There are three keys to success: read, read, read. With these keys, we shine a light on the dusty tomes of History, Philosophy, and Economics that sit idle on the dry-rotted shelves of the ruling bourgeoisie and the institutions of their diseased intelligentsia and can begin to Reason the root cause for society's decay: capitalism. You do not need to be a Marxist to understand wages are not keeping up with inflation any more than you need to Understand profits are at a 50-year high. However, the Notion behind their interrelatedness remains in itself until Reason breaks it apart, revealing capitalism's inner workings, historical development, and inevitable negation out of necessity. As a form of logic, Material Dialectics elevates Reason and explains such things without attempting to place a limit on human knowledge. What we do not know today, one day, we will, and it will sharpen our mastery of the world around us. It holds that knowledge is a process not confined to some abstract Absolute Idea or divided into what can be known and unknown. How Material Dialectics came to be is a perfect example of this process.
Kant’s Critique
Starting in the 18th century, “When [Immanuel] Kant began his intellectual activity,” comrade Alan Woods explains, “German philosophy had reached a dead end.” It served no more as an intellectual arena than Twitter today, “specifically adapted for the display of skill or the exercise of strength in mock contests,” where no one wins because everyone is correct from a certain point of view. As a man of science, Kant grew frustrated that philosophy had been reduced to meaningless abstract reasoning, detached from nature. At 57, he published his greatest work, the Critique of Pure Reason, his attempt to answer the problem of knowledge, which eluded Subjective Idealists like Berkeley and Hume and exposed the need to go beyond formal logic.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presents his famous theory of knowledge, which begins by asking what it is we can know, and how we can know it, one of the central questions of all philosophy. For Kant, the Idealist, knowledge came in two forms: experience and a priori. He argues we can know what sensory experience tells us, but the things-in-themselves, which cause our sensations, cannot be known. As comrade Woods explains, “Although he denied it, these views seem [similar] to the subjective idealism of Hume and Berkeley.” To avoid these claims, he would later change his theory to include that things outside themselves do exist but manifest themselves to us only in appearance, not as they are in themselves. For this reason, it is Kant who denies it is possible to know the real world who has found favor with today’s leading minds, who insist things like “we cannot know what happened before the Big Bang; or that a particle's movement is dependent on someone witnessing it.” To these intellectual despots, “laws, theorems, etc. are only formal ideas which are used for the sake of convenience, but [have] no real relation to the real world.”
Nonetheless, “for the first time,” Woods explains, “we are confronted with the assertion that there is some kind of difference between what we can see and experience and the ‘real’ nature of things... and [runs] counter to all human experience.” Kant owes us an explanation, but because of his inability to see the relation between the subject and the object, to fully break with formal logic, he cannot provide a satisfactory answer. Instead, Kant dogmatically asserts it, which is the opposite of what he set out to do with his work. Kant reasons that while it is impossible to think of objects without time, it is entirely possible to imagine time without objects, just as with space. But try and imagine space without matter; it's pure darkness. It's nothingness. Space, like with time, is only itself in relation to matter. Space without objects is a pure mental abstraction. Developments in modern science have also refuted his theory that time and space are subjective phenomena. In reality, space, time, and motion are modes of existence in relation to matter.
However short Kant's theory of knowledge may fall, until Kant, dialectics was seen as nothing more than a form of trickery, often dismissed as the "logic of illusion." He was the first to distinguish between Understanding and Reason. For this reason, we owe Kant our gratitude. "Although it plays an important role," Woods elaborates, "for Kant, Understanding is the lowest form of rational thinking." Where Reason goes beyond sensory experience, breaking things down into their constituent parts, and putting them back together again to better know things, Understanding takes everything at face value. Reason provides a dialectical understanding of things.
By reintroducing the law of contradiction into philosophy in the form of four antinomies, Kant succeeded in providing philosophy with a new lease on life. Kant's antinomies pushed formal logic to its limits, taking the laws of formal logic and applying them to the real world to reveal the contradictions inherent within them. Why these contradictions occurred would need to wait until Hegel.
Ultimately, Kant's fundamental mistake was to think of appearance and essence as two mutually exclusive things. Following this shortcoming, Kant treats thought as a barrier between the subject and the object, a tool to use to understand the world that must first be worthy of approaching the object in question. A view still widely adopted by the bourgeois intelligentsia that indoctrinates working-class youth with false notions that the market is too complex to understand and, therefore, impossible to democratically and rationally plan.
Hegel’s Dialectic
Born in 1770, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel represents the last of the progressive Bourgeois philosophers. He was a genius, limited only by the level of the natural sciences of his time. Modern science and mathematics have unearthed a wealth of evidence to support the correctness of Hegel's fundamental ideas, including Ilya Prigogine's Chaos Theory. “In their book Order out of Chaos,” Woods notes, “Prigogine and Strengers point out that Hegel rejected the mechanistic method of classical Newtonian physics, at a time when Newton’s ideas were universally sacrosanct:
“The Hegelian philosophy of nature systematically incorporates all that is denied by Newtonian science. In particular, it rests on the qualitative difference between the simple behavior described by mechanics and the behavior of more complex entities such as living beings. It denies the possibility of reducing those levels, rejecting the idea that differences are merely apparent and that nature is basically homogeneous and simple. It affirms the existence of a hierarchy, each level of which presupposes the preceding ones.”
Despite his mighty intellect and the correctness of his fundamental ideas, modern scientists and philosophers meet Hegel with contempt and point to recycled subjective Idealisms in the form of postmodernism, analytic philosophy, and logical positivism instead. They claim Hegel is too difficult to comprehend and that only Hegel can understand Hegel. In actuality, it's because Hegel's dialectical philosophy, is the point of departure for the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Even during his time, the bourgeoisie recognized the revolutionary implications of Hegel’s dialectical method, especially the Prussian authorities under the Carlsbad decrees of 1819, which subordinated all universities in the German Confederation under Prussian jurisdiction to inquisitorial control. Attacked by Rationalists and Evangelicals alike, his ideas made him a marked man. That Hegel, a conservative and religious man in life, should be regarded as a dangerous radical in death for developing the embryo of a revolutionary idea that would later change the world is a perfect example of a dialectical contradiction.
Central to Hegel’s dialectical method is the unity of opposites. “Dialectically,” Woods explains, “what seems to be mutually exclusive phenomena are actually inseparable.” To support his theory, Hegel lists a series of important stages: positive and negative, necessity and accident; quantity and quality; form and content; action and repulsion, and so on. Where Kant says there are only four antinomies and can only hope to reason what we can know, Hegel says that life without contradiction is impossible and that knowledge is an infinite process in which one idea negates another. His greatest achievement lies in his ability to go beyond formal logic to reveal the dialectical character of human thought, from Understanding to Reason.
Through his efforts in developing the dialectical method, he pushed philosophy to its limits, resolving the contradiction Kant discovered between subject and object by introducing thought as a process that penetrates deeper into the objective world. In doing so, Hegel uncovered that science and human history are a dialectically interrelated totality. Instead of presenting thought as a barrier between us and the objective world, Hegel describes it as a process linking the two. Hegel starts with reality being given to us through sense-perception, with human thought transforming this information, breaking it down into its constituent parts, and putting it back together again; to use rational thought to go beyond immediate reality. It is a never-ending process, rife with affirmation and negation, in which one idea negates another, consistently deepening our understanding of ourselves and the universe.
However superior objective idealism is to the subjective kind, Hegel's idealism mystifies dialectics and presents thought as the development of the spirit. But with a Materialist perspective, it becomes easy to see through the blinding fog of idealism and walk away with a greater understanding of reality. It becomes apparent that thought is the product of the brain and the nervous system, inseparable from the human body, which demands nourishment, which, in turn, presupposes some form of human society and productive relations. In other words, thought is the product of matter that thinks.
Thought is the result of humans, from our earliest days, working together to produce the means of sustenance, slowly building communities through the division of labor, which, over time, develop ways to improve production, which provides qualitatively better access to nutrition, and leisure time to think. These quantitative changes in production negate previously established relations until, eventually, the new relations have the potential to produce a qualitative change in the mode of production and change society’s way of thinking. The same process of negation out of accident and necessity occurs in science and philosophy, which, in and of themselves, are products of human thought. In short, to truly understand something, we need to take things not just as they appear but also as they have been and as they will necessarily become.
Material Dialectics today
Although everything is perceivable from two different perspectives: quality and quantity, just because things are always changing does not mean real things do not have a definite form of existence or identity. No matter how much something changes, it retains, within certain limits, a qualitatively different form of existence, different from other forms, past, present, or future. And it is this qualitative definiteness that gives things the appearance of stability, differentiates them, and produces the world around us. This process is also detectable in society, as we saw in 2020. To the everyday observer, things were relatively stable in the United States before George Fllyod's murder. Not until after his murder did millions of people hit the streets demanding to abolish the police. But George Flloyd's death alone did not cause people to engage in revolutionary activity.
Ultimately, Flloyd was the straw that broke the camel's back. From Emmett Till, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Eric Garner to George Flloyd, the anger against one of bourgeois society's body of armed men had been building. Several decades after his death, Emmett's death would plant the seed against police brutality in the country's youth. 57 years later, Trayvon Martin's death would challenge notions of bourgeois community policing and expose the need for self-organization.
Two years later, Eric Garner's uttered his last words, "I can't breathe," as he was murdered by the police, giving a powerful rallying cry to the newly formed Black Lives Matter movement. A few months later, Michael Brown would perish at the hands of the police. But the pressure from the organized Black Lives Matter movement would affect the police adopting wider use of body cams, with nearly half of all police agencies equipped with cameras in 2016. Regardless, after Brown's murder, in everyone's consciousness, the police were untrustworthy, and recording your interactions with the police became normal conduct.
Six years after Ferguson, on May 25th, a police officer murdered George Flloyd in broad daylight for everyone to see and record with their phones and upload to social media. Pandemic or not, this was the final straw for the entire country, who rallied under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement, no longer demanding reforms but abolition. Four days later, the president of the United States was cowering in his bunker. Revolution was in the air! But for reasons other comrades have explained, the revolution did not happen. Nonetheless, in this chain of events, we can see how each event adds up producing a series of qualitative shifts, where we go from generally trusting the police to distrusting the police; in asking for reforms to openly demanding police abolition.
However, just because the properties of something make it what it is does not mean the object is reducible to its separate parts. The country did not almost go into revolution because we have a police problem. As Lenin points out, the police are just one body of armed men that belong to the state, which exists to mediate the affairs of the ruling class. And right now, that class is the capitalist class, whose class interests lie in achieving greater profits. As long as capitalism exists as our mode of production, the capitalist class will oppress the working class and enforce its will upon the majority using bodies of armed men. Whether these bodies are the police, FBI, DEA, ICE, the military, or the CIA, they will have another to replace any of them to secure their interests. To abolish the police, we must first abolish capitalism!
It is difficult to come to this conclusion, let alone understand the interrelatedness of everything, without dialectics. Instead, everything becomes an isolated problem, such as racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, sexism, reproductive rights, education, healthcare, wages, and taxes. And while these things can (and do) become Things-in-and-of-Themselves, their content is rooted in the form of private property. Furthermore, it is important to understand the relation between necessity and accident if the IMT plans to lead any revolution in the United States. Simply because capitalism enters a major crisis every ten years or so, with movements like Occupy Wallstreet and Black Lives Matter organizing with radical ideas, does not guarantee revolution. In fact, more often than not, without the subjective factor of revolutionary leadership, the decentralized movements are co-opted by the Democratic Party and become their opposite: defenders of the system.
Capitalism socializes labor, centralizes production, increases the forces of production to the point of overabundance, and concentrates wealth on one end of society while producing misery and toil for the other. The objective conditions for revolution under capitalism will continue to be present because capitalism itself produces the seeds of its inevitable negation. Just as it was by accident that we discovered the IMT, with each of our experiences preceding, preparing our minds for the revolutionary ideas of Marx and Engles, it will be by accident that the working class will look to the IMT for revolutionary leadership. No matter how large we grow, the revolution will catch everyone by surprise, with no way of telling which event in the future will become the catalyst for the third American Revolution.
Conclusion
As Hegel famously said, "What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational." If all that exists is rational, then what is irrational must cease to exist for the next form of ration to take its place. From here, it becomes clear that amid chaos, there is order. Between the high-interest rates, high inflation, supply chain breakdowns, strikes, evictions, wars, and so forth, these things presuppose an irrational society. And if a society is a form of ration predicated upon production relations, we no longer need a capitalist class to develop the forces of production. Where the capitalist class began as a progressive force in society, overthrowing the monarchies and developing philosophy to its limits, today, it is but a hindrance to progress, providing nothing to society but hoarding all its wealth. The capitalist class cannot rationally justify its existence and must be expropriated and removed from society to make room for what is rational.
In summary, dialectics is a process that proceeds from the abstract to the concrete. It denotes a deepening of our understanding of a given object: the development from a lower to a higher form of thinking. "At the beginning," Woods explains, "[an object] is referred to as 'in-itself,' or implicit. As it develops, it becomes for-itself, until eventually, it is a Thing-in-and-of-Itself... it is a return to the starting point, but on a qualitatively higher level." Throughout this process, dialectics breaks things down into their constituent parts, analyzes their interrelations, and walks away with a higher understanding of the object: where it came from, where it is, and where it's going.
Developed from the lowest form of philosophy, with Kant's subjective idealism, and then fleshed out by Hegel's objective idealism, a higher form of philosophy, and finally realized its full potential through Marx and Engle's Materialist philosophy, is an excellent example of the process described. While Hegel could solve the contradiction between the object and subject by describing thought as a process linking the two, he created his own contradiction by forcing dialectics, a form of thinking which says knowledge is infinite, into the straitjacket of idealism, where we can only hope to know the mind of God. But such a concept is contradictory as it is still a limit on knowledge. Idealism had reached its rational end. And philosophy would need to transform into something else to solve it.
Source: https://www.marxist.com/hop.htm