Dialectics

The science of free association

The Editor

10 Apr 25

This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

When Heraclitus said, “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man,” he was emphasizing the permanency of an unyielding process of change through time. Time does not pass calmly forward—it is forceful, obliterating the present and fossilizing the past, with all matter standing as its witness. The essence of this perpetual motion found in nature is what dialectical materialism seeks to grasp as a framework for the analysis of everything in the universe, from the tiniest atoms to the largest stars. Put simply, dialectics is the study of change.

The first thing to establish is that the laws of nature—including the speed of light, gravitational attraction, conservation of energy, etc.—were woven into the universe at its inception. Current science holds that our universe was born from immense countervailing forces: a sub-atomic singularity of infinite density and infinite heat that erupted in a Big Bang.¹ In dialectical terms, countervailing forces are referred to as contradictions and contradiction not only set the universe in motion, but they provide the friction that keeps it moving. For example, we see our solar system locked in an orbital tug of war between the gravities of planets and their Sun, cosmic collisions that send whole worlds spinning and tensions between galactic megastructures in a universe that has been inflating outward since the start.

Human societies, though notoriously difficult for the subjective observer to predict, must adhere to natural laws of motion and change all the same: “The reason is that nature and society are not different realities, but are co-evolving existences, in which society is asymmetrically dependent upon the larger natural world of which it is a part.”² This realization is what gave impetus to Karl Marx’s ingenious application of Hegel’s abstract dialectical method to the concrete, material world in which we live. He described the motion of human societies as elliptical, as in a spiral galaxy or solar system: “For instance, it is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another, and as, at the same time, constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion which, while allowing this contradiction to go on, at the same time reconciles it.”³ Progress is thus neither linear nor obvious, since change is the product of conflict and creation is the outcome of destruction.

Although Marx did not formally codify the dialectical method he used to present his work in Capital and Grundrisse, his long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels did summarize three main ontological principles:

The transformation of quantity into quality. Also known as a phase transition, this occurs when an accumulation of some input reaches a tipping point, creating something new. For example, liquid water will turn into steam once a quantity of heat has been reached. Or, in outer space, a molecular gas cloud will gradually accrete into a ball and ignite the fusion of a star once a certain threshold of gas and dust have amassed together. In human societies, quantities—of technologies, climate changes, population densities, natural resources and capital accumulation—have led to changes in the quality of society, as seen during the Neolithic Revolution, rise of ancient empires, feudalism and Industrial Revolution. In the contemporary period, changes to quantities are occurring at an exceptionally fast pace, with consequences to quality still unknown.

Interpenetration of opposites. This refers to two elements that are simultaneously opposite one another and interdependent on the opposition in order to exist. For example, light cannot exist without dark or heat without cold. Magnetism relies on the opposition between north and south poles to create a magnetic field and magnetic monopoles simply do not exist. In human society, this phenomenon is most poignantly observed with economic classes. While classless association has been the norm in human evolutionary development, classes themselves can only exist in relation to others. For example, a slave owner cannot exist without slaves. Nor can a landlord exist without tenants or a capitalist without workers. Even the much-discussed “middle class” implies, by mere mention, the existence of an “upper” and “lower” class in relation to it. The interaction of these various classes, their interpenetration with one another, is what accounts for the dynamism of society.

The negation of the negation. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, time fossilizes the past, it embeds history into the present and carries it forward into the future. When a cloud of gas and dust collapses into a star, the gas and dust are not deleted from existence but, rather, transformed into something new and complex. The gas cloud is negated by the star, and the star is eventually negated by a supernova—a stellar explosion of heavy metals and oxygen and helium back into space. Through a process of negation, a gas cloud is thus transformed into the planetary building blocks of the universe. On Earth, life forms are constantly negated by their own evolution into something else better adapted to actually existing environmental conditions, such as dinosaurs into birds. The past is found to mediate the present in all circumstances, however. While some dinosaurs evolved into birds, apes into hominids or flowering plants into fruit-bearing ones, the parameters of these evolutionary negations is set by the physical properties received from the past. This is why grass cannot evolve into an amphibian and humans cannot evolve into lizards.

In terms of human social development, it was the advent of sedentary living, private property and class structure which negated the classless tribal societies that conditioned human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. The negation of class society by a higher-order classless association is made possible by technological progress and the human desire for cooperation, leisure and self-directed activity—desires embedded in the present that are received from our collective past. As a molecular gas cloud is transformed into heavy metals, the free association of humanity’s tribal past may be transformed into a technologically advanced, classless and abundant global civilization.

Cooperation is a carryover from our collective prehistory—the primordial pillar to our monumental success as a species. Class society perverts this tendency toward cooperation by placing the majority of humans into the service of an elite ownership class—with side effects of violent competition and a degraded biosphere that threatens our existence. It is the negation of classes and the fomenting of universal cooperation innate within us that provides the dialectical basis for a peaceful and healthy free association of producers.

Dialectics

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