Fundamentals of Dialectical Materialism (I)

Fundamentals of Dialectical Materialism (I)

Escarpo | Unión Proletaria (Spain)

These notes are the result of a course for militants that was given at Unión Proletaria on dialectical materialism.

The sources of these notes are mainly three texts that I cite below and which were recommended as “compulsory reading.”

• “Manual of Philosophy” by Víctor Afanasiev

• “History of Philosophy” (2 volumes) by M. T. Iovchuk and others.

• “Elementary and Fundamental Principles of Philosophy” by G. Politzer

Afanasiev was a Soviet philosopher who was also director of the newspaper Pravda. He was known above all for his manuals of Marxist philosophy. The objective he had in his manuals was to present dialectical materialism and historical materialism in a systematic way.

Miguel Trifonóvich Iovchuk graduated in philosophy in 1931 from the Academy of Communist Education. He held various positions in Belarus and at Moscow State University. Together with the co-authors of History of Philosophy: Teodoro Ilich Oizerman and Ivan Yakovlevich Schipanov, he was commissioned to be the general editor of this new version of the official Soviet manual of History of Philosophy.

Georges Politzer. The famous philosophy manual, which had the ability to bring the principles of dialectical materialism and historical materialism to the working class. Politzer taught Marxist philosophy at the Workers’ University of Paris. Maurice Le Goas was a student of these courses. He asked Politzer to correct some notes he had in his course notebooks. He found them well done. Unfortunately, he did not have time to make the final correction of the book we are talking about. The Nazi invasion of France took place, and he met a heroic death in the struggle against the Nazi invaders.

Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy

Philosophy, its object and its place among the other sciences

Marxist philosophy is called upon not only to explain the world in a rigorously scientific manner, but also to serve as a technical instrument for transforming it.

The word “philosophy” comes from ancient Greek. It was formed from two words. Phileo, which means love, and Sophia, which means wisdom. Literally, the word philosophy means love of wisdom.

The successes of the special sciences, especially mathematics and mechanics, induced philosophers to study the methods that had made it possible to achieve them in order to clarify the possibility of using them in philosophy. For example, philosophers often attempted to use the axiomatic method of mathematics to create philosophical systems. Attempts were also made to universalize the principles of classical mechanics in order, on the basis of them, to explain not only the phenomena of inorganic nature, but also biological and even social processes.

Materialism and idealism

However varied philosophical doctrines may be, all of them have as their theoretical starting point, clearly or not, the problem of the relationship between consciousness and existence, between the spiritual and the material. The great problem of all of them is the problem of the relationship between thinking and being.

Among pre-Marxist thinkers, the German materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach stands out. He was the one who came closest to a correct understanding of the meaning and importance of the fundamental philosophical problem. He criticised the religious doctrine concerning the creation of the world by a supernatural force, by the spirit, by God, and defended an opposite conception: the spiritual arises from the material. But it was Engels who formulated the supreme problem of philosophy for the first time in a scientifically consistent manner.

If it is admitted, as the idealists do, that consciousness and the spirit are primary and determining, it will be necessary to seek the origin of the social calamities that cause so much suffering to workers in societies divided into antagonistic classes (subjugation, misery, wars, etc.) in the consciousness of two individuals, in their mistakes and defects, and not in the character of the material life of men, in the economic system of society and in its class structure.

Among the varieties of idealism, objective idealism (Plato, Hegel, etc.) must be mentioned first. According to this form of idealism, the spiritual exists outside or independently of matter, of nature, or before it, as universal reason, “universal will” or “unconscious universal spirit,” which determines all material processes.

Unlike objective idealism, subjective idealism (George Berkeley, Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius and others) considers that the objects we see, touch and smell do not exist independently of our sensory perceptions.

Dialectics and metaphysics

The history of philosophy is not only a struggle between materialism and idealism; it is also a struggle between dialectics and metaphysics.

Metaphysicians consider objects and phenomena isolated from one another, immutable in their essence and free from internal contradictions. The metaphysical way of thinking is manifested in the denial of internal contradictions as the driving force of development.

Marxist-Leninist philosophy is a doctrine that argues the paths to be followed in order to transform the world through the revolutionary path for the benefit of the free, multilateral and harmonious development of the human personality.

The struggle between materialism and idealism ultimately reflects the class struggle of society.

Lenin said that Marx’s philosophical materialism had shown the proletariat the way out of spiritual slavery. At the same time, the theory of social revolution is organically linked to the dialectical approach to social phenomena and to the theory of development, according to which gradual quantitative changes logically lead to qualitative changes in the form of leaps.

The ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the revisionists praise non-partisanship, defending the idea of a “third line” in philosophy situated, according to them, above materialism and idealism. But is it possible that in a society divided into classes there can be ideologists and thinkers situated above the classes (which are antagonistic) and who disregard their interests?

The materialist philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which expressed the interests of the nascent bourgeoisie, then the progressive class of society, and fought the religious, idealist and feudal conception, was partisan. And at the same time, despite its limitations, it promoted the advance of science and of society as a whole. But the situation changed radically when the bourgeoisie ceased to be progressive and became reactionary.

A conception of the world that correctly reflects the laws governing the development of the phenomena of nature and society defends the interests of the classes that carry progress and to which the future belongs. Under present conditions, that conception of the world is Marxism-Leninism, the conception of the most advanced class—the proletariat—and of its vanguard, the Communist Party. Thanks to the emergence of dialectical and historical materialism, a scientific-philosophical conception of the world was created for the first time in history that encompasses nature and society and constitutes the theoretical basis for the conscious, communist reorganization of society.

The bourgeois ideologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had presented the suppression of feudal social relations as the establishment of the kingdom of reason, justice and equality, and even of fraternity among men, but the capitalist reality of the nineteenth century refuted those social illusions.

In England, during the 1830s and 1840s of the nineteenth century, the first revolutionary mass proletarian movement emerged: Chartism. The emancipatory struggle of the working class of those times had a spontaneous, unorganized character; it lacked a clear class consciousness. Marx and Engels were the ones who saw the need to change that spontaneous movement through the fusion of scientific socialism by means of the organization of mass proletarian parties, called upon to be the vanguard and leading detachments of the proletariat.

The theoretical sources of Marxism are: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy and French utopian socialism. Let us speak first of classical German philosophy.

Marxist philosophy is the highest form of the materialist conception of the world. Marx and Engels held in high esteem the achievements of philosophical materialism before them; the explanation of the world proceeding from itself, without resorting to supernatural causes.

The conception of knowledge as a reflection of being, atheism, the tendency to explain the history of humanity by natural factors, etc., but at the same time they pointed out the historical limitation of this materialism.

First of all, pre-Marxist materialism had a mechanistic character; it only took into account the laws of mechanical motion. The mechanistic conception of the world directed against the religious world-view was progressive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when mechanics had achieved greater development than the other sciences, but by the middle of the nineteenth century it had already become completely insufficient, especially for explaining biological, psychic and social processes.

Pre-Marxist materialism was primarily metaphysical, that is, fundamentally it considered nature and society immutable. Of course, in those times it was not only materialists who were metaphysical, but also the overwhelming majority of idealists.

The third defect of old materialism consisted in the fact that, restricting itself to the materialist conception of nature, it could not explain social life from a materialist point of view. It is true that these materialists fought the religious interpretation of history and demonstrated that supernatural forces did not act in social life, but natural forces. However, they saw the origin of the movement of society in spiritual, ideal factors, in the conscious activity of historical personalities—Kings, rulers—since these existed, but the pre-Marxist materialists did not see the material source of those ideas, feelings and passions; they did not see the material basis of social life.

Hegel already criticized the mechanistic and metaphysical character of the materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hegel asserted that materialism was mechanistic and metaphysical by nature and that, because of this, it was incompatible with dialectics. In the struggle against materialism, Hegel developed, on an idealist basis, the dialectical doctrine of development. In defining contradiction, Hegel stressed that it cannot be interpreted as an anomaly. Contradiction is the reciprocal action of opposites. It is the principle of all self-movement.

Feuerbach’s materialism brought the development of classical German philosophy to a close and traced (it is true, only in the most general form) the paths for the subsequent development of philosophical materialism. This explains the influence that his philosophy (like that of Hegel) exerted on Marx and Engels during the period of formation of their conceptions.

The philosophy of Marxism and the great discoveries of the natural sciences in the mid-nineteenth century

The development of capitalism and the growth of large-scale industry stimulated the progress of the natural sciences, and these not only contributed to increasing production, but also undermined the idealist and metaphysical interpretation of nature.

The most important achievements of the natural sciences in the decades from the 1830s to the 1850s, achievements in which Marx and Engels saw confirmation of the philosophy created by them. These achievements were: the discovery of the law of the transformation of energy, the discovery of the cellular structure of living organisms and the creation of the evolutionary doctrine: Darwinism. Descartes introduced into science the principle of the constancy of the quantity of motion.

At the beginning of the 1840s, the German physician Julius Mayer discovered the law of the conservation and transformation of energy, according to which a certain quantity of motion in one of its forms (mechanical, thermal, etc.) is transformed into a quantity of motion equal to it in any other form.

For their part, James Joule and Heinrich Lenz established the mechanical equivalent of heat. That is, they calculated the quantity of mechanical energy provided by one unit of thermal energy. It was demonstrated that heat, light and other states of matter are qualitatively determined forms of its motion, which neither arises nor is destroyed, but is continuously transformed.

The representatives of pre-Marxist materialism asserted that motion is not introduced into matter from outside, but is its mode of existence. With the discovery of the new law, it became possible to establish this philosophical postulate on the basis of the natural sciences and to understand dialectically the connection between matter and motion.

Another no less important achievement of the natural sciences was the discovery of the cellular structure of living organisms. This discovery led directly to the dialectical materialist conception of organic nature.

The organism arises and develops through the multiplication of cells with uninterrupted renewal: birth and extinction.

Darwin’s evolutionary theory was the third great discovery of the natural sciences in the mid-nineteenth century. He put an end to the idea that the various species of animals and plants were not connected with one another by anything, but were accidental “creations of God,” and unchanging, and he placed theoretical biology on a scientific basis for the first time.

Darwin, on the basis of an immense amount of empirical material, formulated a series of laws of the formation of species, also considering man as the highest link in the general chain of the development of the animal kingdom. In doing so, he dealt a major blow to the religious conception of the world. These discoveries provided Marx and Engels with the necessary scientific-natural premises for creating a consistently scientific philosophy: dialectical and historical materialism.

Marxism, Lenin pointed out, arose as the direct and immediate continuation of the grandiose achievements of preceding social thought, and the genius of Marx lies in the fact that he provided a solution to the problems posed by his eminent predecessors.

In 1841, while still an idealist (Hegelian), Marx wrote his doctoral thesis, and in it proclaimed militant atheism as his philosophical principle, the essence of which consisted, in his view, in fighting against all earthly and heavenly gods, against every humiliation of the human personality. In 1842 and 1843 Marx began his transition from idealism to materialism, from revolutionary democracy to communism. The state is now defined by him as a political system that guarantees the interests of the possessing classes, hostile to the working masses.

In arguing the thesis of the universal historical socialist mission of the proletariat, Marx reached the following conclusion: “In the same way that philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, the proletariat finds its ‘spiritual’ weapon in philosophy.”

In 1844 the great friendship between Marx and Engels began. From 1844 to 1846 they created two great works, “The Holy Family” and “The German Ideology,” in which they subjected idealist philosophy to systematic criticism and developed the foundations of dialectical and historical materialism. Lenin called “The Poverty of Philosophy” and “The Communist Manifesto,” published in 1847 and 1848 respectively, the first works of mature Marxism.

Thus, in order to solve the problems that the philosophers of the past had posed but could not resolve, it was first necessary to find a correct starting point for theoretical and political work. That starting point for Marx and Engels was the struggle against the exploitation of man by man, against the economic and political basis of social oppression and inequality.

Only by taking as a starting point the situation, needs and interests of the most dispossessed and most revolutionary class could the materialist conception of history be created, which reveals the decisive role of the working masses and of material production in the history of humanity. And it scientifically demonstrates the inevitability of communism.

It is impossible in principle to unite idealism and materialism, the dialectical and metaphysical modes of thinking, since they exclude one another. Marx and Engels dialectically reworked the materialist doctrine of the modern age, including Feuerbach’s philosophy. They also reworked Hegel’s dialectical method according to a materialist criterion, which, due to its idealist character, was not suitable for scientifically studying the processes of nature and society.

Lenin said: “Marx’s historical materialism is a formidable achievement of scientific thought.” The chaos and arbitrariness that until then prevailed in conceptions concerning history and politics were succeeded by an astonishingly complete and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, through the growth of the productive forces, one type of social life develops into another, higher one. As, for example, capitalism arises from feudalism.

Philosophy, by becoming a scientific conception of the world, fully adopts the positions of science, which is always open to new deductions. It progresses without ceasing. And it is enriched with new theses while renouncing those already outdated.

Marx said sarcastically: “Until now philosophers had the solution to all enigmas on their work tables, and foolish and profane people had nothing left but to open their mouths to catch the ‘fried nettles’ of absolute science.” This means that philosophy, insofar as it is conceived as “absolute science,” is not actually a science. Scientific philosophy is not a revelation proclaimed by a genius.

Marx and Engels put an end to the opposition of philosophy to the practical activity of man, in particular to the emancipatory movement of the workers. For many centuries philosophizing was considered a disinterested and impartial contemplation and intellection of reality, whose sole purpose was to satisfy the need to know for the sake of knowing.

Marx and Engels spoke out from the very beginning of their scientific and socio-political activity against the “non-partisanship” of philosophers before social reality: revolutionary effectiveness, uncompromisingness toward everything obsolete, sincere and manifest partisanship, rigorous scientific character, hostility to dogmatism and its ossified formulas, the bold posing of new problems, and creative development irreconcilable with the revisionist adulterations of scientific theory. All these features of dialectical and historical materialism express the essence of the revolution that the emergence of Marxism signified.

The founders of Marxism, in creating and developing their doctrine, pointed out more than once that our doctrine is not a dogma, but a guide to action. Lenin based himself on this principle, which distinguishes Marxism from all preceding doctrines, when stressing the need to continue developing Marx’s doctrine (without excluding philosophy).

Marx and Engels created a doctrine at a time when the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism was not directly posed, not on the order of the day. Lenin developed Marxism under new historical conditions at the beginning of the epoch of the collapse of capitalism, which had entered its final stage, imperialism.

In one of his first works, “Who Are the ‘Friends of the People’ and How Do They Fight Against the Social-Democrats?,” Lenin refuted the subjectivist interpretation of social phenomena by the populists, who placed at the forefront of the historical process the activity of individuals who “think critically.” He showed that Marx’s doctrine of the socioeconomic formation, of the replacement of modes of production as the basis of the historical process, does not exclude recognition of the decisive role of the masses and classes in history.

Lenin devoted great attention to criticizing the theory of spontaneity in the workers’ movement. In the book “What Is to Be Done?” and in other works, he scientifically argued the role of revolutionary theory, of socialist consciousness introduced by the Marxist party into the spontaneous workers’ movement. Without revolutionary theory there is no and cannot be a revolutionary workers’ movement. In his work “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,” Lenin made a profound analysis of the revolution in the Natural Sciences that began at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, particularly in physics, thanks to the discovery of the phenomena of radioactivity, the electron, and the complex structure of atoms, previously considered the ultimate and indivisible “building blocks of the Universe.”

In refuting the idealist deductions made from the latest discoveries in physics, Lenin developed the dialectical materialist conception of matter, showing that the physical, chemical, etc. properties of matter discovered by science are specific characteristics of objective reality. Lenin’s work “Philosophical Notebooks,” which is the continuation and expansion of the basic theses formulated in his book “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,” is of immense importance for the development of Marxist philosophy.

In the article “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” which can be considered Lenin’s philosophical testament, the task of creating and strengthening the alliance of Marxist philosophers and natural scientists is argued, in order to continue creatively developing dialectical materialism and perfecting the methodology of the natural sciences.

Lenin did not limit himself to defending dialectical and historical materialism in the struggle against the enemies of Marxism and to developing Marxist philosophy in all its aspects. In addition to this, he applied this philosophy to analyze the new epoch of imperialism, of imperialist wars, of socialist revolutions and of the building of the new society, responding to the questions posed by the development of capitalism and the world revolutionary movement.

Lenin’s book “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” and the works internally connected with it—concerning the First World War, the bankruptcy of the Second International, the national question, the prospects of the socialist revolution and the new correlation of class forces—contain a profound dialectical analysis of the new epoch and reveal the new laws and tendencies of the development of monopoly capitalism.

Marxist-Leninist philosophy starts from the knowledge of the existence of objective reality, of matter in eternal motion and development. In the materialist philosophy and in the Natural Sciences before Marx, many profound theses concerning matter were formulated, which retain their value in contemporary knowledge. We refer above all to the thesis that matter is the universal substantial basis of all phenomena, and has not been created by anyone. It is indestructible, eternal in time and infinite in space and has an objective existence independent of consciousness. The French materialists of the eighteenth century argued the thesis that matter and motion are inseparable, because motion is an extremely important attribute and a form of existence of matter.

The idea of the qualitative homogeneity of material substance served as the basis for the mechanistic picture of the world. Newton’s laws of mechanics were considered universal laws of nature, as fundamental principles of being that condition all other laws of nature and society. The reality is that the new discoveries testified precisely to the falsity of the metaphysical principles of the explanation of the world. In refuting the mechanistic conception, they confirmed the truth of the dialectical materialist doctrine of matter.

In pre-Marxist philosophy, the primary and immutable material substance was admitted as a sui generis “support” for different objects and their properties. Dialectical materialism rejects the existence of such a substance.

The division into systems and elements is relative. Every system can be an element of an even greater entity of which it forms a part. In the same way, an element will be a system if its internal structure and internal connections are considered. Systems exist objectively as integral, ordered entities: the Galaxy, the Stars, the Solar System, the Earth (as a planet), molecules, Atoms, etc. There are different types of biological and social systems. Cognition of matter is carried out only through the study of its properties and the concrete forms of its system of organization.

Motion and its principal forms

When we know the world around us, we see that there is nothing absolutely motionless and immutable in it, that everything is in motion and passes from one form to another. In all material objects the motion of the elementary particles of atoms and molecules takes place. Every object is in reciprocal action with the surrounding world, and this interaction implies motion of one kind or another. Any body, even one that is at rest in relation to the earth, moves together with it around the Sun, and together with the Sun in relation to other stars of the Galaxy; the latter moves in relation to other stellar systems, etc. Equilibrium, rest and absolute immobility exist nowhere.

The study of the classification of the fundamental forms of motion corresponds in great measure to Frederick Engels, who in his work “Dialectics of Nature” distinguished the physical, chemical, biological and social forms of motion and analyzed their content.

All living organisms are open systems. By constantly exchanging energy with the surrounding environment, the living organism continually recreates its structure and functions and maintains them in relative stability.

The highest stage of development of matter on Earth is human society with the social forms of motion inherent to it.

Space is a real objective form of existence of matter in motion. The concept of space expresses the coexistence of things and the distance between them, without extension, and the order in which they are situated in relation to one another.

Time is a real objective form of existence of matter in motion. It characterizes the succession of the development of material processes, the distance between the different phases of these processes, their duration and their development.

All the experience of human life and the progress of science refute the idealist notions of space and time. Can it perhaps be accepted that space and time are products of consciousness, of the spirit, of the idea, or that they exist only in consciousness, when, as the natural sciences prove, the earth existed in space and developed in time many millions of years before man existed with his consciousness, his spirit and his ideas? The change in our notions of space and time cannot be confused, as Lenin stressed, “with the immutability of the fact that man and nature exist only in time and space; beings outside time and space, created by the priests and admitted by the imagination of the ignorant and oppressed masses of humanity, are the product of a diseased fantasy. They are tricks of philosophical idealism, and the useless fruit of a bad social regime.”

Dialectical materialism differs substantially from metaphysical materialism by the postulate that proclaims the indisputable connection of time and space with matter.

Metaphysical materialism, while admitting the objective reality of space and time, nevertheless considers them autonomous essences, as empty containers independent of matter, destined to hold bodies and material processes.

A similar point of view was held by Isaac Newton, founder of classical mechanics. For him, space and time were objective. But they existed independently of matter in motion, were completely immutable, and were not linked to each other. He called them “absolute.”

Newton’s ideas about “absolute space” predominated until the beginning of the twentieth century, when, with the creation of the theory of relativity, it became clear that it was an error to disconnect space or time from one another and separate them from matter in motion.

Without taking into consideration the connection of space and time with each other, and with matter in motion, it is impossible to understand the physical processes that occur at speeds close to the speed of light, nor those related to large values of energy.

In antiquity the idea already crystallized, and achieved great diffusion under the influence of religion, that in addition to the material world known to everyone, there exists another immaterial world in which “spirits,” “supreme reason,” and “supreme will” reside.

Engels demonstrated that it is not the world that reflects the properties of thought, but, on the contrary, it is thought that reflects the properties of the world. The unity of the world—matter and idea—consists in its materiality, which has its proof not precisely in a few prestidigitator’s phrases, but in the long and arduous development of philosophy and the Natural Sciences.

The heliocentric system created by Copernicus was one of the most important milestones in the cognition of the material unity of the world. Until Copernicus, the idea predominated that the centre of the Universe was the Earth, around which was “the Celestial Sphere” with its “ideal” celestial bodies, the Sun, the Planets, the Moon and the Stars. Copernicus refuted these ideas by creating the heliocentric doctrine. He demonstrated that the Earth is by no means the Centre of the Universe, but only one of its planets. With this it became clear that the “idea” of a “terrestrial world” and a “celestial world” had no basis whatsoever.

In former times the origin of man was unknown, and this gave rise to the idea that certain immaterial forces had created man through a “miracle.” However, a time came when this problem was given a scientific solution, which excluded the religious conception of immaterial forces and the mysterious supernatural world. That solution was initiated by the evolutionary doctrine of Charles Darwin. For its part, Marxism made a decisive contribution to clarifying this problem, demonstrating the role played by labour in distinguishing man from the animal world. Historical Materialism has proved the falsity of the idea that social progress and history advance by “divine will,” laying bare the objective laws and material causes of the development of society.

In the world there has never existed, does not exist, nor will there ever exist anywhere anything that is not matter in motion or that has not been engendered by matter in motion. Precisely therein consists the unity of the world. The world is material, it is one, eternal and infinite, and man himself is its highest product on Earth, a part of the great whole called Nature.

The idea of the “soul” as an immaterial, life-giving and cognizing principle arose in antiquity, when the natural causes of dreams, fainting, death and the various cognitive, emotional and volitional processes could not be explained. The ancients arrived at false conceptions of these processes. For example, dreams were interpreted as impressions of the “soul” which, during sleep, left the body and wandered through various places. Death was presented as a variety of sleep in which the soul, for unknown reasons, did not return to the body.

Dialectical materialism starts from the fact that consciousness is a property not of matter in general, but of highly organized matter, and is linked to the activity of the human brain. As the founders of Marxism stressed, consciousness can never be anything other than existence made conscious, and the existence (being) of men is the real process of their life.

Some idealist philosophers even nowadays try to challenge the thesis that consciousness is a function of the brain. This point of view was upheld, among others, by Avenarius, one of the founders of empirio-criticism. Lenin said when criticizing this position: “since we do not yet know all the conditions of the relation that we observe at every moment between sensation and matter organized in a definite way, we shall therefore admit as existing nothing more than sensation: to this the sophism of Avenarius is reduced.” (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism).

The way in which consciousness exists—and in which something exists for it—said Marx, is knowledge… Something arises for consciousness insofar as it knows that something. (“Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts”). Consequently, consciousness is impossible without man’s cognitive attitude toward the objective world. One of the most widespread bourgeois doctrines about the unconscious in our days is that of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. He studied the sphere of the unconscious in all its aspects, determined its place and role in psychic disturbances and conceived methods of influencing it in order to suppress them. But Freud erroneously asserted that consciousness is determined by the unconscious, which for him was a set of instinctive aspirations charged with high energy. According to Freud, the structure of the individual, his behaviour and his character, as well as all human culture, are ultimately determined by the innate emotions of men, by their instincts and inclinations, whose nucleus is the sexual instinct.

Marxism rejects these irrational ideas. Man’s sensations reflect the real world with relative fidelity. As the means of the direct connection of consciousness with the world, sensations are, in the final analysis, the source of all our knowledge about objects and phenomena. Lenin defined sensations as the transformation of the energy of external excitation into the fact of consciousness. The loss of the capacity to feel inevitably leads to the loss of consciousness. While sensations reflect only some properties of things, the thing as a whole, in the unity of its various properties reproduced sensorially, is reflected in perception. In man, perception ordinarily includes the discernment of objects, their properties and relations. Therefore, the character of perception depends on the level of knowledge that man possesses and on his interests.

If man is a social being by nature, it means that only in society can he develop his true nature, due to which we must measure the power of his nature not by concrete individuals, but by the strength of society as a whole: (“The Holy Family”).

Man becomes a conscious being, rises to the level of the personal and to the heights of the thought of his epoch, only in the course of social development.

The starting principle of the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of consciousness is the recognition of the indissoluble connection that exists between consciousness and activity, practice.

Consciousness and the objective world are two opposites that form a unity. The basis of this unity is practice, the intense concrete sensory activity of men, which manifests itself in labour, in the class struggle, in scientific experiment, etc.

Consciousness is characterized by the active creative attitude toward the external world, toward itself and toward human action. Reality is created in human consciousness, not in an inert aspect, as reflected in a mirror, but transformed in a creative manner. Consciousness has the faculty of creating images that anticipate reality. Lenin had precisely this active, creative and transformative role of advanced scientific consciousness in mind when it directs the mass action of millions and millions of people. “The consciousness of man,” he said, “not only reflects the objective world, but creates it… The world does not satisfy man, and he decides to change it through his activity.” What is life? A special and complex form of the movement of matter. Its most important features are excitability, growth and reproduction based on metabolism.

The origin of consciousness and language is linked to the transition of our anthropoid ancestors from the appropriation—with the help of natural organs—of objects already prepared, to labour, to the manufacture of artificial instruments, to human forms of vital activity and to social relations, which arose on the basis of this activity. The transition to consciousness and language represents a tremendous qualitative leap in the development of the psyche. Labour as an activity directed toward a concrete purpose is the fundamental condition of all human life and of the formation of consciousness. Labour, says Engels, “is the basic and fundamental condition of all human life, and it is so to such a degree that, to a certain extent, we must say that labour created man himself.”

The emergence of consciousness is directly linked to the birth of articulated speech, of language, which naturally expresses the representations and thoughts of men. Like consciousness, language could only be formed in the process of labour, which required joint and coordinated actions by men, and could not be carried out without close contact, without communication between them.

It is not in the brain as such that the causes of the emergence in man of sensations, thoughts and feelings lie. The brain by itself, as it comes from the “hands of nature,” cannot think as human beings do. Society teaches it to do so. In this regard, it is important to bear in mind that the human capacity to think does not reside solely in the structure of his brain. It is formed through the culture accumulated throughout history, through education and instruction, and through a determined activity with the help of the means and methods created by society.

Numerous philosophers of ancient Greece considered that the whole world and every object were the result of a process of formation. It is true that their opinions, despite all their perspicacity, were naive. But the very fact that the problem of development was posed as the universal law of everything that exists already left a profound mark on the history of the cognition of the world.

Materialist dialectics arose as a result of the synthesis of the achievements of science and also of the historical experience of humanity, which demonstrated that social life and human consciousness, just like nature, are in a state of constant change and development. In the world, all systems are formed only as a result of the reciprocal action of the elements that make them up. In the same way, all the properties of bodies arise on the basis of interaction and motion, and manifest themselves through them. Interaction is universal: it encompasses the multiple changes in the properties and states of objects, all types of connections existing between them.

Materialist dialectics does not devote itself to inventing or artificially creating connections and laws, but points out to science the task of discovering them in the objective world itself. The laws of dialectics govern everywhere and encompass all aspects of reality. They are laws of nature, society and thought.

Law of the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative changes and vice versa

In the dialectical doctrine of development, the centre of gravity does not consist simply in asserting that everything develops, but in scientifically understanding the mechanism of this development. Because today, in an age of astonishing scientific successes and grandiose social transformations, no one dares any longer to deny development. Everyone “agrees” on this development. But as Lenin pointed out, this “agreement” is sometimes of such a nature that through it the truth is falsified. Lenin says: “the two fundamental conceptions… of development (of evolution) are: development in the sense of decrease and increase as repetition, and development as the unity of opposites (the splitting of the unity into two poles that mutually exclude each other and the relation between them).”

The first conception is lifeless, poor, dry. The second has vitality. Only the second gives the key to leaps of “continuity broken,” to the “transformation into its opposite,” to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new. (Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics”).

We are surrounded by things and objects among which we already know that certain connections and relations exist. Metal, for example, has properties such as density, compressibility, melting temperature, thermal and electrical conductivity, etc. It could be deduced from this that a thing is nothing more than a set of such or such properties, and that therefore knowing it means establishing what properties it consists of.

However important the properties of a thing may be for defining it, that thing is not reduced to them. Some properties may change, and even disappear, without the thing ceasing to be what it is. Capitalism, in the process of its development, changes a series of properties inherent to it; pre-monopoly capitalism becomes monopoly capitalism, but for that reason it does not cease to be capitalism. The quality of things inevitably leads us to quantity. The latter allows us to know more deeply the essence of things. For example, science could not for a long time understand the cause of the qualitative difference of colours: red, green, violet, etc.; it succeeded in explaining it only when it was established that the difference in colours is determined by the quantitatively different wavelength of electromagnetic waves.

Quantitative changes have external relations with things only within limits determined for each of them. Sometimes even the slightest exceeding of these limits or boundaries implies a radical qualitative change in the thing.

The dependence of quality on quantity can be seen in the example of the qualitative diversity of atoms. Each nuclear species is determined by the quantity of protons contained in its nuclei. If one proton is added or removed, the atom will be qualitatively another. Quantitative changes take place continuously and gradually. Qualitative changes take place in the form of breaks in continuity.

“Life and the development of nature,” said Lenin, “comprise both slow evolution and abrupt leaps, breaks in continuity.” If development as the unity of one and the other form is denied, then one of two possible but equally erroneous notions of the world must be admitted: either to consider that all its richness, the various manifestations of inorganic and organic nature, the multifaceted kingdom of plants, animals and men, have always existed and have changed only quantitatively, or to suppose that all this arose by miracle, all at once, suddenly. These notions have been put forward in the history of science and philosophy, but both have been refuted by the entire course of cognition and historical practice.

Both conceptions have achieved wide diffusion in social theories. All reformism in the workers’ movement is based on the one-sided hyperbolization of the continuity of gradual quantitative development, from which it follows that capitalism “integrates” itself into socialism without the need for social revolutions, through the gradual accumulation of socialist elements that arise in bourgeois society. In opposition to the reformists, anarchists and petty-bourgeois revolutionaries deny all importance to the continuous quantitative form of development and recognize only social cataclysms and revolts. By supposing that social conditions can be changed only by this path, they fall into political adventurism and do not take into consideration the objective conditions necessary for revolutionary leaps.

The leap is a form of development considerably faster than continuous development. It is the period of most intense development, when the old and obsolete are transformed, clearing the ground for new, higher stages of development. For example, social revolutions give a gigantic impulse to the development of the material and spiritual life of society. The same importance they have in science, where they signify new and great discoveries.

When development takes place as the unity of continuity and leaps—whereby one measure gives way to another or is transformed into another—development may take the form of a “key line of measures” (Hegel).

The law of the unity and struggle of opposites

The contradiction between quality and quantity is only one of the manifestations of a general law. According to this law, internal contradictions are inherent in all things and processes, which precisely constitutes the source and driving force of their development. Lenin called the doctrine of contradictions the “nucleus” of dialectics.

Aristotle characterized the opinions of the thinkers of antiquity on this question with the following words: “All recognize that things are composed of opposites; at least, all declare that opposites are the principle.” But it was Heraclitus, the dialectician of ancient Greece, who analyzed the problem of contradictions most deeply for those times. Since everything passes and changes, he held, the nature of things lies in their contradictory character, and everything occurs only by virtue of the struggle of opposites. Hegel deserves immense credit for elaborating the dialectical doctrine of contradictions, but his views on the problem are permeated with idealism. The enemies of dialectics combat precisely the recognition of objective contradictions.

A living being is the unity of identity and difference, both because it is similar to other living beings and because, in carrying out the process of its life, it negates itself, that is, simply speaking, it moves toward its end, its death; and this means that every object and every phenomenon is a unity of opposites. Internal contradiction is an inalienable property of every object and every process. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute. This means that the logical consequence of the struggle of opposites is the disappearance of the existing object as a determinate unity of opposites, and the emergence of a new object with a new unity of opposites.

Contradictions are not something motionless or immutable. Once they arise, concrete contradictions develop and pass through definite phases and degrees. No phenomenon disappears and gives way to others before its contradictions are revealed and unfold to their full extent, since only in the process of this development are the premises for the leap to a new qualitative state created.

At the beginning of its development, contradiction has the character of a difference, that is, of a contradiction not yet unfolded. Afterwards, the difference deepens and is transformed into an opposite, which must be understood as a contradiction already revealed, whose opposing aspects can coexist less and less within the framework of the previous unity. At this stage of development, the contradiction becomes, to use Marx’s expression, an “absolute contradiction,” that is, a correlation of opposites which is “an energetic and intense form, which drives toward resolving this contradiction.” Marx offers in “Capital” a classic example of this development and growth of contradiction as applied to society. He shows that capitalists, trying to obtain the maximum profit, are compelled to develop more and more each day the property that has, in essence, a social character. And the more social production becomes, the more it enters into contradiction with the private property of the capitalists, and the more imperative becomes the need to replace the latter with socialist social property.

The regular culmination of the process of development and struggle of opposites is the second stage: the stage of resolving the contradiction. While the entire preceding process takes place within the framework of unity, of the interrelation of opposites, the stage of resolving the contradiction signifies the suppression of this unity, its disappearance, which coincides with the radical qualitative change of the object.

The Russian revolutionary democrat A. Herzen called dialectics the “algebra of revolution.”

Lenin devoted great attention to the problem of antagonism and contradiction. In his observations on N. Bukharin’s book “The Economy in the Transition Period,” in which the concept of contradiction appeared in an undifferentiated manner and was identified with the concept of antagonism, he pointed out that antagonism and contradiction are different things, that under socialism the former will disappear, but the latter will continue to exist.

The antagonistic character of contradictions also determines the forms in which they take place and develop, and the way of resolving them. It involves the intensification and deepening of the contradiction, which logically culminates in a sharp conflict between the opposing aspects in the transformation of these into polar extremes. Hence also the methods of resolving contradictions of this type: the consistent class struggle and social revolutions, which put an end to the domination of obsolete classes. A non-antagonistic contradiction is one that exists between classes and social forces whose conditions of life determine the community of their objectives and interests.

Such are the contradictions between the working classes: the working class and the peasantry, and between certain elements of socialist society.

Another essential peculiarity of the development and overcoming of non-antagonistic contradictions under socialism consists in the fact that the movement of society is no longer determined by spontaneity, but by the conscious activity of the people, the Communist Party and the Socialist State, an activity that expresses the objective needs of social progress.

The socialist world of today, with its successes and prospects, with all its problems, is still a young social organism, in the process of growth, in which not everything has settled and much still bears the imprint of past historical epochs. The world of socialism is entirely in motion and is continuously improving. Its development, of course, takes place through the struggle of the new against the old, through the overcoming of internal contradictions.

Each stage of the development of society has as its principal contradiction one contradiction, which determines the essence of that stage. For example, in the bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 1917 in Russia, that principal contradiction was the one that already existed between the landowning regime, between the tsarist autocracy and all the forces, especially the working masses that fought against them. The contradiction changes from one stage to another, and what under certain conditions may be a non-principal contradiction, under new conditions becomes principal. The contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie already existed during the period of the February revolution in Russia, but at that time it was not the principal one. It became so after that revolution.

Every object, being a relatively independent system, has its internal contradictions, which are the principal source of its development. The differences between several of these objects manifest themselves as external contradictions. They are closely linked to internal contradictions and are in interaction with them. If an object is considered as an element of a broader system of which other objects also form part, the contradictions between those objects will already be internal, that is, they will be contradictions of the given, broader system. For example, the current relations between the socialist system and the capitalist system, at the level of the development of each of them, are external contradictions.

As a summary of everything that has been said, we can now define the essence of the law of the unity and struggle of opposites. It is a law by virtue of which all objects, phenomena and processes have inherent internal contradictions, opposing aspects and tendencies, which are in a state of interconnection and mutual negation. The struggle of opposites gives an internal impulse to development and leads to the growth of contradictions, which are resolved at a certain stage through the disappearance of the old and the emergence of the new.

The law of the negation of the negation

In pre-Marxist philosophy there existed circular theories called cyclical theories, which recognized upward development in society, but assumed that upon reaching the highest point, society retreated to the starting point and development began again. One of these theories was that of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. The ideologists of the progressive bourgeoisie defended the point of view of the incessant development of society, although they considered the bourgeois regime to be the summit of social progress.

In analyzing the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative changes and the struggle of opposites, we have already seen that negation plays a substantial role in the process of development. Qualitative transformation is possible only as a negation of the old state. The contradictory character of the thing means that it carries within itself its own negation.

“In no field,” said Marx, “can a development take place that does not negate its previous forms of existence.” Now, what is negation? In the usual meaning of the term, the concept of negation is associated with the word “no,” rejecting something, etc. There is no doubt that without rejecting something there can be no negation. But dialectics considers negation as an aspect of development. “To negate in dialectics,” Engels pointed out, “does not simply consist in saying ‘no,’ in declaring that a thing does not exist, or in destroying it arbitrarily.”

The meaning of dialectical development lies in a mode of negation that conditions subsequent development.

What happens afterwards when, through negation, a new initial form, an opposite, arises? The answer to this question will be given to us, better than anything else, by the example of the development of any object from beginning to end. For this purpose let us use the investigation contained in “Capital” by Karl Marx. The starting point of the entire development of social production was a form in which there existed the unity of the worker and his instruments of labour, that is, the instruments of labour belonged to the producer himself.

Marx calls this form “infantile production” (in the sense of the infancy of the human race), since it was characteristic of primitive community and small family agriculture. But the increase in the productivity of labour reached, over time, such a level that the initial primitive form of union between the producer and the instruments of labour became a brake on the further development of production. Private property in the means of production appeared, and the latter became separated from the person who worked. This was the first dialectical negation of the starting form. But upon reaching its complete development in capitalist society, this form of separation between labour and the instruments of labour, which was once the negation of their unity, itself regularly prepares its own negation. This already constitutes the second negation, the negation of the first negation, which is therefore defined as the negation of the negation.

The contradiction is resolved through the establishment of socialist property. With this, the unity of the worker and the instruments of labour is achieved, but at a much higher level of development of production than before. Therefore Hegel was right when defining the second negation, that is, the negation of the negation, as the synthesis that overcomes the first “abstract, untrue moments,” that is, abstract and not “true” in the sense of being one-sided and incomplete. This dialectical character of development also manifests itself clearly in the progress of knowledge. For example, when studying the nature of light, the idea was first advanced that it was a flow of luminous corpuscles, of particles. Later the wave theory appeared, opposed to the first. Twentieth-century physics encountered the fact that neither of these views explained reality by itself, nor can either of them separately explain all luminous phenomena, but together they explain them!

In other words, the contradiction between two opposed one-sided views was resolved through their higher synthesis in a new theory, which considers light as a unity of corpuscular and wave properties.

The law of the negation of the negation, through its action, causes development not to have the form of a line, but of a circle, in which the final point coincides with the initial one. But since this coincidence occurs on a higher basis, development has the form of a spiral, each of whose circles and turns signifies a more developed state.

The process of negation is often presented in the following terms: “thesis” (starting point of development), “antithesis” (first negation) and “synthesis” (second negation), seeing in this triad the essence of development.

The law of the negation of the negation, like every law of dialectics, imposes no scheme; the only thing it does is guide the correct study of reality.

The ascending character of development should not be understood in a metaphysical manner, as a rhythmic process without deviations or zigzags. It is important to bear this in mind, especially when it concerns social development, in which different classes and parties act, having their own interests and struggling for their objectives.

The law of the negation of the negation is a law whose action is conditioned by the connection and continuity between what is negated and what negates; as a consequence of this, dialectical negation is not a hollow, “inane” negation that rejects all previous development, but a condition of development that affirms and preserves within itself all the positive content of the preceding phases, repeats at a higher level some features of the initial stages and, as a whole, has a character of ascending advance.