Marx’s materialism and the dialectical method

Marx’s method developed in a particular historical period and bears all the hallmarks of that period (Riazanov 1973). It synthesised classical German

philosophy and French materialism, British classical political economy and French socialism (Lenin 1977). There can be no absolute truth of Marx’s method any more than there can be an absolute truth of any other real thing. The following exposition develops the version of that method that has been applied through the course of this thesis. Marx described his use of the dialectical method as “in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but the exact opposite of it”, his mode of

expression played with the Hegelian form or “coquetted” with it, but his abstractions were based on real life (Mattick Jr 1993). They were not an a priori construction

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derived from a separate “Idea” or God (Marx, 1982, Capital I, p102-3). Marx was a materialist. His method of enquiry demanded first of all “the appropriation of all the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection” (p102). What he took from Hegel was both a method of enquiry and of presentation as Engels put it, “Marx was and is the only one who could undertake the work of extracting from the Hegelian logic the nucleus containing Hegel's real discoveries in this field, and of establishing the dialectical method, divested of its idealist wrappings, in the simple form in which it becomes the only correct mode of conceptual evolution” (Engels, 1977, Postscript Critique, p224/5). Dialectics recognises only relative, that is specific and concrete truths (Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, 1978). As “every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements… to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations” (Hegel 1975, p78).

The constantly changing nature of the world means the purpose of the dialectic “is to study things in their own being and movement and thus to

demonstrate the finitude of the partial categories of understanding” (Hegel 1975, p117). The static antimony of absolute being and nothing are replaced by becoming, “Becoming is the first concrete thought, and therefore the first notion; whereas Being and Nought are empty abstractions” so that “becoming is the first adequate vehicle of truth” (Hegel 1975, p132). This implies a potential contradiction indeed opposition between the appearance and the essence of thing, as Hegel remarked in the Science of Logic, “The truth of being is essence” (Banaji 1979, p37). Every real thing is a unity of opposites, in contradictory movement between one pole of the existence and the other, from life to death and vice versa, as the accumulation of quantitative changes results in a qualitative change, “the quantitative features of existence may be altered, without affecting quality…this increase and diminution….has its limit, by exceeding which the quality suffers change” (Hegel 1975, p159). This series of quantitative and qualitative changes is ceaseless, with the appearance of the lower form, absorbed within and simultaneously negated by the higher, until the negation is itself negated and so on ad infinitum (Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 1978b) and sudden “The features of this conversion are those of a leap, a break with

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gradualness” (Plekhanov 1976a, p127). The accumulation of quantitative change results in qualitative transformation, but always requires an additional impetus, so to raise the temperature of 1ml of water from 98o to 99o requires 1 calorie, but to raise it from 99o to 100o requires 44 calories.

Quality further describes a situation when a thing shares an essential property or characteristic with another thing, while different quantities of that thing can be measured quantitatively. Dialectical logic incorporates Aristotle’s syllogism but enables it to escape from the dead end of static absolute categories and their abstract juxtaposition. Truth is no abstract absolute but relative, established through the necessarily imperfect correspondence of the idea with the actually existing thing, known through experience, “Those sciences, which thus got the name of philosophy, we call empirical sciences, for the reasons that they take their departure from

experience” (Hegel 1975, p10).

The relation of thinking and being divided philosophy into opposed camps of idealism and materialism (Engels 1978a, Ludwig Feuerbach, p22). Those who regarded ideas, the spirit or God as primary were idealists, those who regarded nature, matter or profane reality as primary were materialists. Nature contained all knowledge that humans could know, outside of nature nothing does or could exist, no matter how limited our experience of it is “we must rest content with the faint

glimpses of the truth that reached us through the medium of our external senses” (Baron d’Holbach Systeme de la Nature 1781, cited in (Plekhanov 1976b, p392)). “However superficial the knowledge our senses provide us with, it is the only kind of knowledge that we can have” (Plekhanov 1976c, p411-412). All consistent

philosophers who argue for the primacy of the idea (God) or of matter (nature) are monists, whether they be objective idealists like Hegel or subjective idealists like Berkeley (2009). Monists oppose eclectics or dualists, like Kant (2003), who argue that both ideas and matter can be predominant simultaneously (Plekhanov 1972). All thought is abstract, it is not the thing that it represents, but the degree to which the thought corresponds to the thing makes it concrete or true, “The search after concrete truth is a distinctive feature of dialectical thinking” (Plekhanov 1976, p357). The

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proof of the thought is demonstrated by practice. The proof of the pudding is not in the contemplation of the correct idea of “pudding” but in the eating, Plekhanov concluded that “The theory of experience, which takes Nature as its point of departure, enables us to avoid both the inconsistencies of Kantianism and the absurdities of subjective idealism” (Plekhanov 1976c, p411-412). Marxists like Guglielmo Carchedi (2012) and Paul Paolucci (2009) claim that Engels was wrong to apply materialist dialectics to nature (Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 1978b). They say that Marxism is a separate social theory that has application only to human society. Certainly the truth is concrete. Human laws apply to human society. Capitalist laws apply to capitalist society. The nature of the world is shaped by and shapes the interaction of human beings with it. But Carchedi and Paolucci have failed to understand the significance of nature for materialism. For materialists the natural world is synonymous to and coincident with real, actually existing objective reality. Humans are part of that natural world and natural laws suitably modified must therefore apply to humans. Human beings are nature conscious of itself, not identical to nature, but a part of and inseparable from it,

“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist” (Marx & Engels, 1978, German Ideology, p34).

To assert that natural laws are inapplicable to human society is a

contradiction in terms and wrong in fact. Humans are subject to chemical, physical and biological laws. The enlightenment materialists explained that the consciousness of human beings was similarly a product of their material environment. The

existence of people determined their consciousness. What they could not explain were the laws that determined that material environment (Plekhanov 1972).

The solution to this problem was provided by the materialist conception of history independently developed by Marx and Engels (Marx, 1977, Critique, p22).

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The laws that determine the nature of society are rooted in the development of the productive resources. These determine the methods through which people produce and reproduce society. These social relations of production are the product of necessity and are entered into unconsciously, they in turn produce the people that produce them. They determine the existence and therefore, consciousness of people. This historical science did not limit itself to society’s economic anatomy, it dealt with the totality of phenomena directly or indirectly conditioned by the social economy, including the imagination (Plekhanov 1976b, p232). To the extent that all humans are subject to laws that are the unintended result of necessity, these laws can be studied objectively and can be described as “scientific”. Freedom is the

recognition of necessity.

This was the science of history, of the real social relationships that govern the production and reproduction of human life (Marx & Engels, 1978, German

Ideology). All animals are a product of their environment and adapt to it through

natural selection. Human beings, uniquely, produce the environment that produces them through their conscious labour,

“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature” (Marx, 1982, Capital I, p283).

This was particularly evident from the sixteenth century as the rise of

capitalism destroyed the material basis for the old feudal way and overthrew the rule of the church, landlords and monarchs in a series of wars and bourgeois revolutions. As the economic foundation of society changed so did the nature of the civil society that rested upon it. Hegel understood that the development of society was an

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unintended consequence of individual human beings acting in their own material interests. He argued that men “are out to ensure that their interests are met, but, thanks to that, something else is realised, something that is latent in them, but is not consciously realised and formed no part of their intention” (cited in Plekhanov, 1976a, p127). The aggregate of those separate interests and the intentions they produced was a result that no one had intended. The laws that produced this

unintended result were the laws that explained the nature of society. Idealism could never satisfactorily explain why, if the idea created the world did the world change and with it people’s ideas? The answer to this question resolved the problem of the relationship between thinking and being and so led Engels to describe the materialist conception of history as the end of classical German philosophy (Engels 1978a,

Ludwig Feuerbach). According to Marx,

“In the social relations of their existence, man inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx, Critique, 1977, p20/21).

That was not to reduce social development to economics. Other material factors and their interplay played their part, but economics were in the last analysis primary. Plekhanov considered that the question of the development of the economy was for Marx, in the first instance, foremost solved by reference to the nature of the geographic environment, but the influence of the natural world declined alongside the development of the productive resources. As soon as they had arisen, the social relations themselves exercised a marked influence on the development of the productive forces, “thus that which is initially an effect becomes in its turn a cause;

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between the development of the productive forces and the social structure there arises an interaction which assumes the most varied forms in various epochs” (Plekhanov 1976b, p145).