1

dialectics- |i

'comprehending andtransforming reality*

by C. D.

As an historically developed science, Marxism-Leninism stands on Jour, theoretical corner-stones. The Jjcsf is the discovery by Marx of surplus value as the key to capitalist exploitation.Marx proved that the secret of commodity production is the unpaid labor extracted from workersand converted into capital by bosses. He showed that even when a worker receives the full value ofhis labor power as a commodity on the market, the capitalist still receives more from this laborpower than he put into it. This discovery rendered all previously existing economics obsolete, un-masked the true character of capitalist social relations, and gave the working class the conceptualframework it needed to envision a society in which it would control and dispose of all the surplusit created.

The second universal feature of Marxism-Leninism is the discovery of working class revolutionand proletarian dictatorship as historic inevitabilities. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 hadalready stated that the history of mankind after the period of primitive communism was a historyof antagonistic class struggle. However, the recognition of class struggle does not, in and of itself,render a theory revolutionary. Marx knew this: he knew, as we can readily see today, that thebourgeoisie recognizes the reality of class antagonisms even when its most vulgar apologists seekto camouflage this reality behind a smokescreen of "pluralistic" quasi-religious gibberish. Ittook the Paris Commune of 1870-1 to prove that the violent overthrow of capitalism, the totalannihilation of the capitalist state apparatus, and its replacement by a revolutionary socialistdictatorship were absolute laws of historical development. Lenin amplified and enriched this theoryin his classic work State and Revolution, when he wrote: "Only he is a Marxist who (recognizes)the dictatorship of the proletariat."

28

The third of Marxism-Leninism's universals isthe the8ry~of the revolutionary party. Marx andEngels both warned that although the contradic-tions of capitalism were ingpjuble, no ruling classhad ever abandoned the scene of history under itsown free will and that socialism could be wononly by the conscious class struggle of workersand their allies. Lenin again refined this dis-covery in his works What Is To Be Done? andOne Step Forward, Two Steps Back, when heshowed that revolutionary consciousness does notfall from the sky into workers' minds but mustbe brought consciously to them from the outside.He argued successfully that revolutionary ideasmust be embodied in a revolutionary organiza-tion: a party whose fundamental goal is the seizureof workers' state power, whose cadre function asprofessional revolutionaries, and whose system oforganization enables the working class to strikeits enemy with undeviating unity under all cir-cumstances. This system of organization iscalled democratic centralism.

The discoveries of surplus value, the inev-itability of proletarian dictatorship, and thenecessity of a revolutionary working class partyconstitute the inertial contributions of Marxism-Leninism to the realms of economics, history,and politics. Taken together, these concepts formthe nucleus of historical materialism—the scienceof human social development. But althoughMarxism-Leninism's primary concern is rightlythe transformation of society, the discoveriesinherent in the theory of historical materialismalso have profound implications for every area ofscience and all processes of development. If itcan be proved that human history operates 'ac-cording to discoverable laws, then can it not beproved that the same general laws of developmentapply to natural history as well? Marxism-Leninism answers this question in the affirmativeand in fact recognizes that the discoveries ofhistorical materialism would have been impos-sible without prior discoveries of correspondingdevelopmental laws in other branches of science.Marxism-Leninism's fourth universal feature isthe philosophy of dialectical materialism: a totalworld outlook and an all-embracing method ofcomprehending and transforming reality.

The present paper will attempt to examinesome of dialectical materialism's key features.As revolutionaries, we are not concerned withthe accumulation of knowledge for its own sakebut rather with the assimilation of knowledge andthe honing of our critical faculties as weapons inthe battle to understand and therefore win theclass struggle. Everyone is a philosopher. Thequestion becomes: what is the content of yourphilosophy? As revolutionaries, we must makesure that our world outlook and our politics areconsistent.

In its simplest form, we can define philosophyas a conscious attempt to discover and systema-tize universals, in other words, to find truthsthat are applicable to and valid for everything.All philosophy takes this as its basic task—even

skepticism, which states that the one universaltruth is that nothing is true. We must begin,therefore, by asking: what is the source ofknowledge?

All of philosophy has throughout its historydivided into two camps over the answer to thisquestion. Is consciousness primary—that is, doesit create and determine the external world, or arethings the other way around? Is consciousness infact a specific product of matter at a certainstage of its development? Put another way: whatis most "real:" the subjective ideas we have inour heads or the totality of the world around us?

The point of view that considers conscious-ness primary is called idealism. At one point inthe development of human history, idealismplayed a revolutionary role. The period of transi-tion from primitive communism to slavery, whichtook an entire historical epoch, required the de-velopment of theories to utilize the advancinglevel of productive forces. Slavery was based on

Karl Marx, founder of science of dial-ectical materialism.

agriculture; agriculture required irrigation; ir-rigation required for the first time a primitivelevel of scientific understanding. The men who,for one reason or another, acquired this theo-retical knowledge were considered to have semi-mystical powers and were treated as virtualdeities. Of course, this state of affairs could nothelp but entrench the power of the slave-owningclass, but it nonetheless had a revolutionaryaspect. Previously, under primitive communism,the objective forces of nature had been literallyincomprehensible. Now, even under a form ofbrutal exploitation, human knowledge was firstbeginning to understand them and could use thisunderstanding to develop its productive forces.

However, after this transition had taken place,idealism turned into its opposite and became theunscientific, reactionary, incorrect world out-look of all exploiting classes. Its classic historicexpression can be found in the phantasmagoricreligious superstructures of all hitherto existing

29

societies. In the slave society of ancient Greece,there was a goddess of war, a god of the sea, agoddess of beauty and love, a god of the sun, agod of speed, a god of the vines, even a lame godwho worked at a primitive forge. All the godswere presided over by Zeus, who was morea firstamong equals than an absolute monarch. In otherwords, the relations among gods in the imaginaryworld of Mount Olympus mirrored the real rela-tions between slaveowning princes and kings inGreek society. The"oracle" at Delphi was thoughtto predict the future in riddles—provided youbribed him with adequate animal sacrifices. Moreto the point, however: this historic expression ofidealism stood the real world on its head andmade a mystery of observable phenomena. TheRoman slave society that succeeded the Greekshad a similar religious superstructure. TheRomans merely accepted most Greek gods andtranslated their names into Latin. The low levelof productive forces in both societies made thedevelopment of exact natural science impossibleand therefore enshrined idealism as the rulingphilosophy.

Under feudalism, idealism assumed a differentform to correspond with changing reality. Christi-anity originated as the revolutionary-criticalideology of oppressed slaves in the period of theRoman Empire's initial decline. Concepts suchas those in the Sermon on the Mount and theEpistles of Paul (The kingdom of heaven belongsto the poor; charity—i.e. the love of fellow-man—is the greatest virtue, etc.) made grave indict-ments of the existing class structure. However,again because of limits in the productive forces,these indictments could not translate their fullimplications into reality: even in its revolutionarystage, Christianity was forced to look for a solutionbeyond the real world. The best it could offer tothe oppressed masses of slaves was a reward inheaven.

For this reason, the emerging feudal rulingclass of Europe was able to appropriate Christi-anity, turn it into its opposite, and use it as thestate religion defending the status quo. First thelatter Roman emperors and then the feudal kingsand barons who succeeded them found a bonanzain a world outlook that told the serfs to disregardtheir wretched life on earth and concentrate in-stead on winning God to give them grace foreternity. After all, bad as serfdom was, the al-ternative to heaven was reputed to be a Hell of alot worse. Like the Greek slave religion, Euro-pean feudal Catholicism also invented a celestialpecking order that corresponded to the real re-lations among the ruling classes of the time. Godthe father had more power in heaven than Zeuson Mount Olympus, just as the king did over thenobles, but the angels and the nobles themselvesweren't to be sneezed at either. We know that oneof feudalism's fundamental ideological under-pinnings was the concept of the "divine right"of kings: in other words, the idea that the crownedheads of state had the franchise from On High.One would be hard pressed to find a more classic

example of idealist philosophy than this religiousrationalization of the oppressive feudal socialorder.

Like the slave-owners who had preceded them,the feudal kings and princes had very limited in-terest in developing productive forces and thefscience needed to harness them. However, like.;all previous societies, feudalism engendered itsiopposite in the guildsmen, town burghers, andjmercantile traders who had a very great interestindeed in developing productive forces and themeans of using them. Real natural science datesfrom the middle of the 15th century. Typically,great scientific advances have revolutionarysocial implications for the class structure ofsocieties at all levels of development. This wassurely true of Copernicus' theory of the solarsystem and Galileo's substantiation of it. Forentire epochs, men had seen the earth as thecenter of the universe. Now it could be demon-strated that the earth revolved around the sun and;not vice-versa. The emerging mercantile capi-talists drew revolutionary social conclusions fromCopernicus* and other discoveries. If the naturalorder of things is not what it has been thoughtto be, why should we accept as given the existingclass structure? The so-called "Renaissance*'was a period in which the idealist philosophy offeudalism—including official church Scholasti-cism and the doctrine of divine right—saw itselfsubjected to devastating criticism by the revo-lutionary bourgeoisie.

However, even this criticism was idealist inthe last analysis. Jean Calvin, the Swiss Protestanttheologian, 'was surely the most advanced bour-geois thinker of his day. His doctrine of pre-destination explained commercial success andsocial status as the products of forces beyond thesubjective control or whim of individual men. Inthis respect, Calvin broke radically with theCatholic doctrine of grace as salvation attainableby human efforts to please God. Calvin went muchfurther than Luther. Lutheran idealism limiteditself to a call for absolute monarchy. The peas*ants from Northeastern Germany who left theCatholic church to join the Lutheran reformationwere immediately transformed from freemen intoserfs. Calvin's doctrine was far more thoroughlydemocratized: the Calvinish church was no longersubjected to the hierarchy of bishops, archbishops,cardinals and popes. As Engels pointed out:* ' . . .where the kingdom of God was republican! zed,could the kingdoms of this world remain subjectto monarchs, bishops, and lords?" Luther brokewith Catholicism only to leap back into the armsof the German aristocracy, Calvin, on the otherhand, founded a republic in Holland and activerepublican political parties in England and Scot-land. Nonetheless, Calvinism could not breakonce and for all with idealism. It had left thetheology of feudalism in the graveyard of historyonly to found a new theology and a new church.The theology and church served a differentclass,but the prime forces of movement and changewere still viewed as belonging to the realm of the

30

spirit. The different Protestant creeds thatemerged in Europe with the development of vari-ous local bourgeoisies were not exactly similarin their details, but they united nonetheless inaccepting Christianity. '''

It took the French Revolution of 1789 for theclass struggle to shed its specifically religioussmokescreen. The most radical of the bourgeoisrevolutionaries consciously took 18th centuryanticlericalism one step further and called forthe official abolition of the church and the confis-cation of its land. St. -Just, Robespierre, Marat,and Babeuf had the most advanced understandingof state power yet developed and they saw theparticular idealism of the Catholic church as anintolerable fetter on the development of the newrepublican capitalist society they sought to estab-lish. Nonetheless, religion made a comeback inthe 13th and 20th centuries. Once the capitalistshad consolidated their power, they themselvesturned into their opposite and from the principalforce for social change, became the principalagent of counter-revolution. Specifically, theirneeds required a philosophic weapon in the waragainst the developing working class. And so re-ligion was modernized and restored in virtuallyevery capitalist country. Today, with U.S. im-perialism in a period of decline and with the U.S.ruling class teetering on the verge of economicchaos and war, we have seen the recent revivalof traditional organized religions as well as theemergence of a lunatic religious fringe (the HareKrishnas, a motley gaggle of Gurus, etc.).

We have briefly considered the phenomenon ofreligion as the most classic, consistent historicexpression of idealist philosophy. However, itshould be clear that idealism, as a total worldoutlook, is by no means limited to religion. Thepolitical superstructure of U.S. capitalism, forexample, is predicated thoroughly on non-religiousidealist philosophy. We are told that ours is asociety of "laws,"and that ultimate contemporarylegal authority resides in a scrap of paper puttogether by a group of slave-owning landlordstwo hundred years ago. Svcoohants who paradeas sociologists and who apologize for capitalismspeak of social wealth and status as predeterminedby some fantastic genetic structure. Our latestmuttonhead president ignores the real world ofthe crisis he and his class find themselves inand beckons us with his "vision" of the goldenage of U.S. capitalism. In one form or another,every feature of capitalist decadence, barbarism,and unworkability is explained away by leading"intellectuals'1 as the inevitable consequence of"human nature.*'

In our own party we can see many examplesof reactionary idealism. Too many of us stillharbor the illusion that just because we discuss adecision once at a meeting, the decision willautomatically be implemented without careful,meticulous organization. Too many of us stilloperate with the false notion that we can winothers to socialism simply by handing them aleaflet and that an all-embracing relationship withour fellow workers' and students' lives is un-

Bronx Community College CommitteeAgainst Racism Sit-in, 1975.

necessary. Too many of us still evaluate develop-ments in terms of our own euphoria or depressionrather than in terms of the developments them-selves.

If idealism has existed as a world outlook sincethe origin of human language and consciousness,so in one form or another, has its opposite,materialism. The decisive struggle for thousandsof years in the realm of philosophy has takenplace over the question of determining the primacyof the external world or of man's subjective con-sciousness. .

In addition to their classical mythology, theancient Greeks also produced a philosophy which,despite its necessary naivete, nonetheless con-tained the germ of modern materialism anddialectics. Thinkers like Heraclitus, reflectingupon nature and the world at large, saw a limit-less sequence of relations, movements, reac-tions, and combinations in which nothing remainedthe same but was on the contrary forever changing.This superficial, primitive view of totality isfundamentally correct. It can be summarized inthe slogan: "Panta rhei"—everything flows.Heraclitus1 followers used to say that he likened

}". . .things to a flowing river and (said) it wasimpossible to enter twice into the same stream."In his Philosophic Notebooks, Lenin cites thefollowing typical passage from Heraclitus' work:

This order of things, the same for all, wasnot made by any God or man, but was andis and will be forever, a living fire kindledby measure and quenched by measure.

These statements represent the first falteringsteps of human knowledge to free itself from theyoke of superstition and religion. Look at the realworld, Heraclitus tells us, and you wil^see not adivinely determined eternal order of things, not amysterious, unfathomable figment of the spirit-kingdom, but rather an endless development inwhich the one constant is change.

However, the low level of productive forces

and its correspondingly low level of social de-velopmelit limited Greek materialism in its in-vestigation of reality. The Greek materialistscould see change and movement as general phe-nomena but could not probe deeper to investigatethe source of particular movement and specificchange. They attributed the origin of things tofire, water, or air and could not show concretelyhow matter changed its form. Heraclitus wrote:

...the parts of the creation are dividedinto two halves, each one opposed to theother; the earth into mountains and plains,water into fresh and salt water... similar-ly, the atmosphere into winter and sum-mer and also into spring and autumn...

Herein lie both the revolutionary character andthe limit of Greek materialism: on the one hand,it chooses reality over dreams; on the otherhand, it cannot make a profound systematic studyof this reality but must stop at the point of ex-ternal, empirical observation.

As slave-owners, the Greeks had no need tostudy the technique of developing production: alllabor was performed by slaves who were viewed,literally, as sub-human. As colonizers, mer-chants, political administrators, and navigators,the ancient Greeks had no need for the detailedinvestigation of a process' inner workings.

However, with the development of productionand discoveries that took place over hundreds ofyears, the need for the closer investigation ofphenomena also developed. It started first, asEngels points out, in the later Alexandrian periodof Greek science. It advanced during the "MiddleAges" and again during the Renaissance, andreached its zenith during the revolutionary bour-geois struggle of the 18th Century. The ancientGreeks had been able to perceive a totality inwhich all things were changing but could notseparate specifics from the totality. The nextphase in the development of human knowledgewas the painstaking extraction of individual phe-nomena from the whole, the study of their specificproperties, the accumulation of experimentaldata, and the formulation of an inventory of plants,animals, minerals, etc.

Developing feudal society produced a philosophyand science that diverted attention away fromgeneral connection and change and concentratedinstead on the isolated characteristics of things.This approach inevitably led to the view thateverything in nature was composed of a specificquantity of immutable properties. Take forexample alchemy (medieval chemistry). The al-chemists thought they had discovered the threebasic properties of bodies: metallic glitter, com-bustibility, and durability. Ignorant of the laws ofchange, the alchemists thought all they had to dowas figure how much glitter, combustibility, ordurability a substance had and they then couldeffect change by adding or subtracting determinedamounts' of these "properties." Each propertythus became an independent substance that func-tioned outside things as their extrinsic determi-nant. The alchemists thought that change itself

was a special force due to a "philosopher'sstone," which, incidentally, also held the secretto the production of gold. For centuries, theyconcentrated their efforts on the discovery ofthis stone.

The development of productive forces and thescientific experimentation that took place underfeudalism revealed a massive body of new sub-stances. All were analyzed within the same gen-eral framework of absolute, rigid properties.Glass was thought to cut because of its "cutting"property; smoke was thought to rise because ofits "rising" property, and so on. Here we havethe essence of tautological reasoning: take a thing,divide it into its separate parts, and explain eachin terms of itself, or, to put it another way: con-stantly bring the unknown back to the already-known.

The feudal landowners had a direct interest inperpetuating this ossified, one-sided method of <viewing things. True, they had more stake thantheir slave-owning predecessors in advancingproduction, but the basic technical problems offeudalism revolved not so much around the crea-tion of new things as in the perfecting and re-combination of already existing techniques. To thesupposed "immutability" of properties corre-sponded the feudal barons' need to preserve asimmutable the 'rigid system of land parcellingthat maintained their great estates and the par-ticular form of peasant exploitation that corre-sponded to this division.

However, despite the whim of the landlords,all things do indeed change, and the developmentof merchant capital drove the serfs into the townsjust as it disintegrated the feudal estates. Theemerging bourgeoisie, as we have already seen,had a vital stake in fashioning a philosophy thatwould both examine a wealth of phenomena withan eye toward advancing the productive forces

, and at the same time break with the theory ofimmutable properties. However, even in its revo-lutionary stage, the bourgeoisie found itselftrapped in an insoluble theoretical contradiction.On the one hand, it needed materialism in itsbattle against a dying feudal enemy. Great stridesin science were made by 17th and 18th Centurybourgeois materialists like Descartes, Linnaeus,and others. On the other hand, as we have pointedout above, the capitalists also needed idealismto maintain and increase their exploitation of theemerging proletariat. And so, even as the bour-geoisie consciously fought the idealism of thethrone and altar, it also perpetuated its ownidealism by encouraging religion for the masses.The greatest single scientific work of the Euro-pean Enlightenment—the French Ency elope die—was destined exclusively for the sons of mer-chants and manufacturers. The only thing con-sidered fit for those of the masses who couldread at all was still the Holy Scripture,

Correspondingly, the bourgeoisie also neededboth to defend and to suppress a philosophy ofchange. On the one hand, the French 18thCenturyglitters with profound dialectical works such as

32

Boston SDS attacks racist prof. HerrnsteinRousseau's Discourse on the Origins of InequalityAmong Men and Diderot's Rameau's Nephew andLetter on the Blind. On the other hand, during itsmost revolutionary-critical stage, the bourgeoisiewas still unable to break with the mechanistic,metaphysical "quality of properties. "The classicembodiment of this contradiction is the 18thCentury view of the so-called "Great Chain ofBeing," in which the feudal conception of God isreplaced by a view of the universe as an enormousmachine and God as a "first-cause" or celestial"watch-maker." The bourgeoisie looked up atthe landlords and saw change everywhere. Itlooked down at the workers and scurried back toimmutable properties. As capitalism made andconsolidated its economic and then its politicalrevolutions, the philosophy of immutable prop-erties inevitably came back into pre-eminence,under new forms. With U.S. imperialism in de-cline, the bosses' intellectual sycophants todayonce again trot out the shop-worn theory of"factors." Why is there unemployment? TheFriedmans and Samuelsons read us some litanyabout features of the "business cycle." Whatexplains the collapse of the stock market? Themarket itself is said to possess "bullishness"or "bearishness." What explains air pollutionand the system's inability to allocate resourcesin a rational manner? Here the bourgeoisie'sscribblers regale us with twaddle aboutthe "over-population factor," and so on.

Naturally, none of the philosophy inherent incontemporary bourgeois economics, sociology, orpolitical theory appears as simple as the descrip-tions above. The fundamental world outlook of ourGalbraiths, Moynihans, Kissingers, Herrnsteins,etc. lies buried beneath a mountain of academicjargon and "learned" gibberish. Yet if we taketheories like the "genetic" determinant of in-telligence in psychology, the notion of "counter-vailing forces" and "equilibrium" in interna-tional politics, or the reputed '' matriarchal

structure" of the black working class family insociology, we find little more than a decadent20th Century rehash of the "durable force ofsalt," the "rising property of smoke," and soon.

The outlook that studies phenomena in this waycan never break forth from the limits of me-chanical materialism. Even when it seeks in itsmost advanced 18th Century form to abandonreligious idealism, its fundamentally metaphysicalcharacter forces it to abandon the real world insearch of non-existent, predetermined causes orfactors—and thus, mechanical materialism com-pletes a full circle by returning to the subjectiveidealism from which it started. The attributesof the mechanical-metaphysical world outlook are:

* an empirical, pragmatic method of viewingthings that contents itself with the statement ofproperties as they first appear upon superficialexamination;

* an insistence on considering properties asseparated from each other;

* a belief that the properties in different thingsare immutable and absolutely identical to eachother and that all things are merely differentexternal combinations of various properties.

From our own experience in attempting to givepolitical leadership to the class struggle, we cansee that an arduous process of retraining isnecessary if we are to leave behind themechan.ical-metaphysical heritage the bosses have be-queathed to us. Many of us still view our poli-tical work in mechanical terms. We tend toview the party line as pre-existing propertyof the class struggle. This error prevents usfrom examining the specific dynamics of eachsituation that arises and determining therebyhow the line must be brought into the struggle.Saddled with this view, we are unable to evaluatenew developments and to carry out the essence ofthe line. For years, we functioned in the massmovement as though revolutionary politics werean inherent force of the struggle for reform. In

the main, when we did introduce revolutionarysocialist concepts, we did so mechanically, elabo-rating the details of the reform battle in questionand then tacking on a line or two about socialismat the end. Although our intentions were good,our errors would eventually have led us to be-come the same type of pragmatic spontaneity-worshipping opportunists against whom Lenindirected the withering criticism of What Is To BeDone? Indeed, not only in our own party butthroughout the history of the working class move-ment, there has been a persistent tendency toview the reform struggle as endowed with revo-lutionary characteristics. We have recognizedthis error and are attempting to correct it.

Another example of mechanistic thinking mayfurther illuminate the reactionary role played bythis outlook. For years, the old U.S. CommunistParty prattled about so-called "American ex-ceptionalism." The realities of life in the UnitedStates were reputed to possess some magicalquality that rendered the laws of class struggleobsolete and that absolved the C.P. from fightingfor the dictatorship of the proletariat. Somehowor other, this special force made U.S. bossesdifferent from others around the world andpromised the advent of socialism by constitutionalamendment. The only problem was that someoneforgot to tip off the bosses, who remained ignorantof their "true" properties and went on as beforeraking in billions from human misery, clubbingstrikers, shooting down ghetto rebels, and com-miting genocide in Vietnam.

Finally, one would be hard pressed to find amore blatant example of the mechanical-meta-physical "quality of properties" than the variousracist stereotypes the bosses so diligently nourishto keep workers divided. Black people are reputedto have the qualities of "laziness" and "shift-lessness;" Latin American people are said to be"hot-tempered" and "happy-go-lucky;" thequality of "stinginess" is ascribed to Jews; etc.History shows where such a mechanistic outlookleads when it is applied to ideology and politics.

We have seen in this brief recapitulation thatthe struggle between materialism and idealism isas old as the class struggle. We have seen furtherthat materialism, by itself, solves only one-halfthe problem of philosophy as science. The ma-terialist world outlook directs human knowledgeto look at universal facts rather than at its ownfantasies. This is an enormous leap away fromdogma and superstition. However, although it isabsolutely correct to state that the "basis of theunity of the universe is objective being" (Engels),reality does not spontaneously supply us with itsown interpretation. We have the real world ofuniversal facts; we still require a universalmethod of interpreting, predicting, and trans-forming them. As we have pointed out above,bourgeois philosophy could not go beyond me-chanical metaphysics and therefore appropriatedmaterialism only to dress it up in an idealistcloak.

Directly opposed to the mechanical-meta-

physical world outlook is the dialectical method.Where metaphysics considers only the external,superficial aspect of things, dialectics seeks todiscover the limitless internal complexities ofself-movement. Where metaphysics sees allthings as separated, dialectics views the entireuniverse as a series of interconnected develop-ments linked together by the very fact of theirexistence. Where metaphysics views the prop-erties in things as eternally determined andtherefore immutable, dialectics sees endlessmovement, development, transformation, cominginto being and going out of being.

The great scientific discoveries of the 19thCentury proved the absolute superiority of dialec-trics over metaphysics. Charles Darwin smashedmetaphysics in the natural sciences when heshowed that every organism—from the lowliesttadpole to man himself—is the product of processspanning millions or hundreds of millions of years.He demonstrated thereby, in Engels' words, that"...nature works dialectically and not meta-physically . . . she does not move in the eternaloneness of a perpetually recurring circle but goesthrough a real historical evolution."

A scientifically correct representation of theuniverse, its evolution, the development of man andsociety, and the perception of this development inmen's minds is therefore feasible only by thedialectical method. The philosophers who aroseout of the German bourgeois revolution worked inthis spirit. Immanuel Kant proved that the solarsystem was the product of an historic processand therefore that its ultimate death was in-evitable. His theory was borne out by subsequentcalculations and experiments. This particularschool of German philosophy reached its zenithwith the work of Hegel. In the Hegelian system,the totality of existence—nature, history, thehuman intellect—was seen as a constant process.Hegelian dialectics perceived existence as de-velopment, change, motion, evolution. Itproducedthe intellectual categories of the dialecticalmethod. Hegel's limit, however, was that he wasin the last analysis an idealist. On the one hand,he saw all nature and history as a process that,ipso facto, could not be frozen in "absolute truth."On the other hand, he viewed life as the mererealized picture of the "Idea," which had existedtunelessly in eternity before all forms of creation.

The job of philosophy, as Marx and Engels said,now became to stand "Hegel on his head," inother words to marry the dialectical method withthe materialist world outlook. This new task couldbe accomplished only by working class revolu-tionaries, and it could be undertaken only afterthe working class itself had reached a sufficientpoint in its own historical development. This pointwas reached by the middle of the 19th Century,after the first workers'uprising in Lyons (France)of 1832 and after the organization of the firstnational workers' movement (the Chartists inEngland, 1838-42). By now, the struggle betweenbourgeoisie and proletariat had reached center-stage in the most advanced countries of Europe

34

and was coming to the fore in others. The bour-geois cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,"was exposed as a monstrous lie, and the an-tagonism between the interest of workers and thatof capitalists was becoming increasingly clear.Marx and Engels took the best of materialism:the view that being determines consciousness.They took the best of dialectics: the view thateverything is in constant flux. The resultingsynthesis enabled them to unlock the secret of allprevious societies and to show that human history,with the exception of the most primitive societies,was the history of class struggle. They demon-strated that antagonistic classes themselves arethe products of existing economic conditions (themeans of production, the mode of production, andthe method of exchange). They proved that allfeatures of a society's institutions and ideas de-pend for their existence upon this base. Finally,by applying dialectics to these discoveries, theytraced the development of primitive communism

Friedrich Engels, Scientist of Revolutioninto slavery, of slavery into feudalism, of feudal-ism, of feudalism into capitalism, and ofcapitalism into socialism. For the first time, thefight for socialism and the struggle to end allforms of oppression were put on a scientificbasis. For the first time, the inevitability ofworking class revolution was demonstrable.

If the mortality of the solar system was now amatter of proof; if dinosaurs, who had once ruledthe earth, were turned into fossils; if man him-self was now known to be the product of a millenialevolution: if every form of social organizationprior to commodity production could now be ob--.erved in its genesis, fruition, and demise, theni h e ultimate fall of capitalism became an absolute•ortainty, not merely in the objective developmenti things, but, for the first time, also in man's

mind as well. Herein lies the true significance of\]arx' well-known statement that theory becomes

material force when it is grasped by the masses:

sooner or later in its historical development, theworking class will become conscious of its roleas capitalism's grave-digger and will act uponthat consciousness. This is indeed the primary newdevelopment that has emerged in the last 125vears both of human history and of science.

We can now turn our attention to the expositionthe categories and laws of dialectical material-

ism. Before doing so, however, one conclusionshould be drawn from all of the above. Likeevery thing'else, scientific truth itself is insepar-able from the partisan alignments of the classstruggle. Bourgeois philosophy would have usbelieve that "justice is blind," in other words,that the truth about a thing somehow resides out-side its history and development and outside itsessential inter-relation with other things. Ob-jectivity for bourgeois philosophy therefore ispictured as external to reality. We can see howthis distortion develops as the intellectual toolof a class that needs to maintain a system of"eternal truths." In fact, however, we have seenfrom the brief survey above that all philosophybelongs to one social class or another. We sawidealism as the tool of slave-owners. We sawmetaphysics as the world-view of the feudalbarons. We saw mechanical materialism as theweapon of the emerging bourgeoisie in its revolu-tionary stage. Now as it wallows in the period ofits decadence and decline, we see the bourgeoisiesinking deeper and deeper into subjective idealism.Philosophy belongs to the class struggle and isinseparable from it. The intellectual parasiteswho yap about the fundamentally abstract char-acter of truth merely belie their own idealism andtheir allegiance to the capitalist system. Dialecti-cal materialism is the philosophy of the revolu-tonary working class. It is our guide to action and

'he method by which we can carry out our historicmission. The sooner we master it, the sooner wecan win.

THE CATEGORIES OF DIALECTICS•••* *-

The examination of any object or process seesfirst its outer, limited surface; next, the duality.jotween this outer aspect and its internal char-icteristies; and, finally, the inexhaustible variety

of these inner aspects. As this examination un-folds, a series of distinct but interpenetratingthought categories clarifies the character ofohenomena and of their reflection in our minds.We shall attempt to give a brief enumeration anddescription of these categories, all of which takeshape as contradictory dualities. <*

I. The Finite and the Infinite.Relativists, skeptics, and empiricists who be-

long to one or another school of bourgeois thoughtAssert that we can know only the finite. This is•lerfectly correct, in a narrow, one-sided sense:,ie only things that can enter our sphere of knowl-

are definite, limited objects. We cannot know

35

a thing that has no material, existence. On theother hand, however, if we accept the idea thatour knowledge is limited to things that stare usin the face, then our understanding is doomed toremain at an animal or, at best, an infantile level.

If, under the conditions that exist on earth, wetake any quantity of water and apply heat to it,the water will boil when its own internal tempera-ture reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit. If a new-born baby is deprived of oxygen for a specifiednumber of seconds, then it is certain that irre-parable brain-damage or death will result,whether the experience takes place in Brooklyn,New Delhi, or Berlin. If the basic relations be-tween social classes are those of commodityproduction, then, inevitably, surplus value will beproduced by workers and appropriated by capi-talists ; antagonistic class contradictions willdevelop and sharpen; Intel-imperialist rivalrywill arise and lead to war; and the working classwill take up revolutionary struggle. If our knowl-edge of a thing at a given point in history islimited by our own internal development, thedevelopment of contemporary productive forces,and the corresponding limits of contemporaryscience, by the same token, the discoverableknowledge of the thing in question has no suchlimits.

Reality, as we have seen, is constantly changing,dying, and being reborn. For this reason, ourunderstanding of it is necessarily circumscribedand approximate. For the very same reason,however, in a universe where the one constant ischange, both reality and its knowledge are inex-haustible. This is the scientific rationale forcriticism and self-criticism in political work:our understanding of class struggle, in both itsparticular and its general forms, must lag atleast a step behind the unfolding struggle itself.

On the one hand, the infinity of knowable matteris made up of the purely finite. For instance,when we speak of the growing antagonism betweenU.S. and Soviet imperialism we can begin tograsp its infinite complexity only by the incom-plete, imperfect study of its specific manifesta-tions—i.e. proxy wars in Turkey-Cyprus orBangladesh; Soviet incursions in the mideast andwestern Europe; the shifting relation of forces insouthern Africa, etc. This study of singularitiesenables us to advance our knowledge to a par-ticularity: we can see that the proxy wars andSoviet ascendency demonstrate growing U.S.-Soviet rivalry and U.S. decline. We can thenelevate this particularity to a universal: underthe conditions of monopoly capitalism, imperial-ist rivalry will intensify, will lead inevitably towar and fascism, and will present the workingclass with new opportunities for revolution. Con-trary to bourgeois pragmatism, dialectical ma-terialism understands the connection between thefinite and infinite, the particular and universal.Our knowledge of the finite proves the infinity ofthe knowable.

On the other hand, for this very reason, knowl-edge of the universal is composed, as Engels

states, of an ".. .infinite number of finite humanminds, working side by side and successively atthis infinite knowledge, committing practical andtheoretical blunders, setting out from erroneous,one-sided, and false premises, pursuing false,tortuous and uncertain paths, and often not evenfinding the right one when they run their nosesagainst it." Nothing more clearly demonstratesthis premise of dialectics than the history ofproletarian revolution and revolutionary thoughtin the 19th and 20th centuries. The analysis ofcapitalism's amoeba—the commodity—unmaskedsurplus value as the secret of capitalist produc-tion and paved the way for the discovery of theuniversal law of workers' ultimate seizure ofthe means of production. Side by side and inter-locked with this development was the consciouspolitical action of the masses, which led to theParis Commune, the discovery of the classnature of state power, and the deepening of thisdiscovery by the revolutions of the 20th Century.By the same token, inevitable "practical and theo-retical blunders1* led to the reversal of workers'power in the Soviet Union and China. This bitterlesson in turn opened the door for even moreprofound insights into the nature of state powerand class struggle.

All finite reality has infinite complexity. Allfinite knowledge has infinite perfectability. There-fore, as Engels says: "All true knowledge ofnature is knowledge of the eternal, the infinite,and hence essentially absolute."

2. The Relative and the Absolute.Metaphysics and dialectics both consider the

question of the absolute but from completely con-tradictory viewpoints. For metaphysics, "ab-solutes" exist in and of themselves. The feudalalchemists believed that durability was an ab-solutely innate property of sale; the feudal kingsthought their place atop society was divinely de-termined and therefore absolute; the Pope had onlyto speak and his word was "infallible." Today'sbourgeois update of metaphysics contains essen-tially the same one-sided conception of absolute-ness. Full unemployment, we are told, is an ab-solute inevitability—but the economists do notadd: "of capitalism." The reactionary sociol-ogists take various manifestations of ruling classbarbarism or aggression and subsume them allunder the supposedly absolute features of "humannature." The learned apologists of commodityproduction tell us that inequality of wealth andpower is an absolute of human life. They failto add: as long as society is divided into mutually'jiitagoitistic classes.

Dialectics, on the contrary, recognizes therelative and the absolute as two inseparable polesof every process. Reality and science show thatnothing is absolute in and of itself but only inrelation to other things.

For example, steel is hard in comparison tohuman flesh but soft in comparison to an industrialdiamond. A hundred years are a long time inrelation to a human life but hardly the wink of

36

an eye compared to the time required for thetransition between ape and man. Imperialist warbrings untold devastation and horror to the work-ing class but also opens the door to revolutionand the end of war. Capitalist dictatorship is anundeniable reality of life but only as long as theworking class continues to tolerate the existenceof bosses.

What dialectics says, in fact, is that everythingis two-sided. If X is related to Y, then Y is alsorelated to X. Under capitalism, our party fightsfor the program of the shorter work week—30hours' work for 40 hours' pay. We say that aslong as the bosses continue to rule and rob us,it is absolutely correct to spend less time grind-ing out surplus value for them. However, undersocialism, as we have pointed out in Reform andRevolution, it is not at all clear that the workingclass should expect a shorter work week, at leastas long as the worldwide fight against imperial-ism is still a necessity. This is so because offundamental changes that will occur in economicand political conditions. A bad thing—working toproduce surplus controlled by capitalists—be-comes a good thing—working to produce surpluscontrolled by the working class and used in itsown interest.

Every relative is at the same time an absolutewhen considered in its inter-relation with theuniverse. By the same token, every absolute isalso relative. Bourgeois metaphysics denies thison both counts. On the one hand, in its blind devo-tion to the "eternal" truths of capitalism, it ad-mits only its own absolutes. On the other hand,faced with the system's insoluble contradictions,it flies in the face of objective reality and con-siders everything relative.

Contemporary bourgeois culture is filled withexamples of this second distortion. Faced withpotential twin cataclysms in the revolt of blackworking class youth and student rebellions againstthe imperialist Vietnam war during the 1960s,the bosses came up with the slogan: "Do yourown thing." Bourgeois metaphysics asserts thatsince the laws of history and nature are funda-mentally undiscoverable, then every theory ispotentially just as valid as every other theory.Therefore, we find the half-baked Linnaean tax-onomy of E.O. Wilson dressed up in a $20 editionof Sociobiology and prefaced with yet anotherversion of the shopworn neo-nazi lies about the"hereditary" character of "entrepreneurship,""creativity," "spite," "selfishness," "al-truism," and so on. Further: Wilson is by train-ing an entomologist—i.e. a bug expert. He makescertain empirical observations about the geneticslave-owning tendencies of ants and then assertsthat the same conditions prevail in human society.Aside from the obviously reactionary politicaland ideological character of this nonsense, wecan see here a metaphysical confusion of therelative and the absolute. Of course, a relation-ship exists between ants and humans on somelevel of the evolutionary process. There is alsoan absolute distinction between the two, just as

there is a relationship and an absolute distinc-tion between slave owners and slaves, lords andserfs, and bosses and workers.

In the course of carrying out political work,analyzing developments in the class struggle, andplanning strategy and tactics at every level, ourparty must make correct evaluations of the rela-tive and absolute character of all phenomena.For instance, when we begin to raise revolu-tionary ideas with a worker on the job, we knowthat just as capitalist consciousness and socialistconsciousness are both absolute poles in the realworld, so they are in his own mind as well. Hisown political movement to the left or the rightmust be related to this law. By the same token,regardless of what is in his head at a givenmoment, his objective class relationship to themeans of production (the fact that he is a prop-ertyless worker who produces expropriatedsurplus-value) is absolute. Therefore, the partycan show him that his interests can be served onlyby fighting for socialism. On the otherhand, how-ever, nothing can be quite so cut and dry. We canstate with absolute certainty that the process ofwinning the working class to make revolution hasthe inevitability of law, but our ability to win anindividual worker is related to a complex seriesof variable phenomena; the objective conditionsof class struggle at a given time on and off thejob, the worker's own psychology, the quality ofleadership provided inside the party, the politicaldevelopment of party members who come intocontact with the worker, the frequency with whichthe worker reads CHALLENGE-DESAFIO, etc.Finally, as'we mentioned, the worker's relationto the means of production is indeed absolute—under capitalism. This relation changes rela-tively as the worker joins the party and as theparty grows and is able to launch sharper politicaland economic struggle against capitalism. Itchanges absolutely after the seizure of statepower when the working class becomes the rulingclass.

We need to apply this philosophical category toour understanding of international developments.We know that ultimately, the main contradictionin the world must be expressed in revolutionaryclass struggle. However, it is also possible forthis contradiction to be expressed temporarilyas inter-imperialist rivalry. This is the casetoday, when U.S.-Soviet antagonism and the prep-arations for war are intensifying. The inevitabilityof war and, with it, fascism, is absolute. By thesame token, the duration of the war and thevirulence of fascism are inextricably related tothe strength of the international communist move-ment and, most particularly, to the growth of our1own party. In the struggle between U.S. andSovietbosses, the relative strength of the antagonistschanges with great rapidity. The Soviets came outahead in India. The U.S. appears to have won atactical victory in the Mideast. The Soviets havemade major incursions into southern Africa. TheU.S. has succeeded in beating back thepro-Sovietforces in Chile and Thailand, at least for now.The U.S. was routed by Soviet imperialism'sVietnamese puppets but still plans to invest inVietnam.

However, regardless of relative manifestationsof strength in this process, the inter-imperialisttug of war nonetheless demonstrates an overalltrend: U.S. decline and Soviet ascendency. Thisis an absolute when viewed in relation to the U.S.ruling class' dreams of an "American Century"alter World War II. Soviet supremacy is alsorelative: the reversion to capitalism in the U.S.S.Rand its development into imperialism cannot failto generate and sharpen the same class antag-onisms that are maturing in the U.S. No one hasa crystal ball, but the laws of class struggle willeventually prevail. The Soviet rulers, like theirpredecessors the Tsars, sow the seeds of theirannihilation even as they stand atop the world.Here, as in everything, the relative and the abso-lute change places and become one another.

3.. The Potential and the Actual.We have seen that metaphysics views quality

and property as identical and describes all prop-erties as the possessors of Ideologically de-termined "forces.*1 We have also seen that themechanistic outlook considers properties in theirrelation to each other but determines only theexternal features of these relations.

By viewing things in their internal developmentand in their inter-connections with other things,dialectics reveals constant motion and develop-ment and shows that everything is simultaneouslyitself and something else. It asks, secondarily,the question: What is? and, primarily, the ques-tion: What is becoming? Bourgeois idealism seeksto limit the unknown to the known; dialectics, onthe contrary, views the known in its essentialinterrelation to the unknown. Pragmatism andidealism converge at and stumble over the im-mediate; dialectics looks beyond it and sees theessential character of the possible.

Engels grasped this duality masterfully inhis fragment The Part Played by Labor in the

Transition from Ape to Man. He showed thatmany hundreds of thousands of years ago, a highlydeveloped group of anthropoid apes slowly beganto walk on two legs. This erect posture enabledthem to develop their hands in a fundamentallynew way. The development of the hand and,specifically, the thumb, over many thousands ofyears, led to various , simple forms of labor.This labor was decisive in transforming apes intomen. It developed not only the hand as an indi-vidual^ organ but also the entire organism of whichthe hand is a mere part. The work that for thefirst time had to be done and could be done toensure survival led to mutual activity and thento primitive communication. The actof communi-cating led to the exercise and development ofthe vocal chords, the production of speech, thedevelopment of the brain, and the growth oflanguage. All the while, the establishment oflabor as a constant of life led to the developmentand perfection of tools. Engels shows, therefore,that even in the pre-history of humanity, man is".. . not only the organ of labor, (he) is also theproduct of labor."

The anthropoid who stood on two feet andwalked erect for the first time was both himselfand something else. The apes who joined togetherand grunted or screeched at each other to indi-cate needs or instructions were simultaneouslyemitting animal noises and something else. Ulti-mately, as the result of the ape's developing in-ternal characteristics and their interrelationwith the external world, the transition was com-pleted, and the ape became a social animal. Fromthis point on, the further development of manbecame inseparable from the parallel develop-ment of the means of production created by manand from man's transformation of society itself.Marx described this dialectic of potentiality andactuality in the following manner:

(Man) confronts nature as one of her ownforces, setting in motion arms and legs,head and hands, in order to appropriatenature's productions in a form suitable tohis own wants. By thus acting on the ex-ternal world and changing it, he at the sametime changes his own nature. He developsthe potentialities that slumber within himand subjects these inner forces to his owncontrol."

The ability to define a phenomenon's state ofdevelopment at a specified point and then to as-certain the same phenomenon's inherent potentialfor future growth and transformation is' centralto the formulation of correct political strategyand tactics. By applying the concepts of poten-tiality and actuality to an analysis of U.S. im-perialist adventures in Vietnam, our party wasable to predict very early that the handful ofmilitary "advisers" in Vietnam during the early1960s would soon swell into a massive invasionthat would launch a genocidal war but that wouldalso enmesh the U.S. ruling class in contradic-tions from which it could never fully recover. Atthe sane time, we were able to predict that amass movement with anti-imperialistaspirations

38

could also develop. For this reason, we were ableto introduce the slogan: "U.S. Get Out of Viet-nam NOW!" into this burgeoning movement. In alimited way and with many weaknesses, we suc-ceeded in demonstrating the immense revolu-tionary potential of the worker-student allianceduring the course of this anti-imperialist struggle.Aside from the many opportunisterrorsourpartymade in this period (which we have analyzedelsewhere), we learned and proved that a smallnumber of people, armed with even a partiallycorrect political line and acting decisively tocarry it out, can indeed move masses leftward.

Bourgeois mechanism sees only the actual andcannot recognize the potential. Bourgeois ideal-ism, on the other hand, desperately longs forillusory potentialities that have no basis inreality. Thus, the imperialists launched theirVietnam aggression without counting on either themilitancy of the Vietnamese people or the classhatred of masses here at home. By the same token,for all his supposed "brilliance," most of Dr.Kissinger's miraculous solutions to U.S. bosses'foreign policy problems fall apart shortly afterhe concocts them, because no amount of wishfulthinking can arrest the inexorable developmentof U.S. imperialist decline.

Marxist-Leninists know, therefore, that thepatient, diligent, complex effort to put forwardand carry out a revolutionary line must eventuallybear fruit. All of our party's many-sided activi-ties—the regular sale of CHALLENGE-DESAFIOat industrial concentrations and on campuses,the constant injection of revolutionary socialist,anti-racist, and internationalist concepts into theday-to-day class struggle, the organization ofscores of small and large actions that raise theseconcepts among the masses—are geared to awakenthe "potentialities that slumber within" the work-ing class and to transform the ruled into therulers of society.

Our efforts to organize a movement againstU.S. imperialist adventure in southern Africa canserve as a case in point. The bosses cannot dowithout the vast mineral resources and cheap laborin this area of the world. As their maneuver-ability diminishes, their ruthlessness will in-crease. Anti-racist rebellion in southern Africais inevitable. The interests of the U.S. workingclass make revolutionary solidarity with theanti-apartheid fighters both possible and neces-sary. The time to vigorously introduce the con-cept of unity with southern African rebels is now—not months or years from now, when massiveimperialist land invasions have become a faitaccompli.

If we do this, the potential can become theactual, and the actual can become the potential.The mass anti-imperialist movement that ispossible today can become a reality, and withcorrect political leadership from our party, thismovement can in turn transform itself eventuallyinto an armed struggle for the seizure of statepower.

4. The Contingent and the Necessary.Metaphysics further exposes its bankruptcy by

its one-sided method of handling the contradictionbetween chance and necessity. Just as it deniesthat the relative and the absolute become eachother and that the potential becomes the actualand again the potential, so it buries its head inthe sand when faced with the idea that chanceand necessity likewise are transformed into eachother.

One branch of metaphysics asserts that onlychance exists. Nature and society do not operateaccording to laws. Poverty, wars, natural di-sasters, etc. are all explained as "accidents."The bourgeoisie tries to get us to believe thatJFK was assassinated by a '.'nut," and that hisdeath had nothing to do with its own internalconflicts. The liberals pushed the idiotic idea that

PL, and SDS protest Vietnam War

U.S. intervention in Vietnam was a "tragic mis-take" that had nothing to do with the laws ofimperialist development. Scientific breakthroughsare attributed to the individual "geniuses" whojust "happened" to be in the right place at theright time. Therefore, for this branch of meta-physics, the only things that are rational arethose it can explain. Everything else must besupernaturally determined.

On the other hand, metaphysics also servesup pure determinism. Everything—from the pre-cise hour at which Vercingetorix invaded Rometo the size of Rockefeller's bank account—has theforce of necessity. Here, too, a scientific con-ception of development is impossible, and wereturn to theology; if everything in nature andsociety is ordered for all time, then science isstill imprisoned by religion, whether we call itKismet, Calvinist predestination, or Wilsonian,Herrnsteinian, and Jensenian "genetic determina-tion."

In the natural sciences, Darwin was the firstto shatter this dual one-sidedness. His studiesthrew into question all previous conceptions ofrigidly determined species. As Engels wrote:

. . . the infinite, accidental differences with-in a single species, differences whichbecome accentuated until they break throughthe character of the species, and whoseimmediate causes even can be demonstratedonly in extremely few cases, compelledhim to question the previous basis of allregularity in biology.

To this "necessity" of apes walking forever onall fours is now counterposed the "chance" ofthe first ape who stood erect. Over millenia, thisnew posture becomes necessity and then trans-forms itself into the "chance" of primitive manuallabor.

In society as in nature, Marxism-Leninismshows that all previous conceptions of necessitybreak down when put to the litmus test of classstruggle. Marx' "chance" discovery of surplusvalue rendered bourgeois social science andeconomics obsolete. The Bolshevik party's"chance" storming of the Winter Palace becamethe necessity of worldwide proletarian revolu-tion. The "chance" of last summer's mass strug-gle against apartheid in South Africa presentsrevolutionaries and workers everywhere withboth an obligation and a new opportunity.

For metaphysics, chance presents itself as anendless series of purely fortuitous happenings:nature and society are no more than a giantroulette game. Metaphysical necessity, on theother hand, imposes its dictatorial will from theoutside, just like the 18th Century mechanicalmaterialist view of God the Watchmaker. Dialec-tics, in contrast, sees that all living nature andsociety are imbued with their own living necessity,which operates according to specific laws butalso departs from these laws for the precisereason that it is living, constantly changing, andtherefore generating new laws.

Marxism's vulgar bourgeois opponents often

denigrate it as "economicdeterminism."Nothingcould be further from the truth. Marxism saysthat, in the last analysis, the economic base of agiven society determines the nature of its super-structure. Capitalist production relations willnecessarily give rise to corresponding forms ofstate power, ideology, psychology, culture, law,science, etc. Enormous variations will developas a matter of "chance" in the base and super-structure of given capitalist societies. By thesame token, the superstructure that has beendetermined by the base can turn the tables andqualitatively affect the base itself. Out of thenecessities of class struggle in the UnitedStates,arose the chance development of the ProgressiveLabor Party. We know that our party's existencewas not decreed from on high and that we have along road ahead before we can say that our sub-jective efforts have the authority of historicalnecessity. Yet our very existence as a politicalforce proves the dialectical interpenetration ofchance and necessity. We did not ha veto come intobeing, yet the laws of capitalism make the eventualdevelopment ofa victorious communist party in theI'.S. inevitable. Our errors can destroy us, yetthe science of Marxism-Leninismi.'nablesustocorrect them and to grow. Our further develop-ment is contingent upon changes in the objectivesituation and our own subjective, improvement.By the same token, the objective situation willchange sooner or later, and we can master it.If we do not, the working class' own needs willforce it to produce another party.

Necessity arises out of chance. Chance becomesnecessity. Accidents are inevitable. The in-evitable is accidental. Dialectics rejects both thetheory of chaos and the authority of written lawsand prophets.

5. The Apparent and the Essential.Cliches sometimes reveal the profound dialec-

tical insight of the masses. One example is thenotion that "You can't tell a book by its cover."The cover of a book will give us only the grossest,most superficial knowledge of the book's content.If we see a shark swimming by himself in thewater, we catch only a one-sided glimpse of histrue nature, which does not fully reveal itselfuntil the shark pounces on another fish and there-by bares his predatory character. Two men thesame age may appear to have a similar com-plexion and general demeanor, yet one may beperfectly healthy and the other may suffer fromcancer.

Bourgeois humanism delights in confusing ap-pearances with essences: this is its favoritemethod of obscuring capitalism's class character.Humanism, which emerged as a revolutionaryworld view in the Sixteenth Century when itstruck an important blow at feudal scholasticism,has now turned into its opposite with the premisethat "deep down, everyone is the same."

Superficially, of course, all men and women havemany apparently identical traits: mortality,

40

organs, method of reproduction, capacity to per-form labor, etc. On the one hand, while theseobservations help identify the essence of Manfrom, say, the essence of fish or dandelions, inreality they tell us very little beyond that. Theessential characteristics of a Rockefeller do notbecome clear when we observe him as a foppishart "lover" or a self-proclaimed "public ser-vant." We can understand his essence only afterwe have delved beneath the surface and analyzedthe enormous wealth he and his family control.When we make this analysis, we leam a) thathe is a capitalist who therefore exploits workersand b) that he is the leading capitalist in the U.S.and therefore the dominant single figure who de-termines U.S. imperialism's domestic and foreignpolicy. In this way, we can single him and hiscohorts out in their primary quality as the mainenemies of the working class.

The party does not evaluate its cadre by sub-jecting them to bourgeois academic standards. Aworker may or may not be able to play the violin;he may or may not have studied Shakespeare; hemay or may not know "all there is to know"about Picasso's "blue period." The essentialquestions to which the party and the working classmust address itself have little to do with personalidiosyncrasies or matters of'"style" that bour-geois culture considers paramount. Fighting forsocialism, recruiting to the party, moving massesleftward against racism, building a base forMarxism-Leninism: these are essential ques-tions. We make major errors when we confusethem with appearances.

Some of Marxism's most vital concepts havedeveloped only because of clarity about thisdialectical category. Marx showed that while acommodity appears to be a simple self-sufficientthing, in fact it contains the germ of the entirecapitalist system. He showed that while a workerappears to sell the boss his labor, in fact thetransaction involves labor power. He showed thatwhile money appears to measure the value ofthings, in fact its essential characteristic is tomask the true social relationship between theowning class and the working class.

We can understand the essential nature of thingsonly when we observe them in their fundamentalrelation to other things. Thus, we can evaluate amechanic when we see him working on a machineand not when we see him playing the piano; wecan evaluate the quality of an automobile after wesee its performance on the road and not when itsits in the showroom; we can best evaluate ourparty after we test it in the class struggle and notwhen we remove ourselves from the struggle.

Dialectics does not reject the knowledge of ap-pearances as useless. On the contrary; itassertsthat understanding the apparent constitutes an es-sential "moment" of human knowledge, (cf.Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks). Dialectics saysthat the most important thing about this "moment"is its transcendence—going beyond the limitedaspects of the apparent to grasp the limitlesscomplexities of the essential. This knowledge ispossible only by the analysis of practice.

As essences change, they force a transforma-

tion in appearances as well. New content seeksout new form. The Paris Commune, the firstproletarian struggle that seriously threw bour-geois rule into question, immediately generatednew governmental forms that constituted revolu-tionary departures from bourgeois parlia-mentarianism. The leap from feudalism to cap-italism brought with it the transformation oflords into bosses and of peasants into workers.The shifting fortunes of U.S.-Soviet imperialistrivalry are revealed in the presence of Sovietships in the Indian Ocean and Soviet economicpenetration in Asia and Africa.

Since it reached its zenith more than a hundredyears ago, capitalist culture has sought an abso-lute separation of form and content, "Art forart's sake" first appeared as the slogan of Frenchbourgeois poets during the 1830s. Since then, inone guise or another, the same concept has comeforth to vindicate the decadentists of the 1880s,the dadaist nihilists of the 1920s, the "triumphof the will" fascists of the 1930s, and the por-nographers of the 1970s. In each case, the ap-pearance of technical "brilliance" serves as acover for the essence of the exploitation anddegradation of-the masses.

Marxism-Leninism, on the other hand, recog-nizes the distinction between essence and ap-pearance or form and content, but at the same timeseeks their revolutionary reconciliation. Againstthe degenerate capitalist esthetic idea that the"medium is the message" stands Stalin's famousformulation that once the working class' com-munist party has settled on its political line, thenorganizing to carry out the line is "everything."For the bards of capitalism, the medium is ir-relevant as long as it makes the message of profit.For workers and revolutionaries, the message ofsocialism must ring out loud and clear in all itsforms of expression.

6. The External and the Internal.Closely related to the question of the appear-

ance of things and their essence is the matter oftheir external and internal aspects.

Mechanics, which limits its view to appear-ances, considers phenomena as the products of theexternal function of processes upon each other.Bourgeois social science and psychology provideinsight into the one-sided character of this ap-proach. For years, capitalist theorists have de-bated with each other over the primacy of"heredity" and "environment" in thedetermina-tion of social realities. On the one hand,the racist hereditarians tel1 us that op-pressed wori\ti'a ana minorities are doomedbecause of "inferior genes," and that no changesin the environment can alter nature's reputedunfairness. The pseudoscientific character ofthis Hitlerite twaddle is so blatant that every sooften the bourgeois academic community has toclean house by getting rid of its over-exposedhereditarians. The recent "discovery" that thenotorious English racist Cyril Hurt was a quackprovides a case in point.

On the other hand, we have racist "environ-mentalists," who tell us that culture generates

its own fatality and that oppression, rather thangenes, makes people inferior. Leading spokesmenfor this other side of the eugenics movementinclude Moynihan (the "matriarchal structure ofthe black family"), Oscar Lewis ("the culture ofpoverty"), Banfield (the theory that povertyexists because poor people like it', and Glazer(racism is just a figment of the liberal imagina-tion: the real problem is the unfair advantagesaccorded to black people).

Both hereditarians and environmentalists pre-tend to explain the phenomenon of unequal wealth.Both concoct a theory that "blames the victim."Both start from a clearly partisan position todefine poverty as the product of something com-pletely external to poverty. Neither can come togrips with the dialectical proposition thatpovertyis merely the external manifestation of somethingelse—the class struggle.

Dialectics says that the external is a specificform in which the internal manifests itself. In the1960s, the Black Panther Party aroused the ad-miration of militant black working class youth.The Panthers called for armed struggle againstthe ruling class; they showed great individualcourage, their outlook appeared to be anti-imperialist. Ultimately, however, the bosses'police smashed them. A mechanistic explanationof their development would say that an externalphenomenon (ruling class terror) overwhelmedthem. A dialectical explanation of their demiseconsiders the ferocity of the bosses' attack as asignificant factor in their failure but looks beyond-

A Black OKFor the Klan

CAMP PENDLETOX,C«L (AP)—The chairwom-an of the Rack Congres-sional Caucus says tfie KuKhuc Klan has a right toexist on the nation's mili-tary bases,'- but shouldoperate ta the open andought to be watched.

The comment by Rep.Yvonne Brathwalte Burfce(D-Cat) came 'after shespent yesterday bivesttffat-Ing racial conditions atCamp Pendteton. scene ofa Nov. IS raid by blackson whites they suspectedof beln? KKK members.

N.Y.

Post

12/1/76

it to their own internal characteristics (national-ism, the failure to build a base among workers,illusions about the ability of a handful of armedfighters with no mass ties to withstand the on-slaught of the capitalist state apparatus, etc.).

We can see the dialectical interpenetratinn of

the external and internal and the primacy of theinternal in the development of our own party. Aswe have pointed out above and elsewhere, formany years our mass political work has beencharacterized by reformism—the revisionist ideathat revolutionary practice will arise spontan-eously from the day-to-day struggle for conces-sions from the bosses. If we had analyzed thisphenomenon mechanistically, we would have saidthat the opportunist influence of the mass move-ment on our members was too great to be over-come. By applying dialectics to our own case,we were able to ascertain that we were indeedsusceptible to the right-wing influence of thereform struggle precisely because this was thenature of the training we received andgave insidethe party. As soon as we began to change the in-ternal character of our party's outlook we wereable to observe a change in the political characterof its external appearance. The change is not yetqualitative, but it can serve as an example ofthe superiority of dialectics over mechanics.

The mechanistic view that the external isprimary and mutually exclusive of the internalpervades all categories of the bourgeois super-structure. Capitalist medicine, which elevatesdoctors to the prestige of guruhood and trainsthem as entrepreneurs, also makes a fetish outof drugs. Here again, we see the one-sided pre-ponderance of the external: good health is madeoverwhelmingly dependent on pills, syrups,elixirs, and injections. Naturally, this approachis a bonanza for the drug companies, butit makesfor rotten medical care. Capitalism can't admitthat the major diseases are those it produces it-self. Hypertension, cancer, heart disease, and ahost of other ills are directly attributable to theunsafe, infested conditions under which the bossesforce us to work and live. Capitalism cannottolerate and will not develop health care in itsrational, scientific form, the form that seeks tostrengthen the human organism in its interactionwith the outside world: preventive medicine. Pre-ventive medicine welcomes advances in pharma-cology, chemotherapy, and the like, but its primaryconcern is to make the organism free fromdisease and from the susceptibility to diseaseby eradicating the cause of disease.

Several years ago, the vicissitudes of the in-ternational capitalist economy forced a changein the method of distributing oil. The majoraspects of this development were the decline ofU.S. imperialism vis-a-vis the Soviets and theemergence of Arab and Iranian oil potentates assecondary competitive factors on the worldmarket. The U.S. ruling class and the oil baronsquadrupled gas prices and made us all line upfor hours at service stations. Then they explainedtheir internal economic and political debacle as aproduct of its external form and came up With abit of brilliant circular reasoning to explain the"energy crisis:" it's harder to get oil becauseoil is harder to get. Further developments in the"energy crisis" provide a classic textbook ex-ample of the impasse inevitably reachedby imple-

42

Vladimir Ilich Leninmenting the mechanistic view that the externalis primary. Several alternatives are availableto U.S. bosses if they want to free themselvesfrom dependency on imported oil. Coal and under-ground oil are both superabundant in the UnitedStates. But the profit and growth needs of U.S.capitalism make thistransformationunfeasible.ltis not technologically impossible: it is simply tooexpensive and would put the U.S. further andfurther behind the competition. Therefore, be-cause Rockefeller and Co. are unable to strengthentheir economic base internally, their dependencyon outside help increases geometrically. Sincethe long gas lines of 1974, U.S. oil imports havezoomed to 40% of total domestic oil consumption.This development inevitably makes U.S. rulersall the more vulnerable to the whims of MiddleEastern oil barons and the incursions of Sovietimperialism. Internal self-sufficiency is ap-proachable only under socialism.

The external and internal are two necessaryphases of all development. Dialectics shows thatthe internal provides the basis of a phenomenon'sexistence and transformation, while the externalsupplies the conditions. No amount of cooking canmake a chair edible. The president of Exxon isnot winnable to socialism. Aspirin cannot cureterminal cancer.

On the other hand, masses of workers will re-spond to the party's revolutionary ideas. Ex-ploited white workers have an interest in fightingracism. Students have a class basis for unitingwith the proletariat. The external always playsits distinct role in development, but this role isincomprehensible without and secondary to therole played by the internal.

7. Likeness and Difference.Bourgeois mechanism typically approaches

phenomena in a one-sided manner. Because it isthe philosophy of a class that cannot view thingsapart from their immediate profitability, it isunable to go beyond pragmatism. Capitalist phi-

losophy < like capitalist greed, never sees beyondthe tip of its own nose. It grasps the relative butnot the absolute; it understands the appearanceof things but does not penetrate their essence;its comprehension of development stops at theexternal and never reaches the internal.

Because of this one-sidedness, the bourgeoisworld view paints itself into a dogmatic cornerwhen confronted with the question of likeness anddifference. On the one hand, bourgeois humanismtells, us that all men are essentially the same.We have seen that this idea serves as a mask forthe class antagonisms that arise in capitalistsociety. On the other hand, the same bourgeoisphilosophy also tells us that every human beingis endowed with inalienable "uniqueness." In thesame breath as that with which it promulgatesall class unity, the capitalist world-view alsoendorses unbridled individualism. Somehow, theclothes we wear, the cars we drive, even thedeodorant we use are supposed to make us "dif-ferent." Of course, a system that could not existwithout cut-throat competition has a great stakein artificially glorifying all forms of individualismand in denigrating the concept of collectivity forthe working class.

In a philosophic sense, then, we can say thatcapitalism sees likeness only as likeness anddifference only as difference. Furthermore, italso has an interest in convincing the workingclass that likeness is exclusively difference andthat difference is exclusively likeness. The work-ing class of any country is never totally homo-geneous. Workers come from many differentnational backgrounds; they speak different lan-guages; their skin pigmentation has many shades.The ruling class seizes upon these insignificantdifferences to promote racism by first assertingthat differences among workers are more funda-mental than similarities and then by attemptingto elevate the differences to the level of absoluteantagonism. The dual campaign to promote racewar in Boston and to portray all of South Boston'sworkers as fascists is a case in point. The bosses'press blares lies about the incompatibility ofblack and white workers (fundamental likenessdisguised as fundamental difference) and goeson to assert that all of South Boston's oppressedworkers have the same outlook as fascist ROAR(fundamental difference disguised as fundamentallikeness).

Dialectics alone is able to grasp the intercon-nection and interpenetration of likeness and dif-ference in all phenomena, because dialectics aloneamong world outlooks does not shrink from thereality of contradiction. Dialectics shows that wesee likeness first as likeness and difference firstas difference, but that as our examination ofphenomena proceeds from the superficial to theprofound, we perceive that likeness and differenceare ceaselessly transformed one into the other.

All bosses are alike in their essential exploi-tative relations with workers. However, not everycapitalist agrees on the best methods for realiz-ing maximum profits and exercising class dic-

43

tatorship. These differences are not merelysubjective: they also reflect the selfish interestgenerated by capitalist competition. This dualitywas clear in the internal struggle that took placewithin the U.S. ruling class around the "Water-gate" caper. By applying the dialectical categoryof likeness and difference to this development,our party was able to show that "old" money hadsuccessfully thwarted the challenge of "new"money upstarts, that this billionaires' dogfighttook place in the context of rapid U.S. imperialistdecline, and that workers' interest lay in usingthe bosses' collective weakness to attack themall in a revolutionary way.

The new Arab and African oil moguls who haveemerged as secondary forces on the internationaleconomic scene are alike in their greed, theirwillingness to rob their "own" workers and theinternational working class, and their need to de-velop an industrial base. This likeness finds itsorganizational expression in OPEC—the Organi-zation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, whichenables them to unite in setting astronomical oilprice increases. However, the nature of capitalistdevelopment in the Mideast and the world at largelimits this likeness. The oil princes are also incompetition with each other, more or less incontradiction sto either the U.S. or the Sovietruling class depending upon circumstances, andtherefore unable to unite on much more than thequestion of price. Now, they cannot even reachfull unanimity on that. This difference is mostreadily apparent in the OPEC rulers' madscramble to build formidable military apparatusesfor use against Israeli bosses and, in many cases,against each other.

In the history of the international communistmovement, the Bolshevik party has surely fur-nished the greatest example for other revolu-tionary parties to emulate, and Lenin has pro-vided the greatest theoretical and practical lead-ership. In their uncompromising pursuit of prole-tarian dictatorship and socialism they stand asthe absolute antithesis of today's fascist "C"PSUand its new "red" bosses Brezhnev and Co. How-ever, as our party pointed out in Road To Revolu-tion in, the stork did not bring revisionism full-blown to the Soviet Union. The difference betweenLenin and Brezhnev is readily visible to anyone:however, only an understanding of their likenesscan lead to an objective explanation of capitalistrestoration's roots. We know now that in the NewEconomic Policy, in the various five-year plans,and in the conduct of the struggle against theNazi beasts, the Bolsheviks pursued a policy ofconcessions to bourgeois forces and bourgeoisideas. These concessions led to a nationalist line,to alliances with various imperialists, and eventu-ally to the redevelopment of commodity produc-tion on socialist soil. To be sure, the main aspectof comparison between the Bolsheviks and today's"C"PSU scabs is difference, but failure to graspthe germ of likeness dooms us to an idealist"devil theory" explanation of revisionism bothin the history of the movement and in our ownparty today.

Many similarities exist between the Great De-pression of the 1930s and the shock waves buffetingthe international capitalist economy today. Ineach case world capitalism is in a profoundcrisis; millions are unemployed; the threat ofwar looms larger daily. On the other hand, crucialdifferences also exist: the U.S. ruling classemerged from the earlier crisis to become theleader of the imperialist camp, and today it is onthe decline; in the 1930s, the Soviet Union, forall its limitations, was still a workers' dictator-ship, and today it is the world's top imperialist;in the 1930s the communist movement had a center,and today the urgent task of revolutionaries is torebuild that center; the world war of 1933-45 sawcapitalism eventually restored to every countryin the world, and today if communists strugglecorrectly against world war and fascism, theoutcome can be universal revolution (see Decem-ber 1976 CHALLENGE-DESAF10 editorials).

Like all dialectical categories, the concept oflikeness and difference provides crucial insightsinto all levels of reality. It is indispensible tothe physical sciences, to technology, and topolitical work. Engels applied this concept toscience when he wrote in Anti-Duhring:

By calling physics the mechanics of mole-cules, chemistry the physics of atoms,biology the chemistry of albumens, I wishto express the transition of each one ofthese sciences into the other and there-fore the connection, the continuity andalsothe distinction, the break between the twofields. Biology does not in this way amountto chemistry yet at the same time is notsomething absolutely separated from it.In our analysis of life we find definitechemical processes. But these latter arenow not chemical in the proper sense ofthe word; to understand them there must bea transition from ordinary chemical actionto the chemistry of albumens, which wecall, life.

Chemistry and biology are separate yet convergeat specific points of identity; the study of mathe-matics and of language are obviously differentyet share many structural similarities; a strikeand an insurrection are two distinct methods ofclass struggle, yet the former can serve as anadmirable training ground for the latter.

In the party and among the masses, an under-standing of likeness and difference enables us tomake essential decisions that affect strategy andtactics. Without this distinction, we cannot sep-arate friends from enemies; we cannot properlyapply the same general line to specific shop,campus, and community situations; we cannot con-duct correct inner-party struggle. One comrademay react only to the most strident criticism;another may wilt under it: yet both may respondwell to criticism that is commensurate with theirpolitical development and psychology. The overallconditions of class struggle in a given period mustoperate according to the same general laws, yetenormous variations will nonetheless develop

44

within this context. Understanding the precisenature of these variations enables the party toplan for breakthroughs and to avoid opportunismand adventurism in lactics.

In this brief surv.-y of the major dialecticalcategories, we have tried to show that each oneexists as a function of its opposite and thai, theseopposites take shape both in their distinction f 'omeach other and in their tendency to become trans-formed into each other. We also attempted be-forehand to show that dialectics takes the realworld as it is and observes it as a process ofconstant change and development. We are now in aposition to ask: What is the source of change andmotion? The categories provide us with differentwindows from which motion is perceived at dif-ferent angles. By posing the question of motion'sorigin, we have reached the threshold of the firstlaw of dialectics.

I. THE UNITY AND CONFLICT OF OPPOSITES.As we hope to have shown above, all essential

knowledge presupposes the study of a phenom-enon's internal characteristics. Furthermore, wesaw that nothing is frozen in space and time, butthat all things are rather related to all otherthings and their development. Development, bydefinition, is motion. The bourgeois-mechanicalview considers motion as the product of externalcauses. Dialectics, on the contrary, sees motionas internal and, therefore, as self-movement.

In our study of the categories, we discoveredthat everything was simultaneously "itself andsomething else." In this perception lies the germof the first law of dialectical materialism: thelaw of universal contradiction. This law tells usthat everything—all phenomena of nature, society,and thought—is the product of mutually exclusiveopposites, their interdependence, and their strug-gle with each other. On the one hand, contradic-tion exists in all things. On the other hand, in allphases of the development of all processes, aspecific struggle between opposites takes placefrom beginning to end.

Lenin summarized this law:In mathematics: plus and minus. Differ-ential and integral.In mechanics: action and reaction.In physics: positive and negative elec-tricity.In chemistry: the combination and disso-ciation of atoms.In social science: the class struggle.

Plant life requires both sun and rain: illness isincomprehensible without health; defeat for onearmy means victory for another; darkness cannotexist without light; exchange value presupposesuse value; capitalism needs workers; profit forone capitalist is loss for another; theory re-quires practice. In all these exampus of con-tradiction and in an infinite number t/ others,each aspect is defined in its unity and conflictwith the other. Neither could exist without theother; each develops only through us strugglewith the other.

Just as the infinite is knowable only in thefinite, the absolute only in the relative, the in-ternal only in its external manifestation, and thepotential only in the actual, so is the universaltruth nf contradiction observable only in specificcontradictions. The ability to identify and analyzethe particular characteristics in given contradic-tions draws the dividing line between meta-physical whimsy and the scientific application ofdialectics to revolutionary struggle. Dialecticstells us that if we want to know a thing, we mustdefine it in its essential contradictoriness. Ma-terialism tells us that this contradictoriness mustbe studied in the reality of practice.

It may be useful for the sake of clarity toidentify several of history's key contradictions.Marx and Engels showed in their major works that"all history is the history of class struggle."This formulation means that human society de-velops as the result of conflict between the"means" of production and the "mode" of pro-duction—between the sum of productive forcesavailable to sustain and expand life and the socialrelations engendered by this base. Further, thefounders of scientific socialism demonstrated thatas the qualitative nature of a society changes,the qualitative nature of this contradiction alsochanges. Thus, the contradiction in classlessprimitive communism is between man and nature;the contradiction in slavery is between slave andmaster; the contradiction in feudalism is betweenserf and lord; the contradiction in capitalism isbetween labor and capital.

The basic contradiction of capitalism, then,may be defined as the conflict between the socialcharacter of production (armies of workers herdedinto factories, offices, etc. and organized into ahighly complex division of labor) and the privatemeans of appropriation (the concentration ofownership of productive forces into the hands ofan infinitesimal minority of capitalists). Thiscontradiction between bosses and workers, inthe words of Engels; "...includes in itself all

45

those contradictions which surround modern so-ciety and are especially evident in heavy in-dustry."

A number of important contradictions in moderncapitalism that now from this one:

1) The contradiction between the advanced or-ganization of production in an individual factoryand the anarchy of capitalist production as awhole. Thus, the ruling class is capable of de-veloping advanced computer technology but cannotput it to use to pick up city garbage or provideadequate medical care. The jobs on a Ford as-sembly line are scientifically differentiated, yetthe profit system cannot develop a rational net-work of mass transportation.

2) Capitalism requires the perfection of ma-chinery and the instruments of labor as well asthe general increase of production. On the otherside of this contradiction, however, are the growthof unemployment and the recurrent crises of over-production that accompany each technologicaladvance.

3) Within capitalism there is the distinctionbetween ownership of property in capital and thecontrol of production itself. For instance, mil-lions of people, including workers, may ownshares of stock and receive dividends from theaccumulated surplus produced by the workers of agiven company. On the other hand, the controlover production, the financial purse-strings forexpansion, and the allocation and distribution ofprofit remain under the tight grip of a smallgroup of financial moguls. As this contradictiondevelops, the concentration of capital in the handsof this ruling group intensifies and leads to thefurther impoverishment of all other socialclasses. This is the Marxist law of the ''grind-ing down" of the petty bourgeoisie into the ranksof the working class. Its specific manifestation isapparent today in developments like the abolitionof tenure for many college professors, the grow-ing number of house staff doctors' strikes, andthe rebellion of California private practitionersagainst the malpractice insurance boondoggle.

4) The contradiction between the ruling class of. a given country and the most oppressed sectionsof the working class. Capitalism's need to amassmaximum profits spontaneously gives rise to theunequal development of exploitation. This is theeconomic basis of racism. This contradiction isa feature of the profit system's fundamental boss-worker antagonism. Understanding it is crucial tothe revolutionary process. Various revisionistsand scribblers on the left who take a nationalistapproach to the struggle against racism hope-lessly obscure the class origin of the contradic-tion and therefore can find no basis for unitybetween oppressed "majority" workers andsuperoppressed "minority" workers. Dialecticsand Marxism teach that racism is the capitalistsystem's "Achilles' heel" and that all workershave a vital stake in smashing it. The fight againstracism is a universal aspect of our party'spolitical activity.

5) The contradiction between imperialism andthe oppressed workers of countries to which itexports capital. This contradiction is merely therepetition of racism on an international scale.As with racism, revisionists distort its aspectsand urge all-class unity for illusory "nationalliberation." Socialist revolution alone can wipeout the super-exploitation of imperialism.

6) The contradiction between monopoly andcompetition. This is the major contradiction with-in the international capitalist class. It manifestsitself in three ways:

a) The contradiction within a given localruling class. Examples are the "old money"—"new money" Watergate dogfight or the currentstruggle between the mining wing and the agri-culture-state capital wing of South Africa's racistbosses.

b) The contradiction between major im-perialist powers and secondary imperialists ornewly emerging capitalist forces. Examples ofthis contradiction are the lessened maneuver-ability of U.S. rulers vis-a-vis OPEC, growingtrade rivalry between the U.S. and Japan, theindependent nuclear strike force developed byFrench bosses, the flirtation between U.S. im-perialism and Romanian revisionists and theapparent return of the latter to the Soviet bloc,etc.

c) The contradiction between imperialistsuper-powers. Marx and Lenin proved that theconflict between monopoly and competition in-evitably leads to world war. For several years,our party has pointed out that the specific modernapplication of this general law is the intensifica-tion of rivalry between U.S. and Soviet im-perialists. We have written at great length aboutthe inevitability of war and fascism andthe work-ing class' ability to transform them into theiropposite.

Many other contradictions exist within moderncapitalism. We have tried to list only a few of themajor ones to demonstrate the first law of dialec-tics.

However, we cannot understand the law of con-tradiction if we limit ourselves to the statementthat contradiction exists in all things and the cita-tion of several important contradictions. Thelaws of dialectics are laws of motion. Thereforethe simple definition of a contradiction does notenable us to know it: we must also grasp itsdynamics.

1) When dialectics states that things are com-posites of opposites, it means that opposites are"equal" only in the superficial sense, that is, onlyin their unity and conflict with each other. Thestudy of any contradiction reveals that one aspectis principal and the other subordinate, one pri-mary and the other secondary. Failure to graspthis law in practice dooms us to subjectivity anddogmatism. Combining the fight for reforms withthe fight for revolution is a contradiction. Wecannot escape this fact and should not try to.However, every day, our political work forces usto decide which is primary: "improving" the

4b

PUJSrl&OTToMOURT.V. SET

- WHATCHANNEL?

profit system or destroying it. We can lead theworking class to socialism only to the extent thatwe view the revolutionary aspectof this contradic-tion as primary and act upon our understanding.

Democratic-centralism, the method of ourparty's organization, also embodies a contradic-tion. There must be democracy in inner-partydiscussion because the party can move forwardonly in an atmosphere of frank, comradely strug-gle, criticism and self-criticism. By the sametoken, if we are to crush an enemy with vastrelative superiority, we must carry out decisionswith absolute single-mindedness of purpose oncethey have been reached. Thus, centralism is themain aspect of this contradiction.

The worker-student alliance is theparty's mainstrategy for uniting the masses in the revolu-tionary process. Both forces are indispensible,but because only the working class can seize andhold state power and because communists musttherefore fight for the dictatorship of the prole-tariat, the working class is the primary aspectof this contradiction. This is why our party at-taches high priority to its own internal prole-tarianization and trains workers, particularlyminorities and women for leadership.

Every worker, every student, every party hasweaknesses. These weaknesses exist on manylevels. Politically, however, they all reflect theclass struggle that rages within each of us be-tween the bourgeois and the working class. Cor-rect communist work requires not only that weascertain awhich aspect is primary at a givenmoment but also which has the potential to be-come primary. For example, a worker who de-plores violence in the abstract may give exemplaryleadership in fighting scabs and cops during astrike. White postal workers, many of whomdoubtless were infected with racist ideas, none-theless followed the leadership of black and latinwildcatters during the 1971 walkout. Someone whoexpresses profound cynicism about achieving abetter life under the present system may wellrespond with vigor to communist ideas. A com-rade or a leader with many faults may make vitalcontributions to the party and the working class.On the other hand, the machinations of Sovietand Chinese revisionism have long since ceasedto be mere "errors" committed by revolu-tionaries in the course of fighting capitalism.Factionalism inside the party must be handled asthe work of the class enemy. One cannot be adrug addict and a communist at the same time.

This distinction between primary and secondaryaspects of particular contradictions applies alsoto the sum of contradictions in a given processand to the totality of universal contradictions.Thus, when our party defines the intensifyingrivalry between Soviet and U.S. imperialism asthe main contradiction in the world at the presenttime, it also identifies this contradiction as theprimary determinant of all other contradictionsthat devolve from it. With this frame of reference,we can see the common elements of such apparent-ly disparate events as the proxy wars in the

47

Mideast, Bangla Desh, and Cyprus; fascist take-overs in Thailand and Chile; Jimmy Carter's callfor a return to thesaladdaysofU.S. imperialism,etc.

When cancer cells attack a body, their destruc-tive potential is such that, once their developmentreaches a given point, the body is so greatlyweakened that it becomes susceptible to manyother seemingly unrelated diseases. A personsuffering from terminal bone cancer may "actual-ly" die of pneumonia.

The mode of production throughout the worldis capitalist. Even in non-industrial countrieswhere feudal vestiges may persist in the super-structure, capitalist production relations none-theless characterize the base. Contrary to variousrevisionist theories like "New Democracy" or"Two-Stage Revolution," there is no such mode ofproduction as "semi-feudalism." This false con-cept is merely a theoretical fig-leaf for the be-trayal of Marxism-Leninism. Where capitalistrelations are dominant, the principal antagonismbetween classes is the struggle between capitaland labor. This is always true potentially evenwhen inter-imperialist rivalry predominatesactually. Therefore, concepts like the "state ofthe whole people" and "shared power" belong inthe septic tank of history. If capitalism is themain contradiction in the world—regardless of itsspecific forms—the fight for revolution must bethe universal line of the international communistmovement.

2) The unity of opposites in a contradiction is"conditional, temporary, transitory, relative."The struggle between them is "absolute, just asdevelopment and motion are absolute." (Lenin)The stability of a given contradiction, whichdepends upon the inseparability of the oppositesthat define it, is therefore temporary and apparent.The essential dynamic of contradiction is themutual mobility of opposites and their tendency tointerpenetrate, first relatively, then absolutely.

Guerrilla warfare againstimperialismprovidesdeep insight into this feature of contradictions.When the U.S. imperialists initially invaded Viet-nam, the relationship offorces seemedhopelesslyone-sided. The U.S. was an industrial behemothwith the greatest land and sea armada in history.The workers of Vietnam had little more—or soit appeared—than the clothes on their back and afew primitive instruments of labor. Yet by con-centrating their forces on the enemy's weakestflanks, the Vietnamese anti-imperialists wereable to seize the initiative and attack when theywere strong and their antagonist was weak. Ifyour enemy has 600,000 troops and yon have buta few thousand, you do not meet him head-on inpositional warfare. Rather, you hit him when heleast expects it and in particular situations whereyou outnumber him. By applying this principle,the Vietnamese anti-imperialists were able tobecome the major aspect of the contradiction be-tween themselves and the U.S. invaders in specificskirmishes and then in the war as a whole. Thisrich lesson is not invalidated by the betrayal of

revisionists in Hanoi and the so-called Pro-visional "Revolutionary" Government.

The mobility and interpenetration of oppositesis evident in the most common daily occurrences:when a warm weather system produces springtemperatures in January; when a normally healthyperson becomes sick with fever; when, on thecontrary, someone terminally ill has a remis-sion; when a participant in battle retreats, thencounter-attacks; when workers strike, shut downproduction to win reform demands, and then re-turn to work only to have the boss take back theirtemporary gains by the various means at hisdisposal; when a wave of working class struggleand rebellion erupts as it did in the 1960s, sub-sides, and then begins to breathe new fire.

The mutual interpenetration of opposites isagain evident in the daily experiences of ourparty's political work. It would be absurd topretend that at the present time we are the mainaspect of the contradiction between ourselvesand the ruling class. We understand that for allhis weaknesses, which must eventually lead to hisdoom, the enemy nonetheless remains strong inthe short run: he continues to retain state powerand all that goes with it. Nonetheless, regardlessof our numbers at any given time, our party hasalways been able to act from the strategic view-point of taking the offensive. This was the casewhen we helped launch the mass movement to getU.S. imperialism out of Vietnam; it was the casewhen we and others revived the mass movementfor a shorter work week; it was the case when wecalled for an all-out offensive against the newbreed of academic racists and the consequencesof their theories; it was the case when in 1975,PLP's May Day march raised the cry of "Deathto Fascism" in the stronghold of ROAR; it is thecase today, as we attempt to make revolution themain lesson drawn by workers from all battlesin the class struggle.

The ruling class has the upper hand—but op-posites interpenetrate. This is true every timea worker joins the party, every time a new com-munist fraction is formed inside a shop, everytime the broadened circulation of CHALLENGE-DESAFIO exposes socialist concepts to a largeraudience than before. When we say that each newrecruit to the party is a "nail in the bosses'coffin," we apply to the class struggle a specificfeature of the first law of dialectical materialism.

3) Finally, all contradictions develop in one oftwo ways: antagonistically or non-antagonistically.We have not fully grasped a contradiction if weunderstand it merely as the unity and conflict ofinterpenetrating opposites. We must also under-stand the fundamental nature of the conflict in-volved and, therefore, the method of struggle re-quired to complete the process.

a) Antagonistic contradictions are those inwhich the resolution of a process is its intensifi-cation and ultimate annihilation. One aspect of thecontradiction destroys the other. In class society,the major social contradictions are antagonistic.History proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

48

Regardless of the mode of production, rulingclasses have always ruthlessly sought to suppressthe masses' efforts to obtain a better life. Thisantagonism underlies theMarxist-Leninisttheoryof the state as the "special" apparatus for theviolent exercise of power by one class over an-other.

All of the specific contradictions mentioned inthe outline above are antagonistic by nature. Noneof them can change without the destruction ofcapitalism and the simultaneous overthrow ofbourgeois state power by proletarian dictator-ship.

Pacifism is a reactionary political doctrinebecause it is unscientific. It denies the violenceinherent in all class struggle and pretends toplacate absolutely irreconcilable enemies. This isthe philosophic essence of revisionism; by re-pudiating revolution and workers' dictatorship,it makes a farce of dialectics. Mao Tse-tung'sbook On Contradiction, which contains many valu-able portions, nonetheless makes a serious rightwing deviation on precisely this point. Mao sayscorrectly that the contradiction between theChinese working class and Chiang Kai-shek'sfascist Kuomintang was antagonistic before theinvasion of the Japanese imperialists. However,he goes on to assert that the Japanese changedall that. Somehow, because Japanese bosses werein contradiction to Chinese bosses, the Chinesebosses could become the friends of the Chineseworking class for the duration. This misapplica-tion of dialectics helped lay the seeds of the re-versal of socialism in China, as it justified manyconcessions to the Kuomintang bourgeoisie and,later, to any imperialist or fascist who opposedthe revisionist Soviet Union.

To determine whether a contradiction is an-tagonistic, we must make what Lenin called the"concrete analysis of concrete conditions." Wemust evaluate each contradiction in terms of itsown aspects. The idea that the "enemy of myenemy is always my friend" is an absurdity.I must always know the character of his relationto me. This is as true of nature as it is of society.Two predatory animals may fight each other tothe death over their prey; yet the beast they seekto devour has as much to fear from one as fromthe other. In politics, revisionism makes amockery of objectivity and dresses wolves insheep's clothing. This is the underlying rationalefor its incessant cavorting with "lesser-evil"forces in the ruling class. In the past decade, thefake "left*' in our country has denied the role ofantagonism in class struggle at several criticaljunctures: when it united with ruling class liberalsto divert the anti-Vietnam war movement from amilitant alliance with the working class; when itpushed the line of nationalism and class collabora-tion to mitigate the potentially revolutionary blackghetto rebellions of the 1960s; when it called forreliance on piecards and sellouts rather than onthe rank-and-file during the strike wave of theearly 1970s; and when it offered prayers of thanksto the Rockefeller-Morgan wing of the bourgeoisie

for "preserving the Constitution" in the face ofNixonite "fascism." In the near future, as con-tradictions between U.S. and Soviet bossessharpen over the Mideast and southern Africa, weshould expect the "Communist" Party, variousTrotskyite groups, and the Maoists to betray thecause of revolution by glorifying any nationalistwho happens to be in conflict with the sinkingU.S. ship. To some extent this development isalready underway.

The contradictions of capitalism are antag-onistic. They cannot be resolved without violenceand the annihilation of the ruling class. Noverbalcontortion, no external force, no mysterious"exceptional" quality can alter the laws of de-velopment.

On the other hand, antagonism is not theeternally dominant form of social relations. Manhas been on earth for many hundreds of thousandsof years, yet the class war per se—the violentstruggle between owning classes and exploitedclasses—began barely 10,000 years ago with theadvent of slavery. With the victory of socialism,with the worldwide consolidation of proletariandictatorship, the basis will be laid for the aboli-tion of violence as the necessary means of re-solving social conflict.

b) Non-antagonistic contradictions are thosein which development is resolution rather thanannihilation. One aspect of the contradiction doesnot destroy the other; rather, the "conflict" be-tween the two opposites impels both forward,transforms -them, and generates a new, highercontradiction.

Contradictions within the party are non-antag-onistic. If a comrade is seriously committed tothe party and the working class, then struggle andcriticism must always seek to strengthen himand correct his weaknesses, not to drive him awayor undermine his ability to carry out communistwork. Sharpness -and objectivity in identifyingerrors are necessary; however, ruthlessness or

49

viciousness have no place in inner party struggle.They must be reserved—uncompromisingly—forthe class enemy.

Democratic-centralism, the method of com-munist organization, also embodies a non-antag-onistic contradiction. Democracy excludes cen-tralism; centralism excludes democracy. Thesetwo opposites unite and enable the party to assessthe broadest possible range of collective ex-perience in the class struggle, to make an ob-jective evaluation of this experience, and totransform this evaluation into a line which, whenit is carried out universally in the party's prac-tice,, organizes the working class into "one army,under one flag, with one aim."

Contradictions within the working class arenon-antagonistic. As we tried to show in our dis-cussion of likeness and difference, capitalismcannot rule unless it divides. Therefore, it seeksto sow as much discord as possible within theranks of the working class. Its main weapon inthis regard is racism, the ideology that seeks totransform infinitesimal differences of skin coloror national origin into antagonisms. The apparentcontradiction that does exist between "minority"and white workers is in reality a difference ofdegree between super-exploitation and exploita-tion, which are both qualitative expressions ofthe same phenomenon. When white workers aremisled into opposing the aspirations of their moreoppressed class brothers and sisters, they actagainst their own best interest by unwittinglycovering up the antagonism that all workersshare with the boss.

Many genuine contradictions exist within theworking class: employed and unemployed, menand women, factory and office labor, manufactur-ing and service labor, industrial and agriculturallabor, contradictions within individual industriesand within individual factories, between twoworkers side by side on an assembly line: Theyare infinite—and each is non-antagonistic^-Undercapitalism, each can be resolved only by strength-ening the unity of the working class as a wholeand its commitment to socialism. The contradic-tion between workers and students, which is thesame as the contradiction between mental andmanual labor, is also non-antagonistic. It is em-bodied and propelled forward in the worker-student alliance. It is resolved under socialism.

Socialism and communism will not abolish con-tradiction. To pretend otherwise is to fly in theface of natural and historical law. The dictator-ship of the proletariat—the most concentratedform of state power in history—paves the way forthe abolition of the state, which is possible onlyas the result of the long-term process that leadsto the abolition of classes. After this develop-ment, which will comprise an entire historicalepoch, contradiction will continue to characterizeall phases of man's existence. We cannot predictthe specific forms it will assume, but we canstate with assurance that the unity and conflictof opposites, their mutual interpenetration, andtheir non-antagonistic resolution into the unityand conflict of new opposites at a more advanced

level, will remain the abstract form of all forwardmotion.

n. THE TRANSITION OF QUANTITY INTOQUALITY AND QUALITY INTO QUANTITY.The first law of dialectics teaches us the

qualitative definiteness of a given process. Whenwe understand the specific character of oppositesin a contradiction, as well as its main and sec-ondary aspects, we can answer the question:What is this? However, no process can existwithout two opposite quantitative limits. In fact,the word "define" comes from the Latin word for"limit."

The mutual interpenetration of quantity andquality is the second law of dialectics.

At first, quantity and quality seem independentof each other. Up to a certain point, a tiling cangrow larger or smaller without changing intosomething new. Yet, upon further investigation,we discover that quality cannot be determinedwithout quantity. Thus, water remains qualita-tively the same within a specified temperaturerange. It freezes at 0 degrees Centigrade andboils at 100. Take away or add a specific qualityof an element in a chemical compound and thecompound can change completely, as in the caseof carbon dioxide and the lethal gas carbonmonoxide. Ford Motor Company and a single Forddealership are both capitalist enterprises. In thissense, their qualities are identical. However.their difference, which defines them as much astheir likeness, depends upon quantity: the amountof capital controlled by Ford bosses gives them avoice in the ruling class, whereas the capitalcontrolled by even the most affluent individualdealer places him at best in the upper stratumof the petty bourgeoisie.

In a battle, victory and defeat are determinedby measurable criteria: the amount of territoryconquered, the number of enemy soldiers killed,the number of miles one advances or retreats.In all phases of its political work, our party musttake quantity into account. Our growth dependsupon clearly measureable factors: theincreaseofthe party press* circulation, particularly CHAL-LENGE -DESAFIO; the number and size of partyshop fractions; the number of new recruits to theparty; the size and frequency of independent partyactions, such as May Day.

The upper and lower limits of a process there-fore constitute the^rst^fcey feature of the seconddialectical law. Every~ph*enomenori becomes itselfat a specified quantitative point and becomessomething else at another quantitative point.Understanding the precise moment of these limitsis a vital feature of all science and an incUs-pensible weapon in the conduct of revolutionarypolitical activity. Disputes over the question oflimits rage even within bourgeois science, whosemore serious practitioners are forced willy-nillyto base their research upon elements of dialectics.A recent example is the debate between leadinggerontologists about the question of aging. Asrecently as the late 1950s and early 1960s, the

50

prevailing belief was that cells in tissue culturecould survive indefinitely. The leading spokes-man for this theory was Alexis Carrel of theRockefeller Institute. Carrel maintained that hisexperiments with chicken-heart fibroblasts (em-bryonic cells that later gave rise to connectivetissue and then multiplied in culture after culture)proved the immortality of the cell. Many scientistsquestioned this concept, but their ideas wereusually attributed to their own "sloppiness." Itturned out, in a development strongly reminiscentof Cyril Burt's quackery, that Carrel's own cul-tures were proved to have been contaminated.

In contrast, a researcher named Leonard Hay-flick set out to study the effects of cancer-causing viruses on normal cells. He found thatin the cell populations under scrutiny, growthand perfect division over a period of months wouldultimately slow down, that division would cease,and that the cells would die. Hay flick found thatthe cells consistently underwent about fifty di-visions before they stopped dividing altogether.Variations of these experiments have been re-peated in hundreds of laboratories around theworld.

Other experiments tended to confirm the ac-curacy of "Hayflick's limit," as it came to beknown. A number of cells were placed in frozenstorage at varying "ages" (i.e. after a specifiednumber of divisions) and then thawed a few at atime over a period of years. In each case thecells "remembered" where their lives had beensuspended. A cell that had been frozen aftertwenty divisions proceeded to double roughly an-other thirty times before stopping at about fifty—thereby attesting to the validity of "Hayflick'slimit." This limit is applied only to normal cells,not to cancer cells, for which no limit has yetbeen found.

Hayflick's conclusions have recently been chal-lenged by a gerontologist named W. DonnerDenckla, who contends that the clock of aging doesnot lie within individual cells but rather withinthe brain. Denckla has received a lot of favor-able publicity, while Hayflick is the subject of amajor scandal. We wouldn't presume to attributethese developments to overtly political causes,but it does seem consistent, that the U.S. ruling

class would cotton to any theory of immortality.By the same token, Denckla has failed to accountfor the central fact that in Hayflick's culturedcells, which are, by definition, in vitro, andtherefore beyond the control of any brain, di-visions cease after roughly fifty. It would seemthat here too, materialism and metaphysics arelocked in struggle even if they do not understandtheir true identities.

An understanding of the upper and lower limitsin political phenomena is vital to revolutionarystrategy and practice. We are not adventurists:we recognize the futility of attempting to challengethe bosses' state apparatus for power with anundermanned and unprepared army. We know alltoo well the fate of groups like the Panthers andChe's focos, which attempted to crush a vastlysuperior enemy with a handful of armed fighterswho had no mass ties. At best, they are sincere,misguided, and doomed to failure. At worst, theyare vulnerable to ruling class infiltration that inturn serves as a pretext for police terror againstthe people.

On the other hand, however, communists mustlead the class struggle under all conditions. Aparty that does not fight withers and eventuallydies. Understanding our limitations vis-a-vis theruling class enables us to determine tactics thatutilize our forces to the maximum without over-extending them. This was clearly the casein!975,when our party organized its annual May Daymarch in the heart of ROAR's fascist Bostonstronghold. Every fake-radical clique from the"Communist" party to the Trotskyites said thatit couldn't and shouldn't be done, but by relyingon the people and by making a correct estimateof the relationship of forces, our party was ableto repulse attacks by both ROAR and the policeand to hand the racists a tactical defeat. The samewas true when we and others launched a militantoffensive against the fascists in Decemberof 1976.

The strategy of building party shop fractionsprovides further insight into the law of limits.By definition, a fraction is a part of something,a quotient of two quantities. A party fraction ofthree in a shop of, say, 10,000 workers mustobviously operate within relatively narrow limits.However, regardless of its actual size, it has the

WEUHIW

potential to grow and therefore to expand thelimits of revolutinnary activity inside the shop.Here, as in everything, quantity and quality areinter-related.

The second feature of the second law is theactual transformation of quantity into quality andthe conditions under which this transformationtakes place.

One of metaphysics' favorite slogans is theold French proverb that "the more things changethe more they remain the same." This is itsway of denying the development of quantity intoquality. The universe is seen as a simple seriesof greater or smaller increases or decreases, asendless repetition. Dialectics, as we have triedto show, sees reality as development that takesplace through the unity and conflict of opposites.

Each time opposites in a contradiction inter-penetrate, something new is produced. It maynot be obvious to the naked eye, but it is dis-coverable nonetheless. The development of a fetusin the womb, from the moment of conception tothe moment of birth, provides a classic example.We all know that babies don't come from thestork. Nor are they simply placed full-growninside the womb for nine months. The spermfertilizes the egg; the contradictions inside thenewly-formed embryo generate new cells, whichtransform themselves into organs. When the fetusis fully-formed, it must gain weight and strengthso that it can survive outside the uterine en-vironment. All this development is inconceivablewithout a vast complex of transitions from quantityinto quality.

The denial of this transition is one of re-formism's distinguishing characteristics. Thebest the reformists can offer is patch-work—puny quantitative measures to keep their systemgoing. They cannot see or will not admit that thesolution to capitalist contradictions lies outsidethe limits of capitalism. Therefore, they pose aschampions of "gradualism," the notipn that thingswill somehow get better if only the workers re-main patient and keep the faith. Of course, thispseudo- religious gibberish flies in the face ofreality: how can you reform a system in whichone-third of all the dog-food produced is eaten bypeople while modern technology is capable of put-ting TV cameras on Mars?

As far backas the 1930s, when the still-socialistSoviet Union stood as a beacon of hope to workerseverywhere while hundreds of millions sufferedthe onslaughts of a capitalist crisis, Marxists atthe Leningrad Institute of Philosophy wrote:

.. .anirreconcilable struggleforthedialec-tical understanding of development, a piti-less showing-up of the hypocrisy of grad-ualism (the a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t ofdevelopment in words, the denial of it inaction)—is the actual political task of ourphilosophic front.

This is the essence of the Progressive LaborParty's main slogan today: Revolution—not Re-form! The day to day battles of the working class(quantitative aspects of the class struggle) must

lead to a qualitative understanding of the neces-sity for revolution. This will not happen by itself:only a Marxist-Leninist party can guarantee thatrevolution becomes the main aspect of the con-tradiction between itself and reform.

Gradualism is incorrect on two counts. First,it denies the interpenetration of quantity andquality.' Second, when reality forces it to admitthat development does indeed take place, it deniesdevelopment again in a new way, by covering overthe intense struggle that always takes place whena new quality emerges.

Dialectics calls this the moment of the leap.This is the third feature of the second law. Newqualities emerge in the midst of great turbulence,not at all with things going on in the old way. Birthitself again provides a fine example of the leap.The myriad of changes that take place inside thewomb finally convert themselves into a humaninfant, but the infant comes into the world scream-ing; it must literally be cut away from its mother'sbody; and even the easiest labor represents atraumatic departure from the mother's normalroutine. As Hegel pointed out when he sought toillustrate this law, water does not freeze gradual-ly when it reaches 0 degrees centigrade: it freezesall at once, and even when it remains liquid inits initial frozen period, the slightest tap willconvert it into a solid. A child does not learn towalk all at once: first he must sit up, crawl, andbegin to pull himself erect by his hands. None ofthese tasks is accomplished without failure andphysical pain. However, once he walks, he walksonce and for all.

Leaps can be relatively simple, as in the ex-amples given above. They can be highly complexas in the case of the formation of new solar sys-tems or the emergence of new species. Theymaytake a moment (the death of a fly) or an epoch(the rise of mammal life, the transition from apeto man). In all processes, however, the leap bringswith it a heightening of the conflicts in a givencontradiction and a clear break with the past.This is true" of both antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, although by definition,violence and destruction are the major aspect ofantagonisms, whereas non-antagonistic contra-dictions preserve aspects of the old in a new way.Nonetheless, in all transitions from quantity intoquality, something dies and something else isborn.

In social science, the revolutionary processitself is the clearest example of the leap. Theviolent, revolutionary seizure of power char-acterizes the emergence of all new societies.There are no exceptions and can be none as longas classes continue to exist. Slavery was destroyedon the battlefield. Commodity productiontriumphed with the guillotine. The history ofworkers' struggles for socialism from the ParisCommune to Chile proves the theory of leapsand exposes the line of "peaceful transition"as a bankrupt figleaf for capitalist atrocity.

However, by attacking the one-sideness of re-visionist gradualism, dialectics does not commit

52

the converse one-sided error of explaining alldevelopment by leaps alone. It views leaps asradical breaks with the past that are nonethelessrooted in history. The anarchist, who does notanalyze the internal contradictions in things,thinks he can pull rabbits out of hats. The dialec-tician knows that leaps are inevitable in politics,but that they must also be carefully and pains-takingly prepared. The revolutionary repudiationof gradualism by no means constitutes a repudia-tion of the complex, patient work that must beperformed on all fronts to ripen the conditionsfor the seizure of power. As Lenin wrote over 60years ago:

The revisionist regards as mere phrasesall arguments about "leaps" and about theopposition (on principle) of the .workers'movement to the old society as a whole.They accept reform as a partial realiza-tion of socialism. On the other hand, theanarchist-syndicalist repudiates "pettytasks"... As a fact, this ... amounts to amere waiting for "great days" withoutand knowledge of how to marshall or pre-pare the forces that create great events.

Both the "right" and the "left" graspatonly one aspect of development and, by turn-ing it into a whole, create reactionarymetaphysical theories.

But real life, real history, includes initself these different tendencies in justthe same way that life and development innature include in themselves both slowevolution and sudden leaps, sudden inter-ruptions of gradualness.

When our party asks its cadre to function ascommunists 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, andwhen it issues the call to make "every day MayDay," it is acknowledging the dialectical premisethat only the consistent carrying out of many"petty tasks" can lead to the arrival of "greatdays."

The fourth feature of the second law is thetransition of quality into quantity. We have seenthat quantitative development leads to qualitativedevelopment. However, new qualities do notemerge simply as the result of abstract increasesor decreases. "Pure" quantity is anillusion.Thenumber 5,867,765 can describe both the numberof shares traded on the stock exchange in a givenday and the number of industrial workers pre-pared to seize state power at a given historicalmoment. Numbers without quality are mean-ingless.

By the same token, qualitative changes at alllevels of a process return to quantity. As in allcontradictions, opposites interpenetrate. Let ustake the rise of world imperialism as a concreteexample. According to Lenin's formula, between1800 and 1870, "free" capitalist competitionreached its limit and began the transition intomonopoly. This was, initially, a quantitativedevelopment whose tempo increased over the nextthirty years with the emergence of the firstcartels. However, by the close of the 19th century,

quantity had become quality: the cartels were nowthe dominant form of commodity production, andcapitalism had become imperialism,, Competitionbetween the cartels led to World War I, which inturn engendered its opposite: the first successfulproletarian revolution and the development ofSoviet socialism.

With the emergence of these new qualities, newquantities and tempos also emerged. The intensityof inter-imperialist rivalry grew stronger thanever and led to World War II. However, inter-national capital also had to contend with Sovietsocialist state power as its major strategic enemy.At the same time, revisionist errors present fromthe earliest days of the communist movementwere not corrected. At first, these were quanti-tative phenomena, but they led to major quali-tative developments. The revolution of 1917 andthe Civil War of 1919-21 were essentially com-munist-led movements for proletarian dic-tatorship. The heroic battle of the Soviet workingclass against the Nazis, which ranks as one ofthe greatest class struggles in history, was none-theless organized around a line of all-class unityand nationalismEthe opposite of proletarian inter-nationalism and socialism.

After World War II, one significant quantitativeand one significant qualitative development tookplace. First the U.S. ruling class began to declineas the world's imperialist colossus. This develop-ment was dramatized by Sputnik in 1957 andaccelerated by the U.S. rout in Vietnam 18 yearslater. Second, the Soviet Union ceased to be asocialist society with glaring revisionist weak-nesses and by 1956 had reverted to capitalism ona formerly socialist base. The U.S.S.R. had thusbecome an imperialist power in its own right.The same process unfolded in China and otheronce-socialist states. Further quantitative de-velopments saw the explosive rise of the Sovietempire and the continued skid of its U.S. compe-tition. Much can be said about whether the Sovietsare absolutely or relatively the stronger of thetwo imperialist titans, but two conclusions areinescapable at this point (January 1977). First,while U.S. decline and Soviet ascendancy were intheir initial quantitative stages, the main aspectof the contradiction between the two was stillcollusion, with antagonism always present butsecondary. Second, now that the Soviet rise isvirtually completed and U.S. decline has gonemuch further down the road, the main aspect ofthe contradiction has shifted to antagonism, withcollusion still present but shrinking daily. Thesequantitative developments have arrived at thebrink of a leap. When our party asserts that U.S.-Soviet imperialist rivalry has reached the "count-down" stage, it is saying in effect that the inter-national class struggle has now all but exhaustedthe quantitative limits of its present phase andthat a major new quality—world war—is about toemerge. When this happens, quality will againbecome transformed into quantity, as possible orprobable "local" wars in southern Africa, theMideast, and elsewhere ignite, expand, and lead

53

to a direct U.S.-U.S.S.R. confrontation.The task of the working class and of our party

will be to transform this contradiction into itsopposite by '^turning the imperialist war into acivil war" for revolution and proletarian dic-tatorship.

Here, too, the mutual interpenetration of qualityand quantity will characterize developments andhelp us to understand them. For example, theparty is now in a stage of quantitative developmentas far as its ability to lead the class struggle isconcerned. We can grow but we cannot yet chal-lenge the bosses for state power. However, wewould commit a grave error if we one-sidedlyevaluated the revolutionary process as a seriesof uninterrupted quantitative increases. We mustalso analyze the quality of everything we do. If weview our shop fractions merely in terms of theirnumbers and the number of workers in them, wewill never organize communist fractions. In everyfraction from the largest to the smallest we mustalso pay scrupulous attention to internal and ex-ternal political questions. Does the fraction en-gage in class struggle from a communist view-point and link every feature of the issues at handto the capitalist system? Does it introduce majorpolitical issues (fascism, war, racism, SouthAfrica and U.S. imperialism, etc.) that seem un-related to the workers' economic struggle? Doesit broaden the sales of CHALLENGE-DESAFIOand other party literature? Do the workers in thefraction understand the party line on major ques-tions and the elements of Marxism-Leninism?Does the fraction recruit to the party? Does thisrecruitment lead to the broadening and prole-tarianization of the party leadership?

In the course of a year, our party organizesmany hundreds of actions, from streetcornerrallies to May Day demonstrations. These actionsare still at the quantitative stage. Yet quality ispresent in every one of them, and if we did notrecognize this, we would be unable to organizeour way out of a paper bag. What is the qualityof the agitational literature produced for theseevents? What is the political line put forth atthem? Do we show upon time for them or stragglein? If defense is needed, is it organized? If trans-portation andfoodare required, are they adequate?Are organizing responsibilities delegated asbroadly as possible under centralized leadership?Are new participants consolidated into party-ledcollectives? Does the sale of party literature in-crease during and after these actions?

All quality has limits. All quantity leaps intonew quality. New quality in turn becomes trans-formed into quantity. This is the nature of de-velopment. To achieve scientific knowledge and tocarry out correct revolutionary practice, we mustfirst study the specific contradictions of givenqualities, then analyze quantity, and finally returnto the evaluation of quality based on all the factsthat have been accumulated. The second law ofdialectics provides the key to the measurementof all processes and the connection between theemergence, disappearance, and transformation ofall phenomena.

ID. THE NEGATION OF THE, NEGATION.The laws of development of nature, society,

and thought are not limited to the unity and con-flict of opposites and the mutual interpenetra-tion of quantity and quality. After a contradictionhas been defined, after its limits have been as-certained, science must still look ahead towardthe emergency of new qualities: it must seek outthe connection between the old and the new and atthe same time show what is dying out and what isbeing born in the course of development.

Hence, there is a third basic law of dialecticalmaterialism: the negation of the negation.

This law can best be grasped in its classicMarxist application to the study of small scaleindustry's transformation into large-scale capi-talism and thence into socialism. In Capital, Marxshows that before the full development of capital-ism in England, small-scale industry decendedupon the private property of individual laborerswho owned means of production. Obviously, thistype of society could function only within narrowtechnological and scientific bounds. When it de-veloped to a certain point, it produced the seedsof its own destruction. At this point began whatMarx calls the "primitive accumulation" ofcapital. At first gradually, then at an acceleratedpace, and always with much violence, the in-dividual owners of productive forces were ex-propriated, driven off the land, and herded intotown, where they became propertyless prole-tarians: slaves of a new type.

Once this process had been completed, thetarget of expropriation was no longer the indi-vidual artisan and his tools but the capitalist whoexploited many workers. As the productive forcesdeveloped under capitalism, the control over thembecame increasingly centralized. "One capi-talist," as Marx writes, "always kills many."However, at exactly the same time as greaterand greater amounts of wealth are gobbled up by ashrinking minority of capitalists, the stocializa-tion of all phases of the labor process also in-creases. Thus, the antagonistic contradictionbetween the private ownership of the means ofproduction and the collective nature of the pro-duction process intensifies. With this intensifica-tion, comes the numerical growth of the workingclass, its debasement and oppression by thebosses—but also its rebellion. Capitalism ceasesto stimulate rational production and in fact be-comes the maui obstacle to the advancement ofscience and society. It produces its own grave-digger in the very working class without which itcannot survive. At a specified point in its de-velopment, the working class produces the theo-retical knowledge that will enable it to destroythe system of commodity production. Eventuallythis theory is grasped by masses arid becomes amaterial force. In a protracted, violent, and in-evitable process, "The knell of capitalist privateproperty sounds. The expropriators are ex-propriated." (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 834-7.)

At this point, a whole new epoch of history

begins. The newly victorious working class canenjoy the broadest democracy in history only byexercising a ruthless dictatorship over its formeroppressors. It thus develops a completely newtype of state apparatus: the dictatorship of theproletariat. This is the specific political contentof socialism. Under socialism classes and, there-fore, the class struggle, continue. However, inanother protracted and complex process that in-cludes much violence, the workers' dictatorshipgradually eliminates capitalist production rela-tions and the capitalist superstructure untilnothing is left of either. At this point, social an-tagonism and therefore social classes cease toexist. The state, as the form for the violent sup-pression of one class by another, also ceases toexist. At a time far in the future, well beyond theworldwide consolidation of revolutionary social-ism, the dictatorship of the proletariat itself willbecome an obstacle to the development of society.What Marx calls the "pre-history of man" willhave ended, and tl.e final, non-violent transitionto classless communism will be completed.

Man's social existence begins in a state ofprimitive, classless communism. This society ofdeprivation is negated by slavery. Slavery isnegated by feudalism. Feudalism is negated bycapitalism. Capitalism is negated by socialism.The final negation—communism—represents botha revolutionary break with the entire past and areturn to aspects of the original negation's ap-pearance. In both primitive communism and thecommunism born out of the workers'dictatorship,social antagonism and social classes do not exist.However, the former is a "communism" of wantin which the contradiction between man and natureholds sway. The latter is the communism ofabundance, which retains the appearances of itsinitial state, but is also fundamentally trans-formed by all the intervening content of historyand science.

From the above, we can attempt an abstractanalysis of the third dialectical law:

1) In the development of a process, one keycontradiction emerges as both the starting-pointof a new contradiction and the negation of the oldcontradiction. The negation of the negation is thusthe result of a contradiction's development.

2) The negation of the negation then becomesthe development of the new contradiction thusgenerated.

3) Aspects of the old contradiction still survivein the negation of the negation. What is old anduseless dies out, but certain features of theoriginal contradiction are preserved and ab-sorbed by the new contradiction. This process iscalled "sublation."

4) A new key contradiction emerges in thecourse of this process. The negation of the nega-tion is in turn negated. Forwardmotioncontinues.

Here a word of caution is in order. Marxism'svulgar opponents delight in reducing the conceptof "negation" to a weak-minded denial ofwhatis.This is not the case. Denial, as Lenin wrote, isonly a feature of this complex process. "Nega-tion in dialectics does not mean simply saying

no, or declaring that something does not exist,or destroying it in any way that one likes."(Engels, Anti-Dun ring.) If you squash a cocoon,you have negated something, but you have alsomade the transformation of caterpillar into but-terfly impossible. The party must call for thebrutal extermination of capitalists, but if it doesnot at the same time win workers to other so-cialist ideas, then it cannot lead the fight forproletarian dictatorship. The key to the negationof the negation lies in the constant emergenceof the new out of the old and in the historicalconnection between the two.

Casting off the old and at the same time pre-serving it characterize the contradictory de-velopment not only of social history but also ofscience and the history of thought. Thus, thephilosophy of the ancients was primitive ma-terialism. However, because of limitations in theproductive forces of the time, this world viewcould not penetrate the internal essence of phe-nomena and therefore could not grasp their con-tradictions. Religion developed and brought withthe birth of idealism—an outlook that negated theold materialism. Idealism was in turn negated bythe development of science and modern material-ism, which both preserved certain aspects ofprimitive materialism and overcame its deficien-cies. Modern materialism is no longer aphilosophy in the old sense of the term. It doesnot stand apart from the rest of knowledge orscience but acts rather as a guide for the de-velopment of all science. Thus, it preserves andgoes beyond bourgeois science.

A similar development took place in the socialsciences. Marxist materialism stood Hegel'sidealist dialectics on its head but at the sametime preserved it. The Communist Manifestoshowed for the first time that workers' revolutionwas an inevitability. This discovery, was in turnsublated by Marx' discovery of the inner contra-dictions in the capitalist system. The Marxistanalysis of the Paris Commune both preservedand advanced this new knowledge by revealing thedictatorship of the proletariat as the essentialpolitical expression of socialist revolution. TheBolshevik revolution both affirmed and trans-formed Marx' work with its contributions to thetheory of the party, of state power, and of im-perialism.

Our own party's existence and development con-firm the law of the negation of the negation. TheProgressive Labor Party was born out of the oldcommunist movement. It represented both a clearbreak from certain errors of the past and at thesame time an attempt to return to the core ofMarxism-Leninism. The history of major revolu-tionary movements embodies a fundamental con-tradiction: the fight for the dictatorship of theproletariat compromised by concessions to thelocal and international bourgeoisie. This contra-diction characterized the Paris Commune, theBolshevik Revolution, the Chinese Revolution,and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. InRoad to Revolution HI, we said that we wanted tolearn from the overwhelmingly positive ex-

56

periences of these titanic class struggles and tocast aside the negative features that led back tocapitalism.

Road to Revolution HI was an important pointin our development, but it was only a point. Likeeverything else, it had to be negated. We had ac-cumulated enough knowledge and practice to graspcertain key contradictions in revolutionaryhistory; however, these discoveries still had tobe applied to our own experiences. In this sense,Reform and Revolution represents a negation ofRoad to Revolution HI. The dictatorship of theproletariat and the fight against revisionism arepreserved. Our own reformism is rejected, atleast in theory.

The crucial test is practice, carrying out andadvancing the line of Reform and Revolution. Ourown work as revolutionaries in the shops, thecommunities, and the campuses must be negatedtoday. The third dialectical law will be presentas a feature of this entire process, at every stepof the way. When a worker joins the party, heremains a worker, but he has gone beyond him-self to become a communist worker. Arthur Jen-sen and the KKK in the Marines are both examplesof U.S. bosses' racism, but the fight against theKKK goes beyond the battle against reactionaryideas and poses a sharper challenge to the system.The war that looms between U.S. and Sovietbosses will be animperialistbloodbath. By turningit into a civil war for socialism, the communistmovement can both preserve class struggle andits inevitable violence and also break decisivelywith the necessity of capitalist carnage.

The history of science, technology and natureconfirm this law as a feature of all forward mo-tion. Because development is uneven and becausecontradiction exists in everything, not all motionis forward. Regression is also a feature of anyprocess. This is especially true at the initialappearance of qualitatively new developments,which are relatively weak at first. We can seeregression in the history of the internationalcommunist movement: the defeat of the ParisCommune, the restoration of capitalism in Russiaand China, the corruption of liberation movementsby nationalism, etc. We can see regression as afeature of the PLP's development.

However, recognizing regression does notmean succumbing to it..The 129 years that havepassed since the Communist Manifesto correspondbarely to one tick of history's clock. During thatperiod, capitalism has been partially negated notonce but many times. The child who is still tooweak to walk may crawl for a few months afterit has fallen on its face—but eventually, it stopscrawling and stands on two sturdy legs. The samecourse of development must inevitably charac-terize the fight for socialism and can charac-terize the development of our party.

Forward motion—the negation of the negation-is a general law of history. In all societies, theweak have become strong; the ruled have trans-formed themselves into rulers; the new has re-placed the old.

The laws of dialectics enable us to analyze the

innermost contradictions of reality, to show boththeir limits and their connection to history, andto predict the course of future developments.Dialectics is neither a dogma nor a mechanicalprimer for rote learning but rather a guide toaction that takes into account the specific char-acter of everything and also demonstrates itsrelation to everything else.

By applying dialectics to history in general, weknow that the working class must eventuallytriumph. By applying it to our party and the classstruggle in the world today, we can help bringabout this eventuality in our own lifetime.

The contradictions of capitalism can only in-tensify. The solution to the problems created bycommodity production lies outside the system.Capitalism no longer has a shred of historicalusefulness. The time has come for its completenegation. The time has come for the workingclass to take power and dominate the stage ofhistory.

Our party can play a decisive role in this in-evitable process.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following list includes some of the most helpful workson the subject of dialectics in classical Marxist-Leninistliterature.

MARXCapitalThe Communist Manifesto

ENGELSSocialism: Utopian and ScientificAnti-DuehringThe Dialectics of Nature

LENINMaterialism and EmpiriocriticismPhilosophical NotebooksOne Step Forward, Two Steps Back

MAO Tse-TungOn ContradictionOn Practice

STALINDialectical and Historical Materialism

LENINGRAD INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHYTextbook of Marxist Philosophy (1937)

57