and that the class structure and resulting life practices obscure reality while posing contradictions that reveal hidden or undeveloped truths.

....Marxism aims to start with the real economic and social foundations that literature, culture and all social life ultimately remain determined by.

....all texts maintain a relationship to social reality which remains marked, in one form or another, by the reality of class divisions and class struggle present sharply in the antagonistic social order of capitalism, or previous class societies. Whether we look at a literary text from the point of view of its production, its inherent features as a text, or its reception, a Marxist approach situates the work within determinate parameters of social reality.

....economic and historical relations shape, on some level and in some form, the nature of culture and its artistic products

....for readers interested in learning 'how to read like a Marxist', the task is complicated because there is no single approach or precise methodology to guide the process. This book aims to show that Marxist literary theory is not some infallible guide but rather a series of questions and concerns based on the premises of Marxism to approach literature.

....note the importance placed by Marxist literary criticism on the series of symbolic and linguistic encounters that permeate daily life.

....All of capitalist society treats itself as natural, timeless, rational and eternal; however when one reads critically and learns to recognise the ways that language, emotion and affect are generated by layers of hidden or obscured meaning, the same lessons can be extrapolated to all conditions of life.

WHY WE MUST RETURN TO MARXISM: THE END OF THE END OF MARXISM

....in the face of a decaying society, the ability to read well and critically becomes more important.

....knowledge derives from existing material reality and social conditions, not mere speculation.

LITERATURE AS A REFLECTION OF OUR TIMES AND BEYOND

....suggests that contemporary culture seems partially aware that capitalism falters on the edge of crisis, and many welcome change. In this sense, Marxists sometimes describe cultural patterns as 'symptomatic' of underlying sea changes in economic and political conditions.

....Marxism, therefore, inherently involves the task of interpretation. This suggests the critical methods of Marxism that help interpret society have much to say about understanding concrete manifestations of culture.

....whether considering form or content, this generally requires probing beneath appearances and often discovering the central issues of Marxism as implicit subjects of the text.

....such realities, although partially hidden, appear more often than the casual eye detects. Just as Freud detects that desire often needs to hide itself, Marxism anticipates that antagonistic social realities conceal themselves when possible.

MARXISM RETURNS TO AN 'ANCIENT QUARREL': DOES ART PROMOTE CRITICAL THINKING OR DOES IT DECEIVE US?

....grappling with Marxism and its categories, particularly in relation to creative products, provides real truths about the world.

....art and its power transcends a precise historical period, with all its biases and ideology, more easily than, say, politics or jurisprudence, which necessarily protect clear particular class interests.

....ideas are shaped and formed by the dominant class and its values combining with material daily practices tied to the structure of a given society.

....to the degree that Marxism adopts the standpoint of the proletariat, the class in contradiction with the existing structure of society, new ideas become possible. In literary analysis proper, critics can draw attention to moments in culture where the mechanisms of ideology lower their guard.

....Marxism detects a glimpse beyond the confines of daily existence in literature and other products of the imagination. The fictional and the playful provide an opportunity for individuals to speculate, consider, critique and philosophise....

Aristotle....  defends the cognitive and political value of art when he argues that tragedy, with a well-constructed plot, attains higher ethical and philosophical status than history because 'the historian narrates events that have actually happened, whereas the poet writes about things that might possibly occur. Poetry is therefore more philosophical and more significant than history, for poetry is more concerned with the universal and history more with the particular'

....Plato argues that art stirs the emotions, confusing the audience and thereby misleading spectators to act in ways that the rulers of society and the traditions of propriety deem inadmissible.

....in an unjust world (like our own) his description of art's force to unleash and destroy 'unity' and create conflicting emotions promoting 'strife' provides justification for the poetic to Marxists, based on valuing the very features Plato describes as negative.

....relishes the kind of disruption of normal behaviour that Plato fears.

....the Plato/Aristotle dispute anticipates one of the central dividing lines amongst Marxist literary theory.

....Is the poetic that stirs the mind and the emotions valuable, or not to be trusted?

'copy of a copy'

....Plato argues that exposure to representations creates a situation where appearances or imitations are mistaken for reality.

....audiences viewing representations or performances are swept up by the power of the illusion and confuse the nature of fiction leading to the likelihood of applying mistaken judgments to the world.

....warn that when we lose ourselves in the aesthetic we remain susceptible to ideological manipulation. Worse than that, for some critics, particularly Marxists influenced by contemporary theoretical approaches such as poststructuralism or deconstruction, a dangerous illusion emerges that literature or language actually mirrors the world in a clear and simple way.

....he distrusted Aristotelian theatre for reasons that seem distinctly Platonic; identification with fictional characters leads away from reality, and substitutes simple 'culinary' or 'narcotic' pleasures for those spectators who lose arts relation to the world, thereby dulling their critical sensibility.

....fear of art, particularly when it purports to describe reality

....As the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who takes the claims of this strand of Marxism and theory the furthest, argues in his work Reading Capital (1968), 'the distinction between the real object and the object of knowledge implies the disappearance of the ideological […] myth of a one-to-one correspondence between the terms of these two orders' (47).

....Don Quixote effect, where ideological images of reality, derived from literature and cultural representations, confuse the masses about the nature of society.

....The myths Barthes critiques deceive the masses by a process of confusing representations for reality, in ways that echo Plato's concerns, despite a historical separation of over two thousand years. He later coined the term 'reality effect' to denote literary devices producing deceptive 'effects' that simulate reality to lure readers into confusing politically motivated fiction (ideology) with reality.

....even seemingly innocuous or liberal humanist works of art can contain hidden dangers.

....the apolitical or heartwarming often turns out more political and guilty than expected.

....warn that when we lose ourselves in the aesthetic we remain susceptible to ideological manipulation. Worse than that, for some critics, particularly Marxists influenced by contemporary theoretical approaches such as poststructuralism or deconstruction, a dangerous illusion emerges that literature or language actually mirrors the world in a clear and simple way.

HISTORICAL AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM, EXPLAINED

     Marxists recognise that science remains limited not just by social conditions but also by the incredibly complex nature of reality, from access to an absolute truth. That, however, does not lead to epistemological relativism (the position that knowledge does not exist except as a social construct). Truth exists, for Marxists, but it is not absolute, timeless, eternal or fixed; rather it is learned in social practice through a movement of abstract and concrete levels of thought and social investigation. Reality only gets constituted in the mind through human interaction on existing conditions that transform reality through labour, but scientific thinking presupposes reality beyond consciousness. Science, understood broadly as incorporating the struggle to think rationally, to access truth through reason and striving for evidence and coherence as a guide to understanding, remains the strongest weapon in the human intellectual arsenal. For Marxists the scientific approach is constituted by and offers a form of knowledge that allows us to focus upon the real conditions facing real humans in the real world.

     Other-worldly speculations and mystical accounts of events, on the other hand, lead away from clarity of purpose and grasping real truth in thought, according to the traditional Marxist view. Ironically, religion and idealism claim both absolute truth and the inability of humans to access it through a rational method. Marxism denies absolute truth while holding onto the possibility of accurate thinking. The sense of valuing scientific approaches explains Marx and Engels referring to their approach, in contrast to other socialist and communist forces, as 'scientific socialism'. The stress upon rationality and reason also implies that when examining literary works, there can be a real basis for understanding the social relationship between the imaginary and the real, at least potentially and within a given moment in time. This must be stressed because Marxism is often falsely equated with two opposing charges: it is a macro-theory that is unfalsifiable and supposedly explains everything and that it is pure historical relativism in which all values remain arbitrary. Both claims misunderstand the materialist theory of history and the nature of the Marxist theory of cultural production. Indeed, both charges actually apply more to anti-Marxist approaches. Marxism aims to provide practical and timely truths that aid the struggle of the oppressed while recognising all values and concepts are socially constructed within objective historical parameters.

     For Marxists, religion, like fiction, remains an illusion, but there is a necessary truth in the illusion....

....Marx aims to direct attention at removing unnecessary forms of suffering that derive from an irrational world by creating new conditions that promote rational understanding and action. This involves a radical rupture with traditional methods of thought. But clearly, religion, like art, corresponds to a real lack and social need in reality.

....Marx's complex attitude towards religion overlaps with attitudes towards art, entertainment and pleasure.

....Marx views religious faith as a surrogate for humane social conditions. These hopes and desires then transmit into the realm of the imaginary, and this prefigures, compensates for, and blocks real joyous conditions.

....materialism is based on the scientific conviction that reality and nature derive from matter or substance that evolves, transforms and changes form.

....critics of Marxism claim its theory is reductive and determinist when Marxism has never offered such an impoverished and simplistic explanation for human behaviour as much mainstream scientific discourse, which often looks for a scientific 'quick-fix' explanation for complex social issues, such as a genetic explanation for homosexuality, among many other examples.

Dialectics, or dialectical thinking, attempts, in thought, to capture the continuity and changes in reality that first became deeply obvious in the French revolution and its aftermath.

....Dialectical materialism suggests that, unlike a machine, which changes in absolutely mechanical and fairly predictable patterns, reality, particularly social reality, changes in ways that move at a faster or slower tempo than expected at times. In other words, 'historical time', to use Walter Benjamin's phrase, must be distinguished from chronological time.

....dialectical logic notices the impurity of categories as absolute identities.

....complexity of reality in its change and development becomes obscured.

....The logical 'rule' that explains how opposites can contain elements of each other is termed by Engels and other Marxists as the law of the unity or interpenetration of opposites.

....opposing categories or identities contain elements of each other.

....dialectical view of Zola's ideology and writing allows for appreciation, distinction, and the need to evaluate the different ideological and political meaning and effects of his writing. The identity of Zola's output contains divergent and even contrary elements and a too-quick evaluation of the individual makes critics one-sided and inaccurate. The goal of evaluating the political implications of Zola's writing must avoid all-or-nothing judgments.

....all that exists goes through a process of developments, through tensions and contradictions that ultimately change form. Dialectics attempts to capture the changing nature of reality that bursts into radical transformations, often seemingly out of nowhere. Engels defined the second aspect or law of dialectical logic thus – 'transformations of quantity become quality'. This means that a slow, almost invisible accretion of changes in quantity (say number of strikes or the unemployment rate or the adding of a third member to a Greek chorus) can suddenly transform into a new situation (revolution or a proper Greek tragedy). All those who argue, for example, that capitalism remains powerful, given appearances, and therefore will last forever, fall prey to what dialecticians might term 'the worship of the accomplished fact'.

....inversion of conditions, which at some point involved a series of quantitative changes (diminishing military power, levels of obedience, diminishing respect for authority and so on) that developed until the identity of the powerful tyrant and his empire crumbled and faded.

....the second law of dialectics, the 'transformation of quantity (or quality) into its opposite'.

....third law, the 'negation of the negation' recognises that forces defeating an existing reality, over time, develop contradictions that then must be ultimately overcome.

MARXISM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR LITERARY AND CULTURAL PRODUCTS

     As Terry Eagleton explains in the introduction to the anthology he co-edits, Marxist Literary Theory (1996): '[…] the relation between literary works and forms of social consciousness […] has also involved some subtle epistemological reflections: is art reflection, displacement, projection, refraction, transformation, reproduction, production? Is it an embodiment of social ideology or a critique of it? Or does it […] critically 'distantiate' that ideology while remaining caught up in its logic?' (11).

.....Historical materialism contrasts with other theories of history in several key ways. First, theories that assert 'great men' make history, separate from broad social forces, get rejected. The individual always operates in a context. However, Marxism does not rule out any role for the individual or subjective factors in historical development (we can consider the role of Lenin or Fidel Castro in helping to facilitate revolutions in their nations as highly significant). But historical materialism asserts that the general thrust of the totality of political, economic, technological and social conditions combined with class struggle remain decisive in shaping the broad contours of history.

.....Different works, genres and aesthetic movements may operate differently.

....common patterns suggest causal factors that, theoretically, can be discerned.

....Marxist approaches can be comprehensible, logical and reducible to straightforward propositions.

Marxism does not exclusively discuss capitalism....

....any theory that asserts pure contingency or randomness in history (while Marxists don't deny that such factors play a role) fails to explain the many continuities and common features of human history that can be detected. We often find similar patterns of social development in divergent places when similar conditions prevail.

....The history of art also demonstrates common patterns across space and time.

....Friedrich Nietzsche's approach to history, which has gained adherents through the influence of Michel Foucault, Heidegger, and others, stands in stark contrast to the Marxist views. Throughout his writings, Nietzsche understands history in two broad interrelated ways: first, as articulated originally in his On the Genealogy of Morality (1887); then, throughout his entire work including the posthumous publication of notebooks, Nietzsche argues that history and morality are constructs and the arena in which the 'will to power' of powerful individuals creates values disguised as universal features such as the concept of good. Instead, these represent strong individuals influencing and shaping history with their power and needs which they have the 'will' to promote. The second way that Nietzsche understands history concerns the argument that historical categories, conditions or claims for truth are mere disguised heuristic devices (concepts, such as truth or morality, which have no reality outside of language and in Nietzsche's view, serve established power structures and modes) designed to promote an illusory sense of meaning. Nietzsche's framework, while serving perhaps to unmask the neutrality claimed in some historical or literary analysis ultimately diverges from Marxism and devolves into irrationalism.

....promoting the claims of the rulers to superior will and overestimating the ability of the powerful to construct historical myths and fables, unchecked and at command. Marxism rejects Nietzsche's view that the oppressed are weak-minded, easily deceived 'slaves' who accept naïve conceptions of history and power.

....Nietzsche's nominalism, or belief that words have no real referrent but serve merely to mask differences under a conceptual label falsely taken as 'things', underestimates the real, determining power of forces such as the profit motive, or the market, in the capitalist system, which prove their reality when workers lose their jobs due to such allegedly unreal 'concepts' as falling rates of profit.

....if history as history ultimately remains rational then the search for valid meaning and truth in relation to literature also remains possible....

    As the Marxist George Novack puts it in his work Understanding History (1968):

It is not elites but the many-membered body of the people who have sustained history, switched it in new directions at critical turning points, and lifted humanity upward step by step.

....Novack quotes Engels defining historical materialism as: 

[…] that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historical events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another. (qtd. in Novack 29)

....similar forces also should, at least on some level, shape the products of history, including cultural products. Whether discussing modes of cultural production (painting, sculpture, architecture or literary texts), literary genres (broadly or narrowly understood), artistic practices and movements, exemplary artists, or great individual works, there remains a key relationship to historical, technological, material and social conditions and life practices.

....Enlightenment thought and its evolution into modern liberalism also contrasts with Marxist approaches to historical determination.

....conviction that reason and correct thinking can overcome the problems of society. Enlightenment thinkers believed that reason and rationality could overcome traditional authority that had been invested in religious obscurantism and long-term, unexamined social practices.

....American Declaration of Independence required struggle in the realm of ideas but also in revolutionary struggle that took a violent form.

....Althusser rightly, from a Marxist point of view, challenged such a view as to how ideas dominate minds by suggesting such explanations remain in the realm of ideas and ignore 'material existence' (1265) or the life practices of individuals. In addition to the lack of materialist credentials such ideas offer, they share much in common with conspiracy theories, which Marxists reject out of hand. Such irrational explanations describe history as the result of secret groups of bad individuals who plot behind the scenes to deceive the masses. The problem with such ideas is that, in contrast to historical materialism, they cannot explain why people are so easily manipulated. Do people just believe what they are told even when the individuals telling them how to look at the world clearly do not share common interests? Are humans just sponges for whatever authorities present? Obviously, sometimes deception does work to blind people to social realities. But this explanation reduces to the tautology that people are confused when they are confused. It also allows the systematic nature of oppression to be obscured; if we can only find the cabal, the secret elite, all will be well.

MARXISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS

....Ideas and long-held assumptions shift in pace with social transformations. This suggests that ideas, in themselves, do not remain uncontaminated by broader shifts in society.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

....Historical materialism does not concern itself merely with history in the grand sense. It also provides a theory of how ideas, conceptions, viewpoints and cultural conceptions derive from the economic base and material practices of a given condition of life.

....that 'from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature'. For Marx and Engels the material transformations in technology and trade, generated by capitalism in its relentless quest for profits, inadvertently produces a new material basis for literature and sharing of ideas. This is seen as a positive for the oppressed that can share ideas and culture. The internet and the World Wide Web and the opportunities generated for quick and easy transmission of ideas offer new possibilities in this direction.

....who we are and what we believe gets shaped by real-life conditions

....Daily life builds upon economic processes and 'definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will' (Marx, qtd. in Eagleton and Milne 31).

....broadly and indirectly to modes of writing, genres, styles, literary approaches and individual works of literature and the imagination. We will look at this question more closely in the following section.

MARX'S BASE/SUPERSTRUCTURE MODEL

     In Contribution, Marx writes: 'In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are […] independent of their will, namely, relations of production appropriate to a definitive stage in the development of their material forces of production' (20).

     This suggests both that these 'definite relations' and 'forces of production' are knowable and open to analysis. They can be empirically verifiable and judged as sociological or technological facts because they are material, not conceptual. Marx continues:

....The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

....varieties of a given mode of production are not as relative as often appears. Social conditions and the economic and technological base dictate real potential situations.

The Human Costs of the Failure of the Market

....Marx's base/superstructure model, which metaphorically describes society like a building or pyramid built upon foundations in real material, objective economic processes that lay the basis for higher, abstract and theoretical realms of ideas, it provides a conceptual starting point for the historical materialist theory of how ideas develop out of prior material conditions. Marx distinguishes between economic 'conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science' (21) and the more ambiguous and subjective 'legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out' (21).

....They offer the chance for men or classes to 'become conscious and fight it out'.

....prior to and alongside the direct struggle for power, a war of values ensues. This 'cultural war', as rightist forces in the US dub their effort to undermine expanded conceptions of humanity and solidarity that developed out of the social movements of the 1960s and beyond, determines the relative strength of rival class forces.

....But we can formulate an approach to literature derived from basic points of Marxism and then consider some of the major efforts to elaborate a more fully developed theory.

A BASIC DEFINITION OF A MARXIST APPROACH TO LITERARY THEORY

Society is key....

....Marxism uncovers relations between cultural expression and modes of life shaped by conflicts that operate in societies divided socially and economically by classes. Indeed, for Marxism, the use of the term 'society' without attention to class divisions is an abstraction since class divisions operate in all societies since the dissolution of communal tribal societies and the rise of agriculture and economic surpluses beyond mere subsistence.

....The Marxist wager remains that if the working class as a class can only free itself by universal emancipation and has no interests in forms of property that can be privately owned, then its rise is the dissolution of class society in general.

....'There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits'

....Marx's base/superstructure model, which metaphorically describes society like a building or pyramid built upon foundations in real material, objective economic processes that lay the basis for higher, abstract and theoretical realms of ideas, it provides a conceptual starting point for the historical materialist theory of how ideas develop out of prior material conditions. Marx distinguishes between economic 'conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science' (21) and the more ambiguous and subjective 'legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out' (21).

....They offer the chance for men or classes to 'become conscious and fight it out'.

....prior to and alongside the direct struggle for power, a war of values ensues. This 'cultural war', as rightist forces in the US dub their effort to undermine expanded conceptions of humanity and solidarity that developed out of the social movements of the 1960s and beyond, determines the relative strength of rival class forces.

....But we can formulate an approach to literature derived from basic points of Marxism and then consider some of the major efforts to elaborate a more fully developed theory.

Jay

5 November 2021

Reading notes: An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

Lecture IX

From Capitalist Ignorance to Socialist Enlightenment

....In order to become a Marxist every worker has to revolutionize his political mentality. This change in his thinking does not and cannot take place all at once. It comes as the climax of a protracted process of development that includes manifold experiences in the class struggle and passing through various stages of political understanding.

....Every contradiction presents an opportunity, no less than an obstacle, if it is properly understood and handled. The crying objective contradiction between the organization of the workers for independent action on the industrial arena and their political subordination to capitalist parties and policies provides the motive force for the next stage of their development. How is this great contradiction to be overcome? That is the theoretical question, posed in and by practice, which confronts the mass of American workers today.

....A break with the capitalist parties is the prerequisite for a different kind of party and politics. It is a negative indication of the positive fact that the workers are driven to realize that they need and want their own class party. They are beginning to move toward a declaration of political independence….

....1. The process developed by way of contradictions, as a whole and in each separate phase. The entire process was a contradictory passage from complete identity of interests to absolute opposition, and from ignorance to scientific knowledge. The mentality of the workers became transformed into its opposite through the objective unfolding and the corresponding intellectual recognition of the existence of opposing and irreconcilable class interests.

2. The various forms of judgment reflected successive stages in the comprehension of the real facts formulated in the logical categories and represented a widening and deepening of real social relations together with the knowledge of them. They were both objective and subjective in nature.

3. These forms of judgment, which reflected the successive stages of social and mental development, issued out of one another in a reasonable manner according to the extent and depth of the experience involved. From an isolated case, to a group of cases, then on to the whole class, then from the whole class inward to a grasp of the social basis and material interests of that class. Such was the process taken on the plane of social development. This objective social process had its logical expressions in the singular, the particular, and the universal, and ultimately the crowning judgment of the necessary and universal law. The serial phases of social development of the class and its consciousness has its corresponding reflections in the process of logical thought. These two processes are essentially interlinked with each other.

4. These judgments provide the basis for practical activity. "Theory is a guide to action." There can be no revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory. 

5. Dialectics is the highest type of scientific knowledge of real processes. On the practical side it is the consummation and condensation of the rich and ripe experience of the working-class movement, embracing the widest range of forms and phases of the concrete struggles and experiments. On its theoretical side it is the highest product of scientific brainwork and investigation. Such knowledge comes as the reward of struggle and of labor.

The process of social and mental evolution which has here been ascribed to an individual worker likewise occurs among the entire class of workers, especially in its most advanced sections. Through their struggles the working masses become progressively aware, as they pass through rising levels of apprehension, of their real relations to the capitalist exploiters. At any given moment in this process, different parts of the same class stand upon different heights of consciousness. While the most backward can remain stuck at the stage of class collaboration, the most advanced can have marched forward under the spur of necessity and reached, and even surpassed, the point of irrepressible revolutionary conflict. The Russian as against the American workers in 1922, for example; the Cuban versus the American people in 1962.

When a sufficient number of workers emerge from the primitive state of absolute subservience and begin to differentiate themselves in theory and in practice and to oppose themselves to the capitalists, a change begins to take place in the social and political consciousness of that class. But for the class as a whole there has not yet occurred a qualitative leap in their political mentality. There is progress toward that end-but not yet enough change to produce a revolutionary transformation into its opposite.

Such a revolutionary change in class consciousness takes place only when the dominant section of the workers, aided and led by the Socialist Workers Party, becomes convinced of the utter incompatibility of their vital interests with the capitalist regime and proceeds to act upon that theoretical conviction. At a certain point in the development of the class struggle and in the class education of the workers, this critical point is inevitably attained. Then a qualitative change in the class consciousness of the workers, a revolutionary leap, takes place. From having been more or less capitalist-minded, the advanced workers become really proletarian-minded; from having been more or less reactionary, they become revolutionary in thought and deed. This is the necessary law of the class struggle manifesting itself inexorably during this death agony of capitalism.

At a specific stage in the course of this process a dialectical reversal takes place. What had been an effect of the class struggle, the growing class consciousness of the workers' vanguard, expressed in the growth of the revolutionary party and its influence, becomes in turn a cause of the acceleration and maturing of the class struggle. The objective logic of events is made explicit and realized through the conscious understanding and political intervention of the socialist-minded workers. Their subjective grasp of the logic of events, produced by their experiences in the class struggle and by their Marxist education, becomes an effective and indispensable link in the chain of causes leading to the socialist revolution….

Reading notes: An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

Lecture 

VIII. The Categories of Dialectical Logic

laws: 

change of quantity into quality

development through contradictions 

conflict of content and form

interruption of continuity [discontinuity]

change of possibility into inevitability

....each one corresponds to some particular phase or aspect of the material reality of the universe. 

....possible to approach these laws as a whole through consideration of any of them

....we shall approach the laws of dialectics through a consideration of the relations between essence and appearance

....these categories of thought are consciously or unconsciously used all the time by all of us

❖

[The category of essence]

....The essence of a thing is what necessary ....without which it could not exist is.

....This problem of essence especially puzzles those whose minds have become somewhat sophisticated or adulterated by contact with philosophy as taught in the colleges. They too think of the essence of a thing as something absolutely permanent, fixed and final, as radically different from the appearances of the same thing.

....In reality, the essence of any thing does not and cannot come into existence all at once and remain there in immutable form

....The essence of a thing develops and is realized along with the process of development of the material thing itself. It is an integral and inseparable aspect of the object, sharing all the vicissitudes of its history.

...has ....a material and historical character  ....comes into being under specific conditions, develops into and through various forms, and eventually goes out of existence, together with the perishing of the thing itself.

....its course of development has a dialectical or contradictory character. The essence of a thing never comes into existence by itself and as itself alone. It always manifests itself along with and by means of its own opposite. This opposite is what we designate by the logical term appearance. 

....through a series of relatively accidental appearances that essence unfolds its inner content and acquires more and more reality until it exhibits itself as fully and perfectly as it can under the given material conditions.

....distinguishing between essence and appearance, the relatively permanent core and changing surface of things

....urgent need to see their unity, their interconnections, and their conversion - under certain conditions- into one another. Hegel expressed this in an unforgettable formulation: "In essence everything is relative." Whereas, in appearance, regarded in abstraction from essence, everything is immediate or absolute.

....Essence and appearance are identified with as well as opposed to each other at every stage in the development of a given material movement. But their respective relations can become reversed in the course of development.

    In the initial phase of a thing, the appearance usually tends to subordinate the essence to itself. Along the way, the two diverge to the point of opposition; and then, at the height of a thing's development, its essential nature most transparently shines forth in triumph over its various appearances. Essence and appearance commingle at the peak as they did at the beginning. But in the latter stage essence dominates appearance.

....For no sooner does the essence of a thing manifest itself most directly and coincide as fully as possible with its appearance, than the thing itself, having realized its possibilities, having unfolded its inner content to the utmost, begins to move toward and to pass over into something else. In other words, the essential starts upon a descending path to be transformed again into the less essential and eventually into the nonessential.

❖

The evolution of money in class society

....Money is not an accident but a necessity under capitalism. We are every day reminded that without it we cannot live.

There was a time when money did not exist. In primitive societies, where all production is for the use of the community and none of the products of labor enters into exchange, money is unnecessary and unknown. It came into existence only with the regular exchange of a diverse multitude of commodities and the extensive development of trade relations, when the need arose for a general equivalent through which all other commodities could express their exchange value.

Money originated, not in a form appropriate to its essence, but in a disguised form imposed by the conditions of its birth. Money made its first appearance as one commodity among others, as a money-commodity, just as man first emerged as an ape-man. That commodity which was singled out and elevated to serve as a medium of circulation and a measure of value for other commodities has assumed many different concrete guises in the historical development of commodity producing and exchanging societies, of which capitalism is the supreme expression. Cattle, iron, slaves, furs, wheat, rice and many other material substances have acted as money-commodities.

The commodity passed through three stages to achieve the essence of money and to make its form coincide best with its content. So long as exchange relations were restricted and the market was small, all sorts of commodities could play the role of general equivalent.

The qualitative jump from the commodity to the genuine money form of value occurred when the precious metals took over the money functions. Money-commodities such as cattle maintained their natural uses while serving as general equivalent; their functions in the process of circulation were subsidiary to these other uses. The cattle which were a measure of value could be slaughtered, their meat eaten, and hides dressed for various purposes.

The precious metals had a different status. Once they were stamped as coins by some public authority, their sole use was to serve as general equivalent for the mass of commodities. At this point the general equivalent became a coins and ingots asserted itself in its own right.

The development did not stop there. Ultimately gold became the supreme embodiment of the universal equivalent. It may be asked: Which of these diverse appearances of money is really and truly money in itself? In logical terms, where is the essence of money to be found among all these diverse manifestations of the money-relation? The first answer is that in a certain measure and under certain circumstances of economic development, all of these various material appearances have been and can be money. They have each proved in practice, which is the ultimate test of truth, that they can perform the basic functions of the money-commodity.

This then means that each of these historical incarnations of money contains to some extent its qualitative essence. Money in general is relative to each of its various concrete manifestations. Cattle, shells, furs, precious metals, and so on, must have partaken of the essence of money or else they could not have appeared or functioned as media of circulation. Else they would either be simply the material objects or the particular kind of commodity they happen to be. They could not have served as money without really being in essence the kind of economic relation which money is.

But that is only one side of the matter. It is obvious that, if each and every one of these forms of money contained some part of the essence of that economic relation, no one of them contained the entire essence of money. Each, taken by itself, embodied no more than a share in the essence of money, just as each stockholder holds only a given portion of a corporation's stock. Each individual money-commodity is essentially, of necessity, no better than a defective, superficial, episodic representative of the economic relations and functions exhibited in and through the money form.

On the other hand, since each in its own way and according to its capacity incorporated and carried on some of the essence of money, we must recognize that all the constituent members of this series of money forms have contributed to the realization, the clarification and perfection of the essential money form. They constitute transitional forms in which the essence of money makes its appearance, the accidents which go to make up its necessity.

So we see that essence, instead of being something fixed and simple in nature, is composed of various grades, which constitute a hierarchy of essence. We can proceed, and things in their evolution progress, from the less essential to the more essential. In other terms, the quality of a given essence can become quantitatively greater or smaller. It can grow in extent and in content; it can, step by step, become defined or determine itself into different grades or forms of its being.

The essence of a thing always manifests itself inextricably intermingled with its opposite, which is one or another of its appearances. In general, the more essence, the less appearance; the more appearance, the less essence at hand. These two united determinations of reality and thought appear together - but in inverse ratio to each other.

Money in the shape of cattle, for example, had only begun to differentiate itself from and oppose itself to the mass of other commodities. It is little more than one commodity standing slightly above other commodities. The essence of money makes only a feeble appearance in this embryonic form of money in uncivilized societies. It is not until money assumes the form of coin, and finds a material embodiment in the precious metals, that its essence begins to predominate over its appearance and the general equivalent graduates to a universal equivalent.

How clearly and thoroughly can essence show itself, detach itself from mere appearance? The purity and perfection of the realization of any given essence depends upon the material circumstances governing the development of the thing in question. In the case of money, its essence has succeeded in disclosing itself with great clarity and definition, thanks to the evolution of commodity producing societies into capitalism.

As a result of the development of commodity production and exchange, one particular kind of money has shown itself to be the most essential or necessary embodiment of money. That is gold. This is one of Marx's important discoveries, sneered at as "Hegelianism." Gold has established its superiority over all earlier forms of money in practice, as the outcome of the most severe competition covering hundreds of centuries of commerce and industry. No person and no political power arbitrarily selected gold as best suited to embody and exercise the functions of money. That status was fundamentally determined by an extensive series of economic processes and causes, whose result political authorities had to ratify in their legal codes and everyone else had to recognize in everyday economic relations. Gold has deposed all rival monies because it has proved itself to be a more powerful, more real, more essential physical form of the money relation.

The example of gold demonstrates that, for all its absoluteness, essence remains relative to the less essential, or nonessential, forms of money. Gold, the most essential money form, arose historically out of less essential forms and maintains today definable relations to them as well as to the whole world of commodities. Silver exchanges, for example, in specific amounts with gold.

What is or appears essential at one stage in the development of a relation - and every single thing is either a relation or a constellation of relations - becomes nonessential or less essential at another stage of development.

Earlier in economic evolution it looked as though silver might be the money commodity par excellence and that gold would have to take second place. Silver was then more valuable than gold. But with subsequent changes in technological and economic conditions this relationship be-tween silver and gold became conclusively reversed. During the nineteenth century it was proved that not silver but gold was supreme. Silver turned out to be but a passing and subordinate representative of the money relation and receded into the background with its obsolete predecessors.

Today gold is absolute monarch, not only in respect to money forms, but also in respect to the entire world of commodities under capitalism. Every other commodity is inferior to gold and must bow down before it. Gold is Value Incarnate. Gold will hold this high and mighty position for the historical epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism. 

"In the transitional economy, as also under capitalism, the sole authentic money is that based on gold," wrote Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed. But this position of absolute economic power held by the money form, which spans so many different organizations of society, is likewise relative and limited. It too will endure for no more than a passing stretch of historical evolution. In socialist society money will begin to lose its magic powers and tend to disappear. "The death blow to money fetishism will be struck only upon that stage when the steady growth of social wealth has made us bipeds forget our miserly attitude toward every excess minute of labor, and our humiliating fear about the size of our ration. Having lost its ability to bring happiness or trample men in the dust, money will turn into mere bookkeeping receipts for the convenience of statisticians and for planning purposes. In the still more distant future, probably these receipts will not be needed. But we can leave this question entirely to posterity, who will be more intelligent than we are," Trotsky observed.

Then, as Sir Thomas More predicted and Lenin hoped, men will use the gold which has been identified with so much happiness and misery in the past as trimming for bathroom fixtures.

The precious metals, and gold par excellence, were especially suited to monopolize the role of money because of their physical properties. They were malleable, ductile, highly divisible, homogeneous, durable, readily portable and easily recognizable. Even more, because of their relative rarity, they represented a large amount of exchange value in a small volume. They incorporated a great deal of labor in highly condensed form.

Many people mistakenly believe that such conspicuous physical properties by themselves make these metals into precious objects with miraculous powers. That is the appearance, not the reality, of the matter. Money is a highly developed form of value which exists only in commodity producing societies. Thus, in the last analysis, money is a thing which represents specific economic relations between people. These relations constitute the essence of money.

And when an economy of abundance and equality will fundamentally transform the relations of men, the need for money will dwindle and disappear, while all the physical properties of gold and silver will endure.

Is essence something abstract or concrete? The example of money shows that it is both. Money always exhibits itself in some one specific form. But no one of these concrete manifestations of money contains its entire essence. The essence of money is therefore both present and not present in any of its particular forms.

Without the serial development of the various concrete forms of money, it would have been impossible to realize in social economy the essence of money in its purest form of gold bullion. It would likewise have been impossible for the economists to have conceived through their scientific investigations a correct understanding of the inner nature of money.

Thus we see that the essence of a thing is an abstraction from its diverse concrete material forms conceptually expressed in a generalization taken from its particular instances. The abstract and the concrete, the general and the particular, the essence and the appearance, are essentially interrelated and interconvertible categories. The one is never found without the other. "In essence," as Hegel says, "all things are relative."

These opposites are continually becoming transformed into each other. This coin, for example, looks extremely concrete and so it is from the standpoint of its material composition. But from the economic standpoint it is not at the moment so concrete. As it now exists, it is only partially and potentially money. It is money in the abstract. It can be used under normal circumstances as a medium of circulation. This coin really and truly becomes money and realizes itself as such when I buy some commodity with it. In that transaction it loses its abstract, i.e., ideal, money character and becomes money in the concrete. When it comes into the hands of the commodity seller, it once again assumes its more abstract character. This transmutation of predominant features goes on perpetually in the process of commodity circulation. It is the same with all other categories in all other domains of existence.

Let us examine the relations between the categories of quantity and quality through this example. Money has as its starting point, not money (it is its destination to become money), but something other than money, its own opposite, commodities. The "ground" of money, as Hegel calls it, is its own opposite, commodities. Without commodities, that is, labor products which are exchanged, money cannot begin to become itself, cannot realize its peculiar essence.

How does a commodity transform itself into money, which is the opposite of the commodity form? A multitude of acts of exchange of goods must take place before the need for a particular commodity to serve as a medium of circulation makes itself felt. This need is satisfied by selecting one commodity to serve as this medium. This is usually, as Marx points out, the most important commodity, such as cattle, grain, or furs.

A specific quantitative development of exchanges is therefore the prerequisite for the qualitative generation of money as a new economic property. The new quality of money appears as the necessary result of the quantitative accumulation of acts of exchange. The production of this new economic quality occurs in a revolutionary way and has revolutionary results. It more and more splits the world of commodities into two opposed poles: into particular commodities on the one hand and the money commodity, which is their universal equivalent, on the other. The ultimate result of this split is exhibited in the crises of capitalism where commodities cannot be exchanged for money on a world scale.

This leap from quantity into quality is no fiction but a true logical expression of what actually occurs in real processes. The germ of the money relation is latent in the existence of commodities. As soon as men begin to say in the market place, "This is worth that," and exchange the products of their labor on equivalent terms, the preconditions for the production of money are generated.

This possibility becomes transformed into necessity with the increasing quantity of such transactions. The social need for an independent measure of value, a standard of price and a means of reckoning brings money into existence.

Given a sufficient quantity of different commodities and number of acts of exchange, it is eventually necessary to find one commodity among the many to serve as money. When men say, "This is worth that," then they soon find that they must have something of which it can be said,

"All things are worth that." This commodity becomes the money commodity. When national paper currencies became valueless during the Second World War, cigarettes temporarily acquired the functions of money.

The dialectical process of development does not end with the transformation of quantity into quality. That is only one of its lawful manifestations. The process continues in the opposite direction and converts the new quality into anew quantity. Once the quality of money makes its appearance in society, it tends to spread indefinitely, to penetrate everywhere, and to transform all other economic relations. This quantification of the money quality reaches its high point under capitalism where every product of labor and, above all, labor power itself, necessarily becomes exchangeable for money.

This quantification in turn leads to the production of a new economic quality. Money transforms itself into capital, which is a higher form of money. This new quality of money, its capital form, also grows and assumes diverse forms: usurious, commercial, manufacturing, industrial and finance capital.

With the socialist revolution this capital form of money will wither away, as will many other forms and functions of money, in the course of time. As Trotsky pointed out, with the establishment of socialist relations, money will become transformed into mere bookkeeping receipts.

Thus we see that there is a ceaseless process, a never-ending round, of the transformation of quantity into quality and quality into quantity, of possibility into inevitability and inevitability into possibility. Money which is inevitable under our economic system was not possible under primitive tribal collectivism which preceded commodity production and will no longer be necessary under the communism of the future. This path of development is extremely contradictory.

Money comes out of commodities and always remains a commodity, just as man came out of the animal species and always remains an animal. Yet money is more than and is other than a commodity, just as man is more than and other than his fellow mammals. Money develops its contradictory characteristics to the point that, under capitalism, money, which is the sole means of unifying and realizing the value of commodities, stands in absolute opposition to the world of commodities. Without money, no commodity can realize itself as a commodity; conversely, without commodities, money cannot realize itself as money.

This contradiction most conspicuously manifests itself in capitalist crises, when the money which originated and functions as the sole medium of circulation becomes the principal and insuperable barrier to the circulation of commodities. This is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism which will bring about its downfall.

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The evolution of money from its origins to its prospective dying away exemplifies the dialectical nature of appearance and essence, quantity and quality, possibility and inevitability, content and form, relative and absolute, accident and necessity, the abstract and the concrete. Such correlative categories make up the content of dialectical logic. They are indispensable conceptual tools for analyzing the contradictory characteristics of reality and its modes of development.

This dialectical and materialist view of appearance and reality clashes with the conceptions of other philosophical schools such as the agnostics and the empiricists. The agnostic theory of knowledge, as put forward by Kant, makes an absolute disjunction between subjective appearances and inner substance, things "for us" and things "in themselves." It asserts that men can experience only phenomena and cannot penetrate to the essence of things. Therefore reality is unknowable through either the senses or reason, though it may be intuited by faith.

Empiricism tends to subordinate essential relations to the sensuous or subjective appearances of things and to take, or mistake, their superficial aspects and immediate manifestations for their fundamental content.

Both theories of knowledge err in divorcing phenomena from essence and disregarding or denying their necessary interconnection as opposing poles of a unified whole.

The divergence and coincidence of appearance and reality are especially important in understanding how knowledge progresses from everyday experience to scientific insight and foresight. Things as they are first manifested to us have contradictory and confusing characteristics which are both leading and misleading. Their immediate presentation can conflict with their real state. At the same time these phenomena provide clues which can expose the deceptiveness of the outward show and open the way to a grasp of their basic content, since essence presents itself in and through diverse appearances.

One familiar instance of this divergence between appearance and reality is the relation of the earth to the solar system. The sun seems to be revolving around the earth whereas we now know that the earth, like the other planets, is orbiting around the sun. The discovery by Copernicus of the rotation of the earth on its axis and its motion around a fixed sun opened the modern epoch in astronomy.

At the same time it is understandable why the other celestial bodies seem to be moving around the observer situated on earth. In the scientific picture of the solar system, both the apparent and the real motions are interconnected inexplicable.

One of the main aims of science is to resolve the conflicts between the outward forms and the inner reality of things by demonstrating their dialectical unity. Knowledge advances by probing beneath, behind and beyond appearances to ever deeper levels of real existence.

From: An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

Lecture VIII. The Categories of Dialectical Logic

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