2 short essay

CHAPTER 1

The Meaning of Dialectics

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Have you ever tried to hop on a car while it was still moving? How different was it from entering a car that was stationary? Would you have been able to get into the moving car if you were blindfolded? Would you have been able to do it if you were not only blindfolded but didn't know in which direction it was mov- ing or even how fast it was going?

Why all these silly questions? Obviously, we all agree on the answers, and anyone in his or her right mind would make sure to know how fast and in which direction a car is moving before trying to climb aboard. Well, what about soci- ety? Society is like a vehicle that every one of us tries to climb aboard to find a job, a home, various social relationships, goods to satisfy our needs and fancies- in short, a whole way oflife. And who can doubt that society is changing. In fact, no century has experienced as much social change as ours, and no period has experienced faster change than the period since World War II. But just how fast is it changing and, more important, in what direction?

Will American, or British, or Japanese society as it is coming to be in the next few years be able to give you the things you want from it, that you are expect- ing, that you are preparing for? Being an optimist, you may answer "yes," but if so, you are looking-and none too closely-at things as they are now. But so- ciety, as you admit, is changing, and very fast. Have you studied what our demo- cratic capitalist society is changing into, or are you like the blindfolded person trying to get onto a moving vehicle, not knowing either the speed or direction in which it is traveling?

How, then, does one study the infinitely complex organism that is modern society as it evolves and changes over time? Marxism enters the picture as the most systematic (though, obviously, still incomplete) effort yet undertaken to provide such an analysis. Focusing on how goods are produced, exchanged, and distributed in the capitalist era, it tries to account for the structure as well as the dynamics of the entire social system, including both its origins and likely future. We also learn how the few who benefit most from capitalism use a mix-

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ture of force and guile to order the lives and thinking of the great majority who would benefit most from a radical change. Finally, Marxism also lays out a method (dialectics) and a practice (class struggle) for updating this study and helping to bring about the most desirable outcome. No one who is about to climb aboard the moving vehicle that is our rapidly changing society can afford to proceed without it.

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What we understand about the world is determined by what the world is, who we are, and how we conduct our study. As regards this last, in our day the prob- lems involved in grasping reality have been compounded by an approach that privileges whatever makes things appear static and independent of one another over their more dynamic and systemic qualities. Copernicus could have been speaking about the modern academy instead of the astronomers of his day when he said, "'With them it is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head, and other members for his images from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body, and since they in no way match each other, the result would be a monster rather than man'" (qtd. in Kuhn 1962, 83). The existing breakdown oflmowledge into mutually indifferent and often hos- tile academic disciplines, each with its own range of problema tics and meth- ods, has replaced the harmonious enlightenment we had been promised with a raucous cacophony of discordant sounds. In the confusion, the age-old link between knowledge and action has been severed, so that scholars can deny all responsibility for their wares while taking pride in lmowing more and more about less and less. It is as a way of criticizing this state of affairs and develop- ing an integrated body oflmowledge that a growing number of researchers are turning to Marxian dialectics.

With all the misinformation conveyed about dialectics, it may be useful to start by saying what it is not. Dialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis- antithesis-synthesis that serves as an all-purpose explanation; nor does it pro- vide a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history. The dialectic, as such, explains nothing, proves nothing, pre- dicts nothing, and causes nothing to happen. Rather, dialectics is a wav of think- ing that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions iliat occur in the world. As part of this, it includes how to organize a reality viewed in this manner for purposes of study and how to present the results of what one finds to others, most of whom do not think dialectically.

The main problem to which dialectics is addressed is set out clearly in Marx's retelling of the Roman myth of Cacus (1971, 536-37). Half man, half demon, Cacus lived in a cave and came out only at night to steal oxen. Wishing to mis- lead his pursuers, Cacus forced the oxen to walk backward into his den so that their footprints made it appear that they had gone out from there. The next

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morning, when people came looking for their oxen, all they found were foot- prints. Based on the evidence of these footprints, they concluded that, starting from the cave, their oxen had gone into the middle of a field and disappeared.

If the owners of the oxen had taken a methodology course at an American university, they might have counted the footprints, measured the depth of each step, and run the results through a computer-but they would have arrived at the same wrong conclusion. The problem here arises from the fact that reality is more than appearances and that focusing exclusively on appearances, on the evidence that strikes us immediately and directly, can be extremely misleading. How typical is the error found in this example? According to Marx, rather than the exception, this is how most people in OUT society understand the world. Basing themselves on what they see, hear, and bump into in their immediate surroundings-on footprints of various kinds-they arrive at conclusions that are in many cases the exact opposite of the truth. Most of the distortions asso- ciated with bourgeois ideology are of this kind.

To understand the real meaning of the footprints, the owners of the oxen had to find out what happened the night before and what was going on in the cave that lay just over their horizon. In a similar way, understanding anything in our everyday experience requires that we know something about how it arose and developed and how it fits into the larger context or system of which it is a part. Just recognizing this, however, is not enough, for nothing is easier than slipping back into a narrow focus on appearances. After all, few would deny that every- thing in the world is changing and interacting at some pace and in one way or another, that history and systemic connections belong to the real world. The difficulty has always been how to think adequately about them, how not to dis- tort them, and how to give them the attention and weight that they deserve. Dialectics is an attempt to resolve this difficulty by expanding our notion of anything to include, as aspects of what it is, bath the process by which it has become that and the broader interactive context in which it is found. Only then does the study of anything involve one immediately with the study of its his- tory and encompassing system.

Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the common- sense notion of "thing" (as something that has a history and has external con- nections with other things) with notions of "process" (which contains its his- tory and possible futures) and "relation" (which contains as part of what it is its ties with other relations). Nothing that didn't already exist has been added here. Rather, it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and estab- lishes units (the dialectical term is "abstracts") in which to think about the world. The assumption is that while the qualities we perceive with our five senses ac- tually exist as parts of nature, the conceptual distinctions that tell us where one thing ends and the next one begins both in space and across time are social and mental constructs. However great the influence of what the world is on how we draw these boundaries, it is ultimately we who draw the boundaries, and people

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coming from different cultures and from different philosophical traditions can and do draw them differently.

In abstracting capital, for example, as a process, Marx is simply including primitive accumulation, accumulation, and the concentration of capital-in sum, its real history-as part of what capital is. Abstracting it as a relation brings its actual ties with labor, commodity, value, capitalists, and workers-or what- ever contributes to its appearance and functioning-under the same rubric as its constituting aspects. All the units in which Marx thinks about and studies capitalism are abstracted as both processes and relations. Based on this dialec- tical conception, Marx's quest-unlike that of his commonsense opponents- is never for why something starts to change (as if it were not already changing) but for the various forms this change assumes and why it may appear to have stopped. Likewise, it is never for how a relation gets established (as if there were no relation there before), but again for the different forms it takes and why as- pects of an already existing relation may appear to be independent. Marx's cri- tique of the ideology that results from an exclusive focus on appearances, on the footprints of events separated from their real history and the larger system in which they are found, is also of this order.

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Besides a way of viewing the world, Marx's dialectical method includes how he studied it, how he organized what he found, and how he presented these findings to his chosen audience. But how does one inquire into a world that has been abstracted into mutually dependent processes? Where does one start, and what does one look for? Unlike nondialectical research, where one starts with some small part and through establishing its connections to other such parts tries to reconstruct the larger whole, dialectical research begins with the whole, the sys- tem, or as much of it as one understands, and then proceeds to an examination of the part to see where it fits and how it functions, leading eventually to a fuller understanding of the whole from which one has begun. Capitalism serves Marx as his jumping-off point for an examination of anything that takes place within it. As a beginning, capitalism is already contained, in principle, within the in- teracting processes he sets out to investigate as the sum total of their necessary conditions and results. Conversely, to begin with a supposedly independent part or parts is to assume a separation with its corresponding distortion of mean- ing that no amount oflater relating can overcome. Something will be missing, something will be out of place, and, without any standard by which to judge, neither will be recognized. What are called "interdisciplinary studies" simply treat the sum of such defects coming from different fields. As with Humpty Dumpty, who after the fall could never be put together again, a system whose functioning parts have been treated as independent of one another at the start can never be reestablished in its integrity.

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The investigation itself seeks to concretize what is going on in capitalism, to trace the means and forms through which it works and has developed, and to project where it seems to be tending. As a general rule, the interactions that constitute any problem in its present state are examined before studying their progress over time. The order of inquiry, in other words, is system before his- tory, so that history is never the development of one or two isolated elements with its suggestion, explicit or implicit, that change results from causes located inside that particular sphere (histories of religion or of culture or even of eco- nomics alone are decidedly undialectical). In Marx's study of any specific event or institutional form, these two types of inquiry are always interwoven. The fuller understanding of capitalism that is the major result of such a study is now ready to serve as a richer and therefore more useful starting point for the next series of investigations.

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Given an approach that proceeds from the whole to the part, from the system inward, dialectical research is primarily directed to finding and tracing four kinds of relations: identity/difference, interpenetration of opposites, quantity/ quality, and contradiction. Rooted in his dialectical conception of reality, these relations enable Marx to attain his double aim of discovering how something works or happened while simultaneously developing his understanding of the system in which such things could work or happen in just this way.

In what Marx calls the commonsense approach, also found in formal logic, things are either the same/identical or different, not both. On this model, com- parisons generally stop after taking note of the wayes) any two entities are ei- ther identical or different, but for Marx this is only the first step. Unlil<e the political economists, for example, who stop after describing the obvious differ- ences between profit, rent, and interest, Marx goes on to bring out their iden- tity as forms of surplus-value (that is, wealth created by workers that is not re- turned to them in the form of wages). As relations, they all have this quality, this aspect that touches upon their origins, in common. The interest Marx takes in delineating the special features of production or of the working class, without neglecting all they have in common with other economic processes and other classes, are good examples of his approaching identity and difference from the side of identity. The relations that stand in for things in Marx's dialectical con- ception of reality are sufficiently large and complex to possess qualities that- when compared to the qualities of other similarly constituted relations-appear to be identical and others that appear to be different. In investigating what these are and, especially, in paying extra attention to whichever half of this pairing is currently most neglected, Marx can arrive at detailed descriptions of specific phenomena without getting lost in one-sidedness.

While the relation of identity/difference treats the various qualities that are