MARXISM AND AMERICAN PRAGMATISM

Lecture One -- The Social And Philosophical Roots Of Pragmatism 

THE FIRST QUESTION I want to address myself to, and in many ways this will be the theme of these lectures, is why do we study philosophy? Why at this particular point do we propose that it becomes critically important to turn to questions of philosophy in order to be able to build a party, a revolutionary party in the United States, in order to be able to take part in the whole international struggle for socialism? 

Throughout these lectures I am going to be referring to a book by George Novack, who is the main person in the Socialist Workers Party who concerns himself with questions of philosophy, called Empiricism and its Evolution. In answer to this question and in fact to a more specific question, more directly related to what we are doing here - why it is important for socialists, militants and workers at this point to study empiricism - Novack states: “First of all for practical reasons.” Then he notes that “the current influence of empiricism upon the organizations of the working class give immediate point and political purpose to a study of its characteristics.”(1) 

This in a sense, of course, is correct. He then goes on to point out by example that the trade union leaderships, the social democrats, and in particular, Atlee and Wilson, use the empirical method, and that the empirical method is the basis for opportunism. It is the method of opportunism; it is the method which says we just seek within the given existing situation to do what we can. It is the philosophy of “bread and butter” politics. You get a little bit here; you patch together something there.

 

PARTY 

But what Novack misses is the main and central point. While he sees empiricism as the philosophy of opportunism - and as we develop the discussion through these lectures we will see that even clearer - he sees this opportunism as expressed outside the party itself. In other words, he sees the question of philosophy as a way of arming the party to fight the enemy, and the enemy is seen as somewhere outside the party in the form of the labor bureaucracy and the right wing social - democracy. By posing it that way, the whole central meaning and thrust of philosophy and its role within the party gets pushed aside, and philosophy becomes just simply an educational activity at best within the party, to arm party members to fight the opportunists somewhere else. 

In so doing he misses the main, the real central meaning of Trotsky’s in many ways most important work and certainly his last major contribution, that is In Defense of Marxism. Right on the eve of World War II you had breaking out inside the Trotskyist movement itself, in the most important section of the world Trotskyist movement, the Socialist Workers Party, a fundamental struggle which Trotsky explains represented a class struggle, a clash of classes within the party itself. At the very heart of that struggle was the question of philosophy and the Marxist method. At the very heart of the opportunist opposition, the petty-bourgeois opposition which developed in the SWP in 1940, the very core, the central meaning of it was the question of philosophy, method and pragmatism. 

We would pose the question of why study philosophy in a sharper form. We pose it in this way. We would say that the question of philosophy is the question of the party. They are not separate questions. They are essentially the same question. In the world today there is no philosophy, there is no development of philosophy outside of the revolutionary party. And in the world today there is no revolutionary party outside of the development of philosophy. 

PRACTICAL 

We see philosophy not as something to fight empiricism with some place else, but as the very heart of the question of the party itself. We see that basically the party, and the construction of the party, is a philosophical question. To the extent that the construction of the party is a philosophical question, philosophy therefore is a practical task. We can see this if we ask two additional questions which are necessary for an understanding of why we study philosophy. 

First of all, what is philosophy? Philosophy historically has centered around the question of human knowledge and its validity, of the relationship of idea to reality. All philosophical schools from the origins of philosophy in Greece have to one extent or another confronted this basic question, and have posed one or another solution. Philosophy has always been an attempt to relate the thinking of man to the material world. Therefore at the heart of any philosophical position or system is where the philosopher stands on that question of the relationship of knowledge, of thought to reality, of how knowledge takes place, how one can know, how one learns, how knowledge can develop.  

LOGIC

The form of the theory of knowledge is logic, which is the science of cognition, or the scientific approach toward the thinking process. So when we are dealing with philosophy, we are really dealing with two related things. One is what is the relationship of thought to the material world. The second is, what are the processes of thought, how does thought take place, how do we organize our thinking in order to be able to understand? 

Lenin writes as follows in the Philosophical Notebooks about logic: 

“Logic is the science of cognition. It is the theory of knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of nature by man. But this is not a simple, not an immediate, not a complete reflection, but the process of a series of abstractions, the formation and development of concepts, laws, etc. and these concepts, laws, etc. embrace conditionally, approximately, the universal law-governed character of eternally moving and developing nature.” (2) 

He is saying several things here. First he says that logic, which we will be discussing as we go along, is the science of cognition, that is, the scientific approach to the question of thinking. He says it is the theory of knowledge, that is the theory of how thinking takes place and how it relates to the external world. This knowledge is a reflection of nature by man. This is the materialist stand on the question of knowledge. What we know is a reflection in our mind of the external world. But it is not a simple reflection. It is not just simply putting a mirror up to the external world. It is a complex process. It is reflecting nature in your mind through a series of abstractions, through the formation and development of concepts and laws which embrace in part and to a certain degree, the universal material world around us. 

He further notes that thinking, cognition, contains at its heart an active element. It is not just simply a mirror which reflects reality. Lenin says: 

‘‘Marx clearly sides with Hegel in introducing the criterion of practice into the theory of knowledge, see the ‘Theses on Feuerbach.’”(3)

It wasn’t Marx who discovered the conception of practice and the role of practice in thinking. Hegel, in particular, introduced the conception of practice, of the active element of practice into the theory of knowledge, and through this conception in an idealist way broke down the dualism between your own subjective thinking, the thinking of a particular individual, and the whole world around us. 

Marx said, in the Theses on Feuerbach: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.”(4) 

CHANGE

On this point, what Marx is saying is that the question of whether the world exists is not a question which can be understood, can be coped with analytically, that is, by the relationship of one thought to another thought in your mind, but is a question which can only be resolved in actual practice, that is, in your actual participation in the world. In other words ideas are a reflection of reality and the proof of this is in the fact that you change reality. 

Or as Lenin puts it: “Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.”(5) 

Let us summarize what we are saying about philosophy. Philosophy is the theory of knowledge. That is at the heart of what philosophy is - how you relate your thinking to the objective world. The relationship of your thinking to the objective world has two aspects. First is thought as a reflection in your mind of what is around you, though that reflection is not a simple thing like a mirror where you just see a picture of a tree. It is a more abstract thing - you have a conception of a tree. You don’t just see a picture of a thing which is green and has a certain shape. You have a conception of a tree. When you see something which is green and has that kind of shape, immediately you think “tree.” 

In other words, the reflection of reality in your mind takes an abstract form. You have a conception, thought. The second aspect of knowledge is your participation in the material world which you are a part of and your struggle to change it. Or as Lenin puts it, man not only reflects the objective world, he creates it. 

PROGRAM

Now we turn to the second question, what is the party. The party, we are talking now about a revolutionary party, is a voluntary organization. There is no compulsion to be a member of a revolutionary party. One chooses to be a member of a revolutionary party. At heart, what the party is is its program. It is nothing else. The apparatus, the forces, the people, the equipment, the paper, are all expressions of what? A program, and it is the program around which it is all organized. It is all organized to implement that program and a program is an idea. So at its heart you could say that the party is an idea. 

But we can say something more than that. But we begin with that conception. The party is an idea, it is a conception, it is a program, it is a series of positions or conceptions, abstractions if you like. This idea in turn reflects the interests of a social class, the working class. Not directly, like a mirror, but in a more complex way. But it reflects the material interests of a material body, of a specific social class, organized in a material way, representing specific economic interests and desires and motivations in the actual material world. 

So the party is an idea which reflects material reality. It is also composed of materiality; it is composed of people organized around that idea. It is that idea which selects the people, the people don’t select the idea. 

The task of the party is to change reality. Not just change it in the sense of influencing it here and influencing it there, but to fundamentally change the very nature of society. Through the changing of the nature of the society the party opens up a new stage in the changing of reality itself, the whole material world we know. Because only to the extent that man triumphs over society, controls his own society can we really leap forward in man’s control and development of nature. 

SAME

If we understand the party in that sense, if we understand philosophy in this context, we see that they are the same question, are they not? They are the same question. The party is the organization of material forces around an idea for the changing of material reality. This means at heart the party is the question of the relationship of thought to practice, of theory to reality through practice inorder to change reality. That’s what the party is. 

Therefore the development of the party is a philosophical question. The party cannot develop if it cannot relate idea to reality in such a way as to change reality. It cannot relate idea to reality if it is going to be obtuse and refuse to look at the question of how idéds are related to reality. That is the question of philosophy. 

We must struggle against all those conceptions which take our thought processes from a real reflection of reality into something that is alien to reality, into something which is an impediment for changing reality. At the heart of philosophy is the question of the party. There is no philosophy, there is only the degeneration of philosophy outside of the party. 

Thus Marx states: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.”(6)

This has two meanings. First, the rise of the working class marks the end of classical philosophy. It means on the one hand that philosophy outside of the party is dead, there is no philosophy any more in the sense of interpreting the world in various ways. That is a past period. After Marx there has been, as we shall see, no philosophical development, there has only been degeneration. But it also means that in order to change the world you need a philosophical understanding and you cannot build a party unless you take the question of philosophy and make the question of philosophy at the center of the party. 

ROOTS

In this lecture we are going to deal with the question of the social and philosophical roots of pragmatism. We will not get to pragmatism in this lecture. We are probably not even going to get to the United States. We will get to these questions in the next lecture. What we are going to do is very briefly sketch the development of philosophy and put it in its social context since the birth of empiricism, that is, what is known as philosophy of the modern world, philosophy since the birth of capitalism. 

We will be sketching briefly the philosophical development of thought and the social development of society and we will see from the materialist point of view that the two are related, to put it in Marx's terms, as superstructure is to base. But I want to issue a warning at this point, and this is a point that Plekhanov goes in to in his pamphlet that has recently been republished, Fundamental Problems of Marxism.(7)

The relationship of the superstructure to the base is a complex relationship, and at every moment every specific philosophic conception does not specifically relate to some specific material interest. It is just that the general trend of thought reflects social classes. Only through an understanding of that can there be any understanding of thought, and why people think what they do. 

Second, to say that a particular philosophical conception has a social root does not answer the philosophical conception. For instance, if we say that empiricism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, that does not remove from us the obligation to take the conceptions of empiricism and to answer the philosophical points the empiricists make. Unless we understand that, we will be approaching the questions of philosophy in an extremely anti-theoretical way. We won’t be understanding the first point we made, that is, the importance of philosophy to the party. 

BOURGEOIS

Empiricism was born with the bourgeois revolution. It is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie. It had its greatest strength and it developed its most profound and powerful philosophers precisely in the period when the bourgeoisie found itself in a struggle with feudalism. When the bourgeoisie was seeking to break itself free, break the productive forces that had already begun to develop within the old society, these productive forces were constantly running up against the old judicial, legal and land relationships of feudal society. 

Empiricism was formed in a struggle against the philosophy of feudalism known as metaphysics. This philosophy was largely devoted to argumentation to prove the existence of God developing from an analytical and complex system, what is known as scholasticism. Scholasticism is based on the development of analysis, logical analysis. It doesn’t begin with reality; it is not related to reality. It is not related to the material world, but it is concerned with the relationship of an idea to an idea. 

It always proceeds like this: If you accept A then it follows that B is true. Then if B is true, we must conclude that C must be false. Having already agreed to all that we can then proceed to D. It is on that level that scholastic philosophy develops. 

FEUDAL

It represents essentially a justification of the feudal order which as we know was an order based on an extremely static set up, a hierarchical set up. Religion was very much a part of it, and the Catholic Church in particular was not only at the heart of the feudal system in the sense of defending the feudal system but was part of the feudal system. In most countries of the world the Catholic Church represented at least a third and sometimes as much as a half or more of the feudal class itself. In other words they owned. a third or half of all the arable land, they were the largest employer of serfs, and they had the largest estates and so on. 

Now, what the empiricists did was say that the fundamental question is not the relationship of an idea to an idea through analysis, but the relationship of an idea to experience through what is known logically as synthesis. Or as Novack puts it: “The primary principle of empiricism is that all knowledge is founded on experience of the senses.”(8) 

The early empiricists like Bacon and later the most influential of all empiricists John Locke, based themselves on this conception. With the conception that knowledge is based on the experience of the senses, that truth means correspondence of ideas to sensory information, they attacked feudal conceptions: metaphysics, scholastics and all these justifications for the old order. 

SCIENCE

At the same time, obviously, this philosophy was not only used to break down the power of the church and religion and all the justification for the old feudal order, which had become economically at that point reactionary and holding back the development of society, but it also reflected the very necessary development of science. That is, for capitalism to develop technology had to develop so that the machinery of the productive forces from which the capitalists made profit would develop. Only with the development of the mechanistic science in its early stages were they able to develop the beginnings of manufacturing technique. With the later development of chemistry and of physics you had a tremendous industrial development in the productive forces. Empiricism was also a reflection of the development of science and was very much to free science from questions of religion.

The early empiricists posed questions similarly to what is known as pragmatism, in the sense of emphasizing the question of practice, the practical meaning of theory. Bacon for instance said: “What is most useful in practice is most correct in theory. For truth is shown and proved by the evidence of works.”(9) This was written in the 16th century and represents a very good statement of what we will see later became the basic philosophy of the pragmatists. 

ENGLAND

At the same time it should be recognized that the home of empiricism was England. England was the first capitalist country, the first country in which capitalism really developed. The English bourgeois revolution was the earliest of the bourgeois revolutions. 

It is also important to note that because of the early development and power of the British bourgeoisie, and the fact that it emerged as the dominant world force, the British bourgeoisie was in a position to carry through a compromise with the old feudal class. This produced what we know now as the British system of constitutional monarchy. The bourgeoisie through the House of Commons dominated Britain politically but at the same time you still had the House of Lords which over a period of time lost its power. You still had a king. 

IDEALISM

In philosophy, the early empiricists were never fully and completely materialist. They always held open a door to idealism and religion. For instance, to say that all knowledge is founded on experience of the senses does not necessarily mean that the experience of the senses is founded on a material world. In other words the empiricists were what is known as sensationalists. They based themselves on the conception of sensation; they recognized sensation as what hits your eye, and your ears and so on. They recognized sensation as the basis of knowledge. But when it came to the question of what the basis of sensation is, they had a question in their minds. 

Locke, for instance, said that the world is made up of “independent self-determining unchangeable substances”(10) but he said that we cannot know “the secret abstract nature of substance in general.” (11) In other words he had a position which we shall see later was actually developed by Kant into a whole system. The idea was that our perceptions, our sensations, must be caused by substance. Locke says they are caused by substance. But sensation we know; substance we cannot know. Substance is like a First Cause; something which causes sensation. We only can infer that substance exists because we get sensations. But we cannot know substance. 

SENSATION

Knowledge is thus completely based on sensation, but sensation is not based on anything really knowable. You are not really sure what sensation is based on. Well then you have to come to the conclusion that your knowledge is not only imperfect, in the sense that it is not complete but is also unreliable. In other words you develop a skeptical attitude toward knowledge. This is seen when he says: ‘‘We may be convinced that the ideas we attain to by our faculties are very disproportionate to things themselves, when a positive clear distinct one of substance itself which is the foundation of all the rest, is concealed from us.’’(12) 

What he is saying is that our ideas are very much unrelated to the material world. They have some relationship but it is a very imperfect relationship to the material world and how could it be otherwise since the basis of the material world, substance, is unknown to us. We cannot know it. It is unknowable. 

Empiricism, like the bourgeoisie it represented philosophically, accepted those aspects of materialism necessary to fight the idealists, the old feudal order, and to make it possible for a certain material development of industry. At the point where what was required was confronting the complete and absolute material stand - at that point they pulled back. As Marx pointed out in particular at a later point in his writings on Germany, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany, and Trotsky pointed out in his theory of the permanent revolution which based itself on Marx’s writings on Germany, as capitalism developed it began more and more to confront not just feudalism on the one side, but the working class on the other. It is this that constantly forced capitalism in its later development to compromise with feudalism and to hold back from precisely what had been the most progressive features of capitalism in its earlier period. This is what is reflected here in this compromise with idealism which is at the heart of empiricism. 

We must understand therefore that when we are talking about empiricism we are not talking about a consistent materialist outlook. We are talking about an outlook which simply says that the knowledge we have is based on experience. We cannot get knowledge from any other source. 

The empiricists do not even necessarily mean that. They say that whatever knowledge we can get from any other source comes to us in a religious way and that we cannot judge it. We just have to accept it. Because all these people are religious men and they all believe in faith. In other words, you do not necessarily have a material world, you do not know substance. What can you say if someone says that on the basis of faith he has communicated with God? Well why not? If you are not a materialist you cannot deny the existence of a non-material world. All you deny really is that there is any rational way of explaining God, reaching God, defending God. 

DECAY

With the development of capitalism, and its maturity, which in the U.S. came in the era of the Robber Barons, the late 19th century, we have the emergence of pragmatism. In the period of the maturity and decay of capitalism, and corresponding to this the rise of the working class and the beginning of its political maturity, you had the decay of empiricism and the rise of idealism. This has been the general characteristic of modern philosophy, particularly since Hume. 

The point here, and it is a particularly devastating point about capitalism, is that the strength of capitalism in its thinking for the thinking of man, was the extent to which it related ideas, at least in part, to the real world. It did this through the conception that experience is the source of knowledge and turning to experience and sense perception as a real basis for the understanding and development of thought. With the development of capitalism, its maturity and decay, you have developing and growing inside capitalist thinking and philosophy precisely the conceptions which the early empiricists fought. That is, the development of even what is called empirical schools of thought since the days of Locke, have been a development back in the direction of idealism. Those ambiguities that existed in Locke’s system on the question of materialism were grabbed hold of. That side of John Locke which said, “I don’t know what substance is really composed of” became developed and that side of John Locke that said, “Well, anyway, the main thing is that we have knowledge and knowledge is real and is based on sensation,” was pushed aside. 

It appears in philosophy as if this took place on the basis of argument. It is as if Locke came up with a certain problem on this question. No one would deny that knowledge comes from sensation, but since he was ambiguous on where sensation came from all you needed was a very sharp and intelligent man to come along and to probe it philosophically and the whole system would collapse. It is many times posed that way by philosophers. They act as if the decay of philosophy took place completely unrelated to the development of capitalism. 

HUME

What Hume did was to take the method of empiricism and ruthlessly apply it to empiricism itself. He came to the conclusion of what is known as solipsism and skepticism. A solipsist view is the view that nothing exists outside yourself for the moment. Solipsism is the deadend of thought because you say that you can only project your own existence. You are therefore not sure that you existed before the word ‘‘existence’’ came out of your mouth, you have no way of knowing you exist after words come out of your mouth, and you have no way of connecting the word which came one millimeter of a second after one word with the word that came before. In other words, only the moment for you is real. 

CAUSALITY

Hume developed his view by applying the limited conceptions of empiricism to the conception of causality. As we know, all scientific knowledge is based on causIn other words, you conduct an experiment to find out something. You try to find out what was the cause and what is the effect: that one effect comes from a certain cause. You learn something and you have an expansion of knowledge. You learn that if you light a match and put it to a piece of paper the piece of paper burns up. Hume stated: 

“Objects have no discoverable connection together. Nor is it from any other principle but custom operating upon the imagination that we can draw any inference from the appearance of one to the existence of another. This skeptical doubt with respect to reason and the senses is a malady which can never be radically cured.”(13)

Basically what he is saying is that the relationship of the cause of something to the effect cannot be from the point of view of simple perception alone. You can perceive no more than a time relationship. You can only perceive that prior to the paper bursting into flame, a match was held underneath it. You cannot perceive that the match caused the paper to burn. The conception is in your mind. It cannot be perceived. You do not therefore perceive, as Hume pointed out, any of the logical categories. 

Since you cannot perceive these things, then we cannot state really that we have any knowledge of anything. This is because all the perceptions that one has, we order in our mind according to cause and effect, according to time sequence, according to spatial relationships. Time, space, cause, effect, contradiction, identity - all these things cannot be perceived as such and therefore we cannot be sure that the world has time in it, that the world has effect in it, that the world has cause in it, or that the world has space in it. All this may very well be what we add from our own mind. 

Since Hume, these statements have remained to this day questions that have not been answered outside of the Marxist movement. Shocking as it may seem, this business as to whether cause and effect exist in reality is still the mainstay of modern philosophers. 

RUSSELL 

Bertrand Russell, for instance, had the following to say about Hume:

“He represents, in a certain sense, a dead end: in his direction, it is impossible to go further. To refute him has been, ever since he wrote, a favorite pastime among metaphysicians. For my part, I find none of their refutations convincing; nevertheless, I cannot but hope that something less skeptical than Hume’s system may be discoverable.”(14) 

Basing himself on Hume he has the following to say about logic, his specialty: 

“What these arguments prove - and I do not think the proof can be controverted - is that induction is an independent logical principle, incapable of being inferred either from experience or from other logical principles, and that without this principle science is impossible.’’(15) 

The empiricist said that deduction is nothing. You just cannot simply prove. something by relating it to something else. 

In inductive thought, your thinking is dependent on experience. What Russell is saying is that we cannot prove that our experience is valid on the basis of experience. We certainly cannot prove that it is valid on the basis of simple logic, because the whole logic we have is open to question. But we cannot have any scientific understanding without logic, without the principles of induction, causality. So what is his conclusion from that? He does not like to do it, it makes him unhappy, he has difficulty sleeping sometimes, but basically he has to assume the existence of causality as a matter of faith. Since we have to think with logic, we will just accept that we have to think with logic, and then we will proceed, as did Russell, to take logic abstracted from reality, and analyze it, work it out in a mathematical way, the most complicated ways of relating word to word. Most important, we give up, because of what Hume said, relating word to reality and thus seeking to change reality. 

KANT

Kant is in my opinion very much the central figure in the development of modern bourgeois philosophy. We can say that all modern philosophy, with only the exception of the most extreme of Hegelians, today bases itself on Kant. All of it. No one outside of Marxism and Hegelian idealism really represents any different position than Kant on basic philosophic questions. Pragmatism as a philosophy is essentially Kantian, even though, as we will see later, Novack sees it as a simple development of empiricism. 

Kant began with Hume’s skepticism, Hume’s question of how to relate the thinking in our heads with the material world and the fact that the logical categories cannot be proved. Confronting these questions, Kant created a dualist system. 

Kant agreed with Locke that knowledge is based on sensation. He said that sensation is caused by things. He went on to say, however, that things are not knowable. We know sensation, we know the effect of things in themselves, but we cannot know things. The reason for this is that the things we perceive are organized because we have in our minds as an a priori the conception of time, space and logic, cause and effect, contradiction, etc. In other words, we simply must accept this a priori on faith. We simply cannot think without it. Itis there. It organizes the sense perceptions. We have no way of knowing whether the world is organized by time and by space, and has any identities or contradictions within it.  

So Kant was a dualist, he was an idealist in the sense that he considered the basic conceptions of thought were unprovable, immaterial, and he was a materialist to the extent that he considered the origin of experience and perception something materially that exists that he called “thing in itself.”’ This material world he did not consider really knowable. We could only therefore get a sort of approximate idea of things. Lenin said about Kant: 

“The principal feature of the philosophy of Kant is an attempted reconciliation of materialism and idealism, a compromise between the claims of both, a fusion of heterogeneous and contrary philosophic tendencies into one system. When Kant admits that something outside of us - a thing-in-itself - corresponds to our perceptions he seems to be a materialist. When he, however, declares this thing-in-itself to be unknowable, transcendent, ‘trans-intelligible’ - he appears to be an idealist. Regarding experience as the only source of our knowledge, Kant seems to be turning towards sensationalism and by way of sensationalism, under special conditions, toward materialism. Recognizing the apriority of space, time, and causality, etc., Kant seems to be turning towards idealism.”(16) 

The whole Hegelian system and dialectics was really developed as an answer to Kant. Lenin, basing himself on Hegel, summarizes the critique of Kant as follows: 

“In my opinion the essence of the argument is (1) in Kant, cognition demarcates (divides) nature and man; actually it unites them; (2) in Kant ‘the empty abstraction’ of thing-in-itself instead of living progress, the movement deeper and deeper, of our knowledge about things.”(17) 

Lenin bases his criticism of Kant on Hegel. This was why Engels said that very little needed to be said about Kant because most of it had already been said by Hegel.(18) The difference between Kant’s approach and a dialectical approach is that in Kant the thought process actually separates out man from nature because his thought is structured by a prioris, which are unrelated to nature, so that thinking, rather than bringing man and nature closer together, separates man and nature. It is a dualist system. The thought is unrelated to nature. We organize nature according to some internal system for some reason that is not explained. 

Second, in Kant because of this separating out of thinking of man and nature, you have a conception of nature which is an empty abstraction, dead. Thing-in-itself is unknowable, it is there but it is dead, you can learn nothing about it. It has no movement, it cannot have movement because it does not have space and it does not have time, it is simply an empty abstraction. Therefore the whole real world as we know it is transformed into an empty abstraction. With dialectics the real world is seen as a living movement, as a development, with our knowledge at every point developing a deeper and deeper understanding of that movement. 

Hegel wrote his logic essentially in answer to Kant, to destroy his dualism and inconsistency. This presents us with a tremendous paradox: we have Kant representing a compromise with the very idealism of religion and feudalism which original bourgeois empiricism had fought. So to that extent Kant represents a step back toward the philosophy of an earlier period, of feudalism, of an earlier stage in the development of man despite the great development of modern society and technique, with man’s tremendous beginning to master the material w6rld. Because he cannot master his own social system, you have developing within that social system as its main philosophers people who begin to move back and to compromise with the very mystical conceptions of the middle ages. Hegel represented a resolution of that compromise in favor of idealism. The only thing that was real to Hegel was thought and idea, and therefore the only thing that exists is God; everything is a reflection of God. Hegel represented the most extreme retreat back toward the Middle Ages. This is what we must conclude if we see Hegel in a one sided way. What we would thus miss is that cloaked in the form of a retreat back to the Middle Ages, bourgeois philosophy only developed under Hegel. 

KERNEL

The only philosopher who contributed to human thought after Locke was Hegel. Only covered with mysticism could a kernel of truth develop. What Hegel did was to say that reason in effect is God. Having said that, and that only reason exists, he then took reason and rational cognitive process and developed an understanding of the laws of rational development. Since reason is a reflection of the real world Hegel developed the laws of the real world far beyond anyone before him. 

MARX

On this level Marx changed very little of Hegel. He simply, as he put it, tore off the cloak. The capitalists could only develop philosophical thinking by covering themselves up with a white sheet like a ghost. Marx said: “Thus it happened that the active side in opposition was developed by idealism.”(18) 

The active role of man, that should have been developed by the materialists, the active participation by man in thinking, and in life and in reality, was developed not by the materialists but by the idealists. Lenin said this about idealism: 

“Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated development of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge into an absolute; divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised. Idealism is clerical obscurantism. True. But Philosophical idealism is a road to clerical obscurantism through one of the shades of the infinitely complex knowledge of man.”(19)  

Philosophical idealism, particularly in the form of Hegel, developed one shade of reality, that is the reflection in mind of the real relationships of the world. it developed that one shade of reality to deny all the rest. ‘But it developed that one shade. Our task is not to throw it all out. Only by seeing it as a development of that shade, a very critical shade, and only by putting it back into the material world where it belongs, turning Hegel on his head, as Marx put it, can development in philosophy take place. 

RIVER

Lenin describes Hegel’s dialectic as follows:

“A river and the drops in this river. The position of every drop, its relation to the others; its connection with the others; the direction of its movement; its speed; the line of the movement - straight, curved, circular, etc. - upwards, downwards. The sum of the movement. Concepts, as registration of individual aspects of the movement, of individual streams, etc. There you have approximately the picture of the world according to Hegel’s Logic - of course minus God and the Absolute.”(20) 

If you see the world as a river, the dialectic allows you to see the river, to see each drop in it, to discover the position of each drop, the relationship of each drop to every other drop, the connection of the drops, the direction of the movement of the whole, the speed of the movement of the whole, the line of the movement of the whole - is it a curve, a spiral - is it up, is it down, the exaggeration or the abstraction of particular aspects of this movement, each aspect, each stream of the river. Then put all that together. That is human knowledge, as Hegel saw it and as Marx Saw it. Another way that Lenin put it, basing himself on Hegel is that understanding is the universal, yes, the general conception, but the universal enriched with all the detail of the particular.(21) That is human knowledge. 

Pragmatism and positivism, linguistic theories, etc., all the so-called modern philosophies, represent really a degeneration of philosophy within the framework of Kant. Everyone of these schools agrees with Hume and agrees with Kant on the unreality of logic. All of these philosophers hold this position, all these philosophers stand opposed to the question of the objective reality of the material world. 

COVER

To the extent that the working class developed and the bourgeoisie confronted its own inability to develop, the great technical forces began to bang up against the social way those productive forces were organized. The world began to turn into the period of imperialism, and war and chaos, and atomic bombs and all the rest. To that extent the role of philosophy became not to fight metaphysics, but to defend metaphysics, God, religion, mysticism, to defend all that and cover it with a superficial look of empirical materiality. 

The very thrust and heart of pragmatic and empirical philosophy since the 19th century, since Hume, has been not to fight idealism, but to bring idealism into the thinking of man and particularly the working class.

Our fight with the pragmatists will be’ to develop the materiality of logic for a particular purpose. The purpose will be to enrich our understanding of logic not to just simply defend a principle of materialism. To the extent that logic is removed from reality by the idealists and by pragmatists, logic withers and dies, and the real world and the changing of the real world becomes impossible. This is because we become blinded to the real forces and movement of the real world and how change takes place in the real world. Our task will be to put logic back into the material world so that we can develop logic in order to make it possible to develop the party. 

FOOTNOTES

1. Novack, George. Empiricism and Its Evolution, A Marxist View. Page 96. 

2. Lenin, V.I. Collected Works, Vol. Page 182. 

3. Ibid. Page 212. 

4. Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach in Reader in Marxist Philosophy Edited by Howard Selsam & Harry Martel. Page 316. . 

5. Lenin, V.I. op. cit. Page 212. 

6. Marx, Karl. op. cit. Page 318. 

7. Plekhanov, George V.: Fundamental Problems of Marxism. Pp. 70-80. 

8. Novack, George. Op. Cit. Page 20. 

9. Ibid. Page 18. 

10. Ibid. Page 33. 

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid. 

13. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. Page 670. 

14. Ibid. Page 659. 

15. Ibid. Page 674. 

16. Lenin, V.I. Materialism and EmpirioCriticism. Pp. 184-185. 

17. Lenin, V.I. Philosophical Notebooks. op. cit. Page 91. 

18. Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach, op. cit. 

19. Lenin, V.I. op. cit. Page 363. 

20. Ibid. Page 147. 

21. Ibid. Page 99.

Lecture Two--The Development Of American Pragmatism

WE MUST FIRST of all put pragmatism within the framework of its American context. Engels said in a letter to Sorge, a German-American Marxist: 

“For good historical reasons, the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical things, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions, they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short every kind of imbecility that was not directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable for making the masses stupid.’’(1) 

In this one quote we get very much at the heart of what American pragmatism came out of and what American thought has been for a long time. It is precisely because the U.S. developed without any feudal past, the U.S. was from its origins a bourgeois country, that the sharp edge of the struggle against medieval metaphysics never took place and was never necessary. American thinking from its earliest days lacked even that sharpness, that sharp tendency at least in the direction of materialism of the early empiricists of England.

As Engels pointed out, the Americans were very happy to import from Europe every possible form of mysticism, religion and metaphysical confusion just as long as it did not get in the way of conducting business. America was first of all and above all the most bourgeois of countries. Trotsky in fact points out that precisely because American capitalism began without this feudal past, and developed by the time of World War I into the leading and most powerful capitalist country, American capitalism is closer to the model of capitalism which Marx discusses in Capital, than even the British capitalism.

IDEALISM

The conclusion we draw from this is that contrary to what is usually held, American thought has been more imbued with idealism than that of any other country. It was not just that Americans were from their birth empirical. The so-called: empiricism in the U.S. has always been a cover for idealism. It is significant that Novack, the philosopher of the Socialist Workers Party, states quite the opposite. He says American philosophy: 

“Has spontaneously spurned scholasticism, since it was born after the rise of bourgeois society, the victories of the democratic revolutions, and under the auspices of Protestantism. Thanks to the expansion and stability of capitalism in this country, it has yet to arrive at an acceptance and assimilation of dialectical materialism.’’(3) 

Here we have the view of an America which automatically and spontaneously spurns idealism but has not yet reached dialectical materialism. It stands there somewhere in between idealism and materialism. This is incorrect. The central characteristic of American thought from its very origins has been a completely eclectic combination of the most absurd idealism with certain practical conclusions drawn from empirical philosophy and used as the basis of development of American industry and science.

We will see this if we look at some of the early American thinkers. The method of pragmatism permeated early American thinkers who were openly idealist just as the theoretical outlook of idealism stands very much at the heart of pragmatism. 

EDWARDS

For instance, it is of course no accident that the first American philosophers and thinkers were religious leaders. Perhaps the most influential was Jonathan Edwards, who was the leader of the Puritan movement in the colonial days of the U.S., and was a Calvinist. His views are described as follows by one commentator: 

“His attempt to bring together Calvinist theology, idealism, Lockian empiricism, and the world view of Newton constituted the first major expression of American thought.” (4) 

Here you have a good picture of American thinking. What Edwards did was bring  together the theology of Calvin, brought over from Scotland, a dose idealism from Europe, a good bit of empiricism from Locke, a little bit of very mechanistic physics from Newton and combine it all together. At the same time, of course, the central thrust of it was religious. Jonathan Edwards was one of the most famous of all American preachers (speaking before what at that time were massive audiences). He toured the country, particularly New England.

Benjamin Franklin was not a particularly religious man. However, Benjamin Franklin is the author of what you might call a typically American approach to the question of ethics. Franklin stated that in general the man of high moral character is also the man who has been most successful in the business world and in other pursuits. From this Franklin concluded that being virtuous “pays off.” This view became known in philosophy as “banal pragmatism.”

EMERSON 

The most typical and most influential philosopher of middle nineteenth century America was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s philosophy had a deep impact on the founders of American pragmatism: Pierce, James and Dewey. But more than that - Emerson’s philosophy was as typically representative of America in its initial period of capitalist development as was pragmatism in the period when American industry reached its present heights and began to challenge England for dominance of the world. 

Emerson’s philosophy was openly, blatantly idealist. How absurd it is for Novack to claim that American philosophy “spontaneously spurned scholasticism” when the dominant American philosopher of the nineteenth century was an idealist. Perhaps Emerson rejected the logical aspect of scholastics but he definitely maintained its idealist core. At best we can say that Emerson discarded the strength of the scholastics, their concern with the systematic development of thought, in order to maintain its totally negative features in idealism. 

Emerson himself stated: 

“What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is idealism; as it appears 1842... The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior projection of God in the unconscious.”(5)

Transcendentalism was a system which combined subjective idealism in the sense that you must look for truth within yourself, with an overview of the existence of a “one” or a unity of a God which is virtually pantheistic and is reflected through all the natural world. It is an openly religious, openly idealist philosophy. 

Emerson was also at the same time an advocate of individuality and nonconformity, and of course, one of the persons he had the most influence on was Thoreau who developed the theory of non-violence, individual action, and went to jail for refusing to pay taxes. A utopian communist view was developed by Emerson’s followers at Walden Pond. A whole group in Boston was built around these idealist conceptions. 

PRACTICAL

But at the same time Emerson was a very practical man and very much his approach towards questions, towards life was identical, even in the phrases by which he described things, with the pragmatists. For instance, he said “Only so much do I know as I have lived.”(6) In other words, I know to the extent that I have lived. “Action is with a scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man, without it thought can never ripen to truth.”(7) Thought can never ripen to truth without action, the intermediary of action. He also said: “Life is our dictionary.” That is a good one. He said: 

“I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe, in the spade, for the learned as well as unlearned hands.”(8)

Emerson even developed a whole theory on the question of political economy in which he showed how immersion in commerce brings one closer to God. He was saying that since God is in everything, as well as in ourselves, through our own participation in action and activity and construction and doing things, we bring ourselves much closer to the workings of the Almighty. It is precisely in what appears to everyone to be pedestrian things like working on our homestead with our plowshare in front of us, working away in the textile mill or managing our firm, or out there fighting it out in the Stock Exchange, in these more pedestrian activities, we are actually communicating with God, who is expressed in all this activity and life and action. 

Of course Emerson made some very extreme statements on the question of nonconformity and so on. He openly came out and said that the state is a regressive institution and he favored the abolition of the state. His method of abolishing it was somewhat different from Lenin’s in the sense that he felt that the way to abolish the state would be if each person carried out the Golden Rule the state would no longer be needed and therefore it would disappear. In other words he was for the withering away of the state. But he thought one should begin the process by being moral oneself. 

These views of course fit very much into the period and the time. This was the period of the real beginnings of American capitalism. It was a period in which you had the first flush of American industry. It was a country in which there was a high degree of individuality and nonconformity was still possible. A large layer of the country was the petty bourgeoisie in the form of the small and independent farmer, and the industrial working class was just beginning to develop. 

It is interesting that it was William James, one of the founders of American pragmatism, who said of Emerson, in a letter to his brother, “The reading of the divine Emerson, volume after volume, has done me a lot of good, thrown a strong practical light on my own path.”(9)

It is also interesting that one of the major commentators on American philosophy refers to James as the central figure of what should be called a neo-transcendentalism in New England.(10) He saw pragmatism in actuality as a rebirth of Emerson’s transcendentalism. That is, as a branch and development of idealist philosophy more than of empirical philosophy. 

I want to discuss the question of the relationship of pragmatism to empiricism, and the relationship of their origins and where they come from. For instance, Novack again, who saw Americans spontaneously spurning scholasticism, sees pragmatism as a development of empiricism. He says:  

“In its ideological neology, pragmatism is essentially a belated and updated branch of the empirical tradition, which has been the mainstream of philosophy among English speaking people for over three centuries.”(11)

In a sense this is true. Pragmatism does root itself in the general outlook of empiricism, of beginning with experience, and is opposed to the conception that philosophy develops out of the deductive method, out of logical development. But it is not true in another sense. What Novack ignores is the strong roots of idealism in America: the fact that the major American philosopher prior to the pragmatists was Emerson who was an open idealist. 

RELIGIOUS

He ignores that early America was dominated by religious fanaticism, and religious trends of all sorts, that what would become minor trends in Europe would sweep into America and dominate it. For instance consider Methodism, which began as a revival movement in England. Franklin, who didn’t go for this kind of business very much though he saw its value and worth for some, described in his Autobiography in the early period before the revolution how Wesley and these other Methodists came over to the U.S. and just swept the country. They went from town to town - Boston, Philadelphia, New York, all the centers, and had massive revival meetings all around Methodism. The Methodist Church became in the United States the second or third largest church in the country in a matter of months. 

There was this constant history of this in America. In the 19th century there were waves of religious fervor and revivalism and all kinds of idealist business. Engels himself refers to spiritualism, which was developed around the time Engels was writing in the latter part of the 19th century. It was in the United States that these things always grabbed hold. 

Within the American environment you had all this idealism that developed on the one side combined with a sort of practical approach which allowed business to develop. It is important to understand that the men that formulated pragmatism, the philosophers who developed the pragmatic theory in the U.S., were idealists to begin with. James was an empiricist to the extent that he paid any attention to philosophy before he took up pragmatism. He was a follower of the Scottish school of empiricism. But he was at the same time a close follower of Emerson, who was an idealist. 

PEIRCE

C. S. Peirce, who was the founder of pragmatism, and James based himself really on Peirce’s work, was a Neo Kantian philosopher to begin with. Dewey spent 15 years before he became a pragmatist trying to create his own Hegelian system in Chicago, only to give up Hegelianism for Kantianism. Dewey of course was the man who did the most to develop and defend pragmatism in the 20th century. He had a tremendous influence on the thinking of the American middle class intellectuals through his theories on education. 

These leaders of pragmatism grew up in an atmosphere of idealism, philosophically. We have to realize that the birth of American pragmatism coincided with the development in Europe of Neo-Kantianism. Kant had actually written almost a century before, in the last part of the 18th century. There was this growth of Neo-Kantian philosophy which swept and dominated Europe and penetrated deeply into the United States. 

This coincided with the development in Germany of the first open revisionism of Marxism by Eduard Bernstein. The Bernstein circle was Neo-Kantian philosophically. Developing out of Neo-Kantianism in Europe was the development of Machism, positivism or what is sometimes called, because of the way it was developed in England, logical positivism. 

It was this that Lenin was fighting when he wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in 1908. This was around the same time that pragmatism grew up. We will not go into positivism right now, we don’t need to, except to say as Lenin said about pragmatism, there is no essential difference between pragmatism and positivism on the central question of materialism. Positivist theories take the same kind of stand that pragmatism takes on the question of philosophy. It was very much an international trend living within the framework of this Neo-Kantian idealism. Neo-Kantianism is developed in an empirical framework, in a very practical, experimental pseudo-scientific framework. This was happening all over the world. 

TRUTH

Let us take a look at the basic conceptions of pragmatism within this framework. The most well known aphorism of pragmatism which comes from William James is the statement: “The truth is what works.”(12) We have a term, a word. The only way in which we can discuss what that word means is to see what effect that word will have on reality - that is, through action. Only when words are transformed into some kind of active thing do they have any meaning. The words have to be formed into a proposition to be tested. They have to be tested in such a way as to change through action something, and at that point we can see what the words mean. 

From what they view as an utilitarian or experimental operational definition, the pragmatists come to one of two conclusions. One is that pragmatism is a theory of meaning. This is what Peirce held. It is a way of saying what words mean. They mean what they will do to actually affect things in the world. The other conclusion, which is what James says, is that pragmatism is a theory of truth. You do more than say that you understand what a word means when you say the word is what it actually will do in the material world. What you are actually doing is you are defining what is true. What is true is what works, and it is true to the extent that it does work and it is true only in the sense of what it does. That is its meaning and that is its truth and there is no truth outside of that. 

Pragmatism was even more than that. It was a general way of approaching questions of thought, as can be seen from this description by James. He says:

‘’The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, categories, sup- | posed necessities, and looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, and facts.’’ (13) 

The first thing he said about pragmatism is it is an attitude. We look away from metaphysics, a concern with categories, first causes, and we look at the effect - we look at effect. Pragmatism is interested in effect. It is interested in practical things, fruits, consequences, fact. 

CASH VALUE

He says: “You must bring out of each word its practical cash vaiue, set it at work within your stream of experience.” (14) 

He uses this term “cash value” very often. He says, the conception is you must cash it in. He knows he was using a common word, a common expression, but he wanted to get at the concept behind it. If you grow some corn, the value of that corn is only realized when it is sold on the market, and then you get a certain cash value. That corn is worth what it will actually get you on the market. Well the same thing is true with a word. A word only means its cash value, that is, what it will actually do, change and effect in the world. 

“Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. The pragmatist clings to fact and concreteness. Observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes.”(15) 

He then contrasts this with what he considers to be the view of the metaphysician. He says: 

“Your typical ultra abstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness. Other things equal he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. Ideas which themselves are but part of our experience, become true just insofar as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with the other parts of our experience.”(16) 

The truth of an idea - which he defines as being part of our experience (he does not consider the idea as part of material reality) - is related to the way in which it relates to other aspects of our experience. Of course he would then say it is true only to that extent and it only has that meaning. 

Does pragmatism stand in a progressive relationship with classical empiricism? Well, first we have to notice that there are certain differences between empiricism and pragmatism. The differences lie on several levels, but most importantly and Dewey describes it this way, the empiricist looks at what has happened and the pragmatist is concerned with what will happen.(17) The empiricist simply is able to describe in a passive way reality and to say that this is true. The empiricist says these perceptions are accurate, correct because they match up with past experience.

The pragmatist’s eye is on the future. He says that the truth of a statement now is how it will affect things later. His eyes are in a different direction. His emphasis is on the question of action. He sees the validation of a conception through the action of an individual in reality. 

SKEPTICISM

To this extent it is different from empiricism. But it is different from empiricism in another sense. It develops the idealism that was inherent in empiricism. It begins with Hume’s skepticism and takes it much further. What was a question, a hesitancy with Locke, becomes an out and out declaration of war by the empiricists against materialism. 

Novack takes on this question, as he does many other questions, with an “on the one hand and on the other hand” approach. He says: 

“On one side they took up the cudgels against the idealists who refused to admit the natural origins and practical functions of the thought processes, and who defended unchanging principles and purely speculative, logical and contemplative essence of reason. By hammering away at these bulwarks of idealist error, the pragmatists helped bring philosophy closer to reality and the results of scientific discovery.” (18) 

He points out that on the other hand, it so happened, that they directed more of their criticisms against materialism than they did against idealism. He uses the same method to approach the question of empiricism itself. He says, about empiricism in general:

“The materialist conception of reality is squarely opposed not to empiricism, but to idealism.’’(19) 

This is very important. In other words, when it comes to the question of empiricism as such, he sees the materialist conception of reality as being opposed to the idealist conception of reality but not squarely opposed to empiricism, which he sees lying on the one hand and on the other hand somewhere in between. He further states: 

“Empiricism has many virtues, its reliance upon direct observation and the result of experiment, its closeness to practice, its preference for the facts, even at times its distrust of farflown abstractions in favor of sturdy common sense judgment are useful and necessary qualities.”(20) 

We run up against a problem here. Novack had earlier stated that in the US there was no scholasticism, and that the bulwarks of idealism had been destroyed and therefore that the American people naturally were empirical. Well, if the American people are naturally empirical then how can we consider it to be a strength of pragmatism that it is critical of idealism. That we would take for granted. That is the natural aspect of it.

OPPOSITION

What is going on here is that Novack does not see a square opposition between materialism and empiricism. This is because he does not see a square opposition between the bourgeoisie and the working class. If we recognize that materialism is the philosophy of the working class and empiricism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, and we can see no square opposition between them, this is to say that these two classes are not in square opposition. We notice that at that point where empiricism compromised with idealism was a point where in actual class relationship the bourgeoisie was compromising with the feudalists, with the landowners. 

The first thing we must note is by not seeing materialism and empiricism in square opposition, Novack is reflecting an outlook which does not see the working class and the bourgeoisie in square opposition. Second, he underestimates the idealist conception of modern empiricism, the idealist core of it, which we have gone into here. He recognizes it but he underestimates its importance. 

Here is where we get to this question of whether pragmatism is progressive or not. He abstracts the question of empiricism and pragmatism outside of their historical context. It is as if we can discuss whether empiricism is progressive or reactionary outside of when, and who, and what time. It is as if we could discuss whether capitalism is progressive or reactionary in that way. Capitalism was progressive in one period and is reactionary today. That is the dialectical method. If we look at empiricism abstractly, and say well on the one hand it has a progressive side and on the other hand it has a reactionary side, we have said nothing. 

HISTORICAL

Once we place empiricism within its historical context we can say that in the period of the birth of capitalism empiricism played an important role in the struggle against the idealist and metaphysical theories which were bulwarks of the old feudal order. In this sense empiricism was not only historically progressive in paving the way for a further development of the productive forces of man, but at the same time contributed to man’s thought.

Once we say that, we can also see that in the more contemporary period the survival of empiricism of necessity becomes reactionary, that the so-called progressive side of empiricism becomes nothing more than a necessary cover for putting forward idealism in a period when idealism is being destroyed on the one hand by the development of the productive forces, by the development of science, and on the other hand is being reinforced by the irrationality of capitalism. That is why we must put the question into its historical context. If we do that we understand that we can in no sense see pragmatism as an advance over empiricism. It represents a necessary and unavoidable degeneration by the bourgeoisie in its thought since the days of empiricism. 

Third, what is involved here in seeing no square opposition between empiricism and materialism is the conception that the Marxist role is only to correct that aspect of empiricism which is idealist. Marx stressed in his Theses on Feuerbach that aspect of empiricism which is methodologically formal, mechanical, one sided, that is undialectical. The whole fight for the materialist nature of logic, is so that logic can be developed in a dialectical way. It is not enough to defend materialism in general against idealism in general. 

Finally, to even conclude that the attacks of the pragmatists upon idealists are progressive can be an error. If we understand the way in which the pragmatist attacks idealism, it takes the form of an attack on thought and theory. In attacking: metaphysics, the pragmatist is attacking any validity and development of human thought. So we cannot just abstract out the pragmatist’s criticisms of metaphysics from the fact that he is saying that facts are real, and the abstract is abstract and unreal. This way we miss the whole point. 

THEORY 

Essentially in the guise of attacking idealism he is actually attacking theory and consciousness, and consciousness and theory are at this point absolutely essential for the development of the working class. Therefore the lack of consciousness and the lack of theory in the revolutionary party and in the working class is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of capitalism. 

In this context, I want to refer comrades to Marx’s criticism of Proudhon in the Poverty of Philosophy.(21) Proudhon approached questions in the following manner. It is a very familiar method. Particularly the comrades who have had some experience in the labor movement and in the trade unions are going to recognize this method immediately, in themselves in most cases. Proudhon said: 

“Well, we look at any particular category or existing thing, for instance, competition, and we will say that competition has a good side and a bad side. What we will do now is therefore remove the bad side and keep the good side.”

He even did it with slavery. He showed that slavery had a good side, in that it led to a certain development of international trade. But it also had a bad side. It was not very good for the people who we want to get rid of the bad side and keep the good side. He developed this on competition, the sharpening of competition and on monopoly and competition. He said competition led to monopoly. Monopoly is bad; competition is good. What we will try to do is keep competition, but we will not have monopoly. He went through a whole bunch of categories and set it up this way. 

This method is found in trade union work. For example, in the SSEU, you could say: “Well, reorganization has its good side and its bad side, maybe what we should do rather than get rid of the whole thing is get rid of the bad side and keep the good side.” 

MENTAL

Marx said that that is all very well and good, but that is a mental process. You are finding the two opposites in the situation and mentally in your head removing the good from the bad. But the problem is that the good and the bad are united as a single entity in reality. It is only in the real historical development that these problems can be tackled. When you get down to the real historical development you see that this good and this bad together add up to the thing. The question is not so much the saving of the good and the getting rid of the bad, but of the actual struggle to change and create something else. 

To say that empiricism has two sides is only to say that empiricism as a conception reflects reality because everything in reality has two sides at least. What we are saying is that empiricism has these two aspects and you cannot just separate out the positive from negative. The two together make empiricism. It is not a matter of looking at empiricism and patching it up. 

It is a matter of understanding empiricism in its historical development and understanding that a period occurs when one side dominates the other and must destroy the other. You can say with Locke the man sought to reach out and understand material reality, destroy superstition and mysticism that had clouded men’s minds for thousands years, but he could not go all the way and he held back here and there. When you come to William James you can not say the same thing. Not at all. You can say that in order to cloud men’s minds it was necessary for William James to make some concessions to the world. They are not the same thing. 

James said about pragmatism and its relation to materialism something very different from Novack, and he knew what he was talking about on this level because he was rather familiar with pragmatism. He said: 

“Pragmatism, devoted that she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under.”(22) 

Devoted as pragmatism is to the facts, in no sense does it have a materialistic bias. To make the point even clearer, he then applied the pragmatic method to the question of religion, which was really his whole reason for grabbing hold of the pragmatic method. He was absolutely convinced that you could not prove God on the basis of deduction, he knew he could not prove it through induction. He proposed to prove it by the pragmatic method. 

GOD 

He says: “If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of ‘being good for so much.’”(23) 

What he was basically saying was that the conception of God is true if it works in the sense that those who have the conception of God are happier, live better and do good works. Because that is its practical impact. If the practical effect of the conception of God is good, well then it is true. He says that it is true to the extent that it has that practical impact and the word God means that practical impact. 

This aspect, this very, very sophistic argument of James, is even questionable on the basis of making any kind of assessment of the way in which people who believe in God act. But even if we take that out of the question, it was this, in particular, that. struck Lenin. Lenin’s only mention of pragmatism in his book on Empirio-criticism was precisely on this aspect: 

“Perhaps the ‘latest fashion’ in the latest American philosophy, is ‘pragmatism,’  (from the Greek word ‘pragma’- action; that is, a philosophy of action). Pragmatism ridicules the metaphysics both of materialism and idealism, acclaims experience and only experience, recognizes practice as the only criterion, and successfully deduces from all this a God for practical purposes and only for practical purposes.”(24) 

The question of idealism in pragmatism has deeper roots than this. It is not just that James uses pragmatism, a pragmatic argument to justify God. It is that pragmatism, precisely because it limits itself to experience and to immediate action upon things, and refuses to confront the question of the reality of the world itself, actually has developed and developed further than Kant and Hume an idealist conception of thought. 

DEWEY

It is John Dewey’s whole position on the question of materialism that the relationship of thought to reality takes place through man’s action. He sees that. But he sees the relationship of thought to the material world as a relationship of something that is immaterial and ideal to a material world. He does not see thought as a reflection of the material world and he does not see thought as something conditioned by material forces. Therefore he has an idealist conception, and from that idealist conception and with the narrow pragmatic method, he ends up as a liberal. 

He believes that one must think good thoughts and on the basis of good moral ethical thoughts one must then carry out practical works consistent with those thoughts. He seeks, perhaps, to move things, and make things a little bit better than they once were. He seeks to make this reform and that reform and the other reform. He begins with the idealist thought, independent of classes, leading to the action which must be immediate and practical in the sense of an experiment, and with this action and that action, this bit and that piece, as long as each action is consistent with the ideal thought, society will slowly in bits and pieces and jerks, move ahead progressively toward a slightly better world. This is liberalism in the form of Dewey’s theory. Dewey says the following: 

“By materialism I mean the conception that the statement of the given contains and exhausts the entire subject matter of the practical judgment, that the facts in their givenness are all ‘there is to it,’ so far as intelligence is concerned. The given is undoubtedly just what it is, it is a determinate throughout. But it is the given of something to be done. The survey and inventory of present conditions of facts are not something complete in themselves; they exist for the sake of an intelligent determination of what is to be done, of what is required to complete the given. To conceive the given in any such way, then, as to imply that it negates in its given character the possibility of any doing, of any modification is self-contradictory.’’(25) 

He first defines materialism in the 18th century sense. what exists, exists—period. It is there and that is all there is to it. It is something external to thought. The 18th century empiricist and materialist did not seek to understand the movement of thought itself, or the action of man upon the material world as a material action, but instead saw mind as a mirror, as a . piece of film which reflects things and records life, motion, movement. So beginning with that conception, he says well it gives nothing to intelligence. It is determinate throughout; it is self-complete in and of itself. 

DUALITY 

He views reality as something which exists for the sake of being determined by thought. In other words, he says that reality exists in order to be determined by thought, and that the determination of thought is an active process of man. Therefore, in actuality knowledge, experience has a duality to it. The idealist aspect is our determining it from our own thought which we cannot justify in any way as materialism. And our determining in actual reality, in actual appearance that we are ordering or determining. 

This is basically Kantianism in another form. It is basically the same thing. Among other things, the conclusion must be that without man’s action, there is an indeterminate world. We are the ones who determine it, who give it its determinateness. In other words if we did not exist the world would have no order to it at all. It is the old Kantian conception that either you have an indeterminate mass with no lawfulness to it, or you have a thing-in-itself which is unknowable and has no characteristic of any sort, has no time, space. 

The pragmatists also from this point of view completely reject any kind of materialist conception of logic. Dewey says:

“Logic therefore lends to a realistic metaphysics insofar as it accepts things and events for that they are independently of thought, and to an idealistic metaphysics insofar as it contends that thought gives birth to distinctive acts which modify future facts, and even in such a way as to render them more reasonable, that is to say more adequate to the ends which we propose for ourselves.”(26) 

REALISTS 

We are compelled by logic to an outlook which is both materialist and idealist, or as he says realist - it is not materialist. The realists are not materialist; they simply accept reality and say we can not do anything else but accept reality and they begin from there. They do not say whether reality is material. It is real. It is what causes the impressions upon us, that is all. 

He says, we accept things and events for what they are independently of thought. 

They exist independently of thought. But, we are idealist in the sense that thought, which he sees as an ideal conception, as something unrelated to material reality, can affect and change this material reality. He says, thought can make reality more reasonable. 

This is very interesting because it also shows that Dewey spent 15 years as an Hegelian. When he is talking about making the real rational, he is basing himself on Hegel. It is a Hegelian conception. He is putting it forward in this subjective idealist way. We make the real rational, we change the objective world in accordance with our own rational ideal through our action in it. But this rational ideal, where does it come from? On that he has nothing to say. Maybe from a kick in the head by a mule a million years ago. He does not know. 

FOOTNOTES 

1. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Correspondence 1846-1895. Page 451. 

2. Trotsky, Léon. Marxism in Our Time. Page 27. “Although Capital rests on international material, preponderantly English, in its theoretical foundation it is an analysis of pure capitalism, capitalism in general, capitalism as such. Undoubtedly, the capitalism grown on the virgin, unhistorical soil of America comes closest to that ideal type of capitalism.” 3. Novack, George. Empiricism and Its Evolution. Page 121. 

4. Copleston, Frederick, S. J. A History of Philosophy, Volume 8, Modern Philosophy: Bentham to Russell, Part II. Page 13. 

5. Ibid. Page 19. 

6. Konvitz, Milton R. and Gail Kennedy. The American Pragmatists. ‘‘Challenge’’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Page 13. 

7. Ibid. Page 12. 

8. Ibid. Page 15. 

9. Ibid. Page 11. 

10. Ibid. Page 12. 

11. Novack, op. cit. Page 122. 

12. Konvitz, op. cit. Page 44. 

13. Ibid. Page 33. 

14. Ibid. Page 32. 

15. Ibid. Pages 38, 39. 

16. Ibid. Page 39. 

17. Rorty, Amelie, ed. Pragmatic Philosophy. ‘‘The Development of American Pragmatism’’ by John Dewey. Page 210. 

18. Novack, op. cit. Page 127. 

19. Ibid. Page 136. 

20. Ibid. Page 98. 

21. Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy. “Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy.” 

22. Konvitz, op. cit. 

23. Ibid. Page 41. 

24. Lenin, V.I. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Page 331. 

25. Rorty, op. cit. Page 219. 

26. Ibid. Page 215.

Lecture Three--The Dialectics Of Materialism

WHAT IS THE Marxist conception of truth? The Marxist conception of truth seems on first thought to be very similar to that of the pragmatists. We will look at Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. 

You must understand that this thesis was written very early in 1845. It was written against Feuerbach who was a materialist, a mechanical materialist. It was written at the point where Marx emerges philosophically as a Marxist. It was in the same period as he wrote the Economic and Philosophic Notebooks, and laid the basis for the writing of the Communist Manifesto just three years after that. The basic conceptions of Marx were already formed by this period, in the course ofa struggle within the Hegelian circles in Germany. 

‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the object, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or contemplation but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Thus it happened that the active side in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism—but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really differentiated from the thought-objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as activity through objects. Consequently, in the Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuine human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary,’ of practical - critical, activity. 

‘‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness’ of his thinking. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

‘“The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that circumstances are changed precisely by men and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one towers above society (in Robert Owen for example). 

“The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can only be conceived and rationally understood as revolutionizing practice.’’(1) 

This definitely seems like the statement of a pragmatist. Marx is saying that all other materialists have seen sensuous reality as an object which you contemplate. What the Marxist must do is see this reality as something which the human being senses through his own activity and practice. 

Here he is making several points. First, and this is generally where he seems to be on the same ground as the pragmatist, he says the question of the reality or the non-reality of thinking, is a practical question. This question which has plagued mankind for 4,000 years Marx answers in one sentence. He dispenses with it in one sentence, he says it is not a question to be answered by thought. The question of whether thought is real or unreal is not a question to be answered within the context of thought. It cannot be answered through a deductive reasoning process. How could it be? How can you tell whether thought is real or unreal through thought? 

You cannot tell it through reality as such. Reality is not conscious. So the real world cannot test the thought; the thought cannot test the thought. What can test the thought? The action of man on the basis of thought. Why we know that our minds reflect reality essentially, not perfectly but generally, is that on the basis of the reflections in our mind we can go out and chop down a tree, or plant another tree, or make paper out of a tree. We can do all sorts of things, including going to the moon.

But this is the beginning of what Marx says. It is not the end of what Marx says. He then goes on to say that while it is correct to say that circumstances produce the man, and that changed circumstances produce a changed man, it is incorrect therefore not to confront the question that it is men who change the circumstances.

What he means by this is as follows. You conclude that the circumstances determine you, that what is wrong with society, its inequality, poverty and so on, is because man is conditioned by the society he lives in, and if you want to change man you have got to change society. That is where the old utopians stood like Robert Owen. Therefore what we have got to do is change the circumstances; we will change the society. This is, for instance, the proposal of the utopians who say, we will take some men at least and we will go out to Utah to an old ranch, or find perhaps a left over movie set in California, and gather together our good souls, led by God or devil, and in this new way create a new man—or bump off a few old men.

KEY

What Marx counters to these utopian conceptions, is that circumstances are created by men and therefore the key to the situation is the question of revolutionizing the practice, that is the practice of man guided by revolutionary theory. Here: is where in particular the question of Marxism and pragmatism move in two opposite directions. While the pragmatist states that practice proves the truth or untruth of a conception, he does not see it as proving the reality of the material world and the materiality of the thought processes as a reflection of this world.

With this outlook the pragmatist never gets beyond what Marx called practice as ‘‘conceived and fixed only in its dirty Jewish form of appearance.’’ 

By raising a question mark over thought, and looking upon thought as something that is ideal and not material, the pragmatist does in his own way the same thing as the early materialist did. The early materialist recognized reality, and some of them absolutely, but denied men’s actions and men’s thinking, seeing men’s thinking in a purely mechanical way. These early materialists, turned away from any real understanding of that reality, by probing into the question of its basic movement and any real development of men’s knowledge in order to penetrate that reality and therefore to change it. 

The pragmatist does the same thing by questioning the existence of the material world and proclaiming his absolute conviction that logic has no basis in the material world. The pragmatists therefore found no need to pay attention to logic and to develop logic and thus develop a deeper understanding of the reality itself. 

They were left with only one thing they could do, which was the only thing the bourgeoisie wanted them to do, and that was to see to what extent they could patch up things here or there. Add a little bit here, take away a little bit there. That is all their method could do, because with- ‘out an understanding of basics, of fundamentals, without understanding abstractions they could only tamper with the surface of things. They could not get at the heart of the basic change of society itself. They could only pose that we take the society as a given, and then we see what we can work out within it. 

Proving that logic and thought are based on the real world and are reflections of a material process, is the beginning. It is not the end of knowledge. We must recognize that Marx emphasized that idealism developed the active side. What we want to do in attacking pragmatism is not just what Novack does. He attacks pragmatism for its inconsistencies on questions of materialism, and makes a few points about how it is a little formal, and it should be more flexible, and movement and development, as abstractions. We want to take method and logic and put it back into the real world precisely in order to be able to develop that method. 

PLEKHANOV

Lenin said the following about Plekhanov, whose method is similar to Novack’s, though Plekhanov was way beyond Novack in his understanding: 

“Plekhanov criticizes Kantianism (and agnosticism in general) more from a vulgar-materialistic standpoint than from a dialectical-materialistic standpoint, insofar as he merely rejects their views from the threshold, but does not correct them (as Hegel corrected Kant), deepening, generalizing and extending them, showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept. 

“Marxists criticized (at the beginning of the twentieth century) the Kantians and Humists more in the manner of Feuerbach (and Bucher) than of Hegel.’’(2) 

What Lenin meant by this was that it is not enough to look at Kantians and the agnostics and simply show that they have a contradictory attitude toward material reality. We must not simply reject their view; we must correct their views. We must develop the alternative to their views which requires some discussion and some study of the question of logic itself. It requires some discussion and development concretely within the framework of the understanding of the history and development of the party. It requires some discussion of the development of thinking and the thought process as part of the construction of the party. 

DIALECTICS

It is now necessary to go a little bit into the question of dialectics. When one is dealing with the question of method and of logic, it is one thing to seek to describe the basic categories and processes of logic; it is quite another thing to really understand dialectics. 

The understanding of dialectics, as we have pointed out from the beginning of these lectures, can only take place through practice, through the struggle for the construction of the party. Otherwise what you do is simply state certain formal conceptions, certain conceptions of logic which are relatively easy to memorize and repeat. They have no meaning, because the whole central point that we are seeking to make about method is that method and logic are rooted in material reality. When you are dealing with the conceptions of method and logic you are dealing with the basic movement of reality. But at the same time you have to be able to relate your conceptions of the basic movement of reality with more specific movement of reality. You have to be able to fight to understand dialectics through a study of history, and through practice today to change history. 

This will perhaps become clearer as we get a little bit into dialectics and particularly into the question of the relationship of the abstract to the concrete in dialectics. It is particularly at this point that dialectics sharply diverges from empiricism and pragmatism.

Empiricism and pragmatism are hostile to abstract thought. They identify abstract thought with scholasticism. Scholasticism is a process in which ideas develop independently of the material world through logic alone. You begin with a particular a priori conception, whatever it may be. Then you develop that assertion through certain laws of logic. You can develop from the simplest of all assertions, like the identity of an object, that A equals A, something that can fill 25 volumes. An entire logical system of metaphysics can. be developed that way. 

THOUGHT

In fighting against this approach, pragmatism and empiricism comes to the conclusion that there is no reality to theory. What is really real is immediate appearance, what is perceived. Thus they see the process of the relationship of the concrete to the abstract as a process which they recognize is necessary to some extent as a scientist must have certain hypotheses or theories. They see it essentially as a process of moving away from reality, moving from what they are sure of to something they are doubtful about. Moving a greater distance from reality. They do it grudgingly and they do it skeptically bacause they do not trust the very tools that they use to move from concrete to abstraction, to theory. They don’t see logic itself as rooted in material reality but as something that is ana priori, artificially arrived at subjectively by the human mind. Lenin wrote on this question as follows:

“Essentially Hegel was completely rignt as opposed to Kant (on the question of the relation between concrete and abstract-— TW). Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract—provided it is correct does not get away from the truth but comes closer to it. The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truely and completely. From living perception to abstract thought and from this to practice—such is the dialectical path of the cognition of objective reality.’’ (3) 

Elsewhere he says: ‘‘Nature is both concrete and abstract, both phenomenon and essence, both moment and relation.’’(4)

Lenin says the general movement of thinking, of thought processes, of development of thought is from the concrete. Yes, you begin with appearance and fact, you can begin nowhere else. You move from that to abstraction. From appearance to essence and then back to practice, that is the general movement. In so doing, as you move to essence, you move to a more real level than appearance, than immediate fact, to a more fundamental level, to the abstraction of matter, to the conception of value, the state. These are more real levels. 

REAL

In other words, the theory of the state, the conception of a state as a body of armed men representing one class for the dominance and suppression of another class, is more real than a description of the functioning on any particular day from the Congressional Record of Congress, or a listing empirically of the activities of all the governments on all levels in the United States for any day or any year or all of them put together. 

Such a description would be the appearance of the state. We move, for instance, from the attack of the Philadelphia police on the Panthers to an understanding of the role of the ruling class in seeking to suppress the working class. This requires our understanding of the nature of the state as a body of armed men defending the privileges of the capitalist class. When we do that we are on a more real level, we have a fuller understanding of reality than when we deal simply with the question the fact that the Philadelphia police attacked the Panthers. 

Marx goes into this same point in describing the method he used in Capital. (In explaining why he wrote Capital on the basis of starting out with the commodity) Marx says: 

“If we start out, therefore, with population, we do so with a chaotic conception of the whole, and by closer analysis we will gradually arrive at simpler ideas; thus we hall proceed from the imaginary concrete to less and less complex abstractions, until we get at the simplest conception. This once attained, we might start on our return journey until we would finally come back to population, but this time not as a chaotic notion of an integral whole, but as a rich aggregate of many conceptions and relations.’’(5)

By population Marx means population figures, facts, how many people live here, how many live there, how many people are employed in agriculture, how many in industry, what the distribution of wealth is in the country. Marx considered fact to be an imaginary concrete. It appears to be very concrete, but if you really know what it is it is an abstraction. 

IMAGINARY

If we look at fact, fact is of necessity at any point an abstraction. You cannot describe anything factually. When you describe anything factually youare making an abstraction. You are either noting color, number, texture, some aspect of it, or some particular sum of aspects of it. Each aspect, each fact so to speak, is abstracted from the totality of it, and from its interrelationship with everything else, and the inner processes at work within it. So fact is imaginary concrete. It seems concrete, but the facts are actually abstracted out of the real world. They are not therefore really concrete. They are abstractions. 

They appear not only to be abstractions, they appear to be very simple abstractions. People feel that when they are dealing with fact, they are willing to make a very clear statement that fact is absolute. Things absolutely happened! They are not willing to make such a clear statement that a particular theoretical conception, like the nature of the state, has any absoluteness to it at all, relative or otherwise. They feel comfortable with the fact.’’ And they feel very sure of it.

They do not realize that this fact is an abstraction from reality; it is one aspect of reality. Furthermore when it appears to be very simple, it is really extremely complex. When you are on the level of appearance, if you are a very diligent observer, you note every single fact or aspect of any concrete thing. You will then have an extremely complex abstraction. 

You have all the shades—take for instance a fir tree—all the shades of green that are on each single needle; you have the exact length of every needle; you have the number of branches which have need- les on them; you have the number of roots and the length of the roots, you have the texture of the root as compared to the texture of the needle. As you know with a scientific study using laboratory techniques, each statement I am making here could be filled in with a thousand figures. Really your picture of a fir tree is an extremely complex abstraction.  

At this level of appearance, as Marx says, it is chaotic. Because you do not know what is more important, what is less important—the essential character of the fir tree—you just have a number of figures. So you actually proceed from the complex chaotic abstractions of fact to simpler conceptions. 

Your proceed, for instance to use the Panther analogy, from the fact of so many police moving on a certain night and attacking the Panthers in the following ways and making the following accusations about them. These police work for a particular city government and make various statements about what happened. The Panthers make other various statements. From all that complexity, you move to a simpler and more essential conception of the nature of the capitalist state and the meaning of the attack. In fact the meaning of the attack is not possible to find simply on the level of the fact, as you can see in the papers any day, there are arguments about why they attacked, what is the meaning of it, what it stands for, etc. 

ESSENTIAL

Contrary to popular opinion and the so-called common sense theory, nature is not simply concrete in the normal use of the word ‘‘concrete’’—that is in the sense of appearance. Lenin uses ‘‘concrete,”’ “phenomenon,’’ ‘‘moment.’’ Nature is not simply appearance moment, concrete. That is one aspect of nature. What we see is its concreteness, its immediacy. Abstractions are just as- real, and in many ways more real than the concrete, they really exist in nature. 

When we discuss the issue of the state, we are talking about a very existent aspect of government that is very real. It is so real that it dominates over the other aspects of government. In other words the nature of the capitalist state dominates over the form of democracy or dictatorship. Regardless of form the capitalist state acts in a certain way. We can predict how it will act toward the working class regardless of its form, regardless of the language used by the people who operate the state, regardless of the level of the culture in that particular country. That state acts according to its nature as a capitalist state, according to its essence, according to this abstraction. It does not act according to what language they speak, what governmental form it has, and so on. It does but not completely, that is a very minor aspect of the functioning of the state. Cultural differences, forms of rule, are minor compared to this essential aspect. 

This is why pragmatism, by limiting your thinking only to the level of fact, limits your ability to get at the essential character of things, essential movement. On the level of fact movement can only be described in the sense of having been noted to have taken place. The movement itself cannot be explained. On this level you are dealing as the pragmatists themselves state, not with cause but with consequences, not with fundamentals but with secondary questions. You are therefore dealing in the small change of history.

CHANGE

The only changes you can make on that level are small. You influence this; you affect that fact. You maneuver appearance but you cannot change essence. The central problem facing mankind is the essence must be changed, and nothing can be done with the appearance until the essence is changed. Revolutionary change is required and this is why the methods of empiricism and pragmatism play a reactionary role in this period.

I will go very briefly into some other aspects of dialectics, if only to sort of hold out to you the potential of the dialectical method as developed in real life, not to give you a series of simple formulas to take down and memorize and use in any kind of formal way. This may give you an idea of the scope of dialectics and to make one or two additional points about the general nature of dialectical thinking. 

ELEMENTS

This comes from the Philosophical Notebooks by Lenin, and it is an attempt on Lenin’s part to very briefly list the elements of dialectics. I might also suggest that the very same basics are described in the Philosophical Notebooks in his article On the Question of Dialectics. He says: 

“One could perhaps present these elements in greater detail as follows: 1) The objectivity of consideration (not examples, not divergence but the Thing-in-itself).’’(5) 

The first element of dialectics as Lenin sees it is the objectivity of what we are considering. The materiality, the reality of the world, is the first element. 

“2) The entire totality of the manifold relations of this thing to others.” 

Not only is the thing under consideration real and objective, but we must consider all its relations with everything else. 

“3) The development of this thing, (phenomenon, respectively), its own movement, its own life.’’ 

It is important to note that the printer puts into another typeface what Lenin underlines sharply in his handwritten notebook. These are always the key words. In the first point it was ‘‘objectivity,’’ in the second point, ‘‘relations.’’ Thus we begin with the objective nature of the thing under consideration and then proceed to its relationship to other things. This brings us to the third point where the word ‘‘development’’ is underlined. The third aspect of dialectics is an understanding of the development of a thing. Development takes place through its own movement. It is not simply a matter of the effect of an external force upon a particular thing for this raises the question of what moves the external force. The central nature of matter is that it has internal movement; it moves itself; and it cannot be otherwise. 

‘‘4) The internally contradictory tendencies (and sides) in this thing.’’ 

The word underlined is ‘‘tendencies.’’ The single thing is not a solid unity with no divergencies within it, but it is a unity with divergencies. There are tendencies, contradictory tendencies. 

“5) The thing (Phenomenon, etc.) as the sum and unity of opposites.’’ 

The identity of any particular object is actually a sum and unity of oppositional forces. Its only identity lies in this unity of oppositional forces. 

“6) The struggle, respectively unfolding, of these opposites, contradictory strivings, etc.”

The word ‘‘struggle’’ here is key. 

“7) The union of analysis and synthesis—the breakdown of the separate parts and the totality, the summation of these parts.’’ 

This is the method for analyzing anything. We break it down into its elements and put it back together. Analysis and synthesis are one process and not mutually exclusive processes. They are, of course, in contradiction to each other, but there is also a unity. That unity is our understanding of anything. 

“8) The relations of each thing (phenomenon, etc.) are not only manifold, but general, universal. Each thing (phenomenon, process, etc.) is connected with every other.’’ 

Here the words ‘‘every other’’ are underlined. Everything in the world is interconnected. To understand any one thing completely, whether it is a grain of sand or a human being or a society, you must understand absolutely everything. This is why while we consider everything knowable, nothing will ever be completely known. 

If we develop a conception that things are not related completely to every other thing, then we cannot explain how they are part of the same process, obey the same natural laws. We would create between things unbridgeable gulfs. Each thing would stand absolutely unrelated and separated from every other thing. With this formal conception there would be no motion, no movement, no change from one thing into another. 

“9) not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of EVERY determination, quality, feature, side, property, into every other (into its opposite?).’’ 

“Transitions’’ and ‘‘every’’ are key here. 

‘‘10) The endless process of the discovery of new sides, relations, etc.’’

Let us go over these two points together. 

We have not only the unity of opposites—that these forces are unified through their struggle against each other and this alone gives anything identity—but we have transitions of one opposite into another. This is how change and development take place. This is the process of self-motion that is in everything. 

Knowledge of things is an endless process of discovery of new sides and new relations, and aspects. Things are infinitely sided. That is why one’s knowledge of anything can always be developed. One is constantly discovering new relations between one thing and another. 

“11) The endless process of the deepening of man’s knowledge of the thing, of phenomena, processes, etc., from appearance to essence and from less profound to more profound essence.’’ 

This is the point we were making before. Knowledge moves from appearance to essence, from essence to more profound essence, to more and more fundamental understanding of the basic laws and working of nature and society. 

“12) From co-existence to causality and from one form of connection and reciprocal dependence to another, deeper, more general form.’’ 

Hume, as we noted before, recognized only co-existence and denied causality. In dialectics we proceed from the recognition that things exist side by side to the understanding of how one causes the other. But we go further: from causality to an understanding of the reciprocal dependence of cause and effect. The very conception of causality is a unity of opposites. As we proceed along these lines in our thinking we move to a deeper and more general understanding of the reciprocal relations of things.

“13) The repetition at a higher stage of certain features, properties, etc. of the lower and....

 “14) The apparent return to the old (negation of the negation).’’ 

NEGATION

This is the general process of movement. If you begin with a positive assertion, a positive development; you then have a negation, something that negates it. But it does not stop here. This negation actually brings forth a new thing, a new development, an affirmation. That new thing is the negation of the negation, and that is positive. So you go from positive to negative and back to positive. 

Now as this generally works out because you are going from positive to negative and then back to positive you actually seem to be back where you were before. But, a change has taken place. That is why Lenin calls it an apparent return to the old. A change has taken place as you went from positive to negative. You can see very clearly that negative is different from the positive. Then you go back to positive again and you think you are back where you were before. But a change has taken place. There has been a development, an upward movement. This is why Lenin says, in his ‘‘On the Question of Dialectics,’’ that development takes place spirally. It would be circular if you went from positive to negative to positive, and ended up right where you were before. If you go from positive to negative to positive, and there is a general understanding that history moves that way, and nature, through negation, you are at a higher point than you were before, you are actually spiraling. So that you appear to be where you were before but you have actually moved forward. 

COMMUNISM

The most classic example given by Marx is the question of communism itself. Man began with a communist society. Early man did not know inequality due to wealth. Every man was equal to every other man; he had no conception of one man being superior to another by his economic and material position. Early man lived ina primitive communist society. But he lived in a communism based on scarcity.

One man did not dominate another but nature completely dominated man. Man lived from moment to moment in hunger and in fear of nature, seeking in small bands to survive. 

Then came the negation of communism, the development of class society in which one man dominated another. But this was accompanied by certain development of material wealth. Man lived as a communist 970,000-990,000 years and he spent less than 5,000 years of his life in class society. In that 5,000 years, you have a negation of communism, and development of class society, in which one man dominated another and a whole different character of society. But you had a certain growth of wealth. There was still scarcity. There was some wealth but there was still scarcity. Therefore you had the conditions for some getting the major share of the wealth, using that wealth for power to rule others through the way in which the economic system was run. 

Today we project a return, a negation of the negation, we negate the class society, and we return to communism. But we return to communism on a higher level of equality of plenty rather than equality of scarcity. Therefore we return to communism under conditions in which man dominates nature rather than nature dominating man. So we actually have the negation of the negation and we end up back where we started—but we really do not. 

History is not circular. It is the fatalist who says that history is circular and human nature never changes. We actually have the development of mankind, and human nature, and we have a spiral. We are now in the same position we were before, the positive position, but we are on a higher level, a spiral. This is generally what is meant by the apparent return to the old. 

“15) The struggle of content with form and conversely. The throwing off of the form, the transformation of the content.’’ 

In general this is the movement of matter. In social development there is a conflict between form and content, and at a certain point the content throws off the form and you have the creation of a new form and the transformation of the content. 

CONTRADICTION

One example of that is the conflict between productive relations and the productive technological development of society. The content of capitalism is the tremendous expansion of industry and manufacturing. This comes into collision with the form, the way in which this manufacturing is organized: that is, the form of capitalism, commodity relations and the profit system. They come into conflict with each other. At a certain point it becomes necessary in order for that content to go into a new development, for the form to be destroyed because at every point that form holds back the development of the content. It holds the productive forces from moving forward, the productive relations conflict with the productive forces. This is the most fundamental contradiction of capitalism. 

“16) The transition of quantity into quality and vice versa.’’ (15 and 16 are examples of 9.)

9 says not only the unity of opposites, but ‘‘the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, etc. into every other.’’ Lenin points out that the struggle of content and form, the transition of quantity into quality, are examples of these transitions. You can have quantitative change of the same quality. You can pile up apples and you just have more apples. You pile up enough apples, you have something else, like a landslide that completely destroys everybody; you have a totally different entity. 

You can do that with anything. The classic example is water, where you have simply quantitative raising of temperature and then at a certain point there is a leap and you have steam, or quantitative lowering of temperature and at some point you have ice. Actually you can take water to a point where it is below the freezing temperature and all you have to do is tap it and it turns into ice immediately, solidly, under certain conditions. These are all examples of how quantity turns into quality, and vice versa. 

The point that is being made here is that content and form, change of quantity into quality, are both reflections or examples or details of the more basic movement which is the transition of every determination into the other, that is the change of everything. These are actually the development of certain categorical descriptions of the process of change itself.

UNITY

“In brief dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites. This embodies the essence of dialectics, but it requires explanations, and developments.” 

All these categories in and of themselves have to be given meaning through their use in the practice of man in the construction of the party. We must understand that what we mean by the practice of man in the construction of the party is not just simply a matter of carrying out activity on the level of appearance, but at every point going to essence, and being conscious about questions of method.

I just want to emphasize just one other aspect of this process. We have already talked about three essential features of the process. First is concrete and abstract. The movement from appearance to more essential questions and then back to appearance to change appearance. Second is that movement takes place through contradictions. A thing, whether it is a bottle of 7-Up, or a table, or a social system, is only a temporary unity of two opposing forces. It becomes something else through its own internal struggle. Third, and just as important, is an aspect of dialectics which is usually ignored: Everything is connected with everything else. 

To understand anything, the first question you must ask is what is its internal contradictions. But the second question you must ask is what is its relationship to other things. It is only by putting things within their relationship, and seeking to get the most universal conceptions of relations and sides of anything that you develop any understanding of it. That is why the understanding of things is a complex process, and is not just a matter of well, here is the thing, here is the one side and here is the other side, and they are in conflict. It is a never ending process, because you need to know all its relations, you need to know all its determinations and all its shades. 

FOOTNOTES

1. Selsam, Howard & Harry Martel. Reader in Marxist Philosophy. Page 316. 

2. Lenin, V. I. Collected Works, Volume, 38, Philosophical Notebooks. Page 179. 

3. Ibid. Page 171. 

4. Ibid. Page 208. 

5. Selsam, op. cit. Page 181. 

6. Lenin, op. cit. Pages 221-222. All quotes that follow from same section.

Lecture Four-- Pragmatism, Revisionism And Revolutionary Party

THE QUESTION OF philosophy is essentially a question of the party. It follows that every great struggle within the party has its roots in a break with the Marxist method and an adaptation to the method of the bourgeoisie. This adaptation takes the form in the United States of pragmatism. 

It was this philosophical question which lay at the heart of Trotsky’s last great struggle conducted in the last year of his life—his struggle against the revisionist tendency which had grown up inside the Socialist Workers Party. But before we turn to this struggle we must place it within its historical, social and intellectual context. 

Trotskyism was born in a struggle against the degeneration of the Soviet Union and as a result of this the destruction of the Communist International as a revolutionary instrument. Stalinism both grew out of and contributed to the defeats of the working class in that period. It was a period characterized by the deepest decay of capitalism, the sharpest class struggles, and the collapse of the working class leadership. There simply was not enough time to overcome the disorientation of the working class brought about by the growth of Stalinism. 

REACTION

Particularly in the latter half of the 1930s, bourgeois reaction took advantage of the prostration of the working class to gain the upper hand despite its own crisis and to lay the basis for a new capitalist development through the barbarous growth of fascism and war. The late 1930s was dominated by the growth of fascism in Europe, the pending catastrophe of a new world war, and the most barbarous conduct of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the form of the Moscow Trials and the assassination of Trotsky’s family and then Trotsky himself. 

This was indeed a difficult climate to develop a new Marxist cadre, to see anew flowering of Marxist theory, and to develop mass revolutionary parties. Here is how Trotsky pictured the situation some months before the struggle broke out in the SWP: 

“We are a small boat in a tremendous current. There are five or ten boats and one goes down and we say it was due to bad helmsmanship. But that was not the reason—it was because the current was too strong. It is the most general explanation and we should never forget this explanation in order not to become pessimistic—we, the vanguard of the vanguard. There are courageous elements who do not like to swim with the current—it is their character. Then there are intelligent elements of bad character who were never disciplined, who always looked for a more radical or more independent tendency and found our tendency, but all of them are more or less outsiders from the general current of the workers movement. Their value inevitably has its negative side. He who swims against the current is not connected with the masses. Also, the social composition of every revolutionary movement in the beginning is not of workers. It is the intellectuals, semi intellectuals or workers connected with the intellectuals who are dissatisfied with the existing organizations....We are all very critical toward the social composition of our organization and we must change, but we must understand that this social composition did not fall from heaven, but was determined by the objective situation and by our historic mission in this period.’’(1) 

Thus Trotsky noted the extremely difficult conditions under which the revolutionary party had to be constructed. There were, as Trotsky pointed out, good objective conditions for the great difficulties the Trotskyist movement was experiencing. He pointed this out not to excuse revisionism but as a sharp warning to the movement to conduct the most ferocious struggle against bourgeois influences within the movement so that Marxism itself could be maintained and a basis laid for its flowering in a later more favorable period. 

These difficult conditions, generally true for Europe as well as America, were particularly reinforced within the United States by its long anti-theoretical tradition expressed in the form of pragmatism. At the very moment of his arrival on the American continent in Mexico Trotsky expressed his deep concern with this problem. Here Novack describes his conversation with Trotsky: 

TROTSKY

“January 10, 1937—the day after Trotsky and his wife Natalia had landed in Mexico. His party was on the troop-guarded private train sent by the Minister of Communications to ensure their safe conduct from Tampico to Mexico City. That sunny morning Shachtman and I sat with Trotsky in one of the compartments, bringing the exile up to date on what had happened during his enforced voyage from Norway. 

“Our discussion glided in the subject of philosophy in which he was informed I had a special interest. We talked about the best ways of studying dialectical materialism, about Lenin’s ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism’ and the theoretical backwardness of American radicalism. Trotsky brought forward the name of Max Eastman who in various works had polemicized against dialectics as a worthless idealist hangover from the Hegelian heritage of Marxism. 

“He became tense, agitated. ‘Upon going back to the States,’ he urged, ‘you comrades must at once take up the struggle against Eastman’s distortion and repudiation of dialectical materialism. There is nothing more important than this. Pragmatism, empiricism is the greatest curse of American thought. You must inoculate younger comrades against its infection.”(2)

Max Eastman had at one time been close to Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement. He never, however, was a party man and refused to subordinate himself to the discipline of a party. Moreover, he held for years a hostility to dialectics and supported this position from a pragmatic point of view. In this he was joined by Sidney Hook. Hook as early as 1935 stated: 

HOOK

“To hold that the logic we know is invariant for all possible existence is to utter a proposition which we cannot test for the very meaning of ‘all possible existence’ depends upon what we discover actuality to be.’’(3)  

With this skepticism about logic he denied that logic was based in the natural material world. From this he concluded that while dialectics was the ‘‘algebra of revolution’’(4) it had no relevance to the natural world. There the good old pragmatic method sufficed. In time Hook would lose any interest in revolution, algebraic or not, and deny not only dialectics in nature but Marxism as a whole. 

This man who began trying to build a half way house with one philosophical foot in Marxism and the other in pragmatism began in the late 1930s an evolution openly over to the capitalist camp. Today he emerges as the chief professorial apologist for Nixon’s witch hunt against radical students.

Hook was joined in this defense of pragmatism by Eastman who stated in 1938 about Marxism:

“An antiquated German - romantic faith in a universe where planets are revolving in ‘ever more magnificent circles,’ and things on them from bugs to bureaucracies are in a state of everlasting progress ‘from the lower to the higher’—is anything but helpful. To transplant all this disguised Hegelian rationalistic animistic balderdash into our western world, which has been so largely characterized by practical and therefore skeptical, empirical good sense, is unqualifiedly bad. When Trotsky says that what we need in this country is ‘‘more dogma,’’ he ought to be resisted as an obscurantist by every alert and free and educated mind in America—and he will be.’’(5) 

What is particularly significant here is Eastman’s almost patriotic tribute to American soil untarnished by European “Dogma.’’ It is so strikingly similar to Novack’s comment about an America which has ‘‘spontaneously spurned scholasticism.’’ It stands in sharp contrast with Engels’ assessment that America has spurned nothing but what interferes with business and that its anti-theoretical prejudices were but a cover for the maintenance of the narrowest of thinking combined with the most eclectic idealism.

UNDERMINED

Most important is that Eastman and Hook took up the cudgels for pragmatism and against the dialectic precisely in a period when the very foundations of capitalism were being undermined and therefore the material basis for pragmatism itself. Thus they fought for pragmatism at a time when it was possible to break not only intellectuals but lay the basis for the breaking of the masses of the working class from pragmatic and empirical ways of thinking and bring them to a revolutionary outlook. Trotsky wrote: 

“Empiric thinking, limited to the solution of immediate tasks from time to time, seemed adequate enough in labor as well as bourgeois circles as long as Marx’s law of value did everybody’s thinking. But today that very law is in irreconcilable contradiction with itself. Instead of urging economy forward it undermines its foundations. Conciliatory eclectic thinking, with its philosophic apogee, pragmatism, become utterly inadequate, while an unfavorable or disdainful attitude toward Marxism as a ‘dogma’—is increasingly insubstantial, reactionary and downright funny. On the contrary, it is the traditional ideas of ‘Americanism’ that have become lifeless, petrified ‘dogma,’ giving rise to nothing but errors and confusion.’’ (6) 

This may on the surface seem contradictory to Trotsky’s remarks about swimming against the stream. But both statements are as true, reflecting different sides, different shades of the reality of the late 1930s. In the midst of a depression, with bourgeois democracy caving in to fascism and war on the rise, the illusions of capitalism were being smashed by the objective crisis of capitalism. It was this reality which made pragmatism such a bankrupt method. But the bankruptcy of capitalism did not mean that capitalism would fall of its own weight. What it did mean was that unless a revolutionary leadership came forward capitalism would seek a new equilibrium through the terribly destructive price of war and fascism only to go over into a new and deeper crisis at a later period —the period we are presently entering. 

The pragmatists like Hook and Eastman saw only the surface results of processes they did not understand. The results were the growth of fascism and the coming of war. Accepting these as inevitable they not only did not resist these but would not struggle to lay the basis for changing the situation when the stream once again flowed in our direction. They joined the petty bourgeois stampede and lined up with their own bourgeoisie. 

Later, when the bourgeoisie conducted its McCarthyite witch hunt in the 1950s against the Communist Party and other oppositionists, Sidney Hook emerges to explain from a ‘‘liberal’’ point of view that ‘‘heresy’’ is all good and fine but that the Communist Party is a ‘‘conspiracy.’’ Today when the bourgeoisie seeks to whip up hysteria against students to keep radical ideas away from the working class, Sidney Hook again ‘‘explains.’’ This time he shows that the cause of the repression is the students and even criticizes the repressive administrations for being ‘‘permissive.”

Thus we see that in the late 1930s sections of intellectuals around the Trotskyist movement developed and deepened their hostility to dialectics and their defense of pragmatism and at the same time moved openly into the anti-Soviet bourgeois camp. As the impending storm of World War II cast its shadow over the world they lined up with their bourgeoisie.

PARTY

These trends in radical intellectual circles had to have their reflection within the revolutionary party itself. The party, as we have noted, is precisely where the central questions of mankind are posed the sharpest. The party must therefore be the sharpest arena of class struggle in the form of the struggle for the Marxist method and Marxist policies within the vanguard of the class. 

Novack’s discussion of empiricism, which leaves out any mention of the reflection of empiricism and pragmatism within the party, thus shows no understanding of the lessons of this whole period. Novack’s ‘‘great polemic’’ is directed against openly anti-Marxist cold warrior Karl Popper and is thus an evasion of confronting how pragmatism penetrates the radical milieu and through the radical milieu the party itself. 

Trotsky had no such illusions. As Novack himself faithfully records Trotsky upon landing on the North American Continent jumps from a discussion of the pragmatism of Eastman to the proposal that ‘‘You must inoculate younger comrades against its infection.’’ He knew the pragmatism reflected in Eastman would find its most dangerous expression within the party itself unless a serious struggle was waged then and there in 1937 for dialectics in the party.

The emergence of a petty bourgeois opposition within the Socialist Workers Party dovetails with the development of pragmatism among the intellectuals on the periphery of the party. In fact, as Trotsky was to point out, the real origins of the minority lay in a philosophical bloc between Burnham and Shachtman in the course of the purported struggle against Eastman, Hook and Company. 

ANTI-SOVIET

Now we must turn to the struggle within the Socialist Workers Party. The generally difficult international situation for the revolutionary movement suddenly became more bleak as Stalin signed a pact with Hitler and together with Hitler divided up Poland and launched his own invasion of Finland. This was really the beginning of World War II and immediately an anti-Soviet panic swept the liberal middle class. The middle class had no difficulty in maintaining a friendly attitude towards the Soviet Union during the period of the USSR’s alliance with the allied powers. The middle class liberals not only swallowed the Moscow Trials but these particularly appealed to them. After all it was old Bolsheviks who were killed. Publications like the Nation became open apologists for this frame-up. 

But now that the Soviet Union had formed a temporary alliance with the imperialist rival Germany, a hue and cry swept the liberal circles and ant Sovietism rode high. It was under these circumstances that the petty bourgeoisie opposition arose within the SWP. 

SHACHTMAN

On August 22, 1939 Stalin announced his pact with Hitler. On the very same day Shachtman put forward a motion on the SWP Political Committee: 

“That the next meeting of the Political Committee begin with a discussion of our estimate of the Stalin-Hitler pact as related to our evaluation of the Soviet state and the perspectives for the future.’’(7) 

Then on September 3 in marches James Burnham. Burnham, who was a professor of philosophy at NYU, had joined the party along with A. J. Muste a few years earlier. He had played an important literary role writing a number of pamphlets and articles for the party. In 1937 he joined with Carter putting forward the position that the Soviet Union was neither a workers’ nor a capitalist state. He did not say what it was.(8) At this meeting of the Political Committee he put forward a motion that a full session of the National Committee meet to reconsider the question of the class nature of the Soviet Union.

The majority asked him to produce a document on the question and on September 5 he submitted a document ‘‘On the Character of the War’’ which stated: 

“It is impossible to regard the Soviet Union as a workers’ state in any sense whatever....Soviet intervention (in the war) will be wholly subordinated to the general imperialist character of the conflict as a whole; and will be in no sense a defense of the remains of the Socialist economy.’’

So the matter stood to September 30. At the meeting of the National Committee Burnham withdraws his resolution on the class nature of the Soviet state and in its stead Max Shachtman comes forward with a joint platform resolution restricted to the ‘‘immediate answers to the concrete questions raised by the Hitler-Stalin pact.”’ (10) Abern then enters the scene voting for both the ‘‘concrete’’ resolution of the Shachtman-Burnham minority and the resolution of the majority reaffirming the ‘‘basic analysis of the nature of the Soviet state and the role of Stalinism.’’(11) In this manner the Burnham - Shachtman - Abern minority was born. 

DIRECTION

It is important to note the direction of movement of this faction. Burnham began on the more fundamental level of the class nature of the state but as his faction developed he moved from this level to the level of the ‘‘concrete facts.’’ His movement was from a certain level of abstraction to a stand on concrete facts despite differences on this ‘‘abstract’’ level. As William James said, “The pragmatist is uncomfortable away from the facts.”

The opposition actually held three positions on the class character of the Soviet state. Burnham maintained the state to be a new form of class rule ‘‘neither bourgeois nor workers.’’ Abern held to Trotsky’s position that it was a workers’ state albeit degenerated. Shachtman maintained a neutrality on the question announcing he was ‘‘considering’’ the whole matter. But all three leaders and all their followers agreed on the ‘‘concrete issues’’ of the war, the impermissibility of defending the Soviet Union under conditions of the war. It was on this ‘‘concrete’’ basis combined with a hostility to the ‘‘Cannon regime’’ that their opposition was formed. 

HIGHER

Trotsky’s intervention in the struggle took the exact opposite course. He moved consciously, steadily toa higher and higher level of abstraction centering the discussion fundamentally on the question of the Marxist method itself. Thus his very first comment on the opposition in a letter to Cannon dated September 12, 1939, Trotsky announced his intention to take up the question of the nature of the Soviet state. As Burnham took his document on the nature of the Soviet state and put it back into his briefcase Trotsky took this question and forced it forward to the center of the discussion.(12)

As Burnham never developed any theory of the nature of the Soviet Union just maintaining it was not a workers’ or a bourgeois state, Trotsky turned to an obscure Italian ex-Trotskyist by the name of Bruno R. who had actually originated the theory of ‘‘bureaucratic collectivism.’’ Trotsky pointed out that to conclude that the Soviet bureaucracy was a new ruling class meant that for a whole epoch the working class could play no revolutionary role. Thus, he insisted, the theory which lay behind the concrete assessment of the minority—its refusal to defend the Soviet Union—actually made the entire program of revolutionary Marxism obsolete for a whole historical period. 

Thus Trotsky proceeded from the concrete position of the minority to the abstract theory which that position expressed. He then developed the logic of that abstract theory and from that arrived at the real concrete policies that the minority was advocating—a complete abandonment of the revolutionary program of the working class. From the concrete to the abstract in order to arrive again at the concrete with a deeper understanding of reality. 

But Trotsky did not leave the discussion even on that level. As the minority moved away from a discussion on the class nature of the Soviet Union seeking to hide behind agreement over concrete issues, Trotsky was forced to proceed deeper to the level of the Marxist method itself. At the same time it became necessary to establish the class material roots of the opposition. The two processes were inseparably linked. 

PETTY-BOURGEOIS

Trotsky’s very next major contribution was called ‘‘A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party.’’ In its very first paragraph the article states:

Like any petty-bourgeois group inside the socialist movement, the present opposition is characterized by the following features: a disdainful attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect for the tradition of their own organization; anxiety for personal ‘independence’ at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position to another; lack of understanding of revolutionary centralism and hostility towards it; and finally, inclination to substitute clique ties and personal relationships for party discipline.’’(13)

In the very next paragraph Trotsky raises the question of dialectics and American pragmatism. He traces. the bloc of Shachtman, Burnham and Abern over concrete issues despite differences on the class question of the nature of the Soviet Union back to a bloc between Burnham and Shachtman a year earlier on the philosophical front. In an article entitled ‘‘Intellectuals in Retreat,’’ which was aimed against Eastman and Hook, the authors Shachtman and Burnham, had said the following about dialectics:

“The two authors of the present article differ thoroughly on their estimate of the general theory of dialectical materialism, one of them accepting it and the other rejecting it....There is nothing anomalous in such a situation. Though theory is doubtless always in one way or another related to practice, the relation is not invariably direct or immediate; and as we have before had occasion to remark, human beings often act inconsistently. From the point of view of each of the authors there is in the other a certain such inconsistency between ‘philosophic theory’ and political practice, which might on some occasion lead to decisive concrete political disagreement. But it does not now, nor has anyone yet demonstrated that agreement or disagreement on the more abstract doctrines of dialectical materialism necessarily affects today’s and tomorrow’s concrete political issues —and political parties, programs and struggles are based on such concrete issues. We all may hope that as we go along or when there is more leisure, agreement may also be reached on the more abstract questions. Meanwhile there is fascism and war and unemployment.’’ (14) 

As Trotsky pointed out while one of the authors was an opponent of dialectics, the other did not consider the question relevant to ‘‘fascism and war and unemployment.’’ Dialectics was not seen as central to the development of program and its implementation but rather as a question relegated to ‘‘leisure.’’ In reality, just as the concrete issues of Poland and Finland reflected Burnham’s position on the nature of the USSR, so Shachtman’s attitude towards dialectics reflected Burnham’s pragmatic hostility to abstraction and the objective materiality of logic.

METHOD

This pragmatic method is the method of the bourgeoisie as it deals with only surface phenomena and its expression within the party was an expression of bourgeois influence within the party. The struggle within the SWP was thus a class struggle against a section of the party prone to the influence of capitalism through petty bourgeois democratic circles. 

In 1939 in their joint article Shachtman and Burnham were unable to show the connection between Eastman’s position on philosophy and his political evolution. As Trotsky stated: 

“By allying himself in this question with the anti-dialectician Burnham, Shachtman deprived himself of the possibility of showing why Eastman, Hook and many others began with a philosophical struggle against the dialectic but finished with a political struggle against the socialist revolution. That is, however, the essence of the question.’’(15)

Trotsky continues:

“The attitude of each of them toward the nature of the Soviet state reproduces point for point their attitude toward the dialectic. 

“In both cases Burnham takes the leading role. This is not surprising; he possesses a method—pragmatism. Shachtman has no method. He adapts himself to Burnham. Without assuming complete responsibility for the anti-Marxian conceptions of Burnham, he defends his bloc of aggression against the Marxian conceptions with Burnham in the sphere of philosophy as well as in the sphere of sociology. In both cases Burnham appears as a pragmatist and Shachtman as an eclectic....Not more than a few months passed before Burnham and Shachtman themselves demonstrated that their attitude toward such an ‘abstraction’ as dialectical materialism found its precise manifestation in their attitude toward the Soviet state.’’(16) 

From this Trotsky proceeded into a discussion of dialectics itself contrasting it to formal logic. His aim was not only to fight Shachtman and Company but to educate the majority as well. From then on this became the center of Trotsky’s contributions to the discussion. These same points were expanded upon in ‘‘Open Letter to Burnham’’(17) and ‘‘From Scratch to Gangrene.’’(18) 

James Burnham was flushed out in the open in particular in response to Trotsky’s biting article ‘‘Open Letter to Burnham.”’ In reply he wrote ‘‘Science and Style.’’ Here the real backward and reactionary character of Burnham’s thought was clearly expressed as if a cesspool finally reached the point of overflowing and coming to the surface. Let us first look at what Burnham has to say about logic, its relation to material reality and to the party: 

“You, however, serve up to us only a stale re-hash of Engels. The latest scientist admitted to your pages is— Darwin; apart from Aristotle, the only ‘logic worthy of attention’ is that of— Hegel, the century-dead arch muddler of human thought. Comrade Trotsky, as we Americans ask: where have you been all these years?’’(19) 

Burnham then announces his adherence to the logic of Russell and Whitehead as well as C. I. Lewis. Russell’s stand in defense of Hume’s skepticism and on the non-materiality of logic were commented upon earlier. Burnham’s explanation of logic is clearly based on this pragmatic and essentially idealist approach as we can see: 

LOGIC

“You have an altogether incorrect idea of logic, Comrade Trotsky. You draw an analogy between a machine or instrument and logic: ‘Just as a machine shop in a plant supplies instruments for all departments, so logic is indispensable for all spheres of human knowledge.’ This analogy is false. For our politics, the analogy to a machine or instrument or tool is not logic or ‘method,’ but the party; the party, the actual party, is the instrument we use to achieve our political goals. Logic is indispensable to human knowledge only in this respect: that logic states the conditions for intelligible discourse, so that we ‘violate’ logic only at the risk of talking nonsense.’’ (20) 

Thus logic is seen existing only in the realm of idea as a statement of the proper ordering of idea and the purpose of exchanging idea. Nothing can be said as to why an “intelligible’’ statement is ‘‘intelligible.’’ Logic is not seen reflecting basic movement of matter. The party is seen as a tool or instrument separated out from logic. Above all logic is not seen as essentially a question of the party itself, of the relationship between idea and the material world through the struggle to change that world. 

ABSTRACTION

Beginning with this approach to logic let us see how Burnham deals with the question of the concrete and the abstract, appearance and essence.

“In the first place, it is a direct falsehood to say that I, or any other member of the opposition, rejects the Marxian theory of the state....However, the theory of the state is not a ‘fundamental’ of politics in precisely the same sense that I have explained. If it is fundamental, it is so from the point of view: that if it has been pretty clearly demonstrated that from no other hypothesis can we consistently reach such conclusions as we embodied in many of the planks of our basic program (rejection of parliamentary road, attitude toward imperialist war, dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), whereas any other theory of the state leads to different (and wrong) conclusions about the necessary means for achieving socialism. Thus it would seem that acceptance of our basic program logically entails acceptance of the Marxian theory of the state, though this may not be clear at every stage to every person. Nevertheless, so far as politics goes, it is the program and the empirical consequences that follow from it which are fundamental in relation to the theory of the state, rather than the theory fundamental in relation to the program.’’(21) 

And in conclusion: 

“Comrade Trotsky, you have absorbed too much of Hegel, of his monolithic, his totalitarian, vision of a block universe in which every part is related to every other part, in which everything is relevant to everything else, where the destruction of a single grain of dust means the annihilation of the Whole. I am as opposed to totalitarianism in philosophy as in the state or in the party.’’(22)

The theory of the state is to Burnham rather than a deeper penetration of reality, rather than a more real reflection of the material world than a factual description of the functioning of a particular state, for Burnham it is only a ‘‘hypothesis.”’ It is not necessarily true. In any event its truth lies in what flows from it in concrete consequences. With such an attitude it is easy to toss out theoretical conceptions developed out of the experience and thought of man over hundreds of years—of bitter experiences—because at one particular point the consequences of such a conception are displeasing in their effects. 

Proceeding with this method Burnham had no difficulty in throwing out the whole past of Marxist theory by developing a “hypothesis’’ that the USSR was a new class society which ‘‘better explained’’ the very bad consequences of Soviet policy in the period. It was, as we have noted, particularly the consequences of Soviet policy which went counter to the interests of the allied bourgeoisie which sent Burnham and Company to work in developing new ‘‘hypotheses.’’ 

RIGHT

Burnham, however, was willing, more than willing, really anxious, to toss out his latest hypothesis and carry the logic of his rejection of dialectics to its conclusion. Writing only a few months after he wrote ‘‘Science and Style’’ and a short period after his expulsion from the SWP, he stated: 

“The faction fight in the Socialist Workers Party, its conclusion, and the recent formation of the Workers Party have been in my own case, the unavoidable occasion for the review of my own theoretical and political beliefs. This review has shown me that by no stretching of terminology can I any longer regard myself, or permit others to regard me, as a Marxist. 

“I reject, as you know, the ‘philosophy of Marxism,’ dialectical materialism. I have never, it is true, accepted this philosophy. In the past I excused this discrepancy and compromised this belief with the idea that the philosophy wasn’t ‘important’ and ‘did not matter’ so far as practice and politics were concerned. Experience, and further study and reflection, have convinced me that I was wrong and Trotsky—with so many others —right on this score; that dialectical materialism though scientifically meaningless, is psychologically and historically an integral part of Marxism, and does have its many and adverse effects upon practice and politics.’’(23) 

Burnham soon proceeded far to the right and has ended up as a staff writer for the right wing publication National Review. Shachtman sought to maintain his eclectic attitude toward Marxism over a longer period picking and choosing what suited him from Trotsky and fitting it all together in a pragmatic fashion. His final political evolution was not substantially different from Burnham’s. Today he has abandoned Trotskyism and stands on the extreme right wing of the Socialist Party, a supporter of the Vietnam War, opposed to even halting the bombing of the North, a supporter of the Humphrey wing of the Democratic Party, a supporter of Kennedy’s invasion of Cuba.

The philosophical meaning of the 1940 fight was made all the clearer because Burnham was a conscious pragmatist. He was aware of philosophical questions and he openly defended the pragmatic method against dialectics. But the whole lesson of the 1940 fight would be missed if it were not recognized that while Burnham gave the theoretical lead to the opposition, there would have been no significant opposition if it had not been for Abern and Shachtman. Both these men maintained a belief in dialectics but actually proceeded in their political practice with the pragmatic method.

CANNON

The central struggle in 1940 was waged against the Burnham - Shachtman - Abern minority which represented a petty bourgeois grouping which had abandoned dialectical materialism for pragmatism. This does not mean that the proletarian section of the party and its leadership around Cannon were theoretically developed. Clearly it was Trotsky and not Cannon who had to take over the theoretical leadership of the struggle against the opposition. The majority was incapable of such a struggle by itself.

Trotsky noted this at the time when he said: 

“It would be asinine to think that the workers’ section of the party is perfect. The workers are only gradually reaching clear class consciousness. The trade unions always create a culture medium for opportunist deviations. Inevitably we will run up against this question in one of the next stages. More than once the party will have to remind its own trade unionists that a pedagogical adaptation to the more backward layers of the proletariat must not become transofrmed into a political adaptation to the conservative bureaucracy of the trade unions.’’(24)

Later, after the split with the Shachtmanites, Trotsky returns to the same question during an unsuccessful attempt to get the SWP to turn towards the Stalinist workers. Hansen asks Trotsky point blank: 

“I am wondering if Comrade Trotsky considers that our party is displaying a conservative tendency in the sense that we are adapting ourselves politically to the trade union bureaucracy.’’(25) 

“To a certain degree I believe it is so....In observing the Northwest Organizer I have observed not the slightest change during a whole period. It remains a-political. This is a dangerous symptom The complete neglect of work in relation to the Stalinist party is another dangerous symptom... It seems to me that a kind of passive adaptation to our trade union work can be recognized. There is not an immediate danger, but a serious warning indicating a change in direction is necessary. Many comrades are more interested in trade union work than in party work. More party cohesion is needed, more sharp maneuvering, a more serious systematic theoretical training; otherwise the trade unions can absorb our comrades.’’(26) 

The challenge thus posed by the 1940 fight was whether or not the SWP would take up the struggle within itself for dialectical materialism. The death of Leon Trotsky so soon after the split left this heavy weight on the SWP leadership alone. It would not be enough to do, as Shachtman did, and maintain an orthodox belief in dialectics but abstain from a struggle for the development of dialectics in the course of the construction of the party itself. To rest upon the trade union section of the party would not in and of itself isolated from this theoretical struggle ensure the party from petty bourgeois infection. Trotsky in the very course of the 1940 fight pointed out that ‘‘trade unions always create a culture medium for opportunist deviations.’’ 

LECTURES

The task of the education of the party on dialectics fell primarily to George Novack. Novack proceeded to give a series of lectures on dialectics. These lectures have recently been republished as An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism. Before we turn to the content of these lectures it must be noted that to see the struggle for philosophy as a matter of lectures—and to leave it at that—is to miss the whole point. Lectures and classes are important and the struggle for theory in the party requires constant attention to such educational work. That the SWP once gave such lectures was a very positive side of the SWP in that period immediately after the 1940 split. That today lectures or classes on dialectics are rarely given in the SWP is a sign of a further retreat from dialectical materialism.

But the struggle for philosophy is the struggle for the party. This means there must be a constant day to day battle to bring consciousness of method into the actual life of the party itself. Each branch meeting must begin with theory, with a political assessment of the party’s perspectives and strategy in the light of recent developments. A struggle must be waged to expose the methodological problems which hold the party back from realizing its program in the actual struggle of the class. This means a constant attempt to bring out the weaknesses, the negation so that in a struggle against these weaknesses development of the party can take place. 

A lecture or a class is important in that it sharpens the philosophical tools available to the party membership. But if these tools are not used in the daily construction of the party the class or lecture becomes a cover for avoiding the real struggle for method. If dialectics is not used in the day to day ‘‘practical” party work, then some other method must be used. Dialectics thus becomes a pursuit for the ‘‘leisure’’ of the lecture while pragmatism guides the actual work of the party. This is the very same eclecticism which characterized Shachtman. 

We have already noted a reflection of this eclecticism in Novack’s approach towards empiricism and pragmatism in his book Empiricism and Its Evolution. Novack sees pragmatism as having a “good” and a ‘‘bad’’ side. He sees empiricism as not squarely opposed to the materialist dialectic. He underestimates the strength of idealist and spiritualistic thinking in America and, like Eastman, sees some exceptional value in America’s hostility to theory. We can conclude from this that in the struggle against empiricism and pragmatism Novack pulls some critical punches. 

DEWEY

If we turn to Novack’s article ‘‘Liberal Morality” on John Dewey published in the Merit edition of Trotsky’s Their Morais and Ours we can see that we are not dealing with an isolated problem but with Novack’s fundamental method. John Dewey attacked Trotsky’s position on morality claiming that it was wrong to deduce from the class struggle the rights or wrongs of moral judgement. Novack writes: 

“To deduction, the extraction of particular conclusions from general rules, Dewey counterposed the procedure of induction, the arriving at generalizations on the basis of repeated or duplicated instances. 

“This antithesis is an unfounded one. Did Trotsky actually derive his means arbitrarily, as Dewey implied, through deductive processes alone? To be sure, Trotsky did explicitly evaluate means by reference to the laws and needs of the class struggle. These laws, however, were not freely created and imposed upon society by the Marxists. They had been drawn from a prior comprehensive study of social processes over many generations by strictly scientific methods. The laws of class struggle are first of all empirical generalizations developed from analysis of the facts presented by the history of civilization, including American history.’’ (27) (Emphasis in original.) 

Confronted with Dewey’s fundamental challenge Novack rushes in—to assure the reader that Marxist laws are after all no more than inductively arrived at ‘‘empirical generalizations developed from analysis of the facts.’’ He states that the law of the class struggle was actually developed by the inductive method which he describes as ‘‘generalizations on the basis of repeated or duplicated instances.”

GENERALIZATIONS

Of course there are many other generalizations which can be drawn from their repeated or duplicated instances of factual occurrence through history. One can in this manner develop a law of religious struggle since much conflict—particularly from the birth of Christianity—has been carried out in the religious form. One can develop the law that ‘‘power corrupts’’ since corruption in high office has occurred repeatedly. 

To state that Dewey’s antithesis of deduction and induction is unfounded requires not an attempt to prove that Marxist law is arrived at inductively in the manner of the empiricist but rather to establish the real relationship between induction and deduction—their actual dialectical relationship. Here we must restate what we have stated before about abstraction. We proceed from fact, from appearance, to essence to an understanding of the essential causes of factual phenomena. However we do this dialectically, that is in such a manner as to reflect the real movement of all material and social existence. It is not a matter of noting the frequency of factual appearance but of penetrating appearance to bring out the causes of change in appearance through the struggle of opposing forces. Only proceeding in this manner can we come to an understanding that the class struggle is the absolute within the relative of class society and everything in class society is shaped by it—not religion, not power as an abstraction. 

Of course on the next page Novack states that the class struggle is ‘‘more than an hypothesis about social development... It is a necessity, a certainty.’’ (28) But he does not explain from the point of view of method why this is so. In any event the article we are quoting from was written in 1965. By 1970 Novack is far less certain about this question of hypotheses. He states that prior to 1917: 

“The Communist Manifesto and further writings of the Marxists were still only working hypotheses which served to guide the most advanced elements of the proletarian cause but had yet to be realized.’’ (29) 

FORMAL

This eclectic ambiguity of Novack’s goes all the way back to his early lectures on dialectics and formal logic. These lectures, of course, stand on a far higher level than his later writings for at least they concern themselves with dialectics rather than using the defense of materialism as a cover for a backhanded defense of empiricism. In these lectures Novack takes the very same ambiguous stand towards formal logic that he takes in his later writings toward empiricism. He states: 

“These modern dialecticians did not look upon formal logic as worthless. Quite the contrary. They pointed out that formal logic was not only an historically necessary method of thought but also quite indispensable even now for correct thinking. But in itself formal logic was clearly deficient. Its valid elements became a constituent part of dialectics. The relations between formal logic and dialectics were reversed. Whereas among the classical Greek philosophers the formal side of logic became predominant and the dialectical aspects receded in importance, in the modern school dialectics occupies the front rank and the purely formal side of logic becomes subordinated to it.’’

The very heart of formal logic is the law of identity. This law holds that “A” equals “A.” This simply means that there exists distinct and different things in the world. In early Greek days this recognition of and categorizing of material reality was important for the primitive level of science at the time. All the rest of formal logic flows from, is deduced from, the law of identity. 

Novack gives us an example to show us how wonderful and useful to the revolutionary party this formal law of identity is—and thus how formal logic plays its role, subordinated but still a role under dialectical materialism: 

“Isn’t it an enormous step forward in social and political understanding when a worker discovers on the one hand that a wageworker is a wageworker, and on the other hand that a capitalist is a capitalist?’ And that workers everywhere have common class interests that transcend all craft, national and racial boundaries? Thus a recognition of the truth contained in the law of identity is a necessary condition for becoming a revolutionary socialist.’’(31) 

IDENTITY

Here we have restated in the form of the recognition of the law of identity the very same position on the class struggle which Novack put forward in his polemic with Dewey. Against Dewey he claims that the law of class struggle was an empirical generalization of the facts. Now he claims that class consciousness is the result, not of dialectical thinking, but of the application of the formal law of identity. 

All the law of identity states is that “A” equals “A.” With it one can identify a wageworker with a wageworker, a white man with a white man, and an American with an American, a tool and die maker with a tool and die maker. But one cannot determine by this law which identity is fundamental. To state that ‘‘the recognition of the truth contained in the law of identity is a necessary condition for becoming a revolutionary socialist’’ is actually a reflection on the philosophical level of what Trotsky criticized in the trade union work of the SWP—an adaptation to the trade union, i.e., bourgeois consciousness of the working class. Formal logic cannot bring workers beyond this level of consciousness. Only dialectical materialism can bring a revolutionary consciousness to the working class. 

Trotsky, of course, precisely in his struggle with Shachtman subjected the formal law of identity to a withering criticism. Novack is not only aware of this but he quotes Trotsky at length precisely on this point. He writes: 

‘‘Wherever we encounter some really existing thing and examine its character, we find that A is never equal to A. Says Trotsky:....‘If we observe these two letters under a lens, they are quite different from each other. But, one can object, the question is not of the size or the form of the letters, since they are only symbols for equal quantities, for instance, a pound of sugar. The objection is beside the point; in reality a pound of sugar is never equal to a pound of sugar—a more delicate scale always discloses a difference. Again one can object: but a pound of sugar is equal to itself ‘‘at any given moment.’’ 

‘“Aside from the extremely dubious practical value of this ‘axiom’’’, it does not withstand theoretical criticism either. How should we really conceive the word ‘moment?’ If it is an infinitesimal interval of time, then a pound of sugar is subjected during the course of that ‘moment’ to inevitable changes. Or is the ‘moment’ a purely mathematical abstraction, that is, a zero of time? But everything exists in time;...time is consequently a fundamental element of existence. Thus the axiom ‘‘A is equal to A’’ signifies that a thing is equal to itself if it does not change, that is, if it does not exist.’’’(32) 

So Trotsky deals with what Novack calls ‘‘necessary and valuable instrument of thought.’’ The law of identity is perfectly all right as long as there is no self-movement. But without self-movement there is no existence. Thus the law of identity is a mental construct which does not correctly express reality. It is, as are all mental phenomena including dreams and hallucinations, constructed out of reality. It is thus rooted in reality in that sense. But as a method of correctly expressing reality in our mind so that we may be able to change reality materially it is worse than useless. It distorts reality from a changing, moving interconnected whole into a permanent series of fixtures absolutely separated from each other, immobile, fixed—as changeless as the bourgeoisie would wish society to be. 

OPPOSITES

There is identity in dialectics but it is not a formal identity. In dialectics the law of identity becomes the law of the unity or identity of opposites. That is any single entity is a battleground of opposing tendencies and through this struggle, this clash of opposites one entity can become another. It is so to speak to the extent that a battle is taking place for it to become other. An entity is really a relationship of opposing tendencies, a battleground of contradictions rather than a lifeless fixture.

There can be no more a compromise with formal logic as there can be with empiricism. Both are aspects of the method, the philosophy, the thinking habits of the ruling class. To give any progressive role today to these methods is a form of class compromise. Within the life of the party it reflects an approach which leaves dialectics to the leisure of the lecture while formal logic and empiricism allows the party to muddle through its day to day tasks in the trade unions and elsewhere. Gone is the sharp edge of struggle of method at the center of the party’s very life. 

PABLOISM

Under the conditions of the postwar prosperity in the advanced capitalist countries and the cold war, a new petty bourgeois opposition grew up inside the Fourth International. A section, led internationally by Michel Pablo, abandoned the basic strategy of the Transitional Program using the same pragmatic and impressionistic method as Shachtman—though this time adapting to Stalinism rather than rejecting defense of the Soviet Union.

James P. Cannon in his ‘‘Open Letter” said this about Pablo in 1953: 

“These principles (those of the Transitional Program—T.W.) have been abandoned by Pablo. In place of emphasizing the danger of a new barbarism, he sees the drive towards socialism as ‘irreversible;’ yet he does not see socialism coming within our generation or generations to come. Instead he has advanced the concept of an ‘engulfing’ wave of revolution that gives birth to nothing but ‘deformed,’ that is, Stalin-type workers’ states which are to last for ‘centuries.’

“This reveals the utmost pessimism about the capacities of the working class, which is wholly in keeping with the ridicule he has lately voiced of the struggle to build independent revolutionary socialist parties.’’(33) 

Burnham in 1940 developed a theory that the Soviet Union was a new class society and thus for the whole next epoch the working class would have no revolutionary role. Pablo in 1953 was talking of centuries of deformed workers’ states which would be created by the Stalinists and not by the independent action of the working class led by Trotskyist parties. In both cases the conclusion is one of deep pessimism about the role of the working class and the abandonment of the strategy of constructing revolutionary parties. In both cases the method is one of impressionistically reacting to surface developments and projecting these for all time in the future ignoring the underlying essential developments which were creating conditions for a totally different surface situation as well. In both cases these tendencies reflected the retreat of the petty bourgeoisie and through the petty bourgeoisie the pressure of the capitalists themselves. 

Cannon correctly concluded about the Pabloites:

“To sum up: The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organizationally.’’(34)

So matters stood in 1953. It is true that the struggle with Pablo was a pale reflection of Trotsky’s against Shachtman. It was not conducted on the question of method. It was quickly dropped once the split had been consummated. Few internationally were educated in the process. But, a struggle had taken place and a separation from the petty bourgeois revisionists was concluded. 

REUNIFICATION

However, the failure of the SWP to struggle for the Marxist method in the party itself, its failure to probe to its methodological roots, its split with Pablo in 1953, led the SWP right back to Pablo. Beginning in 1961 the SWP sought to reunify with the Pabloites on the grounds that the SWP and the Pabloites agreed on ‘‘concrete issues.’’ In fact a discussion of 1953 and the principled causes of the original split was barred. All parties agreed in their concrete assessment of Cuba and on that ground alone unification would take place. The method of Shachtman became the method of Cannon and Dobbs. Just as Shachtman found himself in the camp of the liquidationist and anti-Marxist Burnham so the SWP today finds itself in the camp of the liquidationist Mandel with his anti-Marxist theories of ‘‘neo-capitalism’’ and the like. 

HANSEN

However, the struggle for Trotskyism was taken up by the Socialist Labour League of England in particular. The SLL insisted that the discussion must center on the question of method. It was in reaction to this that Joseph Hansen of the SWP was forced to deal with question of philosophy in his major polemical article ‘‘Cuba—The Acid Test.’’ Hansen wrote on empiricism in a section entitled ‘‘Should Marxists Go By The Facts?’’:

“I would submit that ‘Lenin and others’ did not bring from Hegel his opposition to empiricism on idealistic or religious grounds. On the other hand Marxism does share Hegel’s position that vulgar empiricism is arbitrary, one-sided and undialectical. But empiricism ‘systematically carried out?’ This is the view that the ‘genuine objective world,’ the material world, takes primacy over thought and that a dialectical relationship exists between them. What is this if not dialectical materialism?

“Slaughter’s error is to establish an absolute gulf between empiricism and Marxism, leaving out what they have in common. In brief, he is guilty of rigid, mechanical thinking on this point.’’

So here we have it all again. We cannot establish an ‘‘absolute gulf’’ between empiricism and Marxism. That would be mechanical thinking. We cannot be rigid. We must stress what empiricism and Marxism have in common. After all, Hansen states, what is dialectical materialism but empiricism systematically carried out? 

In order to defend a political bloc made on the basis of expediency and over ‘‘concrete positions’’ Hansen is forced to revise Marxism as fundamentally as Shachtman and Burnham. Marxism is made the equivalent of consistent empiricism. Dialectics is destroyed in the process as effectively as with Burnham, even though not as openly. 

DIALECTICS

Hansen, of course gives lip service to dialectics. He states that ‘‘a dialectical relationship exists’’ between thought and the material world. Good, but let us proceed a little further to see exactly what Hansen means by this ‘‘dialectical relationship:’’

“In the Marxist world outlook, dialectics does not serve an auxiliary role. It is central. To understand what this means and to appreciate its relevancy to the issue at hand—our attitude toward facts—we must go back to the origin of materialist dialectics, which is to be found in Marx’s solution to the chief contradiction of Hegel’s dialectics. This contradiction, as Slaughter will certainly agree, was its failure to provide self-criticism, for dialectical self-adjustment. The impasse was inevitable, since the Hegelian system excluded anything more fundamental than thought itself and there was thus nothing for thought to be adjusted against. The material world was viewed as a mere inert and passive ‘other’ created by the activity of thought. Research thus centered on the nature of thought, the ‘nuclear energy’ of the Hegelian system. Marx brought dialectics out of this blind alley by empirically taking matter as the fundamental source of motion. He thereby turned things around drastically and opened the way in principle for adjustment of his own theoretical system; that is, by checking it against the primary source of all movement, the material world. In place of thought spinning on itself as in the Hegelian system, Marx found the way to a genuine ‘feed back.’ Through this revolution the dialectical method becomes self-consistent. It, too, is open to change. A major characteristic of materialist dialectics, consequently is supreme sensitivity to facts. Any work that fails in this respect will not stand up as an example of materialist dialectics. It is an apology or an academic exercise such as abounds in the Stalinist school of pseudodialectics.’’(36) 

What we have here is a presentation of the pragmatic conception of the relation of thought to material reality and in the course of this an exposition of precisely the mechanistic thinking of the early vulgar materialists. Dialectics is likened to a computer with a ‘‘feed-back’’ system so that the method of IBM and the method of Marx become one. 

FEED-BACK

We do not agree that the chief contradiction of Hegel’s dialectics was that it did not allow for self-adjustment. It was, as Marx and Engels put it, that Hegel had to be turned upside down. Hegel certainly did not view the material world ‘‘as a mere inert and passive ‘other’’’ but saw it in constant internal struggle and motion. But he did view it as ‘‘created by the activity of thought’’ rather than seeing thought as a reflection, an expression of the material world.

Marx did not salvage dialectics ‘‘by empirically taking matter as the fundamental source of motion.’’ He was enough of a dialectician to recognize in such a formulation as the metaphysical and mechanistic nonsense of the empiricists. Matter is not the source of motion but is itself always in motion through its own internal contradictions. The separating out of matter and motion with one the source of the other is a reflection of an outlook which sees matter as an ‘‘inert and passive’’ thing-in-itself. By so doing it takes dialectics out of matter for dialectics is the expression of this self-movement of matter itself. 

This separating out of matter and motion then finds an expression in Hansen’s conception of the relation of the thought process, dialectical thinking, to the material world. Theory is seen as something external to the material world which is checked ‘‘against the primary source of all movement, the material world.’’ What is not understood is that theory is an expression of that material world and that abstraction exists as an aspect, a part of material reality itself. Hansen sees theory as essentially unreal idea which is adjusted through checking against the factual appearance of the material world. He does not see ‘‘fact’’ as itself a level of abstraction nor does he see theoretical conceptions, such as the class nature of the state, as expressions of the essentials of the material world. The feedback process he describes becomes a matter of adjusting fundamental principles in the light of immediate appearance and opportunities for the party. 

CUBA

With this method the SWP adapted to the Cuban leadership and on the basis of the appearance of Cuba at the time concluded that revolutionary parties guided by dialectical materialism were no longer necessary. ‘‘Blunted instruments’’ would work, at least in the colonial countries. As our philosopher George Novack wrote recently in an article actually billed as “an assessment of the role of empiricism and of conscious planning in revolutions:’’ 

“Few on either side of the contending class camps would dispute the judgment that Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, Castro and Guevara—to name only three of the top teams—exercised considerable influence upon the thought and action or their time and have all shaped the destiny of modern society. These men were preeminent practitioners of the science of revolution, proletarian-style.’’(3)

At risk of being classified among the few, we are forced to dispute exactly by ‘what criteria the top team of Castro and Guevara get to be classified as practitioners preeminent or not of ‘‘the science of revolution, proletarian-style.’’ These men are anti-Marxists who are completely hostile to the construction of conscious Marxist parties. Guevara lost his life in an adventure in guerrilaism completely separated from the working class. Castro’s state is not only not working class but denies to the working class even the right to construct its own independent party.

FUTURE

Trotsky in the 1930s outlined the great difficulties facing the development of Marxist theory and a mass party based on that theory in that period. He was well aware that in the United States the fight for theory was doubly difficult because of centuries-old anti-theoretical traditions which today are reinforced by the most powerful capitalist class in the world. He did not, however, draw from this, pessimistic conclusions about the future of America. Quite the opposite. He looked to America with its advanced technique and its highly educated working class for a new birth of Marxism under conditions of sharp economic crisis and the development of mass class struggles. 

He stated: 

‘‘Now dawns the new epoch of an independent class movement of the proletariat and at the same time of—genuine Marxism. In this, too, America will in a few jumps catch up with Europe and outdistance it. Progressive technique and a progressive social structure will pave their own way in the sphere of doctrine. The best theoreticians of Marxism will appear on American soil. Marx will become the mentor of the advanced American workers.’’(38)

This is the challenge which now lies before us. The movement of the American working class in the GE, postal and auto strikes, movement among the minority workers, the youth, the students, must find a conscious expression in the fight for and development of theory as part of the construction of the revolutionary party. This will not be an easy or a peaceful process. Like all development it must proceed through the negative—through the struggle against pragmatism which reasserts itself each day within the movement and strengthens the influence of the bourgeoisie in our midst.

The struggle against pragmatism will be just that—a struggle, a battle, a war. We can make no concessions in this war. No ‘‘on the one hands and on the other hands,’’ no fence straddling, pulling of punches. The methodological struggle must be as ruthless as will be the class struggle itself. They are shades of the same struggle. 

FOOTNOTES 

1. Trotsky Leon. ‘‘Fighting Against the Stream’’ in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-9). Page 64. 

2. Warde, William F. ‘‘Trotsky’s Views on Dialectical Materialism’’ International Socialist Review, Fall. 1960. Page 111. 

3. Hook, Sidney. From Hegel to Marx. Page 74. 

4. Ibid. 

5. Eastman, Max. ‘‘Burnham Dodges My Views’’ New International, August 1938. Page 245. 

6. Trotsky, Leon. Marxism In Our Time. Page 36. 

7. Trotsky, Leon. In Defense of Marxism, (Pioneer Edition) ‘‘Introduction’’ Page ix.

8. See: ‘‘Not a Workers and Not a Bourgeois State?’’ in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38)

9. ‘‘Introduction’’, op. cit. Page ix. 

10. Ibid. Page x. 11. 

Ibid. Page xi. 

12. Trotsky, Leon. In Defense of Marxism. Page 1. 

13. Ibid. Page 43. 

14. Ibid. Page 44.  

15. Ibid. Page 46. 

16. Ibid. Page 47. 

17. Ibid. Page 72. 

18. Ibid. Page 103. 

19. Ibid. Page 190. 

20. Ibid. Page 191. 

21. Ibid. Page 196. 

22. Ibid. 

23. Ibid. Page 207. 

24. Ibid. Page 146.

25. Discussions With Trotsky in The Struggle for Marxism in the United States by Tim Wohlforth. Page 40. 

26. Ibid. 

27. Novack, George. ‘‘Liberal Morality’’ in Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky. Page 67. 

28. Ibid. Page 68. 

29. Novack, George. ‘‘The Science of Revolutions and the Art of Making Them’”’ May 1970, International Socialist Review, Vol. 31, No. 3. Page 15. 

30. Novack, George. to the Logic of Marxism. 

31. Ibid. Page 25. 

32: Ibid. Page 33. 

33. As reprinted in Bulletin Supplement Revisionists in Crisis by Tim Wohlforth. Page S-7. 

34. Ibid. Page S-8. 

35. Hansen, Joseph. Cuba—The Acid Test. SWP Discussion Bulletin Vol. 23, No. 2, January, 1963. Page 5. 

36. Ibid. Page 6. 

37. Novack, George. ‘‘The Science of Revolutions and the Art of Making Them.’’ An Introduction Page 19. op. cit. Page 13. 

38. Trotsky, Leon. Marxism in Our Time. Page 38.