George Novack's philosophical glossary

George Novack's Polemics in Marxist Philosophy [NY: Pathfinder Press 1978] can be purchased here.  It's glossary:

George Novack on "negation of the negation"

From the glossary in George Novack's Polemics in Marxist Philosophy

negation of the negation - one of the basic laws of dialectics, flowing from the unity and struggle of opposites and the transformation of quantity into quality.  Every object or condition is characterized by internal contradiction between a positive and a negative pole - that which exists and that which is coming into being.  At the first dialectical leap, or negation, the old framework is broken, the previously subordinate quality or object in the relationship becomes dominant, and a new framework is established with a new set of internal contradictions.  In both Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, this rupture is referred to as transcendence, rather than mere empty negation of the previous status quo, because there is an element of continuity and development as well as destruction.  The concept of the negation of the negation traces this element of transcendence over a longer period of time.  It is the logical means of conceptualizing evolution over time, on the premise that natural and social processes are sufficiently determinate to show long-term cyclical patterns.  Common examples given include the life cycles of living species, where birth represents the breakup of the previous unity of the parent organism for the first negation, with the stage where the progeny reach reproductive age representing the second negation, or the negation of the negation.  In social evolution, a common example is the negation of primitive social property by the rise of private property and class society, followed by the eventual emergence of the proletariat, which moves toward the second stage, the negation of private property and the reestablishment of social property on a higher level, for a negation of the negation.  From these examples  it can be seen that Marx's concept is not purely cyclical but more like a spiral in which the conclusion of the complete process also involved evolution and progress toward a higher level of organic or organizational complexity, and not mere repetition.

from Polemics in Marxist Philosophy [Pathfinder, 1978] page 315.

Alain Badiou and the Idea of Communism by Alex Callinicos

ON DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM Marx Engels Lenin [Progress Publishers: Moscow 1972]

Read the book here.

"To storm the bastions of capitalism"

Anarchism & Anarcho-Syndicalism Selected Writings By Marx, Engels, Lenin [(New World Paperbacks) 1972]

Socialist construction and the development of Marxist philosophy

DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT IN THE USSR
F. V. Konstantinov

from Development of Revolutionary Theory by the CPSU

Progress Publishers, 1971

Marxist-Leninist philosophy—dialectical and historical materialism as the general theoretical foundation of the Marxist-Leninist teaching—naturally, plays a crucial role in the contemporary ideological struggle. The fight for and against Leninism was started during Lenin's lifetime. But it acquired particularly acute forms after Lenin's death. The central issue was, of course, that of the ways and prospects of development in the Soviet Union and of the possibility of building socialism in the USSR when it was encircled by capitalist countries.

But this vast general problem contained a series of other problems: the ways and means of socialist industrialisation in, a country devastated by two wars; the problem of reorganising the scattered and backward peasant economy and turning it into a large-scale socialist co-operative economy; the problem of wiping out illiteracy, the problem of mastering the great cultural heritage of mankind; the problem of turning the USSR into a country with the most advanced socialist culture; the problem of preserving and consolidating the alliance between the workers and the peasants, an alliance that forms the political foundation of Soviet power; the problem of preserving and strengthening fraternal friendship among the numerous nations and nationalities inhabiting the USSR; the problem of how to direct these nations and nationalities to the road of successful socialist construction. After Lenin's death, the Soviet people and the Communist Party were confronted with these and numerous other challenging problems.

In tackling political, economic, social, ideological and military problems, the Central Committee, the theoreticians and the Leninist Party as a whole successfully upheld Marxism-Leninism as an integral teaching. They fought for Marxist philosophy, for revolutionary dialectics, for the creative development and implementation of Lenin's teaching, combating the Right and "Left" revisionists, those who sought to revise the basic principles of Leninism, and the dogmatists who were unable to apply revolutionary dialectics and turned it into scholasticism.

For decades and particularly in our day, in spite of facts, the opponents of Marxism, of dialectical and historical materialism, have endeavoured to prove that Marxism is a teaching of the 19th century, that it has grown obsolete and runs counter to the conditions, facts and reality of the 20th century, and to modern natural science.

Actually, it is the bourgeois philosophical and sociological theories that in their totality contradict the facts, reality and character of our epoch.

Marxism-Leninism is the only philosophy that has withstood the test of time, the test of the great events of our epoch.

Hegel called philosophy an epoch set in thought. This definition is extraordinarily profound. Marx called philosophy the spiritual quintessence of the epoch. But far from every philosophy fits into this lofty category. Every philosophy is the child, the creation of its times, but not every philosophy mirrors the substance, character, content and soul of its epoch.

In the capitalist world there are today many different philosophical schools and trends, major and minor. Each in its own way reflects some aspect of 20th-century life. Mostly, this is a misinterpreted, distorted or one-sided reflection, a tendentious reflection sustained by the viewpoint of one social group or another.

Today the whole world has been set in motion. And throughout the world all thinking people recognise that ours is an epoch of revolution: revolution in science and technology, and political, social and national liberation revolutions. The whole of spiritual life in the world is in the grip of revolution. Throughout the capitalist world people are re-assessing values. Revolutionary ideas have invaded 56 all spheres of human life in Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Africa.

What philosophy most adequately reflected and continues to reflect this revolutionary character, this revolutionary spirit of our epoch? Perhaps various positivist schools and trends appealing to experience, facts and phenomena but denying philosophy the right to get to the bottom of phenomena, the objective laws of movement and development operating independently of man? These trends deny science and philosophy the right of prevision. But this is a bad philosophy, a poor and unreliable guide in ordinary times, let alone in an epoch of revolution, in an epoch of great historical changes. In capitalist society considerable influence is wielded by neothomism, a religious philosophy that seeks to integrate theology with science. This is a philosophy of the past, not of the present or the future. It cannot serve as the ideological banner of progressive social forces.

Existentialism, a subjectivistic philosophy, has a very large following in capitalist society, chiefly among a section of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. It comes forward under the banner of humanism and as its principal object of study it has selected man, the individual, regarding him abstractly, in isolation from the tasks and conditions that may lead to the individual's real emancipation from all forms of alienation, to genuine freedom. Existentialism is a pessimistic theory reflecting man's tragic destiny in the world of capitalism, in the world of alienated essences, of phenomena created by man and acting against him as a force alien and hostile to him.

Dialectical materialism, revolutionary dialectics is the only philosophy that adequately reflects the revolutionary character of the contemporary epoch. This philosophy is hostile to everything reactionary, conservative and outworn. It is an enemy of everything stagnant or fossilised. As the richest, most profound and comprehensive teaching of development in nature, society, thinking and cognition, materialist dialectics calls on people to move forward without resting content with what has been achieved. Dialectics requires a bold unearthing and settlement of the contradictions arising in life and in knowledge. It demands support for everything new, progressive and revolutionary against the old and outworn. Ultimately the new always vanquishes the old. Such is the inexorable law of development. As a method of cognition and action, dialectics is critical and revolutionary by nature, by all its inner substance. It regards human knowledge as an everlasting, living, mighty, omnipotent and insuperable onward movement from ignorance to knowledge, from shallow to deeper knowledge, from relative and objective truth to absolute truth, never fully and completely achieving it. It whips up the human mind, keeping it from resting content with what has been achieved; it awakens a craving for more knowledge.

Revolutionary dialectics is opposed to dogmatism, bigotry, complacency in science, and to claims to the attainment of absolute knowledge. What other philosophy conforms to and reflects to such an extent the revolutionary, dynamic spirit and steady, onward sweep of 20th-century science?

Revolutionary dialectics is the only philosophy that places a reliable theoretical weapon in the hands of all the Marxist-Leninist Parties. That is why Lenin, the Party and its Central Committee have unremittingly devoted so much energy and attention to the further all-sided elaboration of dialectics as a science, as a theory of knowledge, as a method of revolutionary action. That is why Lenin and the Leninists have always been so earnest in combating all forms of metaphysics, dogmatism, eclecticism and sophism, all forms of subjectivist play in dialectics. In a philosophical work headed On the Significance of Militant Materialism Lenin wrote that the development of dialectics as a science had to be furthered creatively. He recommended publishing excerpts from the works of Hegel with accompanying examples from the dialectics of the development of modern capitalism.

As a means of enlarging on dialectical materialism and preventing idealism and positivism from filtering into theoretical natural science, Lenin recommended an alliance between Marxist philosophers and modern materialist natural scientists. This alliance, he wrote, was needed equally by modern naturalists and Marxist philosophers. "It should be remembered," he pointed out, "that the sharp upheaval which modern natural science is undergoing very often gives rise to reactionary philosophical schools and minor schools, trends and minor trends. Unless, therefore, the problems raised by the recent revolution in natural science are followed, and unless natural scientists are enlisted in the work of a philosophical journal, militant materialism can be neither militant nor materialism." [58•*

After Lenin's death the development of philosophical thought in the USSR proceeded as a drive to carry out the tasks set by him.

Marxist philosophers devoted considerable time to a struggle against vulgar, mechanistic materialism, whose expounders included Lyubov Axelrod, I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, Alexander Varyash and A. K. Timiryazev. The principal expounder of mechanistic, anti-dialectical materialism was Nikolai Bukharin with his theory of equilibrium. For the Right opportunists this theory served as the philosophical foundation of their economic and political programme, as the philosophical basis for their theory of spontaneity, of spontaneous development. In philosophy and politics the struggle against mechanism naturally grew extremely acute. Crowded meetings at which heated debates took place and dialectics, Marxist philosophical materialism, was upheld in a struggle against simplified, vulgar materialism, were held in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev and other cities. Marxist philosophical cadres grew, formed and became steeled in this tense situation. This struggle of Marxist philosophers against mechanism was reflected in extensive literature dealing with purely philosophical and sociological problems and with problems of the struggle against simplified, vulgar, anti-dialectical views in physics, chemistry, biology, political economy, historical science, literary criticism and aesthetics. Much was contributed to this struggle by the journal Pod znamenem marksizma {Under the Banner of Marxism], which carried articles devoted to philosophical problems of natural science. The alliance between Marxist philosophers and representatives of modern natural science was achieved and strengthened. The journal printed articles on problems of dialectics. But towards the beginning of the 1930s (in some cases even earlier) serious errors and distortions came to light in the work of the journal and in the school of A. M. Deborin, who headed the journal. Regrettably, the editors failed to cope with the task recommended by Lenin —that of giving a materialistic interpretation of Hegel's dialectics. On many issues they erased the border-line between the idealistic dialectics of Hegel and the materialistic 59 dialectics of Marx. This was the weak point of the Deborin school in the struggle against mechanistic materialism. A most serious retreat from the principles of materialism by the journal's editors was that they divorced philosophical theory from practice, from politics^

But the main failing of Deborin and his school was that in a number of works they belittled Lenin's contribution to the development of Marxist philosophy, overlooking the fact that Lenin had raised Marxist philosophy to a new, higher level.

When the adversaries of Marxism assert that Marxism which was evolved a hundred years ago is obsolete, they deliberately ignore the fact that in our 20th century the teaching and philosophy of Marx were all-sidedly developed by Lenin. Marxism has never been and cannot be stagnant. The struggle for Leninism in the sphere of philosophy has been part and parcel of the Party's general struggle to achieve socialism, to mobilise all forces and means to attain the greatest objective after the October Socialist Revolution. This struggle demanded a herculean effort from the working class, the working peasantry, the Soviet intelligentsia, the Soviet Government and the Communist Party, which is the collective leader and inspirer of the Soviet people. In this struggle, in this advance along unexplored paths the Soviet people and the Communist Party were pioneers. And this great work, this unparalleled feat of building a new society, would have been inconceivable without the creative application and development of Marxist-Leninist theory, Marxist philosophy and, in particular, materialistic dialectics.

Our ill-wishers abroad are the only people who are so blind as to speak and write of the stagnation of theoretical thought in the USSR in the period of socialist construction, during the grim years of struggle against the capitalist encirclement and during the years of the life-and-death struggle with nazism. It would be hard to list all the great, pressing political and theoretical problems that arose every year, every month, at every abrupt turn in history. It would be hard to list all the contradictions and difficulties that we had to surmount in practice by applying -theory, revolutionary dialectics.

After Lenin's death some mistakes were made in the course of socialist construction. The personality cult damaged the development of Marxist theory and philosophy. It fettered theoretical thinking, pushing it into dogmatism and reducing it to commentary. The Leninist Party and the Soviet people found in themselves the strength to surmount this phenomenon. Theoretical thought, including philosophy, cannot be stopped. Life, the practice of socialist construction and the extremely complex international situation demanded repeated analyses of events and the situation, and theoretical answers to new problems. These answers were furnished chiefly by the Party, by its Central Committee and theoretical cadres.

Is it possible to build socialism in one country taken separately? The theoretical answer to this question was furnished by Lenin. He formulated and theoretically substantiated the ways and means of fulfilling this task. His plan called for industrialisation, electrification and collectivisation. But in carrying out Lenin's plan the Party and the people encountered innumerable perplexing difficulties and innumerable enemies.

The Party and its theoretical cadres, philosophers among them, surmounted these difficulties. Perhaps, there was a better way of achieving this, with fewer sacrifices. But we were the pioneers and had no models, no historical examples to draw on. Besides, war clouds were gathering over our heads. We were not free to set the time-limit either for industrialisation or collectivisation. In ten years we had to achieve an industrial build-up which had taken other countries 100–150 years.

It is a complicated and difficult task to evolve the theory of dialectics. But the dialectics of history follows a path that is even more tortuous. And the difficulties besetting it are even more formidable. Here is one more example from the sphere of historical dialectics—the cultural revolution in a backward country such as Russia used to be, where prior to the Revolution 71.6 per cent of the population were illiterate. How was this revolution to be accomplished? How was it to be tackled? What had to be the attitude to the cultural heritage of the past? How was this heritage to be preserved, assimilated and enlarged? These were the problems that had to be resolved in theory and practice. They were coped with brilliantly by the Party and the Government. The proof of this is that today 56.4 per cent of the working population have either a secondary or higher education; there is a 27-million strong intelligentsia; the Soviet 61 Union has scored monumental achievements in science and technology; the world's first artificial satellites and spaceships were launched by the Soviet Union.

A new socio-economic system putting an end to mankind's prehistory and ushering in its real history, consciously made and directed by the people, can only emerge on a solid scientific foundation, on the foundation of MarxismLeninism, of research into the objective laws of social development. Dialectical and historical materialism were the theoretical weapons ably used by the Communist Party in changing the old world and creating the new, socialist world.

Without combating dogmatism and the various forms of revisionism the Soviet Union would have been unable to ensure the building of socialism. During the most difficult years of socialist construction, as in the period of the October Revolution, the Communist Party and its theoretical cadres waged a struggle against the decrepit dogmas of the West European and Russian Social-Democrats. The character, spirit and nature of the problems with which the Soviet people and the Party had to grapple demanded courageous innovation.

In a letter to Joseph Bloch, editor of the journal Sozialistische Monatshefte, Frederick Engels wrote that in view of the evolution of the materialistic, i.e., genuinely scientific understanding of history, human history from the most remote times to our day would have to be written anew. This applies not only to history but also to jurisprudence, literary criticism, aesthetics, ethnography and philology. For that reason one of the results of the development of Marxist philosophical thought in the USSR is that Marxist dialectics and historical materialism have become the method and soul of all the humanities.

During the years of socialist construction Marxist philosophical ideas penetrated deep into the thick of the masses: workers, intellectuals and collective farmers. Under Soviet power the entire country was turned into a mammoth university. The Revolution and the building of the new society awakened in the masses an insatiable craving for knowledge. Marxist-Leninist philosophy has been and continues to be studied not only in a huge number of institutions of higher learning, but also at numerous circles, seminars and courses at factories, research institutions and laboratories, and in towns and villages throughout the country.

One of the greatest victories of Marxist philosophy is that it liberated tens of millions of people from the hold of religious ideas and armed them with a progressive, scientific world outlook. Everybody knows of the importance Lenin attached to the struggle against religion, to atheistic propaganda and the moulding of a materialistic scientific world outlook. Much has been done in this direction, although religious ideas cling on tenaciously to this day among the backward section of the population. For that reason the drive for an atheistic world outlook must be continued.

What philosophical and sociological problems devoted to events of historic significance have been worked out and resolved by the Party after Lenin's death? In the Philosophical Notebooks and On the Significance of Militant Materialism Lenin set Marxists the task of comprehensively elaborating materialistic dialectics as a science, as the logic and theory of cognition. In the period of over 50 years since the Revolution Marxists have written works on the dialectics in Marx's Capital, on the problems of dialectics in the works of Lenin, on the dialectics of the development of modern capitalism, on the dialectics of the development of socialist society, on the system of categories of dialectics, on the theory of reflection and on individual laws and categories of dialectical logic. A six-volume history of world philosophy and a three-volume history of philosophy, published earlier, are fundamental Marxist treatises tracing the history of the struggle between materialism and idealism, between dialectics and metaphysics. The sixth volume of this work and the supplementing works on the history of philosophy and sociology in the USSR and in the European socialist countries deal with the development of philosophy, including dialectics, in the USSR after the October Revolution.

The first-ever five-volume encyclopaedia of Marxist philosophy has been brought out. Four volumes have been printed, and the last volume is to be printed shortly.

Philosophical problems of modern natural science occupy an important place in the work of Soviet philosophers. The significance of Soviet research into problems of the dialectics of nature of the 20th century is that it is being conducted by Marxist philosophers together with leading natural scientists.

At one time some philosophers committed the serious error of oversimplifying the approach to special problems of natural science (the theory of relativity, genetics and cybernetics) and thereby undermined the alliance between Marxist philosophers and materialistic natural scientists. This error has been rectified. Soviet natural scientists support and actively propagate dialectical materialism, and this is one of the finest achievements of our epoch.

In recent years researches, monographs and papers have .been written which in their totality give a fairly comprehensive picture of Lenin's contribution to the development of dialectical materialism. They are a gratifying result of our endeavour over many years, of the joint effort of prominent philosophers and natural scientists.

These works open the road for a further advance in this sphere. Nonetheless, they have not dealt with every aspect of Lenin's philosophical heritage. Unless Lenin's heritage is studied in its entirety the latest data of natural science cannot be profoundly comprehended philosophically. Precisely because during the initial decades of this century Lenin raised and resolved key problems of philosophical science, his thoughts, practical work and method live on and operate in. every sphere of modern knowledge and act as a powerful driving force of the contemporary development of dialectical, materialistic philosophy. There are, of course, natural scientists who maintain that Lenin's works do not influence the development of natural science because they deal solely with ideological questions. But these are not the claims that determine the true role played by Lenin's theoretical heritage.

Soviet philosophers and natural scientists, and also progressive scientists throughout the world draw on and shall go on drawing on the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. But it is one thing to draw on an authoritative source and another to hide behind it. The modern scientific and technological revolution has raised questions which did not and could not confront the classics of Marxism-Leninism. Therefore, to believe that it is possible to go on living by relying solely on the conclusions of the classics of MarxismLeninism is to belittle the authority of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and of its founders. This makes it incumbent on us to develop Marxist-Leninist philosophy creatively and adhere to its revolutionary spirit, to go beyond the heritage left by the founders of Marxism-Leninism and stop living on philosophical rent.

As a scientific outlook, dialectical materialism helps natural scientists to steer clear of errors and avoid groping in the dark, serving them as a reliable compass in their quest for truth. Marxist-Leninist philosophy does not force on the natural sciences any ready-made, everlasting truths and does not attempt to resolve the specific problems confronting natural scientists. By emancipating the mind, by freeing it from dogmas, prejudices, "eternal truths" and so on, it gives the scientist a method of scientifically understanding reality, a method specified by natural science in its application to special fields of knowledge. Lenin defined science and historical development "as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality". [64•*

The classics of Marxism-Leninism have left us a priceless philosophical heritage. Time cannot change it. On the contrary, with every new discovery of the natural sciences we get a profounder understanding of the fundamental principles of philosophical materialism. These principles are part of the treasure-store of Marxist-Leninist philosophical science and of the treasure-store of the methodology of the natural sciences. Renunciation of the principles of dialectical materialism is tantamount to renunciation of MarxismLeninism.

Recent years have witnessed the accumulation of vast new theoretical and experimental material and the appearance of new sciences and new scientific trends. These are the achievements in the study of the atomic nucleus and the use of thermonuclear energy, the exploration of outer space, progress in cybernetics, electronics, chemistry, molecular biology, and so on. Physics, biology and other natural sciences are again confronted with extremely complex fundamental problems, which evidently cannot be resolved without changing the established systems of scientific concepts in the way that they were changed in connection with the revolution in physics early in the 20th century.

A creative solution of these problems requires the further development, above all, of hilosophical science itself. In the field of dialectical materialism we are now faced with similarly difficult and similarly impressive tasks as had faced Lenin in his day. Engels, it will be recalled, suggested that philosophical materialism had to change its form with every major, epoch-making discovery by natural science. Under the modern revolutionising discoveries of science, this suggestion receives profound concretisation and creative embodiment.

The cascade of astounding discoveries in the physics of elementary particles, the philosophical problems raised by the development of cybernetics, the quests for a new definition of the substance of life and the philosophical problems of chemistry, the science of the earth, astronomy and other fields of knowledge not only demand a philosophical, dialectical-materialist assessment but raise the question of the further development of philosophy. The solution of all these problems would mark the beginning of a new stage in the development of dialectical materialism. Interesting fragments of this general picture have been produced, for instance, by the researches into the classification of sciences and by a philosophical analysis of the principle of causality, the principle of conformity in modern science, the new categories of the element of structure, symmetry and asymmetry, and so forth.

New problems are constantly arising before Soviet philosophers. These are problems of the contemporary stage of the interaction between mathematics and natural science, the role played by mathematics in the formation of new, more profound and generalising concepts, the modern definition of the essence of life, the methodology of the interaction of the entire range of sciences in the study of the Earth and outer space, general problems of the development of science as a large and complex system, and so on.

Differentiation between the sciences is one of the fundamental laws of the development of all sciences, including Marxist philosophy. For example, empirical sociology, ethics, aesthetics and scientific communism have evolved into distinct spheres of philosophical knowledge. The problems of scientific communism have been studied by economists ( problems of political economy), sociologists and representatives of the juridical sciences. During the past few years the need for teaching and developing Marxist science has led to the singling out of the socio-political problems of communist construction into a sphere of their own—scientific communism. Here we do not, of course, have a precise and strict demarcation between the problems of the political economy of socialism, sociology and juridical sciences, but this should not affect research. Life demands comprehensive sociological investigations of the socio-political problems of the development of socialist society. This approach ensures the most allembracing, objective research and makes it possible to give practical effect to its results.

Naturally, during these years Soviet philosophers and sociologists have devoted special attention to the problem of unravelling new laws and motive forces of the development of socialist society. The general sociological problem of the socio-economic system as such was tackled in this connection and on this basis. Bourgeois sociology and economic science continue, as they have always done, to regard capitalism and its laws as something natural, eternal and immutable. Marx creatively refuted this metaphysical view. The October Revolution, the triumph of socialism in the USSR and the formation of the world socialist system have in practice disproved the theories of the bourgeois sociologists and economists. But the task has arisen of revealing and showing the new laws and motive forces of society that have ousted capitalism.

Bourgeois sociologists and economists, Walt Rostow and Raymond Aron among them, and also revisionists and the Maoist dogmatists (revisionists of the Right and revisionists-dogmatists of the "Left" display a touching unity here) try to prove that Soviet socialist society, the world socialist system and modern capitalist society are nothing more than varieties of one and the same industrial society. Meanwhile, the so-called theory of convergence, expounded by some bourgeois philosophers and sociologists, seeks to prove that the Soviet and capitalist societies are both developing in one and the same direction and that at some point they will merge into a single society. Marxists hold that capitalism is fraught with revolution and that sooner or later it will evolve into socialist society through revolutionary transformation. The exponents of industrial society and of the theory of convergence (Mao Tse-tung, for instance) believe that socialist society will turn into a single industrial society. We thus have two opposing concepts, two opposing outlooks.

Socialist society is the first, lowest phase of the new, communist socio-economic system. It is founded on the integration of producers with the means of production, on the socialist mode of production, on public (state) and co– operative ownership of the means of production, and on conformity of the relations of production to the character of the new productive forces. Socialism puts an end to exploitation of man by man and to the subjugation of people by the productive forces and relations of production created by them. This has opened up unlimited scope for the development of the productive forces and of man himself. Planned development not only of production but of society is one of the cardinal laws of socialism as a whole. In socialist society the balance between spontaneity and consciousness has changed fundamentally in favour of the latter. Under socialism not only economic but also social development is planned and directed, but elements of unenvisaged and unplanned development also continue to exist. However, the general direction of development is determined by the Marxist policy of the Party and the Government, a policy resting on the objective laws of social progress.

The law of development of all antagonistic formations, of capitalism in particular, is that all contradictions and antagonisms grow increasingly more acute: the antagonism between exploiters and the exploited, between the rich and the poor, between mental and physical work, between man and machinery, between the colossal socialisation of production and private ownership, and so on and so forth. In socialist society, on the other hand, the advance is towards the steady erasure of the distinctions between classes, towards increasing social homogeneity, towards communist equality. This is a complex, difficult and contradictory process and it takes much longer than we sometimes supposed. The abolition of all distinctions between the working classes, between mental and physical work and between town and countryside, and the attainment of complete social equality require the creation of the appropriate material and technical basis, the utilisation of all the finest achievements of modern science and technology and a level of labour productivity that would ensure an abundance of material blessings.

A fundamental law of socialism and of the future communism is the provision of all facilities for the development of the talents and gifts of every member of society. Much has already been done in this sphere. But still more is to be done. The maxim, law and purpose of socialist and of communist society is: All for man, for the sake of man, for his welfare and happiness and for the all-round development of his abilities.

One of the most important problems of Marxist philosophy and sociology, to which the works and researches of Soviet philosophers and sociologists are devoted, is that of man, of socialist humanism. This problem receives considerable attention also from modern bourgeois philosophy and sociology in the West. It is the central problem of existentialism, too. Some foreign philosophers seek to supplement Marxism with existentialism. After the publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, some "Marxists" turned from the mature Marx, the author of the Manifesto and Capital, to the young Marx. Much in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is valuable and brilliant. These works and the ideas expounded in them should not be consigned to oblivion or, much less, farmed out to bourgeois ideologists. But it is a cruel mistake to think that the entire range of Marx's humanism is contained in these early works, when he had not yet shaken off the influence of Hegel and Feuerbach and was still making such wide use of the category of alienation, which occupies a much more modest place in his own classical works and in the works of Engels and Lenin. The reason it occupies such a modest place is not that they had ceased to be humanists. On the contrary, genuine humanism permeates the entire teaching of scientific communism, the whole of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and political economy. It should not be forgotten that in Capital Marx exposes the inhumanity of the economic and social system of capitalism and comes to the revolutionary conclusion that this inhuman system has to be destroyed. Love of man has been preached for hundreds and thousands of years by religious and atheistic humanists, by philosophers and sociologists, but the man of labour remained chained and fettered. Marxism was the only philosophy that showed the real way to destroy all forms of slavery, oppression and alienation and build a society where the free development of each person would be the condition for the free development of all. In the Marxist-Leninist theory of the class struggle, in the theory of the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat there is a hundred times more humanism than in all the bourgeois and revisionist writings taken together.

Soviet philosophers, sociologists and psychologists have lately been making a special study of the problems of the personality and of the problems of socialist and bourgeois humanism. To change the nature of man that took many millennia to form is an extraordinarily intricate and lengthy process. Nevertheless, the new man of Soviet, socialist society is no longer a dream but an historical reality. This new man—a collectivist, an internationalist, a fighter against imperialism, a revolutionary and humanist, a man armed with the most progressive world outlook of our age—already exists. He accomplished the October Revolution. While changing the old world of social relations and building the new world, he changed his own character. He defeated nazism, mankind's deadliest enemy. This was a great feat requiring love of the socialist motherland and of mankind, courage, valour, heroism and staunchness. The victory over nazism was not merely a military victory. It was a victory of the Soviet socialist system over the capitalist, nazi system; it was a victory of the Soviet man armed with the socialist ideology of internationalism over the brutal ideology of racism and nationalism. A contribution to this victory was also made by Marxist philosophical thought, which through the Leninist Party educated and inspired Soviet people, giving them faith in victory.

True, the Soviet man is not yet completely free of the birthmarks of the old system, of some backward ways of thinking. These ways manifest themselves, above all, in everyday life. But all this is surmountable.

One of the tasks that Lenin had set representatives of the humanitarian sciences, including Marxist sociologists, was to conduct concrete social researches. The aim of these researches was to throw light on the mechanism governing the operation of economic and social laws at a given time and place, sum up the advanced experience of communist construction, and expose and criticise negative phenomena hindering the development of the new. These studies were conducted over a period of many years by the Party and by Soviet economists and sociologists. But, as the practice of communist construction has shown during the past few years, the scientific administration of society requires further and broader sociological research in various fields by sociologists and also by economists and jurists. The development of Marxist sociology—historical materialism—also requires concrete sociological investigations. In this field some advance has already been made.

Mathematical methods of investigation are being employed on a growing scale in economics and sociology. But when mathematical methods are applied, theory and philosophy, i.e., the ideological aspect of science, must not be forgotten.

Bourgeois sociologists have begun to preach the deideologisation of science, of sociology in particular. They hold that in the 20th century sociology is giving way to technology, that technology is capable of resolving all contemporary problems while ideology only acts as a barrier, standing in the way of objective cognition.

The purpose of this theory is to disarm the Marxists and the working class ideologically. Bourgeois ideology is hostile to science, to objective scientific research. On the other hand, Marxist sociology and ideology are interrelated and inseparable.

A distinguishing feature of philosophical development in the USSR is that Marxist philosophy and Marxist ideas have been adopted by the broad masses. In the past philosophy was only accessible to individuals or a few selected schools and circles. The purpose of Marxist philosophy is to serve as a weapon of the working class and its Party in the revolutionary transformation of the world. A philosophy plays this role only when its ideas are embraced by the masses. In the Soviet Union the ideas of Marxism-Leninism have won the minds of millions of people.

The Communist Party has always been true to Marxist principles. It regards Marxism-Leninism as a monolithic, integral teaching moulded from a single piece of steel. It continues, as it has always done, to wage a determined struggle against dead dogmas and revisionism of all hues. Leninism is the supreme example of a bold, revolutionary attitude to theory, an example of how fidelity to the fundamental principles of Marxist teaching should be correctly and scientifically combined with the fearless, creative development and enrichment of this teaching. Theory is not a dogma but a guide to revolutionary action—such is the maxim of Lenin and the Leninist Party. To this attitude to theory the Communist Party and the working class owe their great achievements.

Deep-going changes and transformations are taking place in the world all the time. Much has taken place and continues to take place in the life of the peoples of all countries and continents: the might and influence of the world socialist system and of the world communist and working-class movement are growing; the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America are awakening to activity and beginning to make their own history; the scientific and technological revolution is spreading in breadth and depth and the social productive forces are growing; under capitalism these forces have acquired the nature of formidable destructive elements directed against mankind; parallel with the old deepening contradictions of modern capitalism, new contradictions have appeared and are growing. The socialist countries, the international working class and all mankind are confronted with great tasks, some of which have never been so pressing as today. The more difficult and impressive the tasks confronting the Party, the working class, the country and the world communist movement, the greater are the demands on the social sciences for further creative development and strict objectivity, for profound, accurate and scientific investigations of social processes, and for conclusions based on these investigations.

The fact that Marxist theory, the social sciences and Marxist philosophy comprise the theoretical foundation of the home and foreign policy pursued by the Communist Party and the socialist state and provide the guideline for the activity of the people devolves on scientists a tremendous responsibility for the accuracy and objectivity of theoretical studies.

Subjectivism, departures from objective truth, misrepresentation of historical truth and a time-serving approach to the study of social problems are alien to the spirit and substance of Marxism-Leninism and can harm our cause substantially. Lenin wrote: "The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true." [71•* This has always been the guideline of the Party and its Central Committee. It must always be an immutable law of the theoretical work of scientists.

The Party has set Soviet scientists great and responsible tasks in further enriching Marxist theory and sociology and conducting concrete social studies. These tasks derive from the demands of life, from the requirements of communist construction.

Lately, there has been an intensification of the attacks on Marxism-Leninism, and attempts are being made to belittle Lenin's role as a thinker, as a great theoretician, who raised Marxism to a new, higher stage and enriched all aspects and components of Marxism. Attempts are made to proclaim the theoretically immature writings of Mao Tse-tung as the Marxism of the present epoch.

There is in the world a category of people who, while claiming to develop Marxist philosophy have, in fact, betrayed it long ago. They reject dialectical and historical materialism and preach a variety of bourgeois and pettybourgeois humanism. They counterpose Engels to Marx, the young Marx to the mature Marx and, of course, reject Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as an "obsolete" work.

These critics of Leninism consider that the cardinal problem of philosophy is not that of the relation of thinking to being, but the problem of man, the problem of the individual, as though it can be scientifically resolved outside dialectical and historical materialism, as though two outlooks— materialistic and idealistic—do not clash over the problem of man and humanism. The new-fledged critics of Leninism reject Lenin's theory of reflection in the sphere of the theory of knowledge as being allegedly a conformist, time-serving theory that fails to take the active role of knowledge and consciousness into consideration. The reader will say that this is quite absurd: Lenin and his (and, of course, Marx's and Engels's) theory of reflection—and passivity! These critics counterpose Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism to his Philosophical Notebooks where, reading Hegel, Lenin writes: "Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it." [72•* But consciousness and knowledge play a great creative, transformative role only when they faithfully, adequately and objectively reflect the world and reality. Otherwise they are nothing more than idealism, subjectivism and voluntarism.

Foreign opponents sometimes ask Soviet philosophers the ridiculous question: "What do you hold higher—Marxist orthodoxy or truth?" For creative Marxists-Leninists these have always coincided. Orthodox Marxism has always required a creative development of philosophical and sociological theory in accordance with reality. This is the teaching of Marxist dialectics. This was how Lenin had always acted. And this is how the Party, following Lenin, acts today.

At present the struggle for Leninism cannot be waged successfully without a simultaneous struggle against revisionism and also against die-hard dogmatism, which is actually open revisionism and a betrayal of the fundamental aspect of Marxism—its revolutionary dialectics—which requires a concrete historical approach to phenomena and events and binds us to look ahead, not back, to see the new developments in life and, accordingly, chart our strategy and tactics in the struggle for communism. In this lies the genuinely revolutionary spirit of Leninism.

In all fields of its activity the Communist Party is guided by the great teaching of Marxism-Leninism. Drawing upon revolutionary theory and the knowledge of the objective laws of social development, it formulates and implements its policy in economic, social and cultural life.

[58•*] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, pp. 232–33.

[64•*] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 362.
[71•*] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 19, p. 23.
[72•*] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 212.

Getting to know the dialectic

From the libcom site, a treasure-trove of classics:

On the dialectical method - Amadeo Bordiga

A 1950 essay by Amadeo Bordiga on the dialectical method, reviewing the history of dialectics since the time of Zeno of Elea, summarizing the further development of dialectical thought and its culmination in the works of Marx and Engels, distinguishing Marx’s dialectic from the metaphysical dialectic of the German critical philosophers, French materialism and English empiricism, explaining its differences with regard to the traditional scientific method and illustrating its principles by way of an interpretation of the meaning of the “negation of the negation” in Marx’s abstract schema of historical stages, “individual property-capitalism-socialism”.

On the Dialectical Method – Amadeo Bordiga

The purpose of this brief text is to stimulate interest in the well-known concepts of the dialectical method employed by Marx in his economic and historical works. It is intended to serve as an intermediate step towards more extensive research, which must come to terms with a theme that is rather unfortunately denominated as Marxist Philosophy; the philosophical dimension of Marxism. Such a title would contradict the clear declaration by Engels: “…modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences…. That which still survives, independently, of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its laws — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and history.”

In a decisive change of course it was claimed that, just as the phenomena of material nature have been addressed by means of experimental research and no longer with the evidence of revelation and speculation, thus replacing “natural philosophy” with science, the same procedure should be followed with respect to the facts of the human world: economics, sociology, and history are approached via the scientific method, eliminating any premise involving transcendent and speculative judgments.

Because scientific and experimental research would be meaningless were they to be limited to the discovery of results without their transmission and communication, the problems of exposition are just as important as those relating to research. Philosophy could be a product of individual reflection, at least formally; science is a collective activity and reality.

The method utilized for the coordination and presentation of data, with the use of language as well as other more modern symbolic mechanisms, therefore constitutes a general discipline for Marxists as well.

This method, however, diverges substantially from that of the modern bourgeois schools which, in their critical struggle against religious and scholastic culture, came to discover dialectics. In them, and above all in Hegel, the dialectic exists, it is found and discovered in the human spirit, with acts of pure thought, and its laws, with all their ramifications, preexist in the context of the external world, whether the latter is considered in its natural or its historical dimension.

For the bourgeois materialists the material natural world exists prior to the thought that investigates and discovers it; but they were unable to extend this insight to the same level of comprehension with regard to the human sciences and history that was attained by Hegel, and to understand the importance of perpetual change in the material world itself.

The study we referred to above (the one that is not entitled ‘the philosophy of Marxism’), as we have already pointed out in The Elements of Marxist Economics, could be called: Marxism and the Theory of Knowledge.

Such a study would, on the one hand, have to further develop the basic themes articulated by Engels in Anti-Dühring and by Lenin in Materialism and Empiro-Criticism, in connection with the scientific discoveries subsequent to the appearance of these two classics: on the other hand, it would have to oppose the dominant tendency in contemporary thought which, induced by class reasons to fight against the determinist dialectic in the social sciences, attempts to rely on the recent achievements in physics to reject determinism in general.

It is therefore necessary, above all, for Marxist militants to get to know the value of the dialectic. The dialectic asserts that the same laws apply to both the presentation of the natural and the historical processes. It is necessary to reject any idealist assumptions, as well as any pretense to discover in the minds of men (or in the mind of the author of the “system”) irrevocable rules that have precedence over research in any field. It means recognizing, in the causal order, the fact that the material and physical conditions for the life of man and of society continuously determine and modify the way man thinks and feels. But it also means seeing, in the action of groups of men in similar material conditions, forces that influence the social situation and change it. This is the real meaning of Marx’s determinism. No apostle or enlightened individual, but only a “class party”, can in particular historical conditions discover, not in the mind, but in social reality, the laws of a future historical formation that will destroy the present one. In all the famous pronouncements of “the theory that seizes the masses and becomes a material force”—“the proletariat is the heir of classical German philosophy”—“to change the world instead of explaining it as the philosophers have done for centuries”—the realist and positive content of the method is essential, and it is consistent with this content to ruthlessly reject the following thesis: that it is possible by means of purely mental operations to establish laws to which both nature and history are “forced” to submit.

There is thus nothing mysterious or eschatological in the passage from necessity to revolutionary will, the transition from the cold analysis of what has happened and is happening to the call for “violent struggle”.

This old and familiar misconception is eliminated in the light of those same texts and proclamations on the course of history in the research and the studies of Marx and Engels; the clarity and logical consistency of their edifice is vindicated; and the latter finds further support, in the light of the most recent discoveries, in the natural and social worlds, which today more than ever before have escaped the clutches of metaphysical pedantry and idealist romanticism, and are more explosive—and revolutionary—than ever.

We shall therefore sketch out a few notes on all this, of an elementary nature.

The notes that follow reflect an attempt to grasp a well-known passage of Capital, the last paragraph of the last chapter, where the “negation of the negation” is cited in order to support the transition, individual property-capitalism-socialism, a passage that became the object of such a lively polemic exchange between Engels and Dühring.

1. Dialectics and Metaphysics

Dialectics means connection, or relation. Just as there is a relation between one thing and another, between one event and another in the real world, so too is there a relation between the (more or less imperfect) reflections of this real world in our thought, and between the formulations that we employ to describe it and to store and to practically enjoy the fruits of the knowledge that we have thereby acquired. As a result, our way of explaining, reasoning, deducing and deriving conclusions, can be guided and ordered by certain rules, corresponding to the appropriate interpretation of reality. Such rules comprise the logic that guides the forms of reasoning; and in a wider sense they comprise the dialectic that serves as a method for connecting them with the scientific truths we have acquired. Logic and dialectic help us to follow a road that is not false if, after starting from our way of formulating certain results of the observation of the real world, we want to be able to enunciate other properties besides those we have just deduced. If such properties are experimentally verified, one could say that our formulas and the way we employed them were sufficiently accurate.

The dialectical method is different from the scientific method. The latter, the stubborn legacy of the old fashioned way of formulating thought, derived from religious concepts based on dogmatic revelation, presents the concepts of things as immutable, absolute, eternal, founded on a few first principles, alien to one another and having a kind of independent life. For the dialectical method, not only is everything in motion, but in motion all things reciprocally influence each other, and this also goes for their concepts, or the reflections of these things in our minds, which are “connected and united” (among themselves). Metaphysics proceeds by way of antinomy, that is, by absolute terms that are opposed to one another. These opposed terms can never mix or touch, nor can anything new emerge from their unity that is not reduced to the simple affirmation of the presence of one and the absence of the other and vice versa.

To provide an example, in the natural sciences stasis is counterposed to motion: there can be no conciliation between these two things; by virtue of the formal principle of contradiction, that which is at rest does not move, and that which is moving is not at rest. But the Eleatic School under Zeno had already exposed the fraud of such a distinction that seems so certain: the arrow in motion, while it passes one point of its trajectory, remains at that point, and therefore is not moving. The ship is moving with respect to the shore, while for the passenger walking on the ship this is not the case: the latter is motionless with respect to the shore, and is therefore not moving. These so-called sophisms were demonstrations of the possibilities of reconciling opposites: stasis and motion; only by breaking down motion into many elements composed of points of time and space would it be possible for infinitesimal mathematics and modern physics not blinded by the metaphysical method to resolve the problems of non-rectilinear and non-uniform motion. Today motion and stasis are considered to be relative terms, and neither absolute movement nor absolute stasis has any meaning.

Another example: for the astronomy of metaphysics all the heavenly bodies beyond the sphere of fire are immutable and incorruptible, and their dimensions, form and movement will remain eternally unchanging. Terrestrial bodies are on the other hand changeable and corruptible in a thousand ways. There is no reconciliation between the two opposed parts of the universe. Today we know instead that the same developmental laws rule for the stars and for the earth, which is a “piece of heaven” without thereby earning any mysterious titles of nobility. For Dante the influence of the incorruptible planets on the vicissitudes of corruptible humanity was a major topic of inquiry, while for modern science the mutual influences between the earth and the other parts of the universe are matters for everyday observation, although it does not believe that the peregrinations of the stars decide our fate.

Finally, in the human and social realm metaphysics introduces two absolute supreme principles: Good and Evil, acquired in a more or less mysterious way in everyone’s consciousness, or personified in unearthly beings. We have previously referred to the relativism of moral concepts, to their variability and to how they change depending on time, place and class situation.

The scientific method with its absolute identities and contradictions generates crude errors, since it is traditionally rooted in our way of thinking, even if we are not aware of it. The concept of the antipodes long seemed absurd, they laughed in Columbus’s face when he sought the Orient by going west, always in the name of the formal contradiction in terms. It is thus a metaphysical error to seek to resolve human problems in one of either two ways, as is done for example by those who counterpose violence and the State: either one declares oneself in favor of the State and for violence; or against the State and against violence. Dialectically, however, these problems are situated in the context of their historical moment and are simultaneously resolved with opposed formulas, by upholding the use of violence in order to abolish violence, and by using the State to abolish the State. The errors of the authoritarians and the errors of the libertarians are in principle equally metaphysical.

2. The Idealist Dialectic and the Scientific Dialectic

The introduction of the dialectic can nonetheless be understood in two very different ways. First enunciated by the most brilliant cosmological schools of Greek philosophy as a method to acquire knowledge of nature that did not depend on aprioristic prejudices, this form of dialectic succumbed in the later schools to the acceptance of the authority of the Aristotelian corpus, not because Aristotle did not respect the value of the dialectic as a way to interpret reality, but because the scientific decline and mysticism that prevailed in the later periods fossilized and immobilized the Aristotelian discoveries.

It is often said that the dialectic re-emerged in the schools of modern critical philosophy and was brought to fruition in Hegel, from whom Marx appropriated it. But the dialectic of these philosophical schools, although they successfully achieved the liberation of the use of reason from the formal and verbal obstacles of scholasticism, was based on the assumption that the laws of the construction of thought serve as the foundations for the real construction of the world. Human science first looked in the minds of men for the rules with which the revealed truths must be connected to each other; it then went on to categorize, on the basis of such a schema, all the ideas of the external world. Logic and dialectic could then establish and carry out their formulations on the basis of a purely mental labor: all science depended on a methodology of discovery within the brain of man, or, strictly speaking, within the brain of the individual author of the system. This pretension is justified by the sole argument that, in science, the factor of the external elements to be studied is inevitably connected with the factor of human personality, from which all science is therefore conditioned. In conclusion, the dialectical method with an idealist premise also has a metaphysical character, even if it claims to call its purely mental constructions by the name of science rather than revelation, or critique rather than absolute apriorisms, or the immanence of the possibilities of human thought rather than its transcendence, and this also applies to the evidence of religions and spiritualist systems.

For us the dialectic is valid as long as the application of its rules is not contradicted by experimental controls. Its use is certainly necessary, since we must also address the discoveries of every science with the instrument of our language and our reasoning (supplemented by mathematical calculations; for us, however, the mathematical sciences are not based on pure properties of thought, but on the real properties of things). That is, the dialectic is a tool of explanation and elaboration, not only of polemic and didactics; it serves the purpose of defending against errors generated by the traditionalist methods of reasoning and in order to achieve the result, which is quite difficult, of not inadvertently introducing into the study of questions arbitrary data based on preconceptions. But the dialectic is itself a reflection of reality and cannot claim to be itself the source of reality or to force reality to obey its strictures. Pure dialectics will reveal nothing to us by itself, but it does possess an enormous advantage with respect to the metaphysical method because it is dynamic, while the latter is static; it films reality rather than photographing it. I do not know much about an automobile if I only know that its speed at any one time is 60 km/hour, if I do not know whether it is accelerating or slowing down. I would know even less if I were to know only the place it occupied in a snapshot. But if I also know that it is moving at 60 km/hour; if it is accelerating from 0 to 120 after a few seconds it will go a very long distance; if it is braking it will stop after going a few more meters. The metaphysics that gives me the where and the when of the phenomenon knows nothing compared to the dialectic that has provided me with the dependence between the where (space) and the when (time), which is called velocity; in other words, the dependence between velocity and time (acceleration). This logical process corresponds in functional mathematical theory to successive derivations.

If I am familiar with the dialectic I avoid two foolish statements: the automobile is moving, therefore it will go very far within a short time; the automobile is moving slowly, therefore within a short time it will still be nearby. I would, however, be just as naive as the metaphysician if, as result of my taste for engaging in the dialectic, I were to conclude: the automobile is moving, therefore within a short time it will be nearby and vice versa. The dialectic is not the sport of paradox; it asserts that a contradiction may contain a truth, not that every contradiction contains a truth. In the case of the automobile the dialectic warns me that I cannot conclude on the basis of simple ratiocination, if I lack other data: the dialectic is not an a priori replacement for data, but compels us, when they are lacking, to deduce them from new experimental observations: in our case, a second measurement of velocity carried out at some subsequent moment. In the field of history one is reasoning like a metaphysician if one were to say: the Terror, given the means it employed, was a reactionary movement; it would, however, be a terrible dialectician who would judge the Thiers government, for example, as revolutionary by virtue of its violent repression of the communards.

3. The Negation of the Negation

We shall now return to the negation of the negation. In the metaphysical method there are two opposite but fixed principles, and by negating one you get the other; if you then negate the second principle, you return to the first principle: two negations equal an affirmation. For example: Spirits are good or evil. Tom denies that Lucifer is an evil spirit. I deny what Tom says: I therefore affirm that Lucifer is an evil spirit. This obscures the vicissitudes of the myth of Jehovah, the “vile demiurge”, who cast Satan into Hell and usurped the throne of heaven, a primitive reflection in men’s thought of an overthrow of powers and values.

From the dialectical point of view, during the course of negations and affirmations, the terms have changed their nature and their position, and by negating the primary negation one no longer returns to the primary affirmation, pure and simple, but arrives at a new result. For example: in Aristotelian physics every object tends to find its place, and therefore heavy objects fall downward; rising air and smoke are not heavy. Having gotten this false idea into their heads, the Peripatetics said an infinite number of foolish things in an attempt to explain the motion of the pendulum, which goes up and down in each oscillation. When the question was instead posed dialectically it was much more accurately explained. (But to do this, thinking was not enough; it was necessary to experiment, as Galileo did.)

Heavy objects move downward. Objects that do not move downward are not heavy: then is the weight of the pendulum heavy or is it not? This was the difficulty of the Aristotelians, for this question violated the sacred “principle of identity and contradiction”. If instead one were to say that heavy objects accelerate downward, these objects would also be able to go in an upward direction, subject to a subsequent deceleration. The pendulum has a known velocity, which increases on its downward course and diminishes while it is in its upward course. First we negated the direction of motion, and then we negated the idea of acceleration. We have however taken a step forward not only by acquiring the right to assert that the pendulum is always a heavy object, but above all by discovering that heaviness is not the cause of motion, but of acceleration, a discovery that forms the basis of modern science thanks to the work of Galileo. The latter, however, did not reach this conclusion by practicing the dialectic, but by measuring the motion of pendulums: he made use of the dialectic only for the purpose of breaking the formal and verbal connection with the ancient dicta.

Having arrived at a negation of a negation it is not necessary to think we have returned to the starting point, but that we must consider, thanks to the dialectic, that we have reached a new point: where and precisely what this point is, is not known by the dialectic, but can only be established by positive and experimental research.

4. Categories and “A Priori Forms”

Before we illustrate the negation of the negation in the social example that we have found in Marx’s text, we should point out one more thing about the arbitrary nature shared by metaphysics and a dialectic based on idealist assumptions.

Starting from the assumption that we know the external world only as a result of psychic processes, whether this refers to physicalism, or the doctrine that bases knowledge in the senses, or to pure idealism that bases knowledge in thought (which goes as far as to conceive, in certain systems, of the external world as a projection of subjective thought), all traditional philosophies maintain that the system of things that can be known, or concrete science, is premised on certain rules of thinking, which are located purely in our ego. These first principles, which appeared to be indisputable precisely because they were indemonstrable, were called categories. In the Aristotelian system (the difference between this meaning of the term and the current use of the term class or category is strikingly clear) there were ten categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, space, time, position, property, action and passion; phrased in terms of the interrogatories: What is it made of? How big is it? What is its quality? In what relation does it stand with others of its kind? Where is it? When is it there? What is its position? What are its attributes? What is it doing? What is it suffering? (or, what action is being inflicted on it?). For example: a man is, in terms of substance, alive and thinking; he is 1.80 meters tall; he is of the white race; he weighs more than another man; he is in Athens; he lives in the year 516; he is seated; he is wearing armor; he is speaking; he is being observed by his assistants.

The Aristotelian categories were later modified and reduced in number. Kant depicted them somewhat differently, always defining them as “a priori forms” of thinking with which human intelligence can and must elaborate all data of experience. According to Kant, experience is impossible if it is not referred to the two “a priori institutions”, that is, to the idea of space and the idea of time, which are preexistent in our minds in every datum of experience. But subsequent discoveries of modern science have successively destroyed these various “a priori” systems, and have done so irremediably, although modern science is far from having provided a satisfactory answer for every problem, the lack of which was compensated for by fabricating “a priori forms”. Hegel was already capable of saying that quality can be reduced to quantity (a man is white rather than black because the analysis of his pigmentation shows one amount of pigment instead of another). Kant would have been quite impressed by how the physicists (Einstein’s theory of relativity) treat space and time as a single magnitude, or how, of a common accord, they refer the verdict concerning the marriage or the divorce of the two irreducible categories to some positive experiments of physics and astronomy, leaving it to Mrs. Intelligence to become accustomed to the final verdict.

Marx rejected the cold empiricism of those thinkers who only claim to be collecting the data of the external world, in the form of so many separate and isolated discoveries, without attempting to systematize them, and without knowing how to ask whether what they have gathered together are reliable results of subjective reality or only dubious impressions that are inscribed on the fabric of our senses. Such a method, to which bourgeois thought retreated after its first audacious systematizations, as was the case also in the economic field, adapts to the conservatism of whoever is in power and defends their privileges against any overly corrosive analyses. Marx nevertheless attributed great social importance to it, as he was not completely satisfied with the materialism of the French Encyclopedists, who, despite their revolutionary vigor and their unrelenting attacks on religious prejudices, did not break free of metaphysics and were incapable of generating any other socialism than that of the utopians, which was defective in the historical sense. Furthermore, Marx, despite having drawn upon the results of the German systems of critical philosophy, broke, as he and Engels mentioned on many occasions, with their idealist content that hardly touched upon social problems, a break which dates to around 1842. Pure German criticism shared with the materialism on the other side of the Rhine the effort to dispel religious fantasies and to liquidate all dogmatic and transcendent elements by defining the rational possibilities of man; it also possessed, besides these qualities, the goal of overthrowing metaphysics as well as a general perspective concerning the movement of things and facts; but it possessed less of the power to historically generate a revolution against the old feudal world of Germany, compared to the formidable role played by the political followers of Voltaire, Rousseau and D’Alembert. On the east bank of the Rhine the bourgeois class was incapable of making the transition from theory to action; Hegel’s system was used for nothing but pre-bourgeois and reactionary purposes; Marxism cut this thread, advocating the replacement of the bourgeoisie by a new class, because the bourgeoisie had exhausted its doctrinal possibilities and completely lacked any revolutionary character.

Having thus reestablished the authentic position of Marxism with respect to the schools that preceded it, we shall now demonstrate that its reservations with regard to concrete empiricism (above all that of the English) and metaphysical materialism (above all that of the French) by no means signifies an endorsement of the abstract criticism of the Germans, and of their confused investigations of a priori forms.

With regard to this issue, we need only recall Marx’s critique of Proudhon, in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), regarding Proudhon’s hybrid Hegelianism-Kantianism. The categories of thought and of the mind are casually subjected to ridicule, together with Proudhon’s pretension of being a (German) philosopher. Marx derisively makes fun of the empiricism and the critical philosophy mentioned above in this manner: “If the English have transformed men into hats, the Germans have transformed hats into ideas!”

What follows, in the “First Observation”, can be described as both a splendid exposition and a radical critique of Hegel’s dialectical method, which Marx reduces to a useless “applied metaphysics”. The empiricist leaves the individual and the fact isolated in their sterility. The critical philosopher, by way of abstraction, plummets from the simple datum to all the elements and their limits, and in the end is reduced to the “pure logical category”. “If all that exists, all that lives on land, and under water, can be reduced by abstraction to a logical category – if the whole real world can be drowned thus in a world of abstractions, in the world of logical categories – who need be astonished at it?”

We cannot reproduce the entire passage and provide a commentary here. It is enough to point out that, in dialectical materialism, “logical categories” and “a priori forms” get the same treatment that the entities of the supernatural world, the saints and the spirits of the deceased received at the hands of the thinkers of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.

5. The Negation of Capitalist Property

In the passage we quoted at the end of our study of Marxist Economics, Dühring wanted to catch the author in a contradiction, since the new form that will replace capitalist property is first called “individual property” and then “social property”.

Engels correctly reestablished the meaning of these expressions by distinguishing between property in terms of products, or consumer goods, and property in terms of the instruments of production.

The application of the dialectical schema of the negation of the negation proceeds clearly in Marx. Before recapitulating it we would first like to add a little more clarification regarding the meaning of the terms employed. For us Marxists, terminology has great importance, whether because we are always passing from one language to another, or because due to the requirements of polemic or propaganda we must often apply the language belonging to diverse theories.

We must therefore pause to examine three terminological distinctions: instrumental goods versus consumer goods; the ownership versus the use of the former and of the latter; and the distinctions that obtain between private property, individual property and social property.

The first distinction applies even to the economy of common ownership. The products of human activity are either used for direct consumption, like food or clothing; or else they are employed in other constructive operations, like a shovel or a machine. The distinction is not always easy to make, and there are mixed cases; therefore everyone understands when we distinguish between products that are consumption goods and those which are instrumental goods or tools.

It would be best not to use the term property to define the ownership of the consumption good at the moment of its use, even if we were to qualify the term with reference to its aims: personal, individual. This ownership of the consumption good encompasses the relation by which a person satisfies his hunger with food in hand and no one keeps him from putting it in his mouth. Not even in the juridical sciences is such a relation to a good defined as property, but as possession. Possession can be palpable and material, or it may be a right defined by law, but it always implies “having something in one’s grasp”, the physical disposal of something. Property is the relation by which one has disposal of a thing, without that thing having to be in one’s physical possession, by means of legal title: which derives from a piece of paper and a social norm.

Property stands in the same relation to possession as action at a distance, in physics, stands in relation to action by contact, to direct pressure. Just as in the term ‘possession’ a juridical value also supervenes, we can apply a similar test, by the use of this practical concept of being able to eat a piece of bread or to put on our shoes, to the use of the term “disposal” (since the term “disposition” has the connotation of training and of order, which belongs to another field).

We shall reserve the use of the term property for the instrumental goods: tools, machines, workshops, factories, land, etc. Applying the term property to the power of disposal, for example, of one’s own clothing or pencil, the Manifesto says that the communists want to abolish bourgeois property, not personal property.

The third distinction: private, individual, social. The right to something, private power over something, over a consumable or instrumental good (and previously, also over people and the activities of other men) means a right that does not extend to everybody, but is reserved to only some people. The term private literally has a negative denotation; not the faculty of enjoying a thing, but that of depriving others—with the support of the law—of its enjoyment. The regime of private property is the one in which some are owners, and many more are not owners. In the language of the time of Dante outhouses were known as “uman privati”, places where it is normal that only one occupant should reign, a good symbol of the fragrant ideologies of the bourgeoisie.

Individual property does not have the same meaning as private property. The person, or the individual, is conceived by shrewd thinkers as a bourgeois person, a bourgeois individual (The Manifesto). But we have a regime of individual property only when every individual can obtain ownership over anything, which in the era of the bourgeoisie was no longer the case, despite the hypocrisy of the laws, neither with regard to instruments of production, nor with regard to consumer goods.

Social property, or socialism, is the system in which there is no longer a fixed relation between any good and a particular person or individual. In this case it would be preferable not to speak of property at all, since the adjectival form of the word refers to a single subject rather than to the generality [in the Romance languages—translator’s note]. Thus, we hear people speak all the time about national property and state property, and we Marxists speak, in order to make ourselves understood, about social, collective and common property.

We shall now continue with a discussion of the three social and historical stages presented in the form of a summary by Marx at the end of the first volume of Capital.

Let us set aside the preceding eras of slavery and full-blown territorial feudalism in which, instead of a relation of property between men and things, the personal relation between man and man prevailed.

First stage. A society based on small-scale production, artisanal for manufactured goods, peasant farming for agriculture. With regard to each worker, whether engaged in manufacturing or farming: what relation does this worker have vis-à-vis the tools he uses in the pursuit of his trade? The peasant is the owner of his small plot of land; the artisan is the owner of his simple tools. As a result, the worker has both disposal of and ownership of his instruments of production. What relation does each worker have with respect to the products of his fields or his workshop? He disposes of them freely; if they are consumption goods he uses them as he wishes. Then we may say correctly: individual ownership of instruments of production, personal disposal over the products.

Second stage. Capitalism. Both of the above forms are negated. The worker no longer has free disposal of the land, the workshop or the instruments of production. The instruments of production were transformed into the private property of a handful of industrialists, the bourgeoisie. The worker no longer has any right to the products, even if the latter take the form of consumption goods, which have likewise been transformed into the property of the landlord or factory owner.

Third stage. Negation of the negation. “The expropriators are expropriated”; but not in the sense that the capitalists are expropriated of the workshops and fields in order to re-establish a generalized individual property in the instruments of production. This is not socialism; it corresponds to the formula of “every man an owner” of the petit bourgeoisie, and today of the PCI [Communist Party of Italy--translator's note]. The instruments of production are transformed into social property, because the “acquisitions of the capitalist era are preserved” which have made production into a “social” reality. They will cease to be private property. But what about consumption goods? These are placed by society at the general disposal of all the consumers, in other words, of any individual.

In the first stage, then, each individual was an owner of small quantities of instruments of production, and each individual had at his disposal consumer goods and products. In the third stage each individual is prohibited from private ownership of the instruments of production, which are by their nature social, but he is assured of the opportunity—which capitalism had deprived him of—of always having free disposal of consumption goods. This means that, with the social ownership of machines, factories, etc., there has been a renascence—but in a completely different form—of the “individual property” of each worker with respect to a portion of the consumer goods that once existed in the pre-capitalist artisanal-peasant society, a relation that is no longer private, but social.1

The two negations have not led us again to the starting point of the economy, to scattered, atomized production, but far beyond it and to a higher level, to the communist management of all goods, in which, at last, the terms property, goods, and personal share no longer have any meaning.

6. The Theory of Knowledge

For the purposes of our methodological investigation Engels’ refutation of Dühring is of signal importance, now that we have clarified Marx’s sketch of historical transcendence.

“It is only at this point, after Marx has completed his proof on the basis of historical and economic facts,” that Marx characterizes “the process as the negation of the negation … after he has proved from history that in fact the process has partially already occurred, and partially must occur in the future, he in addition characterises it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law.” He does not claim “that the negation of the negation has to serve here as the midwife to deliver the future from the womb of the past” nor does he want “anyone to be convinced of the necessity of the common ownership of land and capital (which is itself a Dühringian contradiction in corporeal form) on the basis of credence in the negation of the negation”.

To conclude, the dialectic is of use to us (as Marx says in the Preface to Capital), whether it is a question of explaining how analytical research is consolidated, or destroying the obstacles posed by traditional theoretical forms. Marx’s dialectic is the most powerful destructive force. The philosophers toiled to construct systems. The dialectical revolutionaries destroy by force the consolidated forms that block the road to the future. The dialectic is the weapon for destroying barriers that, once shattered, also break the spell of the eternal immutability of the forms of thought, which are revealed to be constantly changing, and are expressed in the revolutionary transformation of social forms.

Our cognitive methodology must lead us to the opposite pole of a statement that we shall quote from no less a decisive source than Benedetto Croce, in a passionate attack on works popularizing dialectical materialism published by Stalinist sources. “The dialectic has a place only in the relation between mental categories and is meant to resolve the ancient and acrimonious, and seemingly almost desperate dualism between value and non-value, true and false, good and evil, positive and negative, being and non-being.”

For us—to the contrary—the dialectic has a place in those representations that are subject to continuous change, with which human thought reflects the processes of nature and narrates its history. These representations are a group of relations, or transformations, which are accessible to a method that is by no means any different from the one that is valid for the understanding how two domains of the material world influence one another.

When “modern” conservative thought tried to combine the powers of empiricism and criticism in a common denial of the possibility of knowledge of the laws of both nature and human society, it was Lenin who responded by calling attention to this counterrevolutionary deception and quickly provided the remedy.

The current order of power in Russia, linked to the conformism of established positions, lacks any possibility of carrying on this struggle, in the scientific world as well: the smug defense and offense offered by the Marxist school in the field of theory is threatened with destruction by the desperate counterattack of the world capitalist intelligentsia and its vast propaganda apparatus, if new foundations are not constructed for radical party work, free to direct the flame of the dialectic to the seams that hold together the artificial structures of privilege and the metaphysical faith in infallible novelties.

The doctrine of the communist revolution requires neither priest nor Mecca.

Amadeo Bordiga
Prometeo (Series I and II) November 1950

Translated from the Spanish translation at: http://bordiga.blogspot.es/1315927382/

• 1. If there is the least doubt about our interpretation of Marx regarding the “re-establishment of individual property”, and also with regard to the rigorous strictness of the continuity of Marxist terminology, it will suffice, in order to dispel any such doubts, to quote a text from another date and dealing with another topic. The Civil War in France: “… no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of capital and wages-slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, ‘impossible’ communism!”