File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-23.012, message 46


Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 23:05:43 -0500 (EST)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Dialectics


On Tue, 21 Jan 1997, Siddharth Chatterjee wrote:
 
> First of all, please accept my apologies for confusion on your
> employment status. In the paragraphs above and immediately below,
> you seem to be implying two opposite views.

No, there is no need to apologize. I didn't want to misrepresent myself.

As for implying two opposite views, I don't believe so. I was offering
more than one view, however. I am not a binary thinker. Remember, I don't
accept a bi-polar conception of the dialectic. :)

> But if historical materialism is dialectical materialism applied to
> socio/historical processes, then it is more specialized than dialectical
> materialsm itself. So, are you saying that you accept the validity of
> the more narrow application of the theory but not the broader one?

I find this statement incredible. Dialectical materialism is the
application of the method of historical materialism to nature, not the
other way around. It was not Marx's system. Marx never wrote about a
system of thought called dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism
is contrary to Marx's system of thought. This was the central thrust of my
two posts. How could you (and others) miss this? I would think that
anybody who has read and grasps Marx's argument would know this already. 

Let me repeat so that this is perfectly clear: historical materialism is
not the application of dialectical materialism to the study of society and
history. Historical materialism IS the Marxian method. Marx never thought
a system called dialectical materialism. It is a vulgarization of Marx's
system of thought and contrary to it. The epistemological foundation of
dialectical materialism is incommensurable with the epistemological
foundation of historical materialism. I have already sufficiently argued
my case (as if the case needed to be argued at all). Whether you agree
with this assessment is up to you. 

It is a statement of fact, and this is for hariette, too, if she can catch
her breath, to say that the argument I have made, and the position I
advocate is consistent with the writings of Marx. Dialectical materialism
is not consistent with Marx. I am aware that my stating this fact may
bring more posts attacking my conceit, or worse, but this does not alter
the truth of my statement.

> In a sense it is true that these laws were developed by human beings
> in order to *bring order and correlate* a wide variety of apparently
> random phenomena. And as human society advances, our understanding
> deepens and the laws are subject to additional refinement. But are
> you implying that "reality" does not exist, that it all is a figment
> of our mental universe? That, tomorrow if human society disappears, that
> the period of revolution of the earth around the sun would change or
> cease to exist all together?

Of course I do not assert that reality does not exist. Being precedes
consciousness. We are first living, breathing, physical beings. If I
believed the universe was a mental figment then I would be an idealist. I
am a materialist, ergo, I believe in the concrete world. It is because I
believe in the concrete world, a real world of human sensuous activity,
that I understand that our consciousness, and all the thought systems that
emerge from this material context, to be transitory. Reality changes,
therefore our thoughts regarding reality change. The objective world
humans produce, day in and day out, in the labor process condition our
subjective understanding of that world. It is because I understand that
nature, humans, societies have no essence, that only the relation is
ontological--and this is the central premise of Marxian dialectics--that I
do not fix the "laws of nature" external to the human world. Dialectical
materialism is an affront to the Marxian system of thought: it ontologizes
as natural that which is socially-constructed. 

> I do not understand your notion of falsehood and vulgarization. Why do
> you say Engles failed? In fact, in his book "Dialectics of Nature" there
> are numerous examples of the dialectical nature of Nature. Of course,
> every thing can turn into its opposite and become a joke if it is
> not correctly applied. If I try to calculate the amount of heat that is
> required to boil off 1 kg of water at 1 atm, it would be crazy if I
> tried to use Newton's second law of motion for this purpose! This split
> between Marx and Engles has been remarked on before and it would be
> helpful if you could cite some sources regarding the nature of this
> split, if at all it existed. However, if you read Marx's "Mathematical
> Manuscripts" (this is a rare book which I was lucky to obtain - if
> you want to know the name of the publisher, please let me know), in it
> he studies the differential and integral calculus adopting a dialectical
> viewpoint. As is well known, integration is the reverse process of
> differentiation. So it is not correct to say that Marx only applied
> the dialectic to social reality.  

I would snip this, but you might think I am avoiding what you have
written. I really don't know how to respond to what you have written here. 
I regard the difference between Engels and Marx as self-evident. I am
really not going to spend time bashing Engels; I think, in his crude and
clumsy way, he did much to popularize Marx's work. Yet he went overboard
trying to scientize (that is make applicable to natural sciences) the
historical method of Marx. And the strawman of equating Marxism to
dialectical materialism has gone a long way in making our position easily
attacked. I spend much of my time defending Marx's materialist conception
of history against those who characterize the Marxian worldview as
dialectical materialist. As for your statement "integration is the reverse
process of differentiation," I can only say: look around you. The reverse
of integration is disintegration. In fact, differentiation of components
internal to wholes can lead to greater structural integration. 
 
> So if historical materialism envelops natural sciences, then it also
> should encompass dialectical materialism. So who is the parent and
> who the child?

Historical materialism is the social scientific method of Karl Marx, a
brilliant political economist and sociologist. Dialectical materialism is
its bastard child that has done more to distort Marx's thought than any
other system of thought that presently comes to mind.

'Nuff said on this thread.

Andrew Austin




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