[net.politics.theory] DKMcK on Marx

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