Dialectics is a fundamental component of the political-theoretical tradition pioneered by Marx, which we call “Marxism,” and which, as Antonio Labriola once suggested, should be termed “critical communism” to better convey its content and objectives, beyond the simple act of following a founder.
Dialectics is a fundamental component of that tradition for several reasons: a) It is grounded in the historically verified relationship between Marx’s thought and that of Hegel, beyond the specific forms it took on during the various stages of the development of Marxian concepts. b) Marx himself used dialectics, employing methods distinct from Hegel’s, resulting in his own reflections (neither numerous nor highly systematized) on the characteristics and scope of the “dialectical method.” c) Debates followed Marx’s death on the question of dialectics in Marxism, which were always present.
Here we can consider a trajectory that spans from the systematization efforts by Engels, Plekhanov, and Antonio Labriola up to the present day, with a significant development during the second post-war period of the 20th century. During that period, debates on dialectics in Marxism expanded significantly due to the impact of the posthumous publication, during the 1930s, of Marx’s works such as the 1844 Manuscripts and the Grundrisse.
In this context, works by György Lukács, Roman Rosdolsky, Mihailo Marković, and Raya Dunayevskaya stand out. Others were also linked to discussions on the relationship between Marxism and various epistemological schools, including Louis Althusser, Lucio Colletti, Lucien Goldmann, Jindřich Zelený, and Manuel Sacristán. Finally, there were debates on the relationship between Marxism and certain currents in 20th philosophy, such as Husserl’s phenomenology or Heidegger’s thought, with contributions by Carlos Astrada, Tran Duc Thao, and Karel Kosik. The authors mentioned are just a few of those who contributed to each (or multiple) of these areas of debate.
At the same time, dialectics has been subject to various pseudo-systematizing interpretations that present problems as more or less resolved when they are far from it — sometimes for the sake of popularization, and other times due to the habit of taking certain ideas for granted because of cultural and ideological context. In Marxism and Dialectics, I examine three traditional approaches to dialectics that are frequently discussed in Marxist debates: the one that defines dialectics as a scientific method alternative to the “official” one; the one that defines it as the science of the general laws of nature, thought, and society; and, finally, the definition of dialectics as a logic “superior” to formal logic. Let us begin by saying a few words about the first issue.
On Methods and Fantasies
There is no doubt that Marx used dialectics as a “method”: he sought to construct a theoretically complete whole; identify the contradictions or oppositions through which the structure of capitalism is driven toward crisis, constructing relational concepts that attempt to explain processes rather than describe things with attributes; and present all of this through an argument capable of being presented as an “artistic whole.”
The problem does not lie there, but rather in the idea — which is much more difficult to justify — that this is a scientific “method” alternative to that of mainstream science. Although Marx’s approach is very rich and allows him to grasp relationships that classical economics (or the philosophy of history) had not grasped with the same clarity and intensity, it lacks a series of steps sufficiently systematized to be reproducible by anyone with even a basic grasp of the subject matter.
To be clear, I am not saying that Marx should have performed such a systematization or that such a systematization was indispensable for him to carry out his theoretical and political work. It is evident that this was not the case. Rather, if we wish to assert that Marx possesses such a “Method” with a capital “M,” we should be able to demonstrate that it is systematized to the same degree as the traditional scientific method (without excluding debates on the crisis of scientism, which are also relevant to a supposedly scientific Marxist method).
In other words, I am not criticizing Marx but rather his apologists, who are reluctant to rethink these issues without resorting to clichés. On the other hand, when Marx points out the differences between his method and Hegel’s in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, he directly alludes to differences in philosophical conception: while Hegel is an idealist and believes that method creates reality, Marx is a materialist and believes that method reflects reality in the mind of the researcher. This issue pertains to philosophical conception and is therefore outside the realm of methodology.
Hence, I propose understanding Marx’s method as a non-systematized method — a combination of scientific method and philosophical conception. To clarify a misunderstanding inadvertently introduced by my friend Esteban Mercatante, who was kind enough to publish an article containing some references to my recent book: we need to clarify not the use of dialectics from a methodological standpoint, but rather the definitions that give this method a scope it cannot have — such as replacing the hypothetical-deductive method or possessing a degree of systematization it never had.
Science with a Different Approach
According to Mercatante, in my book — and especially in chapters 1, 5, and 6 — I fail to evaluate Marx’s “other ways of doing science” more positively. It seems to me that Manuel Sacristán’s lecture “Marx’s Scientific Work and His Notion of Science” (1978) offers valuable insights in this regard. Sacristán identifies three strands in Marx’s conception of science and in the type of work he carried out: what he calls “normal science” (loosely borrowing Kuhn’s concept), criticism (with Young Hegelian roots, which is primarily textual criticism), and “German science,” inspired by Hegel, focused on understanding the movement of reality through its contradictions and reconstructing it in terms of totality.
Sacristán argues — in opposition to both Hegelian and scientistic readings — that the coexistence of these three strands is inseparable from the theoretical and political work carried out by Marx. One cannot take one and discard the others if one wishes to arrive at the most accurate understanding possible of the thought of the author of Capital. The situation is different when interpreting from other points of view or contexts. But Marx developed a sort of “sui generis historical-social science” by using all three strands and linking his scientific activity to politics. This is why it is so difficult to pigeonhole Marx into one academic discipline or another. In other words, that “other way” of doing science decisively includes dialectics but is not reducible to it.
Daniel Bensaïd, in his book Marx the Untimely (1995), reinterprets Sacristán’s lecture, emphasizing “German science” as the dominant element in Marx’s conception of science and identifying the latter with the “other way” of doing science, whereas for Sacristán, that “other way” lay in the combination of the three strands.
Taking these reflections and those from the previous section into account, we could say that just as a non-systematic method should not be posited as superior to a clear and well-defined one, the same applies to the purported scientific nature of these theories. This does not mean that Marx’s theoretical and scientific work should be regarded as less productive. A theory can certainly be more powerful in terms of conceptual constructs than others that adhere more strictly to certain methodological criteria. Rather, to understand Marx’s “other way” of doing science, it is important to take into account its tensions and problems.
At the same time, there are aspects of Sacristán’s approach that can be criticized — and which I discuss in the book — particularly his tendency to limit the contribution of dialectics to the impetus of research and the process of totalization, while assigning it less importance in the formulation of concepts. But we must start from the relevance of his contribution, insofar as it helps clarify the question of what Marx’s conception of science is like, in a much more precise and multidimensional way than Bensaïd — who is much better known among left-wing intellectuals and is often considered a leading authority on the subject, yet receives little criticism for how he uses verbiage to mask a lack of clarity.
Laws That Aren’t Laws
Having discussed some issues regarding the approach to dialectics as “Method,” as well as its relationship to scientific activity, let us now say a few words about the definition of dialectics as a set of general laws of nature, thought, and society.
These so-called general laws would be the classic Hegelian concepts of the unity and interpenetration of opposites, the qualitative leap, and the negation of the negation. These are useful concepts insofar as they present very general frameworks through which changes can be conceptualized. However, they are not sufficient for analyzing specific processes. In such cases, explanations are needed that reveal the concrete ways in which changes take place.
Marx himself, in explaining the laws of the capitalist system, identified and formulated specific laws such as the general law of capitalist accumulation or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Not even someone born with Hegel’s Science of Logic under their arm could derive these laws from the supposed “general laws” without resorting to a forced and a priori construction. In this context, the contribution of Nicholas of Cusa is also relevant; he understood dialectics in terms of the coincidence of opposites and knowledge in terms of “learned ignorance.” Knowledge approaches reality, according to Nicholas of Cusa, just as a polygon approaches a circle. You can add as many sides to a polygon as necessary to make it almost equal to a circle, but it will never be identical to it.
The assumption that “general laws of everything” can be postulated could only be sustained within a framework that conceives of reality in its entirety as translucent — similar to a form of absolute knowledge that nullifies the difference between subject and object. There we are indeed at the very heart of Hegelianism and very far from Marxism, whose theoretical development combines totalization with the construction of explanations of specific processes, while remaining constantly aware of the relationship of approximation (rather than identity) between theory and reality.
Dialectics in Contrast to Formal Logic
The idea that dialectics is a “higher logic” than formal logic is found in any introduction to dialectics, regardless of its orientation. In Marxism and Dialectics, we analyze this in greater detail based on Jindrich Zeleny’s elaborations on “the logic of Das Kapital.” Zeleny conducts a very interesting inquiry into the method of theory-building used by Marx, which he calls “dialectical derivation” and defines it as the investigation of the “genesis and development” of specific forms that constitute the history and structure of a given object. The example Zeleny uses is Marx’s explanation of the simple form, the expanded form, and the general form of value — leading up to the monetary form — in Chapter 1 of Capital Volume I. Convinced that this type of analysis is superior to any expression of formal logic — which focuses on logical consequence rather than on the analysis of the movement of objects — Zeleny asserts at the same time that dialectics is practically impossible to systematize at the same level as formal logic.
This conclusion raises a significant problem: if dialectics is a logic “superior” to formal logic, how can it be less systematic? It is not, however — as a certain anti-dialectical Marxism believed — a matter of rejecting dialectics on the basis of a supposed superiority of formal logic, precisely because the latter does not claim any greater efficacy than other disciplines in matters of content or access to truth: the only thing formal logic guarantees is that, using correct deductive reasoning, if the premises are true (a matter that lies beyond the domain of logic), the conclusion is also true. Nothing more.
The point is not to impose on dialectics, as a perspective that seeks to explain the processes of reality, a false superiority in the formal realm that it cannot, by definition, possess. Precisely because dialectics aims to understand and explain the processes of reality it has been called — more or less appropriately, depending on one’s perspective — the “logic of the material” or similar expressions.
This book will be labeled “anti-dialectical” by people who don’t like to think. That goes without saying. However, there will also be those who, based on a more careful reading and within a shared framework of defending dialectics, consider that traditional approaches deserve to be defended because they provide certain assurances or guarantees that Marxism is superior to bourgeois thought. Here it is worth reconsidering the reasons why a pseudo-systematic approach would be preferable to acknowledging an incomplete but conscious systematization of the provisional nature of its theoretical constructs. If Marxism is, as Milcíades Peña once said, an “open totality,” it makes no sense to present it as a closed, neatly packaged theoretical body based on grandiloquent general definitions.
Originally published in Spanish on May 26 in La Izquierda Diario
Translation by Otto
The post Why Revisit the Debate on Dialectics? appeared first on Left Voice.
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