[In this battle with revisionism, with the proponents of fundamental distortions of Marxism, and to thereby repudiate the illusory notions of Marxian dialectics that the “theoreticians” inspire in the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie, and worse yet, in the proletariat, it will be necessary to quote at length Marx’s great work, The Poverty of Philosophy, chapter II, “The Metaphysics of Political Economy”.]
“As dialecticians” say the writers of the Peoples Tribune, “we fully understand that the process of growth (our emphasis) is the process of ebb and flow or more specifically a process of leaps that are followed by crises – backsliding and then another leap. This process involves the whole of the motion of quantity to quality. We see it only natural that this scientific process be applied to the history of humanity as well as the history of every other organism.” – Peoples Tribune, vol 4, no 10, p 3.
In the “Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League”, J.V. Stalin is quoted as saying that Marxist dialectics “Does not regard the process of development as a simple process of growth ...” (our emphasis)
Having studied the League’s formulation of dialectics in Peoples Tribune, vol 4, no 10, and having contrasted it with the formulation of Stalin which they themselves quote, we find there to be something bizarre, to say the least, in the League’s rather lyrical formulation. For that reason, we set about seriously studying and contrasting the League’s use of dialectics with that of our great Marxist-Leninist teachers and leaders.
Let us begin with the League’s attempt to grasp “the essentials of the dialectical method of Marx and Engels”. Where does the League look in Marx for their definition of dialectics? With the following ”famous quote on dialectics” from the Poverty of Philosophy they begin their discussion on Dialectics:
Wherein does the movement of pure reason consist? In posing itself, opposing itself, composing itself: in formulating itself as thesis, antithesis, synthesis, or yet again in affirming itself, negating itself and negating its negation.
At this point given the phrase “pure reason” we found the League’s language and choice of quotes to be not only bizarre, but also rather revealing, given that Marx’s dialectics are inseparable from philosophical materialism as opposed to philosophical idealism.
In an effort to discover what in particular it was about the League’s language and choice of quotes that gave rise to these doubts, we turned to that great work by Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, from which the League has expropriated its definition of ”Marxist” dialectics. We find that in fact Marx was not discussing his own dialectics, but those of the arch-idealist and metaphysician Hegel. Let us then quote at length the passage from which the League has stolen its fundamental characterization of “Marxist” dialectics:
. . . The economists’ material is the active, energetic life of man; M. Proudhon’s material is the dogmas of the economists. But the moment we cease to pursue the historical movement of production relations, of which the categories are but the theoretical expression, the moment we want to see in these categories no more than ideas, spontaneous thoughts, independent of real relations, we are forced to attribute the origin of these thoughts to the movement of pure reason. How does pure external, impersonal reason give rise to these thoughts? How does it proceed in order to produce them?
If we had M. Proudhon’s intrepidity on the matter of Hegelianism we should say: it is distinguished in itself from itself. What does this mean? Impersonal reason, having outside itself neither a base on which it can pose itself, nor an object to which it can oppose itself, nor a subject with which it can compose itself, is forced to turn head over heals in posing itself, opposing itself and composing itself. . .
Here we will stop for a moment in order to point out that this is the precise conception of dialectics and language which the Communist League holds from “Dialectics of the Development . . . ”, we quote again their own words:
We should search carefully and find out how and why the Marxist revolutionary movement posed itself, opposed itself and elevated itself as a composition to a higher level.
This is nothing other than the Hegelianism of Proudhon which was resoundingly defeated and ridiculed by Marx as “twaddle”, being put forward once again over 100 years later! With this most intriguing insight in mind, let us go on with Marx:
. . . position, opposition, composition. Or to speak Greek, we have thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
Again let us stop and quote the “League” from its own paper:
Imperialism created its antithesis – the colonies,
and
Thesis: capitalist imperialism, antithesis: the proletariat and the toiling masses, synthesis: socialism, – Peoples Tribune, vol 4, no 8, p 7.
The audacity of printing such drivel and calling it Marxism-Leninism is matched only by the insidiousness of the motives that must have engendered it. To go on with Marx:
... For those who do not know the Hegelian language we shall give the consecrating formula: affirmation, negation, and negation of the negation.
Once again, let us pause in order to study the brilliance of the Communist League’s dialecticians:
Without getting lost in historical analysis (?), we can say that Imperialism arose as the negation of its opposite, free enterprise (?!). It arose as the antithesis or the opposition but above all as the negation of the previous economic state of affairs. But imperialism is not simply an economic motion – it is also a social motion; in the process of that motion it is bound to be negated as it negated its negative. – from “Dialectics.. .of the Communist League”
Let us go on with the refutation of M. Proudhon by Marx:
That is what language means. It is certainly not Hebrew (with due apologies to M. Proudhon); but IT IS THE LANGUAGE OF THIS PURE REASON, SEPARATE FROM THE INDIVIDUAL. INSTEAD OF THE ORDINARY INDIVIDUAL WITH HIS ORDINARY MANNER OF SPEAKING AND THINKING WE HAVE NOTHING BUT THIS ORDINARY IN ITSELF – WITHOUT THE INDIVIDUAL MANNER (emphasis ours).” And
All that exists, all that lives on land and under water, exists and lives only by some kind of movement. Thus the movement of history produces social relations; industrial movement gives us industrial products, etc.
Just as by dint of abstractions we have transformed everything into a logical category, so one has only to make an abstraction of every characteristic distinctive of different movements to attain movement in its abstract condition – purely formal movement, the purely logical formula of movement. If one finds in logical categories the substance of all things, one imagines ABSOLUTE METHOD, which not only explains all things but also implies the movement of things.
It is this absolute method that Hegel sneaks in these terms: ’Method is the absolute, unique, supreme, infinite force, which no object can resist; it is the tendency of reason to find itself again, to recognize itself in every object.’
So what is this absolute method? The abstraction of movement. What is the abstraction of movement? Movement in abstract condition. What is movement in abstract condition? THE PURELY LOGICAL FORMULA OF MOVEMENT OR THE MOVEMENT OF PURE REASON. WHEREIN DOES THE MOVEMENT OF PURE REASON CONSIT? IN POSING ITSELF, OPPOSING ITSELF, COMPOSING ITSELF: IN FORMULATING ITSELF AS THESIS, ANTITHESIS, SYNTHESIS; OR YET AGAIN, IN AFFIRMING ITSELF, NEGATING ITSELF AND NEGATING ITS NRGATION.
HOW DOES REASON MANAGE TO AFFIRM ITSELF, TO POSE ITSELF IN A DEFINITE CATEGORY? THAT IS THE BUSINESS OF REASON ITSELF AND OF ITS APOLOGISTS (Among whom we may now number the so-called theoreticians of the Communist League).
And so we see how from the very beginning of their discussion of dialectics the League’s theoreticians have failed to establish a correct understanding and expression of Marxists dialectics. Instead they are immersed in the Hegelianism of their great forebear, M. Proudhon.
On these idealist legs the League’s theoreticians wander through the forest of history and as in the old addage “fail to see the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest.” In the League’s own words:
We should search carefully and find out how and why the Marxist revolutionary movement posed itself, opposed itself, and elevated itself as a composition to a higher level. Only in this manner can we understand the qualitative level and historical tasks of our Communist League.
Without getting lost in historical analysis. . .
From the very beginning they will not get lost in history because there is no history here. The closest thing to history in the rest of this article are a few quotes from Stalin, a long list of names and events all mechanically inter-related, and the interesting bit of gossip that “(Ruthenberg) died of a appendicitis, that despite warnings, he would not attend to.” This ever narrowing description of the history of the labor movement and associated social movements in the world and the U.S.A. is nothing more than an ever narrower intellectual biography of a small handful of individuals who came to call themselves the Communist League. As with all idealist historical writings, it is not the material objective conditions which determine the development of social consciousness, it is the inter-play of ideas in the heads of a handful of theoreticians. It is the “Idea” being worked out in history that is being described in this history of the development of the Communist League. The role of the depression, of World War II, of the Korean War, of unemployment and inflation are absent in this description. Holding true to their original conception of the Communist movement,
. . . the Communist movement could not and did not arise out of the struggles of the proletariat, but rather arose out of the morality of the middle classes, and their struggle against the insatiable monopolies.
Thus, the first communists are hardly ever workers, but are highly theoretical intellectuals. The inevitable composition of this position and opposition is a synthesis that is the unity of the theory and practice of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution. The embodiment of this synthesis is the modern Marxist-Leninist Communist Party. – from “Dialectics of C.L.”
Not satisfied, the CL theoreticians go on to characterize the working class movement as the movement of concepts:
So, out of the revisionist concepts of mass democracy and legal activity grew its opposite which was united with it; the concept of illegal activity in opposition to the masses. This development of the mid 1880’s was concrete proof of Marx’s dialectical method Marx wrote:
’But once it has managed to pose itself as a thesis this thesis, this thought opposed to itself splits up into two contradictory thoughts – the positive and the negative, the yes and no. The struggle between these two antagonistic elements comprised in the antithesis constitutes the dialectical movement. The yes becoming no, the no becoming yes, the yes becoming both yes and no, the no becoming both no and yes, the contraries balance, neutralize, paralyze each other. The fusion of these two contradictory thoughts constitutes a new thought, which is the synthesis of them.’
Marx was not discussing his dialectics here. He was portraying the idealist dialectics, the “abstract method” of “pure reason”. He was describing how the speculations of idealists lead to the systematization of categories into schemas. His reason for doing this was to show that the idealist schemas had no basis in historical reality, i.e., the material conditions of history. We quote Karl Marx
Apply this method to the categories of political economy, and you have the logic and metaphysics of political economy or, in other words, you have the economic categories that everybody knows, translated into a little-known language which makes them look as if they had newly blossomed forth in an intellect of pure reason; so much do these categories seem to engender one another, to be linked up and intertwined with one another by the very working of the dialectic movement. The reader must not get alarmed at these metaphysics with all their scaffolding of categories, groups, series and systems. M. Proudhon, in spite of all the trouble he has taken to scale the heights of the system of contradictions, has never been able to raise himself above the first two rungs of simple thesis and antithesis; and even these he has mounted only twice and on one of these two occasions he fell over backwards. “Up to now we have expounded only the dialectics of Hegel. We shall see later how M. Proudhon has succeeded in reducing it to the meanest proportions. Thus, for Hegel, all that has happened and is still happening is only just what is happening in his own mind. Thus the philosophy of history is nothing hut the history of philosophy, of his own philosophy. There is no longer a ’history according to the order in time,’ there is only ’the sequence of ideas in the understanding’. He thinks he is constructing the world by the movement of thought, whereas he is merely reconstructing systematically and classifying by the absolute method the thoughts which are in the minds of all.
As for the CL’s assertion that the history of the revolutionaries in the U.S.A. stems from the conflict of the Socialist Labor Party with the International Working People’s Association, and not from the developing material conditions, let us quote Karl Marx in order to show how such a conception of history as being the incarnation of slumbering ideas, principles or notions, is none other than M. Proudhon’s idealism:
Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of productions. Proudhon, holding things upside down like a true philosopher, sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of these principles, of these categories, which were slumbering – so M. Proudhon the philosopher tells us – in the bosom of the ’impersonal reason of humanity.’
The method of the CL “dialecticians” is to take any two groups or things and call one the thesis, the other the antithesis. Pose their unification as a synthesis. If they are not united battle to unite them. If the CL’s or their predecessors’ so-called Marxism-Leninism is not united with the working class, they battle to unite the two. But, where does this battle take place? Where is the material base for this subjugation of reality to ideas? We quote from “Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League”:
On the battlefield of the masses and in the struggle for liberal democracy, the Communists were outstanding.
It is ultimately the masses who are the cannon fodder in this great war between ideas. As with M. Proudhon, the CL scales the ladder of contradictions but falls over backwards once having arrived at the second rung by posing themselves as the antithesis to revisionism.
The only meaningful conclusion we can draw from all this claptrap is the following: Sincere but undeveloped cadres, fierce fighters in the struggle to dump the “trotskyist and nationalist orientation that had been imposed on them”, in merging with ”a large grouping of mainly ex-SDS militants who were studying the thought of Mao Tsetung”, made a fatal error of using basically petty-bourgeois and bourgeois anarchists and agents in order to establish their “organizational base”. The world renowned fools who made up the membership of SDS were never taken seriously by any hardworking cadres anywhere. In testimony before government panels and in interviews to public broadcasting interviewers in New York, agent after agent revealed they had infiltrated SDS and had used the organization in order to portray Marxist groups as malcontents and anarchists, in some cases actually instigating and carrying out bombings at the behest of their superiors.
What then have we discovered? That in fact our suspicions were justified. The stench emanating from the writings of the Communist League was not the result of a few rotten word choices and an inappropriate quote. It was in fact a stench emanating from the very minds of the authors of such unadulterated counter-revolutionary filth, minds that in their very deviousness and dishonesty are rotting the very organization they are supposedly guiding!!
BEWARE all serious and sincere revolutionaries. Such an abuse of Marxism-Leninism, such a fundamentally insidious attempt to divert our primitive and undeveloped comrades from the scientific and correct positions of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought can have but one purpose:
THE RUTHLESS SUPPRESSION OF THE REVOLUTIONARY LEFT AND THE LIQUIDATION OF THE STRUGGLE AGAINST FASCISM AND SOCIAL-FASCISM!!
Their fundamental misunderstanding of dialectics permeates every aspect of their work, from the debate over “third forces” to the debate over how to build a party and how to handle contradictions within the revolutionary left. Let us go on to the Peoples Tribune explanation and treatment of the “third forces” question, but after a brief list of but a few of the oddities arising from their fundamentally non-Marxist understanding of dialectics.
From the stand point of dialectical materialism, can there be a third force in any entity? Marxism denies this possibility.
Imperialism created its antithesis – the colonies.
There is no possible third force from the standpoint of theory and philosophy. Thesis: Capitalist imperialism, antithesis: the proletariat and the toiling masses, synthesis: socialism. This is the motion of history.
At the point where investment in the national market and the national productive process became unprofitable this accumulation of capital was invested overseas.
The truth of the matter is that the capitalists understand the dialectical process just as we do. (and here the Peoples Tribune hangs itself!) They understand that if they don’t supply the alternative to imperialism, we will. They want and have a situation where they both pose and oppose.
Under the pressure of current events, the so-called Left is undergoing the dialectical process of splitting and turning upon itself.
First of all it means that the struggle for unity of the revolution, is moving to a higher stage – because unity is unthinkable without disunity.
Growth is the process of excreting the negative as well as assimilating the positive.
Take out the working class and you have nothing – take out the leading role of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Parties and groupings and you have nothing. [This statement could not be attributed to even the most naive Marxist, the most misled theoretician of Marxism, nor even anyone with any sense at all who is taking an honest look at history. Before Marx was born there was class struggle, before the ideas of Marx were carried to the world there was class struggle, and no matter how long and how effectively bourgeois schemers prevent the organization of a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party there will be class struggle. Communist League dialectics is a vacilation between empiricism and idealism, which ever suits their purpose better as wreckers and liquidators.]
. . .Marxism is a theoretical movement.
A revolution is an epochal motion.
We refer to it as a semi-colony because it appears to stand half way between direct colonialism and freedom. However, it is in motion -- either the revolution in permanence being crowned with the dictatorship of the proletariat, or backsliding into neo-colonialism.
These quotes can be found in the CL “Reply” articles, beginning with vol. 4, no. 8 to vol. 5, no. 2, and perhaps with its further volumes, the list will grow. That is to be seen. [note, the Peoples Tribune has not changed at all but continues with its emanation of philosophical idealism.]