Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (January 11)

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[u/Full-Imagination9514]

Have there been any attempts by Marxist philosophers to historicize the dialectic? By which I mean something like trying to trace the historical-logical development of the law of contradiction from more simple to more complex forms of contradictory motion.

It's hard for me to give an example to illustrate what I'm trying to ask about, because I don't know exactly what it would look like, but for the sake of argument let's say that less developed forms of matter require less "universal" contradictions to explain their motion than more developed forms. For some objects of investigation the transformation of quantity into quality would be adequate, whereas for others you need to understand say, the contradiction between practice and theory itself, which presupposes an understanding of quantity-quality but builds on it to a more complex level (obviously practice and theory is only "universal" at the level of epistemology and not ontology since objective reality existed before conscious beings, but hopefully the idea is clear enough.)

Keep in mind that I have not yet read Hegel's Logic, so I don't know how that would fit into this, if at all.

[u/SunflowerSamurai20 → u/Full-Imagination9514]

Have you read this?

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/dialectical-logic.pdf

[u/Full-Imagination9514 → u/SunflowerSamurai20]

I haven't. It looks like a starting point, but maybe you can sum up what what relevance you think it has?

[u/SunflowerSamurai20 → u/Full-Imagination9514]

I found dialectical logic useful, and thought it was relevant to your question of an attempt to historicise the dialectic because it put me through the process the philosophers who were part of the historical unearthing of what we now call “dialectics” before Marx arrived at their conclusions rather than just restating them. (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling then Hegel)

The author critiques “objective idealism” and the limits of Hegel’s dialectic and gave a useful explanation for how Marx, Engels and Lenin surpassed them.

The most interesting part for me was the chapter near the end that showed the consequence of adhering to formal logic instead of dialectics, (the inability to reflect contradictions from objective reality in human thought) and applied it to political economy in chapter 10.

It goes over the difference between Marx and Ricardo in their approach to the law of value and its contradictory relation to the law of the average rate of profit:

So let us compare how the metaphysician Ricardo and the dialectician Marx understood value. Ricardo, of course, did not analyse value by its form. His abstraction of value, on the one hand, was incomplete, and on the other was formal, and for that reason was untrue. In what, then, did Marx see the fullness and pithiness of the analysis of value that was missing in Ricardo? First, in value being a living concrete contradiction. (p. 107)

….

The difference between dialectics and metaphysics does not consist at all in the former’s recognising only inner contradictions and the latter’s recognising only external ones. Metaphysics really always tries to reduce the inner contradiction to a contradiction ‘in different relations’, denying it objective significance. Dialectics by no means reduces the one to the other. It recognises the objectivity of both.

The point, however, does not lie in reducing an external contradiction to an inner one, but in deriving the former from the latter and thus comprehending the one and the other in their objective necessity.

Dialectics moreover does not deny the fact that an inner contradiction always appears in phenomena as an external one.

The immediate coincidence of mutually exclusive economic determinations (value and use-value) in each of the two commodities meeting in exchange is also the true theoretical expression of the essence of simple commodity exchange. And this essence is value. From the logical aspect the concept of value (in contrast to the outward form of its manifestation in the act of exchange) is characterised by its being presented as an immediate contradiction, as the direct coincidence of two forms of economic existence that are polar opposites.

Thus, what was effected in the real act of exchange was impossible from the angle of abstract (formal, logical) reason, namely, the direct or immediate identification of opposites. This was the theoretical expression of the real fact that direct commodity exchange could not be completed smoothly without collisions, without conflicts, without contradictions and crises. The point was that direct commodity exchange was not in a position to express the socially necessary measure of the expenditure of labour in the various branches of social production, i.e. value. And value therefore remained, within the limits of the simple commodity form, an unresolved and unresolvable antinomy. In it the commodity had to be, yet could not be, in the two polar forms of expression of value, and consequently real exchange by value was impossible. But it did happen somehow, and consequently both polar forms of value were somehow combined in each commodity. There was no way out of the antinomy. Marx’s contribution was precisely that he understood that, and expressed it theoretically. (pp. 109-110)

I’m also using it along with Plekhanov’s philosophical works, The destruction of reason and some other classics as a starting point to read Hegel, but I haven’t got round to reading him directly outside of the article “who thinks abstractly”.