On Sat, 7 Aug 1999, Rob Schaap wrote:
>(a) 'material': an analytic foundation conceived of as an integration of
>two dynamics: the way a society reproduces its physical existence and the
>relations that constitute that society;
Engels recognizes this in his best work, Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State (which was based on Marx's notes). This statement
as Rob puts it well is the basic premise of the historical materialist
approach. We should add that the reproduction of physical existence, both
individual and generational survival, as well as the social relations that
constitute society and produce history, presuppose society itself ('the
true is the whole'). These are axioms, not theories. This requirement that
existence and its perpetuation occur in society has a biological basis in
the absence of instinct; Homo sapiens emerged as a species within and
entirely dependent on the context of an already high level of
sociocultural development. We are not only human only in society, but
without society the species does not perpetuate. Therefore, for Marx,
materialism is not a physicalism (a position he explicitly condemned), but
rather the objective interchange between members of a collective in the
production of their existence. This is why the materialist dialectic in
Marx's hands--indeed, he is its originator--does not apply to the physical
world abstracted from history; the material dimension for Marx is the
objective basis for history, and this material dimension is the product of
human labor, which, again, presupposes society and history.
Dialectical materialism is, by contrast, that approach that resurrects
materialism as a form of physicalism/naturalism and then sees the
dialectic as suprahistorical laws of universal physical/natural
development. Therefore it represents a regression to objectivist idealism
but without the sophistication of Hegelianism. The paradox of dialectical
materialism is that its seeks to legitimate Marxism by transforming it
into a physical science but accomplishes instead the diametric opposite by
transforming the approach into a dogma, an ideology. Not only this, but by
subordinating materialist dialectics as conceived by Marx (i.e.,
historical materialism) to the dialectical materialist ideology (probably
more accurately called dialectical physicalism), dialectical materialists
reduce Marx's actual approach to ideology. In other words, dialectical
materialism is anti-Marxian.
Andy
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