carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (03/25/85)
Dan Mc Kiernan writes: > An integral element of Marxism metaphysics is Dialectical > Materialism. Marx derived this system from Hegel. Hegel had > argued that reality proceeded thru stages. First there was > a stage called the 'Thesis', then a stage of opposite > characteristics, called the 'Antithesis', and finall a product of > 'Thesis' and 'Antithesis' called (not surprisingly) the 'Synthesis'. Welcome back, Dan, but I have to tell you that this is comic-book Marxism, that is, it bears about the same relation to the real thing as the comic-book versions of the classics bear to the originals. "Dialectical materialism" is not a good label for Marx's philosophy, and neither he nor Hegel viewed reality as marching through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. "Dialectics" is a very important topic and worth discussing in more detail. What then is the dialectical approach in philosophy? Fundamentally, it is a view of the world as an evolving process, and stands opposed to the mechanistic view of reality as an aggregate of logically independent "things." In order to understand an acorn or an oak tree, one must understand the process by which one develops into the other. One must understand the internal conflicting forces that result in the qualitative change from acorn to oak. The dialectical approach is critical of the empiricist approach, which says that an acorn is one whole reality, and the oak is another whole reality, and each can be understood by itself. That is, one must go beyond *appearances*, according to the dialectical outlook, and discover the *essence*, which is the inner pattern from which these appearances evolve. "The truth is the whole," says Hegel, i.e., the whole process rather than an appearance such as an oak tree, which is indeed real but only the surface aspect, not the whole reality. This dialectical outlook informs Marx's analysis of capitalism. He criticizes "bourgeois" political economy on the grounds that it takes appearances to be the whole truth. It says one can understand the capitalist oak tree in isolation from the process of which it is a phase. Marx's explicit purpose in writing *Capital* was to discover the "laws of motion" governing the development of capitalism conceived as an evolving process, and this enables him to discover that these laws of motion will lead to the possibility of the qualitative change of capitalism into a different mode of production. A theory of acorns that doesn't tell you that they develop into oak trees and how they do so is seriously deficient, and the same charge may be laid to bourgeois economics. To take an example of Marx's dialectical approach, capitalist economists define "capital" as a logically independent thing, a machine or an asset which can generate an income stream for its owner. Marx, however, conceives of capital as a process whose core is this: the capitalist takes a sum of money and spends it on raw materials, instruments of production, and wages; he then sets in motion a process of production, and sells the resulting product for an amount greater than he laid out originally, resulting in a profit. There is more to a dialectical outlook than this, but this is the basic idea. It is a *relational* view of reality, in which things which apparently lead an independent existence (say, male and female, or master and slave) are regarded as related, not accidentally, but essentially. That is, it didn't just happen by accident that males and females coexist in the world; rather, the relation to the female sex is an essential part of what it is to be male, and vice versa. Capital and labor, cause and effect, and necessity and accident, are other such pairs. To view cause and effect as internally connected to each other, and to reject the view of them as rigidly opposite poles, neglecting interaction, is to reject mechanistic determinism. Marx stated his dialectical point of view clearly in the *Theses on Feuerbach*. He is commenting on "the materialistic doctrine of the changing of circumstances and upbringing," in other words, the doctrine that you can change people's character by changing the conditions of their lives and their education (now often called "Marxism"). Marx wrote that this view "forgets that the circumstances must be changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. So it must split the society into two parts, the one rising above the other." Marx is denying that there are in reality two parts of society, the Causers and the Effecteds. Social change must be understood dialectically, not mechanistically. So Marx wrote: "The convergence of the changing of the circumstances and human activity, or self-changing, can only be conceived and rationally understood as *revolutionary* praxis." In other words, changing society means people changing both themselves and their circumstances. It is people who transform the circumstances that form them. This has very important political consequences. Socialism cannot be decreed for the masses by conspirators who have somehow escaped the determinations that affect everyone else. It must be won by the masses. Social change, and revolution, must come from *within* a society, not imposed from above. It was Marx's view that capitalism would generate the tensions that would lead to the self-change of society into socialism. Consequently he rejected Blanquism and all such concepts of "revolution from above," and he would also have rejected Stalin's idea that he could impose change on Soviet society from above, advancing the cause of the proletariat over their dead bodies, for their own good of course. Marx's view of social change is consequently profoundly democratic. So this is a brief exposition of a dialectical outlook. It is necessary for an understanding of qualitative, structural, i.e., historical, change. A mechanistic approach cannot give an account of *qualitative* change. A good introduction to dialectical thinking may be found in a great work by one of my favorite, and non-Marxist, economists, *The Entropy Law and the Economic Process* by N. Georgescu-Roegen. Every economist should study this work, in my opinion, and particularly those who specialize in the application of econometric techniques to the study of history, that is, in cliometrics. Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes