Date: Fri, 6 Sep 96 08:50:33 GMT
Subject: Re: Engels, dialectics, etc -Reply



I got the first edition - it happened to be in the bookshop in
the airport as I was going on holiday.

> I hope someone will state what exactly is meant by a "dialectic in nature"

Perhaps I would put forward a provisional answer to this as :

"The dialectic, for a Marxist, are the laws governing motion, change
and development, of the material world. When we say "there is a dialectic
in nature" , what we mean is that the laws governing motion, change, and
development in nature are at some high level the same as those which 
apply to human society."

But then I would have to immediately qualify this with :

"However, this is NOT to say that the dialectic [ ie laws governing motion,
change and development] in nature is IDENTICAL to the dialectic in human
society, mainly because of the role of human consciousness."

And at this point, we are already out of a "clarifying beginning" and off
into a more detailed, but still introductory discussion.

> Why is such a discussion important ? 

Well, perhaps it isn't ! It is not of critical importance either to Marxists
in their struggle to change the social world, nor to scientists in their 
everyday battle to broaden the scope of human understanding of nature.

I think it is important for Marxists mainly in order that they can refine
and clarify their own methodology. In order to change society, we have
to analyse it. In order to analyse society, we have to have a method (
which itself arose at a particular place and time in history ). And 
a good way of clarifying a set of ideas is to ask how and whether this
set of ideas applies to a domain it was not primarily developed for.

In a way, I think the importance of the discussion for scientists is a 
similar one. What I would refer to as the "classical" scientific method
has suffered a number of severe blows in the 20th century. Scientists
can, for a while, at least, conduct investigations into their own
particular area, more or less in isolation, almost without any explicit
methodology [ ie, within the "classical" method, as practised today ].
But at extremes of size or speed or age or complexity, or as different
areas of science are integrated, this underlying methodology, IMO, breaks
down. And I think it is precisely in these grey areas that science is being
done today.

There is, in addition, an increasing politicisation of science ( eg nuclear
weapons, the internet, reproductive technology etc ). At this point science,
politics, and philosophy, meet head on. Many of the, IMO, incorrect applications
of evolutionary science eg social Darwinism, sociobiology, have to be first of
all refuted in their own terms, but an approach informed by dialectical
materialism would cast grave doubts on these theories a priori, because
of their reductionism. Explaining society in terms of genetics is as silly
as explaining a traffic jam in terms of chemistry.

Adam.



Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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