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Chapter 6: The
materialist dialectic

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DESTRUCTION OF MEANING OUT

NOW

BY SIMON

We can begin as we did with Hegel, on

the general approach or method which
provided the underpinnings of Marx
and Engels method. Marx explained in
the preface to Capital: Volume 1,
published several decades later, that
he had not discarded the Hegelian
dialectic but transformed it, My
dialectic method is not only dierent
from the Hegelian, but is its direct
opposite. To Hegel, the life process of
the human brain, i.e., the process of
thinking, which, under the name of
the Idea, he even transforms into an
independent subject, is the demiurgos
of the real world, and the real world is
only the external, phenomenal form of
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Destruction of Meaning by Simon Hardy,

available on Amazon now.
Ever wondered why politics seems so empty
sometimes? Why media spectacle has
replaced meaningful debate? How someone
like Obama can be called a "communist" for
passing healthcare reform? How the most
successful capitalist country in the world
today, China, is run by a Communist Party?
Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

CHAPTERS

only the external, phenomenal form of

the Idea. With me, on the contrary,
the ideal is nothing else than the
material world reected by the human mind, and translated into forms
of thought. 1
Kant had reintroduced the method of dialectical analysis into western
philosophy, Hegel had developed it and brought it to its most perfect
form within the boundaries of German idealism, and now Marx and
Engels were able to turn it right side up again and discover the
rational kernel within the mystical shell. In short, although Hegel had
developed a philosophy which saw categories of thought as being
derived from an idealist construct of the World Spirit, at the same time
he provided a method whereby motion and the interconnected nature
of things could be demonstrated. This rational form of the dialectic
was and remains an essential component of scientic socialism, and is
the cornerstone of the Marxist method because it identies the
immanent contradiction in the heart of the social order itself, it is this
that has revolutionary consequences for every existing social relation
and institution.
Again in Capitals Afterword Marx explains the importance of the
dialectical method in his work on political economy [i]n its mystied
form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to
transfigure and glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it
is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire
professors, because it includes in its comprehension and armative
recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the
recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up;
because it regards every historically developed social form as in uid
movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature no
less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose
upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary. 2
In his book on Feuerbach, Engels
adumbrates the importance of
dialectical method in thought:
The great basic thought that
the
world is not to
be
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CHAPTERS
Introduction: What is being discussed?
Chapter 1: The Enlightenment
Chapter 2: The breakthrough in philosophy
Chapter 3: Hegel and the completion of
German idealist philosophy
Chapter 4: The early utopian socialists
Chapter 5: The beginnings of scientific
socialism

Chapter 7: Historical Materialism

Chapter 8: The method of abstraction
Chapter 9: Alienation
Chapter 10: Social Oppression
Chapter 11: Surplus value, the working class
and ideology
Chapter 12: Boom and bust and the limits of
capitalism
Chapter 13: Revolutionary crises under
capitalism
Methodology I: Scientific Socialism as a
World-view
Methodology II: Marxism and determinism
Chapter 14: The capitalist state, workers
state, socialism and communism (the riddle
of history solved)
Chapter 15: The Second International

the
world is not to
be
comprehended as a complex of
ready-made things, but as a
complex of processes, in which
the things apparently stable no
less than their mind images in
our heads, the concepts, go
through an uninterrupted change
of coming into being and passing
away, in which, in spite of all
seeming accidentally and of all
temporary
retrogression,
a
progressive development asserts
Diagram of the materialist dialectic, courtesey of
itself in the end this great
David Harvey and online at Larval Subjects
fundamental
thought
has,
especially since the time of
Hegel, so thoroughly permeated
ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is now scarcely ever
contradicted. But to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words
and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation are
two different things. 3
The materialist dialectic posits an organic relationship in which
everything is part of the whole and the whole organises and
dominates the parts that is to say the totality exists both in its
components and as an entity in-itself. However, the totality is not
xed, it is moving, composed of numerous contradictions which are in
uid motion with each other. Everything must be comprehended as a
part of the whole both as it is and how it is moving, in other words
what it is becoming. There can be no articial distinction between the
parts, it is wrong to separate economy from politics, just as much as it
is to isolate art and culture from the totality. Of course individuals
parts can be analysed abstractly, but not in such a way that dissolves
the living connections and bonds that it has to the totality. Marx
develops a way of analysing distinct levels or components of social
formations and the correlatory ideas called abstraction, which we will
examine later.
It was not just Hegel that provided the bedrock for the early formation
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Chapter 16: The debates over historical

materialism
Chapter 17: Fabianism in Britain
Chapter 18: Revisionist controversy in
Germany
Chapter 19: Reform or revolution 1914-1919
Part Four The struggle for the soul of
Marxism
Chapter 20: Ultra leftism and the Third
International
Chapter 21: Hegelian Marxism, Lukcs and
Korsch
Chapter 22: Antonio Gramsci theories of
hegemony, civil society and revolution
Chapter 23: Soviet philosophy
Chapter 24: Leon Trotsky and the fight for
the International
Part Five The post war world
Chapter 25: The Frankfurt School and critical
theory
Chapter 26: Maoism in East and West
Chapter 27: The New Left
Chapter 28: Existentialism: a philosophy of
reality
Chapter 30: Structuralist Marxism
Chapter 31: Poulantzas and Eurocommunism

NEW BOOK OUT NOW!

It was not just Hegel that provided the bedrock for the early formation
of scientic socialism. We have already looked at the ideas of the
utopian socialists which were somewhat inuential in the young
workers movement at the time. It is important to mention two other
sources which inuenced Marx. The rst, which often goes
unmentioned, is Aristotle. Of course Marx rejects Aristotles socially
conservative and outright reactionary views on women, slaves and so
on, but there is a lot of ideas and theories which point to a continuity
directly from Aristotle to Marx and also from Aristotle to Marx via
Hegel. Marx openly compliments Aristotles political economy, which,
whilst primitive in many respects, oers up profound insights on
commodities and the distinction between how useful something was
and what its exchange value was. 4 There is also some considerable
commonality with Aristotles views on eudamonia, the good life, and
Marxs desire to see our labour become unalienated. The descriptions
of life under communism which he gives seems to be inuenced by
this idea of living the good life as a social good, not merely as self
improvement. More generally speaking, Marx and Engels were
certainly in accord with Aristotles view of humanity as political,
creative, self-aware and active, the question that haunted them was
what were the social conditions which frustrated our social being from
achieving its full potential.
Importantly, it is arguable that Marx was advocating a teleological
concept, borrowed from Hegel, which Aristotle had originally
articulated. Scientic socialism posits the inevitability of socialism
developing after capitalism, as the conditions for this society are
immanent within the social order of capitalism itself. There is a causal
relationship, based on material factors which leads to the emergency
of socialism through the conscious action of the central component of
capitalism the working class. Of course it is possible that this
development could not happen because of an accident, such as
environmental destruction or nuclear war, but otherwise it has to
occur sooner or later. If this is teleological, then it strives for a
materialist basis and not an idealist one because it does not require a
ctitious prime mover or God-gure working mysteriously to make it
happen. It is also not the case that a socialist future is somehow
acting back on the capitalist past to cause its own creation. Since
Marx was a doctor of Philosophy and had specialised in ancient Greek
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Beyond Capitalism? The Future of Radical

Politics co-authored with Luke Cooper from
the Anticapitalist Initiative.
Click here for more information. You can
also buy it for 8 from The Book Depository
a company probably not as bad as Amazon.

Marx was a doctor of Philosophy and had specialised in ancient Greek

thought, so he was not unfamiliar with these notions and was
undoubtedly inuenced by the Atomists school of thought which he
researched for his doctorate.
The second important inuence on Marx was the British political
economists. Smith and Ricardo provided valuable insights and theories
that made signicant contributions to Marxism, primarily Smiths
labour theory of value and his work on the division of labour. Smith
was investigating where the value of commodities came from, not just
in the agricultural community but in industry. He concluded that the
value is in a sense embedded in the commodity when it is created,
not when it is sold for instance when he explains; labour be the real
measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. Furthermore
Smith also had a conception of where prot came from which was
very inuential on Marx, the value which the workmen add to the
materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which
one pays their wages, the other the prots of their employer.
However, his conclusion was that there was a law of value in
premodern socieities and conditions of small scale production, but not
under capitalism. It was Ricardos critique of this position that created
a greater synthesis of knowledge of political economy as he placed
the law of value at the centre of his analysis. Writing in 1821, he
agreed with Smith that labour was the foundation of all value, and
the relative quantity of labour as almost exclusively determining the
relative value of commodities.
Marx saw in the theory of surplus value a way of understanding where
the most important dynamic in capitalist society came from, and how
it could have implications for its revolutionary transformation. If the
value of a commodity comes from the amount of labour that was put
into it that puts the entire nexus of capitalist property relations and
the source of their prot not in the market place but at the point of
production. Suddenly the working class moves from being one
component in a process of prot making, alongside the owners of
capital and the merchants, to become the central part of it.
But Marx did not just import these ideas uncritically. Even as early as
t he Poverty of Philosophy (1847) he opens re on the fundamental
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t he Poverty of Philosophy (1847) he opens re on the fundamental

aw in the method of the political economists, that they tended to see
the capitalist system as eternal, and in some way commensurate with
the laws of nature itself (that we live in a permanent state of
competition, aggregation of surplus is natural in primitive societies,
etc.).
He argued: Economists express the relations of bourgeois production,
the division of labour, credit, money, etc. as xed immutable, eternal
categories. Economists explain how production takes place in the
above mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these
relations themselves are produced, that is the historical movement
that gave them birth. 5
Bourgeois economics obscures
the reality of social relations
by
attributing
apparently
innate
characteristics
to
humans

hard
working,
competitive, greedy and so on
and then deducing economic
relations from these. So the
market economy appears as a
natural outgrowth of human
behaviour rather than a socioeconomic system which exists
as a result of a particular class
structure. This fundamentally
obscures reality, and forms the
Its no good Marx, youll have to explain it again
basis for the conservative
I just dont get the act of destroying whilst
argument
that
socialism
preserving the essence part
cannot work because people
are greedy. For a Left
Hegelian like Marx brought up
on the idea of civil society and the sight of the young proletariat
working in a spirit of co-operation and community, the idea that
everyone was selsh was simply a bourgeois fantasy, only a partial
moment of truth for anyone and certainly not a description of reality
for all humans all the time. The notion that all previous societies were
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for all humans all the time. The notion that all previous societies were
some how a distorted version of the true market economy, that the
arrival of capitalism saw humanity reach the zenith of its social
evolution as the natural order was asserted into the economic sphere
was therefore wrong. Thus, the most important ideological struggle to
wage was to refute the claim that thus, there has been history but
there no longer is any. 6
Starting with The German Ideology we can see the emergence of the
materialist, revolutionary outlook on history and Marx and Engels work
out their ideas in combat with the Young Hegelians that they had until
recently been members of. The method is fully materialist since it
takes as its starting point matter and the actual existing conditions of
the world itself. Thought is a product of matter and energy, nothing
else which is the crucial cleavage with idealist forms of thought
which believe that there is something else in the universe which also
produces ideas and thought. Once we come crashing down from the
heavens to Earth, dust ourselves o and look around us with clear and
fresh eyes, free from religious convictions or spiritual concepts like
fate and destiny, we can begin to see human history and our own lives
for what they really are and then begin to gure out how to change
them.
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Notes:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Marx K, Capital volume 1

Afterword to Capital volume 1
Engels F, Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of Classical German philosophy
Aristotle said that a sandal could be used two ways, it could be worn or it could be
exchanged, in otherwords it had both use value and an exchange value.
5. Poverty of philosophy
6. Poverty of Philosophy chapter 2. Worth bearing in mind when considering the End of History
thesis of Francis Fukuyama

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Comments
2 Comments

Add a comment...

Miguel Detonacciones

I have become aware of a recent fundamental breakthrough, in Marxian dialectics, and in the formulation of a comprehensive and singular Dialectic of Nature
that may be of interest to you.

Through the discovery of a new algebra, a contra-Boolean algebra of dialectical logic, the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica research collective has been
able to formulate a single dialectical equation which models, categorially, the epochal evolutions, and revolutions, of our cosmos, starting from the pre-nuclea
particles [the bosons, quarks, and leptons].
This dialectical equation-model would be a ... See more
Like Reply 10 June 2014 10:00

Akanimo Samuel
Chairman at Samakan concepts

fantastic
Like Reply 18 June 2014 16:33
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POSTED IN TH E MATERIALIST DIALECTIC | TAGGED DIALECTICS, H EGEL, PH ILOSOPH Y |

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 Chapter 5: The beginnings of scientific

Chapter 7: Historical Materialism

socialism

One thought on Chapter 6: The materialist dialectic

Carlos says:

February 4, 2013 at 9:45 pm

(except that Ive seen him argue against non-market priincg, which is delightful in any
case), but as a philosopher there may very well be something to him.Recently, I found
this on Marx error of class-distribution.Marx argues (as is commonly known) that there is a
struggle for dominance between the workers and the capitalists. The Fofoa -writer argues that
the two classes are savers and spenders, and that the mechanisms under which power changes
are fairly known.The spenders spend until they go broke (this is where we are today), where the
savers effectively end up in power. When the spenders later get bored with having to live within
their means, they overthrow the rule of the savers, and start spending restarting the cycle.Its
an interesting piece ,-)-S
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