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Marx 101: Introduction to Dialectical Materialism | Red Plateaus
In this video we introduce the general idea of dialectical materialism, before moving on to more specific aspects in the next video
NB Note - there is a link to the audio, but I cannot format the text. Below is my attempt. But here is the link if you want to see something that is more legible. Sorry!!
Marx 101: Introduction to Dialectical Materialism
If you read Marxist theory, you’ve certainly come across the word dialectics. You’ve probably heard that the dialectic is important to Marx’s method, that it’s what gives Marxists their power, and that it’s key to understanding Marxist theory. But what is it exactly? Let’s take a look.
The word dialectics comes from the ancient Greeks, for whom it refers to a method of dialogue between two or more characters with opposed points-of-view, typically aiming to arrive at truth – as in Plato’s philosophical fan fiction of Socrates destroying his opponents with some facts but mostly logic. A version of dialectics as a method of arriving at truth through argumentation, often through identifying and removing contradictions, was taken up by medieval thinkers, and went on to be transformed in the classical German philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and especially Hegel. Hegel’s dialectic makes sense of things in terms of their development through the resolution of contradictions and was applied just to dialogues, real or imagined, but to the natural world and human history as well.
If we zoom out, we can see that thinking in terms of processes, interactions, relations, transformation, and the importance of examining things from different perspectives is remarkably common in human history, permeating, among others, Aztec philosophy; international anarchists from Bakunin to He-Yin Zhen; and famously Chinese thought, going all the way back to the founding texts of Confucianism and Daoism and indeed to the Book of Changes itself.
Marx never wrote a dedicated text on dialectics and later Marxists developed a variety of theories and interpretations of their own. Even when they agree on ideas – which they often don’t – they often use the same words in different ways and focus on different things. So if you’re confused, that’s probably because this really is confusing.
We’re here to help, starting with how Marx thinks in terms of processes and relations and uses these ideas in thinking about human beings, capitalism, history, and communism. We want to be transparent that we find the details of this really tricky, and we’re not sure we fully understand everything, so in order to show you what we’re working from we have a bunch of textual evidence and comments in notes, the numbers of which will appear on screen. On your first watch, though, we recommend that you ignore them and just focus on enjoying the video.
1 Before you read the first “proper” endnote, we think we should let you know that dealing with this aspect of Marx’s thought well without ending up with a video that’s several hours long is very difficult – at least if one wants, as we do, to show you some of the quotes and evidence that support our various claims. That’s why the endnotes to this are longer than the main text of the script. The way we tried to make this work was by having a main text that focuses on explaining what the ideas at work are, leaving much of the textual evidence and asides in these notes, in the hopes that people who are new to or just generally find these ideas difficult can watch the video and get the basics explained, while those who want more detail, or think they disagree with our interpretations, can find more to wrk with by turning to these notes.
2 In fact, Marx doesn't use the term “dialectical materialism”, but both people he agreed with and later Marxist thinkers do. For example, the tanner and philosopher Joseph Dietzgen, of whom Marx once said “Here is our philosopher” (Ollman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, 1976, p. 36) (Marx also mentions him approvingly in Capital, see (Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1990, p. 98)), uses the term, and both this and his ideas’ connection to Marx’s thought has rightly been emphasised both by Engels (Marx & Engels, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 26, 2010, p. 384) and by later thinkers, like the astronomer and theorist Anton Pannekoek (Pannekoek, 1975). In general, we would like to point out that, though our presentation differs in certain mostly minor respects, this video owes a great debt to Bertell Ollman’s excellent book on dialectics (Ollman, Dance of the Dialectics: Steps in Marx's Method, 2003), which we cannot recommend enough on this subject.
Marx views things in the world in terms of active, interactive, and constantly developing and changing processes, with things being shaped and becoming what they are through their patterns of interaction or their relations. Accordingly, Marx defines communism not as a static point to reach, but as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” (Marx & Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, 2010, p. 49).
It’s the sort of view that Octavia Butler expressed in Parable of the Sower, where she writes that:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
Atoms interact with each other to form molecules; cells interact with each other to form plants and animals; and human beings interact with each other to form societies.
The interactions between components generate totalities with new powers, where “power” refers to something like potential or capacity, capacity to affect and be affected by things in the world. Hydrogen and oxygen atoms interacting the right way form a water molecule with polarity, which is why water is such a good solvent. Individual cells can’t fiercely stalk prey or seek out cuddles, but the cute kitty they make up can. Your individual cells can’t understand this language, fall in love, or make friends, but the you they make up can. In this way, things interact to generate totalities with new powers that emerge out of this interaction, thus generating wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.
These totalities in turn affect or determine, enable and constrain, the components that are part of them. So in order to understand the nature of a thing’s components, we need to understand how those components are shaped by the totality they are part of. Two hydrogen atoms in a hydrogen molecule will share their electrons equally and the electron bond between them will be non-polar, but if instead they join an oxygen atom to form a water molecule, the negatively charged electrons in the bond will shift more towards the oxygen, forming a polar bond. The cute cat’s paw is able to pet and bat and naughtily scratch only so long as it’s part of a broader kitty totality. And we ourselves – whether we learn to hunt bison on the prairies or discount games on the internet, whether we listen to Beethoven or Opeth, or whether we learn to live together as free comrades or ruler and ruled – are, as we know, shaped by and through our continuous interaction with our natural, social, and historical context.
Does this mean that things are nothing but the totalities they’re part of, that, say, human beings are simply some blank slate upon which society, or social structure, inscribes its commands? Of course not.
Firstly, totalities don’t, on their own, determine everything about their components. For example, Marx and Engels explicitly point out that being, say, the member of a class, doesn’t mean that people “cease to be persons”, only that “their personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite class relations” (Marx & Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, 2010, p. 78). People can take part in a wide variety of different particular relations and institutions – capitalist corporations, states, workplaces, families, households, unions, political parties, community organisations, and so on – and each of these affect them and are affected by them in turn. Naturally, these different components of our societies differ in their degrees of influence or power, which we’ll discuss in later episodes.
Secondly, things also have certain natures, or aspects of their natures, that persist across different totalities they can be part of. Marx distinguishes between “human nature in general” and “human nature as historically modified in each epoch” (Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1990, pp. 759, footnote 51) – and something can’t be historically modified if it doesn’t exist. Unlike a lot of liberal thinkers, Marx distinguishes things not according to any fixed, static, or unchanging essences that we can take as given; but according to their powers, thus distinguishing human beings by our powers of consciousness. This explains why humans can, but racoons can’t, teach university courses in physics or competently oppress the working class if we vote them into office – unless, that is, we change their natures. Naturally, human powers of consciousness will always develop in interaction with – shaping and being shaped by – our human and non-human environment, and as a result vary across different historical natural, social, and historical contexts. It thus makes sense to speak of human beings across different totalities that we can become part of, but not in isolation from or outside of the various totalities that we’re one interconnected part of.
The powers that distinguish different things emerge through the interactions of their processual and relational parts, their moments. All such natures are thus a kind of interactive process and exist only for as long as these processes persist. On this view, an individual person isn’t simply the sum of cells that are constantly being born and dying, but the evolving relation, structure, or assemblage that they reproduce through time. Relatedly, capital is understood not as a static thing, but as “a social relation of production.” (Marx & Engels, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works in Three Volumes, Volume 1, 1976, p. 160) that’s reproduced through time. The historical task of communism is thus changing the ways we interact, changing the social relations within and through which we interact with each other and with nature in the production and reproduction of human life (Saito 2017) (Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, 1995) (Mészáros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, Volume 2: The Dialectic of Structure and History, 2011).
How we understand ourselves and our societies shapes our orientation, tactics, and actions. We’re taught to think in deeply undialectical ways that hold back our ability to make sense of and change the world. Often accusations that something is “undialectical” just means that they dislike what’s said, but can’t think of a real argument. But when it does means something, it usually means that someone is failing to account for the processual and interactive nature of what they’re talking about. One example would be thinking that class, colonialism, gender, imperialism, race, and so on can be understood in isolation from each other and maybe added together at the end, without understanding how they’ve interacted through history and continue to do so, each shaping the others and being shaped by them in turn. This is why class reductionism is deeply antithetical to Marx’s thought. Another example would be theories of history that abstractly treats the factors of historical explanation as entirely separate and independent entities, with changes in one thing mechanically causing changes in the other. As we’ll see in later videos in this series, Marx roundly rejects theories of history that replace concrete accounts of real human beings’ acting and interacting with some abstract, mechanical set of steps for the world to walk.
When Marx and later Marxists write about human society and history, they often use a variety of technical concepts like Interpenetration of Opposites, Contradiction, and Negation of the Negation, that can be hard to properly pin down. This episode has looked at the relational process ontology that underlies these concepts. Our next episode will explain what they mean and how Marx uses them to understand what capitalism is and how to overcome it.
We’re Red Plateaus. We now also exist as a podcast, are on twitter, and have a discord – for info see the description. We’d like to thank our friends who helped with the script and our patrons – we love you all comrades! If you like our work and think it’s important, please send us some money on Patreon. If you have any questions about the video, things you’d like us to talk about in future, or anything else, please let us know in the comments. Long live the revolution.
[Thanks for helping with script: Anarchopac, Rad Shiba, Rosa Zampella, and Mouthyinfidel, and Paul Giladi]
Bibliography
Marx, K. (1990). Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1991). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1992). Karl Marx: Early Writings. London: Penguin.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1976). Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works in Three Volumes, Volume 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010). Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 4. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010). Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Mészáros, I. (1995). Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition. London: Merlin Press.
Mészáros, I. (2011). Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, Volume 2: The Dialectic of Structure and History. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Ollman, B. (1976). Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ollman, B. (2003). Dance of the Dialectics: Steps in Marx's Method. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Pannekoek, A. (1975). Pannekoek, A., 1975. Lenin as Philosopher: A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of Leninism. London: Merlin Press.
Saito, K. (2017). Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Eonomy. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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