Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 02:35:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Siddharth Chatterjee <siddhart-AT-mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: M-I: Internal & External Change: 2




[From the book "Dialectical Materialism - Its Laws, Categories and
Practice", Ira Gollobin, Petras Press, NY, 1986, Chapter 5, pp. 103.]


		INTERNAL CHANGE AND EXTERNAL CHANGE
			
			(Continued from Part 1)


Similarly, external, geographic conditions may cause a society to
flourish or wither, depending upon that society's internal nature. In
a decadent society, the Yellow River was "China's sorrow," but in a
socialist China, control measures made this river a benefactor.

The principle of self-movement is vital for pedagogy. For effective
learning, major emphasis in teaching should be placed on providing the
data, instrumentalities, and motivation for the child's self learning,
rather than directly providing a solution to a problem.

Bourgeois versions of history are typically an elaborate hodge-podge
that emphasizes the external and obscures the primary role of the
internal.

    "It has become a popular jest in history to allow great effects
     to spring from small causes [idealized by the phrase 'sensitivity
     to initial conditions' in chaotic systems - SC].... Such a so-called
     cause is to be looked upon as nothing more than an occasion or
     external stimulus.... Consequently these arabesques of history,
     where a huge shape is depicted as growing from a slender stalk,
     are a sprightly but a most superficial treatment. (Hegel)"

The primacy of the external is a centerpiece of bourgeois psychology.
George Orwell writes: "A thousand influences constantly press a
working man down into a *passive* role. He does not act, he is acted
upon." Though the external may at times be preponderant, the internal
asserts itself as primary in the overall and long run - the working
man as actor. "The advance of industry... replaces the isolation of
laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due
to association." (Marx and Engles)

For the young and for the working class, receptivity to advanced
ideas basically depends on internal maturation: "a revolution cannot
be 'made' [Cf. Wendell Phillips: "Revolutions are not made. They come.
A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past.
Its foundations are laid back in history."]... revolutions *grow out*
of objectively (i.e., independently of the will of parties and classes)
matured crises and turns in history...." (Lenin) Correlatively, "*every*
worker's party, in a great country, can only develop itself by internal
struggle....." (Engles).

An increasing knowledge of self-movement - which affirms that the internal
decay of monopoly capitalism can be impeded but not stopped - increasingly
endangers imperialism. To the "inert masses" - a libel that exploiters,
through force, periodically but vainly seek to make true - Sartre
declares in his essay "Materialism and Revolution" (more aptly, "Idealism
and Counterrevolution"):

    "Now the fact is that matter is characterized by its inertia. This
     means that it is incapable of producing anything by itself. It is
     a vehicle of movements and of energy, and it always receives these
     movements and this energy from without. It borrows them and
     relinquishes them."

Sartre tries to bolster his postion: "And let us not forget, moreover,
that a body always receives its energy from without (even intra-atomic
energy is so received)...." He cites no data; clearly, the scientific
facts is that the atom's prime source of energy comes from within,
as evidenced in radioactivity, atomic reactors, atomic bombs, and stellar
processes. Sartre concludes: "To make energy the vehicle of the dialectic
would be transform it by violence into an *idea*". Actually, Sartre's
"idea" nullifies self-movement and does violence to "energy," which
proceeds from within a thing as well as from the impact of other things
upon it. His divorce of "energy" from dialectics in effects keeps the
masses relying not on self-help but on outside help, on an idea, on God,
- in essence, eternally married to the bourgeois status quo. It is
unlikely that Sartre's ukase against self-movement will have any more
restrictive effect in immobilizing people than did the views of Aquinas,
who sought to eternalize a feudal order.





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