Senator Sanders

....“In any other country Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” Sanders supporter Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Jan. 7, highlighting the split among Democrats. Days later she assured party members that she was a “proud Democrat” but admitted she was withholding her dues to the party in protest at how it selects its candidates.

Sanders runs on a platform of radical reform, railing against the wealthy and proposing to patch up capitalism. He touts plans to hike taxes to fund an expansion of government-backed Medicare health insurance. He says he would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and praised Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos two years ago when Bezos set Amazon’s minimum wage at that meager level.

He points workers away from relying on our own capacities to organize and struggle against the bosses and urges them to rely on him to “stand up to Wall Street,” and make things fairer. He encourages dependency on the state and its massive regulatory bureaucracy to do good things for working people if they’ll just put him in office. This is his plan, rather than a struggle by workers and our allies to replace the state with our own government — one that can lead millions to transform social relations and ourselves in the process.

His democratic socialist supporters at Jacobin magazine say he would emulate Franklin Delano Roosevelt, enacting a raft of executive orders from the White House to do good, because there’s no way he could pass legislation to do so.

They point to how Roosevelt used anti-democratic orders to create the Office of Scientific Research and Development, as well as the key bodies to advance the U.S. rulers’ entry into the second imperialist world war — like the War Labor Board that tried to impose a wage freeze on workers.

The Democrats have spent three years — since the day Trump was elected — trying to overturn the vote that put him in office so they wouldn’t have to face him again this November....

From: https://themilitant.com/2020/02/15/2020-election-deepens-crisis-of-democrats-republicans/

2020 election deepens crisis of Democrats, Republicans – The Militant

....For decades working people in the U.S. have faced declining real wages and worsening working conditions as the bosses have gone after them in an effort to defend their profit rates, creating a broad social crisis. This, along with opposition to the capitalist rulers’ ongoing wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, has fueled widespread dissatisfaction with both the Democratic and Republican parties, which have alternated presiding over the decline.

The disdain for what workers face by elected officials and the massive government bureaucracy drives a political crisis that wracks both of the bosses’ two major parties. The crisis is most obvious among the Democrats today, whose fights with each other flow from the fear that they won’t find a 2020 candidate who can defeat the incumbent president....

2020 election deepens crisis of Democrats, Republicans – The Militant

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

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[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.

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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.

❖

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

http://www.pathfinderpress.com/an-introduction-to-the-logic-of-marxism_by-george-novack

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

An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

Lecture 

VII. The Marxist Revolution in Logic

....We have not yet really begun to think. Further social advances will inevitably produce tremendous advances in human thought and practice and in the knowledge of human thought.

....Marx and Engels lifted this revolution in the science of logic to a still higher level by separating the rational substance within Hegel's thought from its irrational idealist shell and placing dialectics upon a solid materialist basis. They made dialectics materialist and materialism dialectical. This twofold transmutation was an epoch-making event in the history of thought.

....Just as they cast aside the false Utopian and idealist sides of Saint-Simon's, Fourier's and Owen's social criticism and incorporated their socialist doctrines and outlook into a consistently materialist framework, so they divorced Hegel's dialectics from its mystical idealist shell and absorbed its valid content and vital ideas into their new world outlook

....science of logic in the first half of the nineteenth century underwent a double revolution as it emerged from the creative minds of the great German bourgeois philosophers and then passed through the criticism of the founders of scientific socialism. In a certain sense this is one of the most striking examples of combined development in the history of human thought.

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1. How Marx and Engels Departed from Hegelianism

....Marx and Engels adopted a critical attitude toward the ideas they received from their teachers. They not only retained certain elements of their thought; they also transmuted others, while at the same time they rejected leading ideas of each.

....The steps in their emancipation from Hegelian and all other forms of idealism on the one hand, as well as from one-sided materialism on the other, are clearly delineated in their writings of the eighteen-forties.

....Just as socialism is being brought into existence far more consciously than any previous social system, so the theory of socialism has been created far more consciously than any earlier philosophy.

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2. The Role of Feuerbach

....Feuerbach is the catalytic agent which engendered and then speeded the precipitation of dialectical materialism from the contact of Marx and Engels with Hegelianism.

....From Feuerbach they received a materialist criticism of Hegel and a reaffirmation of the fundamental position of materialism which had fallen into degradation and disfavor in Germany

..... Feuerbach exposed the unreality and errors of Hegel's speculative excesses from a materialist point of view. He placed the fetishistic speculations of the Hegelians with the sober truth of materialism. 

.... Marx and Engels were helped to liberate their minds from the idealism with which Hegel's thought was supersaturated.

..... Feuerbach's thought, they pointed out, had two serious errors. It was nondialectical and it was incompletely materialist. Feuerbach mistakenly rejected Hegel's dialectical logic along with Hegel's idealist aberrations. Just as the great idealists, in their over-anxiety to do justice to the processes and products of thought, suppressed the truth of materialism, so this materialist thinker slighted the achievements of the great idealists in the science of logic.

....Feuerbach was a materialist in his general outlook- but not in the specific application of materialism to history and society. 

....He believed, for example, that love was the cement and the motive force of human society

....dialectics is the logic of evolution and revolution, that is, of slow and gradual molecular processes, which at a certain stage produce a leap into a new molar quality. Feuerbach's materialism was more akin to the mechanical and metaphysical materialism of the seventeenth-century English and the eighteenth-century French materialists than to dialectical materialism.

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3. The Defects of Hegel's Thought

....so Hegel's absolute idealist philosophy reflected the many-sided concrete content of history and the development of scientific thought.

....Owing to the retarded state of scientific knowledge in his day, nature itself for Hegel experienced no fundamental historical development but remained more or less the same. The evolution of society, too, stopped short for Hegel with its capitalist mode. He had an exclusively bourgeois horizon. In politics, in his old age, he could not visualize a more perfect state than a constitutional monarchy. (His model here was the firstborn of capitalism -Britain.) 

...."Hegel operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the movement of material bodies." (In Defense of Marxism, p. 51.)

....Hegel drove idealism to its most consistent and extreme expression. He believed that ideas constituted the essence of all reality and that it was the development of ideas that urged the rest of reality forward. 

....key conception of Hegel's dialectics that everything is limited, perishable and bound to pass into its opposite. Hegel's thought was smitten by this inherent and incurable opposition between its claim to be a system of absolute truth and its dialectical method, which asserted that all truths were relative. Thus it was, said Engels, that "the revolutionary side becomes smothered beneath the overgrowth of the conservative side." (Feuerbach, p. 13.)

....Hegel broke the ground and sowed the seeds for the renovation of logic and gathered the first harvest: the first and thus far the only systematic exposition of the laws of the dialectic. Marx and Engels continued the cultivation and harvested the second and richer crop - the structure of dialectical materialism.

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4. The Marxist Criticism of Hegelianism

...."My own dialectical method is not only fundamentally different from the Hegelian dialectical method, but is its direct opposite. For Hegel, the thought process (which he actually transforms into an independent subject, giving to it the name of "idea") is the creator of the real; and for him the real is only the outward manifestation of the idea. In my view, on the other hand, the ideal is nothing other than the material when it has been transposed and translated inside the human head . . .

    "Although in Hegel's hands dialectic underwent a mystification, this does not obviate the fact that he was the first to expound the general forms of its movement in a comprehensive and fully conscious way. In Hegel's writings, dialectic stands on its head. You must turn it right way up again if you want to discover the rational kernel that is hidden away within its mystical shell."

....Marx and Engels unambiguously assert that dialectics arises out of and applies to the processes of nature. Marx and I, says Engels, "were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics from German philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception of nature and history." Those revisionists who claim that dialectics does not apply to nature but only to society or to the mind contradict the plain words of Marx and Engels. They are either ignorant or willful deceivers.

....Those critics who identify Marxism with Hegelianism not only lack dialectics; they even violate the rules of formal logic. Two things having certain characteristics in common are not necessarily the same, even according to the reasoning of formal logic. The fact that the goose is an animal doesn't mean that all animals are geese. The fact that Marxism derives historically from Hegel and that Marxism and Hegelianism use the dialectical method does not prove that they are essentially the same. It is precisely through this kind of false reasoning that Eastman and Wilson seek to classify Marxism as a branch of Hegelianism and idealism. Astronomy came out of astrology and chemistry out of alchemy. Are these sciences, therefore, to be considered identical with their prescientific forerunners?

....Idealist dialectics gave a more correct delineation of the forms of the thought process. Materialism had correctly insisted upon the primacy of the material content of objective reality. Dialectical materialism combined the essential truths of these two branches of thought into a new and higher system of philosophy.

....Feuerbach's halfhearted materialism, which absolutely opposed itself to German idealism, also begot its negation in dialectical materialism. This movement of two opposing trends of thought into their dissolution and then their resolution into a new synthesis was genuinely dialectical. Thus the evolution of dialectical materialism provides proof of the truth of its own ideas.

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

An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

Lecture VI The Dialectical Method: II

....truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, became in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further and where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and admire the absolute truth to which it had attained.

....the ignorance of the individual does not alter the dialectical character of the process.

....As the proverb has it: Live and let live. Each must have its turn; we admit the one, but we admit the other also.

    "But when we look more closely, we find that the limitations of the finite [as well as of the infinite-G. N.] do not merely come from without; that (in each case and in its own way) its own nature is the cause of its abrogation and that by its own means it passes into its opposite….

....Everything generates within itself that force which leads to its negation, its passing away into some other and higher form of being.

....law of the negation of the negation.

    In this dialectical movement, in this passage out of and into opposition, resides the secret to the movement of all real things. Therefore here also is the mainspring of the dialectical method of logic, which is a correct conceptual translation of the processes of development in reality.

...."Contradiction, above all things, is what moves the world: and it is ridiculous to say that contradiction is unthinkable. The correct point in that statement is that contradiction is not the end of the matter but cancels itself." (Encyclopedia, p. 192.)

....forces of reality keep upsetting and violating the laws of formal logic. Processes in nature are forever contradicting themselves as they develop. 

....both opposition and contradiction are genuinely real and rational. This particular contradiction expresses the inherent nature of things and arises from the contradictory character of reality itself.

....Formal logic had no more use for opposition, let alone contradiction, than the American Indians had for petroleum or the totalitarians have for democracy. They either ignored it or threw it on the junk heap. Hegel retrieved this jewel, cut and polished its facets and thus made a world-historic contribution to logic.

....opposition and contradiction, instead of being meaningless or valueless, were the most important factors in nature, society and thought. 

...."Instead of speaking by the maxim of Excluded Middle (which is the maxim of abstract understanding), we should rather say: Everything is opposite. Neither in heaven nor in earth, neither in the world of mind nor of nature, is there anywhere such an abstract 'either-or' as commonsense thought maintains. All that is, is concrete, with difference and opposition within itself. 

....This law of the unity of opposites, which so perplexes and horrifies addicts of formal logic, can be easily understood, not only when it is applied to actual processes of development and interrelations of events, but also when itis contrasted with the formal law of identity.

    ....This correct proposition is not an affirmation of abstract identity but an identification of opposites. 

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....Instead of eliminating contradiction from reality and logic, Hegel made it the keystone of his conception of reality and his system of logic. Hegel's entire logical structure proceeds from the proposition of the identity, unity and interpenetration of opposites. A thing is not only itself but another. A is not merely equal to A; it is also more profoundly equal to non-A.

....all real development proceeds in a contradictory manner by reason of the conflict of opposing forces within and around all existing things. Nothing is unalterably fixed and absolutely final. Everything passes away in the course of development. Necessity becomes transformed into lack of necessity, or contingency and chance; reality becomes transformed into unreality or appearance; rationality becomes irrationality; yesterday's truth becomes today's half-truth and tomorrow's error, and, finally, utter falsehood.

    Hegel generalized this fundamental feature of reality in his logical law that everything necessarily, naturally and reasonably turns into its opposite during the course of its existence. According to the laws of formal logic, this is impossible, illogical, absurd, because it is self-contradictory. In formal logic contradiction and especially self-contradiction are impossible in reality as well as illegitimate in thought.

....Some people saw-and indeed still see-an insoluble contradiction in this sequence of events. "How can you be for reforming the Comintern at one time and then favor its overthrow at another?" they expostulated. They were formalistic to the point of pedantry and not dialectical in their thinking as well as in their political activity. They do not understand that it is necessary and rational to change policy and strategy with changes in objective reality. They do not comprehend that different and even contradictory policies can and do serve to promote one and the same strategic aim. In logical terms they do not grasp how what is different in appearance can remain identical in essence; or, to put it more generally, that what may seem different can yet be identical. They reason according to the law of identity in formal logic: What is identical must always remain the same both in appearance and essence regardless of circumstances. But dialectics teaches that what is identical not only may but must change.

    This same problem has arisen at each new stage in the development of our movement. Each turn in our political tactics, necessitated by the changing conditions of the radical labor movement, has witnessed a struggle between formalists and dialecticians. In the 1934 merger with the American Workers Party, the Oehlerite sectarians, in reality opposed to the fusion, wanted to lay down formal stipulations and barriers to the Musteite centrists which would have resulted in preventing this fruitful marriage of two different political groups. Unable to reconcile their formalism with the necessities of building a revolutionary party in this country, they drove toward a split.

    The proposal to enter the Socialist Party in 1935 encountered opposition from formalists who wanted to maintain the previous form of party organization, regardless of the pressing political needs of the process of building the proletarian party. They thought our party had attained finished organizational structure when it was actually just at the beginning of party building. The exit from the Socialist Party in its turn encountered opposition from other formalists who had begun to accommodate themselves to cohabitation with the centrist milieu, although political necessity dictated that the struggle with centrism be carried through to the end. It may be not unimportant to recall that some of the same individuals who opposed our entry into the Socialist Party were most reluctant to leave it (Martin Ahern). The more things change, the more formalism remains true to itself- and thereby is false to reality.

    All these different actions, which appeared so absolutely contradictory and therefore incomprehensible to the formalists and sectarians, were equally necessary and rational stages in the dialectical process of assembling our forces. Tactical formulas, like all formulas, must adapt themselves to the changing course, the flux of real events.

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....negation is not something barren or self-destroying. It is also its own opposite. It is the most positive and powerful of affirmations. Just as affirmation transforms itself of necessity into negation, so in turn negation exhibits its positive character, as the negation of the negation, that is, an entirely new affirmation which, in its turn, contains the seed of its own negation. This is the dialectic of development, the necessary transformation of processes into other processes.

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....This movement ....from unreality into reality and then back again to unreality, constitutes the essence, the inner movement behind all appearance. Appearance cannot be understood without an understanding of this process. It is this that determines whether any appearance in nature, society or in the mind is rational or non-rational.

    Writes Engels: "The Roman Republic was real, but so was the Roman Empire which superseded it. In 1789 the French monarchy had become so unreal, that is to say, it had been so robbed of all necessity, so non-rational, that it had to be destroyed by the Great [French] Revolution- of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. In this case the monarchy was the unreal and the revolution was the real. And so, in the course of development, all that was previously real becomes unreal, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its rationality.

    "And in the place of moribund reality comes a new reality capable of living- peacefully if the old has enough intelligence to go to its death without a struggle; forcibly if it resists this necessity. Thus the Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself: All that is real in the sphere of human history becomes irrational in the process of time and is therefore irrational already by its destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality, and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict the apparent reality of existing conditions. In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish." (Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, pp. 10-11.)

   

Capitalism was once a real and necessary social system.

    It had to come into being by virtue of the prevailing social conditions and the growth of man's productive forces. It did come into existence and proceeded to spread throughout the world, overthrowing, subordinating to itself, or supplanting all earlier social relations in its triumphal march. Capitalism therewith proved its necessity, its inevitability in historical practice, by establishing its reality and rationality and exerting its power in society.

    There is a measure of truth in the assertion that so horrifies the philistines, "Might makes right." But the philistine, lacking dialectics, doesn't understand that the contrary of this proposition holds equally true. "Right makes might."

....Something acquires reality because the necessary conditions for its production and reproduction are objectively present and operative. It becomes more or less real in accordance with the changes in the external and internal circumstances of its development. It remains truly real only so long and insofar as it is necessary under the given conditions. Then, as conditions change, it loses its necessity and its reality and dissolves into mere appearance.

....A thing is truly real if it is necessary, if its appearance truly corresponds to its essence, and only so long as it proves itself to be necessary. 

....Materialists ...., locate the roots of necessity in the objective world, in the material conditions and conflicting forces which create, sustain and destroy all things. But, from the purely logical standpoint, both schools of philosophy agree in connecting reality with necessity.

....for Hegel all that is real is not without exception and qualification worthy of existence. "Existence is in part mere appearance, and only in part reality." 

....the omnipotence of the negative side of existence, which is forever emerging from, annihilating and transcending the affirmative aspect of things.

    This "powerful unrest," as Leibnitz called it, this quickening force and destructive action of life- the negatives is everywhere at work

....If everything that comes into existence must pass out of existence, as all of reality pounds constantly into our brains, then every affirmation must inexorably express its negation in logical thought. Such a movement of things and of thought is called a dialectical movement.

     "All things . . . meet their doom; and in saying so, we have a perception that Dialectic is the universal and irresistible power, before which nothing can stay, however secure and stable it may deem itself," writes Hegel. (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, p. 128.)

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....everything comes into existence and remains there, not by accident, but as the result of determinate conditions and necessary causes. There are threads of lawfulness running through the processes of reality and exhibited in the existence and persistence of its products. There is reason in the real world- and therefore the real world is rationally reflected and translated in our mind.

....The real truth about things is that they not only exist, persist, but they also develop and pass away. This passing away of things, eventuating in death, is expressed in logical terminology by the term "negation."

....unless we introduce the negation of our first affirmation, we shall obtain only a superficial and abstract inspection of reality.

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