"Devine, James" wrote:
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> However, I think it's a mistake to assert that "Everything in the world (and also in
>human society and in human thought) is composed of dialectical contradictions."
Whether or not everything is composed of dialectical contradictions, Jim
is quite right to say that it is a mistake to assert so. Some of the
wisest advice on the _use_ of dialectics is to be found in a passage
from the _Anti-Duhring_:
Marx merely shows from history, and here states in a summarised form,
that just as formerly petty industry by its very development necessarily
created the conditions of its own annihilation, i.e., of the
expropriation of the small proprietors, so now the capitalist mode of
production has likewise itself created the material conditions from
which it must perish. The process is a historical one, and if it is at
the same time a dialectical process, this is not Marx's fault, however
annoying it may be to Herr Dühring.
It is only at this point, after Marx has completed his proof on
the basis of historical and economic facts, that he proceeds:
"The capitalist mode of production and appropriation, hence
the capitalist private property, is the first negation of individual
private property founded on the labour of the proprietor. Capitalist
production begets, with the inexorability of a process of nature, its
own negation. It is the negation of the negation" — and so on (as quoted
above).
Thus, by characterising the process as the negation of the
negation, Marx does not intend to prove that the process was
historically necessary. On the contrary: only after he has proved from
history that in fact the process has partially already occurred, and
partially must occur in the future, he in addition characterises it as a
process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law.
That is all.
(MECW, Vol. 25. p. 125)
I think Marx's practice as described here by Engels is exemplary. I
always wince when I read a criticism asserting that so-and-so is
undialectical. If the statement is to be made at all it should come at
_the end_ of the critique, which should first be established without
throwing around labels which in isolation are quite empty.
Carrol
P.S. I think Mao is given a bad rap by those who wrench his works out of
their context in the Chinese Revolution. In his use of the terms
"antagonistic" and "non-antagonistic" contradictions Mao (at least prior
to the fiasco of the Three-Worlds Theory) followed Marx's practice very
closely: the terminology came at the end of concrete analysis of ongoing
conflict in China. We can learn from his practice, but not if we
blithely ignore its context, as did those "Maoists" of the '70s who
attempted to impose the "United Front" strategy on the U.S., thus
requiring the proliferation of imaginary classes in the U.S. in order
to have the elements of which a united front consists.
