Dialectical Materialism

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dialectical method

The dialectical method lies at the core of Marxist theory. Much misused, much maligned, and currently out of favor even amongst some Marxists, I believe that without dialectics Marxist theory does not offer much of anything useful to the world(Indeed, the fizzling out of the Analytical Marxist project seems to prove what happens to Marxist theory without a dialectical method.)
As always with Marxism, the failures of Bolshevism loom in the background as we discuss a method that has been misused to legitimate all manner of state repression as well as all sorts of ideological hogwash. At it’s best the dialectical method is the best model for understanding the complexity of human economic and social activity and the forces behind historical change. At it’s worst it has offered irresponsible writers and oppressive leaders with a tool for draining the complexity from economic and social activity and imposing change upon people.
I argue here that much of the problems with the dialectical method come from misunderstanding and misapplication. Dialectics is very nuanced and complex. It is sometimes counter-intuitive. It requires one to consider broad and narrow perspectives simultaneously. Given all of its difficulty one can’t be surprised that it has been misunderstood and misappropriated. In what follows I will give a brief explanation of the main aspects of the dialectical approach and then deal with some of the primary criticisms and difficulties the method often encounters. While some working familiarity with Marxist concepts is useful, I will try to aim my comments at those who have little or no exposure to Marxist thought.

What is the Dialectical Method?

When a person sits down to write about economics, politics or history they need a method. What sorts of information is important to include or exclude? What sort of questions will they ask? What assumptions will they make? How are concepts related to one another? A method gives order to theory by clarifying the intentions and assumptions of a project.

Marxist writers have big intentions. They want to understand everything about capitalism and the relations between people under capitalism. They want to have theories that adequately explain and predict the actions of groups of people, institutions and markets. They want to understand the history of capitalism and the history of the economic systems before it. They want to create visions of alternatives to capitalism.
It would be an impressive thing to have some theories about capitalism, some theories about the state, some theories about history and some theories about human beings. But Marxist theory integrates all of these theories into one meta-theory. And while there is always room for debate about specific aspects, like crisis theory or class, the overall arc of Marxism as a meta-theory is held together by a common methodology.

This methodology is the Dialectical method.

Here I will break the dialectical method down into what I believe to be its four main aspects: It defines concepts relationally, it is dynamic, it embraces contradiction and it is a materialist method.

1. Defining concepts relationally.
Often in learning a new subject we start off by defining some simple terms which allow us then to embark on a linear train of thought arriving at logical conclusions. The dialectical method allows us to make logical conclusions but we don’t arrive at them by starting with simple definitions and then proceeding from point to point in a linear fashion. It’s more complicated than that because what we are trying to explain is more complicated than that. When you look out a world full of things to explain one is confronted with an “ensemble of relations”- a whole buch of stuff, all intertelated. What gives things their meaning is their relationship to the things around them. Individual people, institutions and concepts loose much or all of their meaning outside of these relationships. So a true, dialectical understanding of society must begin by analyzing the relationships between things.

These relationships are social. Even though we often talk of concrete, physical objects like a factory, or oil, or money, marxists see these things as social in nature. Obviously we can define a factory by it’s physical properties, but this approach doesn’t tell us anything useful economically or politically. What is important about a factory is that it is a place where workers produce commodities for capitalists. The way it embodies relationships between groups of people is its key economic and social characteristic.

Let’s be more concrete here by using another example. Money. What is money? To a marxist money is several different relationships embodied in the same commodity. First, money is a commodity produced like any other commodity. Whether it’s the mining of gold, the printing of paper, the making of coins, etc. money represents the concrete labor of workers under the control and ownership of capitalists and therefore money embodies the basic contradictions that all commodities embody (this is a big topic in itself and I don’t have room to go into it here). As a mere commodity, the value of money is equal to the amount of labor that went into its creation.

But money is also used as a measure of value. This is it’s second “relational” definition. Money is the commodity that all other commodities are measured by. Thus the value of money is relative to that of all other commodities. As other commodities change in value so does money. There are another whole host of issues that this relation implies- again, too extensive to go into here. This second relation is in conflict with the first relation of money as a mere commodity.

But there is a third aspect to money as well. It is also said to “lubricate exchange”. What does it mean to lubricate exchange? In a capitalist economy it is often necessary to achieve rapid turn-over times. Capital must be converted into commodities and these commodities must be converted into money which is then spent on more capital. We call this cycle the “circuit of capital”. Money helps lubricate this circuit so that commodities can very quickly be converted back into capital. Different types of money are better or worse at lubricating exchange- compare credit money with gold, for instance.

So from a dialectical, relational perspective we see that money embodies several different social relations. (As a commodity money is the concrete labor of workers under capitalist control. As a measure of value money is related to the values of all other commodities. And as a lubricant of exchange money is related to the turn-over time of capital.)

Thus we can’t really understand money until we understand the complexities of the class relation between labor and capital, the complexities of value theory and price theory, and the details of the circuit of the capital. In other words: there is no simple definition of money. The more we study money’s relation to other things, the more the definition of money keeps expanding.

This is very much what it is like to read Das Kapital or other works of marxist economists. We proceed from concept to concept in an ever expanding field of vision until our analysis soon encompasses the entirety of social relations. As we do so our understanding of our starting concepts evolve with the change in perspective.

As you can imagine, this makes dialectics challenging. Definitions keep changing- or at least becoming deeper and more complex. Later we’ll talk about the misunderstandings and controversies that these difficulties produce.

2. Dynamic
When talking about the relational aspect of the dialectical method we saw that it’s essentially meaningless to talk about objects or institutions in isolation- that things only have meaning when we understand how they relate to the things around them. So too, good theory must also account for change. In the real world markets change, states change, classes change, and people change. History is constantly happening. We are surrounded by war, violence, exploitation, social upheaval, economic crisis, revolution, counter-revolution, etc. etc. History is “on the go” and theory should be “on the go” with it.

Where bourgeois economic theory is narrowly limited by static, equilibrium theories, Marxism, through the use of the dialectical method, is dynamic! It embraces crisis and historical movement. Just as we see all things connected through a web of social relations, so to we see these social relations constantly changing, evolving, creating a new world.

You see, every morning when we wake up we go out into the world and recreate the ensemble of social relations. We go to work, buy commodities, consume commodities, interact with institutions and then we go to bed. The next day everyone wakes up and does it all over again. Because the economy and the state are no more than an enormous collection of human social relations they have to be reproduced every day. There’s no auto-pilot. We have to get up everyday and remake this messed up world that we live in.

That means that everything is always subject to change. A good theory can explain why things change the way they do. This is the aim of the dialectical method.

3. Contradiction

Change happens because of contradictions. Most social relations contain opposing forces. These opposing forces pull at the cohesion of a relation until eventually it forces the relation to change. If there weren’t contradictions in society nothing would ever change. While bourgeois theory seeks to rid itself of any internal contradiction in order to create equilibrium models, while bourgeois theory sees deviations from equilibrium as exceptions, Marxists seek out contradictions and place them at the center of their theory.
Look out your window at the world. Do you see a world in equilibrium? Unless you are blind you probably see a world full of crisis: war, financial crisis, poverty, the rise of reactionary political movements, etc. These are the things that bourgeois economics would have us ignore, but they are the things of most interest to Marxists.

Here is the dialectical theory of contradiction in the abstract: A social relation which appears to be a unity contains a contradiction. This contradiction pulls at the cohesion of that unity until the unity is burst apart. This is a crisis. The crisis demands a way of resolving the contradiction. Soon a new unity replaces the old unity thus resolving the contradiction. But the new unity has a contradiction of its own that one day will rise to the level of crisis.

The most common example of this is class theory. It goes like this: why do we have social relations? Why do people interact so much? Primarily, historically, it has been because people produce their means of subsistence collectively. As we combine our social labor to grow food, build shelter and make tools we enter into social relations that have a determining influence on who we are. A long time ago human productive activity began producing a surplus. Extra food, extra tools, extra houses. Once this happened we have never been at peace. One group of people is always dominating this surplus while another group is always being dominated. This is what classes are. In capitalism, those who own the means of production (factories, banks, raw materials, etc.) form the capitalism class. Everybody else has to work to survive. We are the working class. Capitalists hire workers with their profits from the social surplus. The workers work all day creating everything society needs (cars, food, clothes, houses, entertainment, information, etc.) plus a surplus. At the end of the day the workers go home with enough pay to buy their means of subsistence and the capitalist goes home with the social surplus.

Okay, so that is the basic theory of class- super simplified, minus the nuance that a mature dialectical method would have. Now where is the contradiction? Capitalists and workers work together to create the social relation that is capitalism. That is the unity. Every morning they get up and play out their roles, reproducing not just commodities and surpluses but also reproducing the social relations. But just because they are working together now doesn’t mean that there isn’t tension in that relationship. Capitalists and workers have diametrically opposed interests. They are competing over the same surplus. It is in the interest of capitalists to pay workers the lowest wages possible so as to get the most surplus (and we know that capitalists are always trying to do just this). And it is in the interest of workers to resist this exploitation whether it is through individual acts of resistance, sabotage or “laziness” on the job or through the collective action of unions. That is the contradiction.

We have seen the relation between labor and capital transform itself many times through the history of capitalism as the battle lines were re-drawn over and over again in this constantly evolving, dynamic relation. Within my own lifetime I have seen the rapid decline of the industrial trade unions as capital has become more globally mobile. By seizing more direct control of the state and curtailing democracy at home and abroad, capitalists have seized back much of the social surplus that the social welfare states of the 50’s and 60’s had redistributed to the working class. This has had profound impacts on every aspect of global society. It is has centralized wealth, created a global financial system deeply flawed and prone to crisis, and sparked an era of regional wars of modern day empire.

And that is how marxists look at contradictions within relationships. Contradictions are ever present in society. They contain the seeds of the future. As the tensions work themselves out a new set of relations is presented, now with a new set of contradictions to work out. This is how history moves forward.

4.Materialism
There is one more aspect of the dialectical method that I want to address here: its materialism. Materialism is so crucial to the marxist use of the dialectical method that we often use the phrase “dialectical materialism” to distinguish it from the earlier dialectical theories of Hegel and his followers.

All social theory is faced with this basic question: Why does stuff happen? We have to wade through a plethora of factors and figure out what are the most important causes. Materialism argues that things called “material forces” are more important in determining history than ideas. Many times in other theories of society the claim is made that people’s ideas, intentions, preferences and attitudes are the primary determining factors. Materialism is opposed to this way of looking at history. Let’s take a look at what “material forces” are…

Material forces are social relations that have achieved some degree of permanence- often by becoming embodied in a material object (hence the name “materialism”). To take our previous example, money is a material force in society. It’s a physical object but it embodies several different social relations. Its physical material body and its importance in economic affairs give it a degree of permanence that ideas, words, and preferences don’t have. We can predict with a high level of accuracy how money will make groups of people act. Of course we can’t be %100 sure of how an individual will behave in a situation, but we can make very accurate conclusions about groups of people. For instance, we know that everyday most workers will go to their job and work all day in order to make money. They will then take this money and buy commodities which they will then consume. They will do all of this despite their ideas about the economy, no matter what language they use to describe the economy, and despite their personal preference to work or not work.

Material forces can be all sorts of things- money, capital, class, credit, banks, factories, the state, institutions of government and finance, infrastructure, commodities, etc. All of these things are embodiments of specific social relations that have achieved permanence because they are embodied in objects or institutions. The whole ensemble of material forces existing in a society at one time are usually referred to as the “material conditions”. Marxists make the claim that these material conditions are the important causal factors in social, economic and political phenomena.

This is an important distinction to make as we are often presented with arguments about history that entirely neglect the primacy of material forces. Postmodernists often argue that language is a determining force. Historians often argue that ideas or culture are determining forces. Marxists don’t thing that culture or ideas or language are unimportant. But they believe that culture, language and ideas must be placed within their proper context of material conditions.

There is much debate on this issue and we will return to some of it in a bit.

Criticism.

The dialectical method is often maligned and often misunderstood. In the soviet version of marxism dialectical thinking quickly degenerated into un-dialectical hogwash and theoretical hackery. And in much of the left-over backwash of Leninism one can still find a lot of the vulgar simplification and bastardization of dialectical materialism that has led to such criticism and misunderstanding. Bourgeois theory often derides the Dialectical Method as being unscientific because marxists do not share the narrow range of questions and the unacknowledged assumptions that bourgeois theory makes. The postmodern critique is directed at the materialism for being deterministic and reductionist. In trying to sum up all of these criticisms, it seems that there are two main avenues of critique: 1. mysticism, and 2. determinism.

“Mysticism- unscientific” criticisms
Bourgeois social science operates under different assumptions than dialectical materialism. This causes many bourgeois social scientists to dismiss the relational, dynamic, contradictory and material aspects of marxism as just unscientific mystical hackery.

[This is not helped at all by the vulgar marxism practiced by the sorry theorists of the soviet tradition in which academic rigor was often sacrificed for political purposes. Marxism is really difficult to grasp in it's totality because it is so holistic- defining things in terms of constantly fluctuating social relations. It doesn't offer clear, easy answers, but is instead full of nuance and flux. It also has huge aims: to explain the entirety of social relations and to give people the knowledge they need to improve their material conditions. Under Lenin, Stalin and Mao this was transformed into a project to control the entirety of social relations and tell people it was in their best interests.]

In bourgeois theory social relations are not important. Instead economic, political and social issues are reduced to the individual level. Economists ask questions about the economic preferences of individuals. Large economic forces are seen as just an amalgamation of individual preferences, not the embodiment of social relations which contain contradictions. This approach decentralizes causality. It has no dynamic motion. Capitalism is painted in equilibrium models in which individual preferences always balance out to achieve the common good. Capitalism seems natural, inevitable and eternal.

In bourgeois theory, the absence of material forces takes away the idea of coercion. You see, to a marxist wage labor is a coercive relation. Workers must sell their labor to capitalists in order to survive even though this is an exploitative relationship. And this is just one of many ways in which capital exerts a coercive influence upon society. The absence of materialism in bourgeois economics takes away our ability to identify these coercive relationships. Instead, bourgeois economics sees everything as a matter of personal choice: people wouldn’t choose to work if they didn’t want to. It argues that everyone is essentially free to do what they want as individuals.

Of course, most of us know that we are not free. We live our lives scurrying through a maze of narrow economic choices, almost all of which involve enriching capitalists at our own expense. The “rules of the game” are set by the material conditions which we live in- social relations that have become so permanent, so fixed that we as individuals don’t have a way to escape from them.
Without a theory of contradiction, bourgeois economics has no way of explaining crisis. Crisis are always seen as deviations from an equilibrium model- a matter of interference with the perfection of the market. In contrast, Marxists see contradiction at the center of capitalist social relations and predict that severe crisis is an integral part of the capitalism.

Because bourgeois theory is dealing only with the actions of individuals they are able to easily quantify their theories. It’s easy to measure consumer spending, GDP, profit margins, etc. It’s less easy to quantify a social relationship. This allows bourgeois theorists to critique marxist theory for not being scientific enough. And while marxists often make use of the numbers and concepts of bourgeois theorists, and while marxists have plenty of their own complex equations, they will never be able to satisfy the demands of bourgeois theory that everything must be quantified and mathematized. And this is okay. Because bourgeois economics is the dominant method of our time it seems to set the standard for what is “scientific”. But we know that there are plenty of things it doesn’t explain that we can only really understand from a relational, dynamic materialist approach which embraces contradiction and crisis. It is no more or less “scientific”. It just makes different assumptions.

Dialectical materialism takes the opposite approach from that of bourgeois economics. Instead of worrying about whether individuals prefer Coke or Pepsi, it seeks to understand the context behind the decisions of individuals. This context is the material forces which surround us everyday: capital, money, wages, unions, infrastructure, commodities, etc. And of course these material forces are the embodiment of social relations- the dominant relation in capitalist society being that between capital and labor.
By comparing the bourgeois approach with the marxist approach we can lean a lot about assumptions and intentions. Bourgeois economics has a much narrower perspective: by ignoring social relations and material conditions and only relying on quantifiable, individual factors it is able to create a theory that avoids any critique of capitalism by diffusing all causality into the actions of free individuals. It’s assumptions allow it to arrive at it’s basic intention as a bourgeois theory: to legitimate capitalism. Marxists, by taking a much broader approach are able to understand the economy at a much deeper level and this allows them to achieve their intention of creating a moral critique of capitalism.

Determinism
When we talk about materialism we are talking about the question of causality. Everyday we as individuals participate in enormous social relationships: the free market, wage-labor, the financial system, credit, consumption. These social relationships appear to be quite permanent. While we may have a choice as to which capitalist to buy a commodity from, or which capitalist to sell our labor to, there is no way that we as individuals have any choice but to participate in consumption and wage labor. Patterns of production and consumption become institutionalized in ways that dominate our lives. Our day-to-day behavior, our culture our world-views are all shaped by the modes of production and consumption that we participate in. This is what materialism is- the acknowledgment that social relations take on a level of permanence that is coercive and dominant.

There is a strange dialectical tension within the concept of materialism itself. Material conditions are the result of social relations and social relations are just an amalgamation of individual actions. Yet individuals have little power to change material conditions. Often in marxist theory, it seems that history is the working out of blind, material forces that seem to be evolving on their own, dragging human beings along with them.
Critics of materialism call this “deterministic”. They say marxists are making the claim that historical outcomes are predetermined by the “laws of motion of capital” and that individual people have no “agency” in the process. Materialism is indeed deterministic if one does not recognize the dialectical tension between human action and material forces- if we forget that material forces they are nothing more than the embodiment of social relations, relations that, ultimately, human beings have control over.

But this is not a control that individuals have. I, personally, no matter how radical my ideas are, no matter how much money or power in society I have- as an individual I cannot change the laws of motion of capital. I can’t end wage labor, stop exploitation, change the state, etc. These are the sorts of things that only large groups of people can do because social relations are by nature social- collective- communal. That is one reason why class is so important to marxist theory and marxist political projects. Only a class of people can act intentionally to change the world.

To use a previous example, in the 70’s capitalists acted together as a class to make drastic changes in the way labor, finance and states were structured. Using all sorts of violence and coercion, a new economy was forged as a result of capitalists acting as a class. This is not the sort of thing that an individual capitalist, no matter how rich and powerful, could do on his or her own.

But when do classes challenge the ensemble of relations, the material structures of capital, and become active agents of change? This often happens in times crisis. In the 70’s the global economic system was in trouble at the same time that democratic movements all over the world were pushing for greater and greater reforms of the system. Capitalists responded to this crisis of economic and political legitimacy with the movement we now know as “neoliberalism”. And because they held more power over the institutions of government, production and finance, capitalists were able to push their neoliberal agenda onto the world stage successfully.

Back in the great depression, when capital was in another deep crisis, and leftist movements all over the world were demanding a better, more just state, capitalists responded with a counter movement called “the welfare state”, which would stimulate economic activity, manage the crisis tendencies of capitalism, and “buy off” workers by raising wages.

A crisis is a time when the opposing tensions within a dialectical unity have become so destructive of that unity that a new form of that social relationship becomes necessary. The crisis of the great depression led to a new vision of the role of consumption and the state in capitalist accumulation. The crisis of the 70’s led to a new vision about regulation, globalization and finance. These crisis were reworkings of the class structure- of the way that the tensions between labor and capital are held in balance.

In times of crisis, the battle over the social surplus becomes more intense. In these times, new ideas, new strategies, new visions of the future become important. We are entering such a period now. It is vitally important that we cultivate creative, just and democratic ideas about a better society now because crisis is the time for change. Crisis is fertile soil for new ideas.

Some critics of dialectical materialism agree that social change comes from collective efforts in times of crisis, but deny the importance of class as a factor. Many argue that cultural factors like race and religion are more crucial to understanding the way groups of people behave. They point to the fact that in our society many people identify themselves as part of a cultural group before they identify themselves as part of a class and that membership in this cultural group informs their conscious actions more than class.

This is a huge debate and much of it stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of materialism. Culture is a type of social relation, I suppose. But it is not one that takes on a material form. It therefore cannot exercise the sort of coercive influence on behavior that material factors can. The material conditions of contemporary capitalism are so pervasive, so woven into the intricate fabric of our lives that few ever realize how deeply capitalist our lives are. All of our actions are part of a giant economic web that dominates and directs our lives. The two most common human activities are working and consuming. We are constantly interacting with commodities- from the food we eat, to the sidewalks we walk on, the social relations of capitalism in material form surround our lives and inform our decisions. Capitalism is the context. It is sets the rules of the game. It’s the cards and the card dealer.

Cultural forces may play a big role in the way people consciously understand themselves and choose to act. But there are greater unquestioned, unconscious forces that culture exists in. Under capitalism culture becomes a commodity which is produced, sold and consumed like any other commodity. Culture begins to take on the logic of capital. We may call it a “Protestant work ethic” or “american ingenuity” but these are all profoundly capitalist values. Right now there is much ado about the cultural clash between the West and the Muslim world. The reality is that this cultural clash has everything to do with geopolitics, access to resources, the history of economic and political imperialism in the middle east, and the relationship between american capital and the arab oil barons. What gods people want to worship, what clothes they wear, what language the speak – culture has very little to do with it.