Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 04:38:00 -0500 (EST)
From: Viraj Fernando <viraj-AT-interlog.com>
Subject: M-TH: In Defence of Dialectics 


Dear Thaxalites,

I am cross-posting my post to M-Sc into this list, since the topic would be
more relevant here. You will have to excuse me for the format of the post as
it is the way it developed under the trends of the debate in M-Sc.

As I see it, there is a monumental task before us to defeat "Western
Marxism". And this can be done only by joint efforts by all of us
undertaking a comprehensive research into original Marxist works and
refuting the falsifications of Marxist premises by the "Western Marxists".
It is towards this end that I am posting it here.


Best regards/ Viraj


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ENGELS LETTER TO MARX (July 14, 1858): ..." By the way, do send me Hegel's
'Philosopy of Nature' as you promised....This much is certain: if he had a
philosophy of nature to write *today*  the facts will come flying to him
from everyside. ......Another result which would have pleased old Hegel is
the correlation of forces (energy - ed) in physics, or the law that under
given conditions mechanical motion,.. changes into heat, into light, light
into chemical affinity, chemical affinity... into electricity, electricity
into magnitism..  But is this not a splendid MATERIAL proof of the way in
which determinations of REFELXION are resolved into one another?

Let us hope that Western Marxists will not, in the light of the above accuse
Marx of secretly encouraging and practising the voodoo idealism of Engels,
of reflexion theory and dialectics of nature as evident from the above.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
List,

We must realise that this debate has become sterile where what one side says
the other side does not understand and vice-versa. Why? Because it is in
reality a clash of two opposing paradigms. Both sides are competing to claim
that theirs is the correct Marxist theory of knowledge.

The problem is two-fold. Firstly as for me, I have not done any substantial
reading on the standpoint of "Western Marxism", and I suppose it could be
that the same holds for others who are opposing Andrew's point of view. But
from the frame work of what we have read on Marx, Engels and Lenin, (and
others), we are in a position to see and criticise wherever and whenever
Andrew contradicts our frame work. And it is the same for Andrew, it is
quite apparent that he has not addressed his mind to reading and
understanding authentic texts of what he calls "diamat" material, Engels of
Anti-Duhring in particular. He is attacking "dialectical materialism"
without first reading and understanding and knowing what its real standpoint
is. 

The second part of the problem is that Andrew Austin ascribes a lot of false
premises to dialectical materialism. The converse is NOT true about the
otherside (if incorrect please indicate).

Thus the basic problem here is that, in Andrew's paradigm of Western Marxism
there are inbuilt falsifications about the premises of dialectical
materialism. Until we go deeper into marxist texts and expose what these
falsifications are a) this debate will remain a "slinging match" b) All
future discussions in this list will be infested with attributing to
dialectical materialism, what it is not.

Why in the above, I say "Engels of Anti-Duhring in particular" is for this
reason. Marx wrote Capital in the form of Hegel's system divested of its
idealism. This Marxist system was attacked by charlatans, and one of its
chief adversaries was Duhring. It came to a point that Duhring's distortions
had to be answered. Between Marx and Engels, the book Anti-Duhring was
developed, the bulk of the work was done by Engels and read out in
manuscript to Marx, with MARX WRITING the Chapter X, entitled "From the
Critical History" (ref Preface). Thus this work is infact a collaboration
between the founders of Marxism.

Extract from Anti-Duhring:
Duhring: (Refering to Capital) "What a comical effect is produced by the
reference to the confused and foggy Hegelian conception that quantity
changes into quality, and that therefore an advance, when it reaches a
certain size, becomes capital by this mere quantitative increase!"

Engels: "In this 'purged' presentation by Herr Duhring it certainly looks
curious enough. But let us see how it looks in the original, in Marx. On
page 294 (Capital Vol I Ch XI), Marx, on the basis of the previous
examination of constant and variable capital and surplus value, draws the
conclusion that "not every sum of money, or value, is at pleasure
transformable into capital. To effect this transformation, in fact, a
certain minimum of money or of exchange-value must be presupposed in the
hands of the individual possessor of money or commodities". (Engels then
states how Marx explains this - VF), ...it is only then that he observes:
"Here as in the NATURAL SCIENCE, is shown the correctness of the law
discovered by Hegel (in his Logic), that merely quantitative differences
beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes" - Marx (Capital Vol I
Ch XI). (Emphasis added)


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Time to digress:

a) What we must note is that when Marx says, "Here as in Natural Science" in
one place in Capital, it must mean the same contextually when states it in
another place in Capital ( ie. in regard to the Negation of the Negation).

(What Marx refers here to Logic is Hegel's example to the three states of
water, and accordingly Engels explains this LAW:  "We gave there one of the
best known examples- that of the change of the state of water, which under
normal atmospheric pressure changes at 0*C from liquid into the solid state,
and at 100*c from the liquid into the gaseous state, so that at both these
turning points the merely quantitative change of temparature brings about a
qualitative change in the condition of the water" and in Marx's Capital we find
a foot note refering to the homologous series of hydrocarbon given elsewhere
by Engels. What you must note here is the close link between Capital and
Anti-Duhring as well as the close collaboration between Marx and Engels in
both these work. It should be known in particular that Marx sent sections of
his work on Capital for Engels criticism, comment and advice)

b) Note Marx's words: 'correctness of the LAW discovered by Hegel' (Quality
and Quantity).

If you look at Hegel's Logic, Quality, Quantity, Measure are subdivisions of
Being. This is not mentioned as a 'Law' as such, if one wants to take a
legalistic view of this. Therefore the 'culprit' who ascribes this as a
'LAW' is MARX.

What does Andrew Austin tell Sid over and over in his posts:( e.g. of
11/16/97 11.19 am)

The "law of transforming quantity into quality" was organized as a law 
of *dialectics* AFTER Hegel and Marx. The ad hoc organization of a basic
scientific observation--this observation is a hard and fast rule in
chemistry, dialectical or non-dialectical--doesn't demonstrate anything at
all in relation to dialectics in nature.


Here we see clearly  where Andrew Austin belongs: The "Western Marxist"
School of Falsification. Marx call it a 'Law' but Andrew says it came to be
considered as a "law of dialectics AFTER Marx".
------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Lets get back to our Main topic, the relationship between a) Capital and
Anti-Duhring, and b) Marx and Engels as COLLABORATORS of the marxist system.

Excerpt from Anti-Duhring: (begining of Ch XIII "Dialectics. Negation of the
Negation")

Engels quotes Duhring: "This historic sketch (of the genesis of so-called
primitive accumulation of capital in England) is relatively the best part of
Marx's book, and would be even better if it had not relied on the
dialectical crutch to help out its scholarly crutch. The Hegelian negation
of the negation, in default of anything better and clearer, has in fact to
serve here as the midwife to deliver the future from the womb of the
past.....  Herr Marx call this 'individual property' also 'social property',
and in this there appears the Hegelian higher unity, in which the
contradiction is is supposed to be sublated that is to say in Heglian
jugglery.......Herr Marx remains cheerfully in the nebulous world of his
property which is at once both individual and social and leaves it to his
adepts to solve for themselves this profound dialectical enigma...." Engels
then goes on to explain what the real Negation of the Negation was in this
case according to Marx. And then he quotes Marx (Capital Vol I Ch XXXII):

"The capitalist mode of appropriation the result of the capitalist mode of
production, produces capitalist property. This is the first negation of
individual private property, as founded on the labour of the private
proprietor. But capitalist prodiction begets, with the inexhoralibility of a
LAW OF NATURE (emphasis added here and below) its own negation. It is the
negation of the negation".

Engels gives a whole series of instances of negation of the negation from
nature and history (including cases of this from Rousseau)and then gives
goes on to say:

"Already in Rousseau, therefore, we find not only a line of thought which
corresponds exactly to the one developed in Marx's Capital, but also, in
details, a whole series of the same dialectical turns of speech as Marx
used: PROCESSES WHICH IN THEIR NATURE ARE ANTAGONISTIC, CONTAIN A
CONTRADICTION; transformation of one extreme into its opposite; and finally,
as the KERNEL OF THE WHOLE THING, the Negation of the Negation"........

(THE KERNEL OF THE WHOLE THING IS THE NEGATION OF THE NEGATION - Andrew,
what would have been Marx's reaction if this statement were against his
system, when he saw it in manuscript and the book in print?)

Engels continues:
"And so what is the negation of the negation? An extremely general- and
extremely far reaching and and important-  LAW OF DEVELOPMENT OF NATURE,
HISTORY AND THOUGHT;  a law which as we have seen, holds good in the animal
kingdom, in geology, in mathematics, in history and in philosophy......When
I say that all these processes are a negation of the negation, I bring them
all together under this one law of motion, and for this very reason I leave
out of account the specific peculiarities of each individual process.
DIALECTICS, HOWEVER, IS NOTHING MORE THAN THE SCIENCE OF THE GENERAL LAWS OF
MOTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF NATURE, HUMAN HISTORY AND THOUGHT".


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Time for a little digression: What does our "Western Marxist" has to say
about the NEGATION OF THE NAGATION?

Andrew Austin  11/16/97 12.44 AM:
>"As for the "negation of the negation," this is pure Hegelianism. Marx
regarded "Feuerbach's great achievement" as threefold, but the two most
important achievements being: (1) "The establishment of *true materialism*
and of *real science*, since Feuerbach also makes the social relationship
'of man to man' the basic principle of the theory" (eat crow) and "His
opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute
positive, the self-supporting positive, postively grounded in itself" (cough
it up and eat it again). Marx goes on to note that "Feuerbach thus conceives
the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with
itself--as the philosophy which affirms
theology (the transcendent, etc.) after having denied it, and which it
therefore affirms in opposition to itself." In other words, if you want to
remain in the realm of idealism, then continue to assert linguistic
constructs such as the negation of the negation, but if you want to follow
lines of positive science, then come out of your theological view of the
world and lose the objective idealist premise, comrades". 

( Note: In reality Marx here criticises Fuerbach for an imprecise
interpretation of the negetion of the negation, and our Western Marxist
takes this as a rejection by Marx of this Law of Dialectics. Andrew should
look at other references to Negation of the Negation in the Manuscripts - VF).

(Also Marx took the BASIC FORM of Hegelian system in TOTALITY divested it of
its idealism - But as Andrew says if that out of this system, Marx cut and
chopped sections what would be left would be mutilated  entity and not a
system. "An arm only in name").

Therefter when Sid confronted Andrew on this Law as Marx indicates it in his
Mathematical Work, Austin wriggles out:

Andrew Austin (11/16/97 11.16 AM):

>"On the matter of the negation of the negation, Marx never denied that this
idea lived in symbolic logic, such as math, and in philosophical rhetoric.
What he denied was that it existed in the real world, having credited
Feuerbach with putting for a material explanation that contradicted
Hegel's turning of ideal principles into objective realities. I supplied
this quote from Marx yesterday.

>Thus your quote of Marx,

> Thus, at first the postulation of a difference, and then its inverse
> removal will lead literally to *nothing* (emphasis in text). The
> entire difficulty in understanding the differential operation (as in
> that of any NEGATION OF NEGATION [italics in text, capitalized by SC]
> whatever) lies precisely in seeing *how* (emphasis in text) it differs
> from such a simple procedure, and leads to valid results .........."

>demonstrates clearly my point about Marx's acceptance of this principle in
these realms. There is nothing more bound to ideas than logic. Marx was no
pythagorean, those idealists who believe that numbers (ideas) precede
reality, and that somehow paradoxes in the symbolic world translate into
objective contradictions--"All is numbers!" Pythagoras proclaimed--is not a
belief Marx was inclined to have, since he was a serious scientific
thinker. Thus, this last note,
 
> [After this, there follows more examples and a discussion whereby Marx
> removes the mystification commonly associated with the derivative
> dy/dx that exists to this very day - SC].

>is in the ideal realm entirely, and has no relevance to the notion of
materialist dialectics, nor does it have any bearing on dialectics of
nature.
  
Andrew, I suppose then, according to you and Western Marxism, the Negation
of the Negation of property relations as indicated by Marx in Capital, also
must belong "in the ideal realm entirely and has no relevance to the notion
of materialist dialectics".

===========================================================================I do not know whether list members know that Andrew Austin is a smart young
college student of immense but misdirected capacity (and practicing all the
pranks found in students' cookbook). However, we should hope that he would
read authentic Marxist texts of Marx and Engels in an unbiased manner first
hand. Irrespective of his misguided outlook we must appreciate his diligence
and talent, his dextrisity of mind and capacity for volume. What an asset he
would be, if he comes to grip with dialectical materialism! I hope he will.
============================================================================-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lets get back to our Main topic, the relationship between a) Capital and
Anti-Duhring, and b) Marx and Engels as COLLABORATORS of marxist system.


This is what Marx writes (to Kugelmann March 6, 1868):

"I can now understand the curiously embarassed tone of Herr Duhring's
criticism. He is ordinarily a most bumptious, cheeky boy, who sets up as a
revolutionary in political economy. He has done two things. He has
published, firstly (proceeding from Carey) a 'Critical Foundation of
Political Economy' and secondly, new 'Natural Dialectics' (against the
Hegelian). My book has buried him in BOTH respects. (Note here: According to
Marx, his Capital has buried or smothered,  Duhring's 'Natural Dialectics'
which were anti-Hegelian in FORM. What does this imply? There lies embedded
in Capital, references and inferences of materialist dialectics of nature
-VF). He gave it notice because of his hatred for the Roschers (a pro-Marx
professor - VF), etc. For the rest, half intentionally and half from lack of
insight, he pratices deception. He knows very well that my method of
development is *not* Hegelian, since I am a materialist and Hegel is an
idealist. Hegels dialectic is the BASIC FORM of all dialectics, (Note: if
you don't take this BASIC FORM as a whole,100%, the dialectic is lost -
"Truth is the Whole"   - VF) but only *after* it has been stripped of its
mystical form, and it is this which distinguishes my method. As for Ricardo,
it really hurt Herr Duhring that in my treatment his weak points, which
Carey and a hundred others before him pointed out, do not exist.
Consequently he attempts, in bad faith, to burden me with all of Ricardo's
limitations....." 

But the "cheeky boy", 9 years later turned into a real trouble maker against
Marx and his Party in Germany:

Marx's letter to F.A. Sorge (October 19, 1877):

...A rotten spirit is making itself felt in our Party in Germany, not so
much among the masses as among the leaders (upper class and "workers"). The
compromise with the Lassalleans has led to a compromise with other halfway
elements too: in Berlin (like Most) with Duhring and his 'admirers', but
also with a whole gang of half-mature students and super-wise diplomaed
doctors who want to give socialism a 'higher, idealistic' orientation, that
is to say, to replace its materialistic basis (which demands serious
objective study from anyone who tries to use it) by  modern mythology......"


Do we now see the relevance of Engels(and Marx's) Anti-Duhring in defence
of, Capital and the Marxist dialectics? Do we now see how closely related
these two books are?

And here is a long excerpt from Engels (letter to Marx May 28, 1876). Here
Engels discusses with Marx his strategy on the attack in the proposed book
refuting Duhring. Note especially what Engels says about natural science,
viz., "my studies in natural science have been of great service to me for
the Duhring thing....Especially in natural science I find that the ground
has become considerably more familiar to me and that I can move on it with
certain amount of freedom and safety, though I have to execise great
caution...". What else does this mean other than DIALECTICS OF NATURE? On
Marx's behalf Engels is planning the book (Anti-Duhring)in defence of
Marxian system which is: Dialectics of Nature, Human History and Thought.

Engels letter to Marx:
"Dear Moor,
It's very well for you to talk. You can lie in bed and study ground
rent.....but I am to sit on the hard bench, swill cold wine, suddenly
interrupt everything and get after the scalp of the boring Duhring. However,
there is doubtless nothing else for it, even if I get involved in a
controversy (Note: Engels is prepared to risk his skin within the party in
regard to the book, leaving out Marx diplomatically for good reason -VF) the
end of which is not in sight; after all, I shall have no peace otherwise,
and then my friend Most's panegyric on Duhring's Course of Philosophy has
shown me exactly where and how to direct the attack. This book will have to
be taken up along with the other because in many decisive points it better
exposes the weak sides and foundations of the arguments put forward in the
"Economy" (Duhrings Book - VF). I am ordering it at once. Of actual
philosophy- formal logic, dialectics, metaphysics, etc.,- it contains
nothing whatever; ........Here, therefore, banalities are dished up in an
even simpler form than in the economy book and taking both works together
one can expose the fellow from this side too at the same time. .....My plan
is ready.

"First of all I shall deal with this trash in a purely objective and
apparently serious way, and then the treatment will become more trenchant as
the proofs of the nonesense on the one the one hand and of platitudes on the
other begin to pile up, until atlast a regular hailstorm comes pouring down
on him. In this fashion Most & Co (Ref Marx letter above) are deprived of
any basis for charging "unkindness" and Duhring gets his desserts still the
same. The gentlemen must be shown that there is more than one way of
settling accounts with people of this kind......

"My  re-reading of ancient history and my studies in natural science have
been of great service to me for the Duhring thing....Especially in natural
science I find that the ground has become considerably more familiar to me
and that I can move on it with certain amount of freedom and safety, though
I have to execise great caution. I am begining to see the end of this job
too. The thing is starting to take shape in my head, and loafing here and
there at seaside where I could let the details run loose in my mind has
helped this on a good deal. In this enormous field it is absolutely
necessary to interrupt one's regular grind from time to time and to digest
what one has gulped down.....

Lizzie and I send our best regards to all of you. Friday we shall come again
to London....

Yours

F.E.

(Come Friday, do you think that this book was not discussed in detail
between the two buddies - Moor and Fred?)

DO WE NOW SEE THE RELEVANCE BETWEEN MARX'S CAPITAL AND ANTI-DUHRING? DO WE
NOW SEE THAT MARXISM IS *DIALECTICS OF NATURE HUMAN HISTORY AND THOUGHT?


We have no objections to "Western Marxist"  cutting and chopping the Marxist
- Dialectical Materialist system and forming their own hybrid system. None
whatsoever. But please do not turn round and falsify that Dialectical
Materialism is a distortion of the Marxian dialectic, and claim that the
hybrid is the original.


(TO BE CONTINUED AS AND WHEN TIME PERMITS)

Best regards/ Viraj
 





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