From Mechanistic to Dialectical Materialism
Maurice Cornforth
4. From Mechanistic to Dialectical Materialism
Mechanistic materialism makes certain dogmatic assumptions: (1) That the world consists of permanent and stable things or particles, with definite, fixed properties; (2) that the particles of matter are by nature inert and no change ever happens except by the action of some external cause; (3) that all motion, all change can be reduced to the mechanical interaction of the separate particles of matter; (4) that each particle has its own fixed nature independent of everything else, and that the relationships between separate things are merely external relationships.
Overcoming and passing beyond the dogmatic standpoint of mechanism, dialectical materialism holds that the world is not a complex of things but of processes, that matter is inseparable from motion, that the motion of matter comprehends an infinite diversity of forms which arise one from another and pass into one another, and that things exist not as separate individual units but in essential relation and interconnection.
Things and Processes
In order to find how the limitations of the mechanist approach can be overcome we may consider first of all certain extremely dogmatic assumptions which are made by mechanistic materialism. These mechanistic assumptions are none of them justified. And by bringing them to the light of day and pointing out what is wrong with them, we can see how to advance beyond mechanistic materialism.
(1) Mechanism sees all change as having at its basis permanent and stable things with definite, fixed properties.
Thus for the mechanists the world consists of indivisible, indestructible material particles, which in their interaction manifest such properties as position, mass, velocity.
According to mechanism, if you could state the position, mass and velocity of every particle at a given instant of time, then you would have said everything that could be said about the world at that time, and could, by applying the laws of mechanics, predict everything that was going to happen afterwards.
This is the first dogmatic assumption of mechanism. But we need to reject it. For the world does not consist of things but of processes, in which things come into being and pass away.
“The world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things,” wrote Engels, “but as a complex of processes, in which things apparently stable, no less than their mind-images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.”[23]
This, indeed, is what science in its latest developments teaches us. Thus the atom, once thought to be eternal and indivisible, has been dissolved into electrons, protons and neutrons; and these themselves are not “fundamental particles” in any absolute sense, i.e. they are not eternal and indestructible, any more than the atom; but science more and more shows that they, too, come into being, pass away and go through many transformations.
What is fundamental is not the “thing,” the “particle,” but the unending processes of nature, in which things go through “an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.” And nature’s process is, moreover, infinite: there will always be fresh aspects to be revealed, and it cannot be reduced to any ultimate constituents. “The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom, nature is infinite,” wrote Lenin.[24]
Just so in considering society, we cannot understand a given society simply in terms of some set of institutions in and through which individual men and women are organized, but we must study the social processes which are going on, in the course of which both institutions and people are transformed.
Matter and Motion
(2) The second dogmatic assumption of mechanism is the assumption that no change can ever happen except by the action of some external cause.
Just as no part of a machine moves unless another part acts on it and makes it move, so mechanism sees matter as being inert—without motion, or rather without self-motion. For mechanism, nothing ever moves unless something else pushes or pulls it, it never changes unless something else interferes with it.
No wonder that, regarding matter in this way, the mechanists had to believe in a Supreme Being to give the “initial impulse.” But we need to reject this lifeless, dead theory about matter. This theory separates matter and motion: it thinks of matter as just a dead mass, so that motion always has to be impressed on matter from outside. But, on the contrary, you cannot separate matter and motion. Motion, said Engels, is the mode of existence of matter.
“Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be. Motion in cosmic space, mechanical motion of smaller masses on the various celestial bodies, the motion of molecules as heat or as electrical or magnetic currents, chemical combination or disintegration, organic life—at each given moment each individual atom of matter in the world is in one or other of these forms of motion, or in several forms of them at once. All rest, all equilibrium is only relative, and only has meaning in relation to one or other definite form of motion. A body, for example, may be on the ground in mechanical equilibrium, may be mechanically at rest; but this in no way prevents it from participating in the motion of the earth and in that of the whole solar system, just as little as it prevents its most minute parts from carrying out the oscillations determined by its temperature, or its atoms from passing through a chemical process. Matter without motion is Just as unthinkable as motion without matter.”[25]
Far from being dead, lifeless, inert, it is the very nature of matter to be in process of continual change, of motion. Once we realize this, then there is an end of appeal to the “initial impulse.” Motion, like matter, never had a beginning.
The conception of the inseparability of matter and motion, the understanding that “motion is the mode of existence of matter,” provides the way to answering a number of perplexing questions which usually haunt people’s minds when they think about materialism and which lead them to desert materialism and to run to the priests for an explanation of the “ultimate” truth about the universe.
Was the world created by a Supreme Being? What was the origin of matter? What was the origin of motion? What was the very beginning of everything? What was the first cause? These are the sort of questions which puzzle people.
It is possible to answer these questions.
No, the world was not created by a Supreme Being. Any particular organization of matter, any particular process of matter in motion, has an origin and a beginning—it originated out of some previous organization of matter, out of some previous process of matter in motion. But matter in motion had no origin, no beginning.
Science teaches us the inseparability of matter and motion. However static some things may seem to be, there is in them continual motion. The atom, for instance, maintains itself as the same only by means of a continual movement of its parts.
So in studying the causes of change, we should not merely seek for external causes of change, but should above all seek for the source of the change within the process itself, in its own self-movement, in the inner impulses to development contained within things themselves.
Thus in seeking the causes of social development and its laws, we should not see social changes as being brought about by the actions of great men, who impressed their superior ideas and will on the inert mass of society—nor as being brought about by accidents and external factors—but as being brought about by the development of the internal forces of society itself; and that means, by the development of the social forces of production.
Thus unlike the utopians, we see socialism as the result, not of the dreams of reformers, but of the development of capitalist society itself—which contains within itself causes which must inevitably bring it to an end and lead to the socialist revolution.
The Forms of Motion of Matter
(3) The third dogmatic assumption of mechanism is the assumption that the mechanical motion of particles, i.e. the simple change of place of particles as the result of the action on them of external forces, is the ultimate, basic form of motion of matter; and that all changes, all happenings whatsoever can be reduced to and explained by such mechanical motion of particles.
Thus all the motion of matter is reduced to simple mechanical motion. All the changing qualities which we recognize in matter are nothing but the appearances of the basic mechanical motion of matter. However varied the appearances may be, whatever new and higher forms of development may appear to arise, they are all to be reduced to one and the same thing—the eternal repetition of the mechanical interaction of the separate parts of matter.
It is difficult to find any justification for such an assumption. In the material world there are many different types of process, which all constitute different forms of the motion of matter. But they can by no means be all reduced to one and the same form of (mechanical) motion.
“Motion in the most general sense,” wrote Engels, “conceived as the mode of existence, the inherent attribute, of matter, comprehends all changes and processes occurring in the universe, from mere change of place right to thinking. The investigation of the nature of motion had as a matter of course to start from the lowest, simplest forms of this motion and to learn to grasp these before it could achieve anything in the way of explanation of the higher and more complicated forms.”[26]
The simplest form of motion is the simple change of place of bodies, the laws of which are studied by mechanics. But that does not mean that all motion can be reduced to this simplest form of motion. It rather means that we need to study how, from the simplest form of motion, all the higher forms of motion arise and develop—“from mere change of place right to thinking.”
One form of motion is transformed into another and arises from another. The higher, more complex form of motion cannot exist without the lower and simpler form: but that is not to say that it can be reduced to that simpler form. It is inseparable from the simpler form, but its nature is not exhausted thereby. For example, the thinking which goes on in our heads is inseparable from the chemical, electrical etc. motion which goes on in the gray matter of the brain; but it cannot be reduced to that motion, its nature is not exhausted thereby.
The materialist standpoint, however, which rejects the mechanistic idea that all forms of motion of matter can be reduced to mechanical motion, must not be confused with the idealist notion that the higher forms of motion cannot be explained as arising from the lower forms. For example, idealists assert that life, as a form of motion of matter, cannot possibly be derived from any processes characteristic of non-living matter. For them, life can only arise through the introduction into a material system of a mysterious something from outside—a “vital force.” But to say that a higher form of motion cannot be reduced to a lower form is not to say that it cannot be derived from the lower form in the course of the latter’s development. Thus materialists will always affirm that life, for example, appears at a certain stage in the development of more complex forms of non-living matter, and arises as a result of that development, not as a result of the introduction into non-living matter of a mysterious “vital force.” The task of science in this sphere remains to demonstrate experimentally how the transition from non-living to living matter takes place.
Thus the mechanistic program of reducing all the motion of matter to simple, mechanical motion must be rejected. We need rather to study all the infinitely various forms of motion of matter, in their transformations one into another, and as they arise one from another, the complex from the simple, the higher from the lower.
In the case of society, no one has yet tried to show how social changes can be explained by the mechanical interactions of the atoms composing the bodies of the various members of society—though to do so would be the logical culmination of the mechanistic program. But the next best thing is attempted by the mechanistic theory known as “economic determinism.” According to this theory, the whole motion of society is to be explained by the economic changes taking place in society, all the determinants of social change have been exhausted when the economic process has been described. This is an example of the mechanistic program of reducing a complex motion to a simple form—the process of social change, including all the political, cultural and ideological developments, to a simple economic process. But the task of explaining social development cannot be fulfilled by trying to reduce the whole development to an economic process. The task is rather to show how, on the basis of the economic process, all the various forms of social activity arise and play their part in the complex movement of society.
Things and Their Interconnection
(4) The last dogmatic assumption of mechanism to be mentioned is that each of the things or particles, whose interactions are said to make up the totality of events in the universe, has its own fixed nature quite independent of everything else. In other words, each thing can be considered as existing in separation from other things, as an independent unit.
Proceeding on this assumption it follows that all relations between things are merely external relations. That is to say, things enter into various relationships one with another, but these relationships are accidental and make no difference to the nature of the things related.
And regarding each thing as a separate unit entering into external relations with other things, it further follows that mechanism regards the whole as no more than the sum of its separate parts. According to this view, the properties and laws of development of the whole are uniquely determined by the properties of all its parts.
Not one of these assumptions is correct. Nothing exists or can exist in splendid isolation, separate from its conditions of existence, independent of its relationships with other things. Things come into being, exist and cease to exist, not each independent of all other things, but each in its relationship with other things. The very nature of a thing is modified and transformed by its relationships with other things. When things enter into such relationships that they become parts of a whole, the whole cannot be regarded as nothing more than the sum total of the parts. True, the whole is nothing apart from and independent of its parts. But the mutual relations which the parts enter into in constituting the whole modify their own properties, so that while it may be said that the whole is determined by the parts it may equally be said that the parts are determined by the whole.
Once again, the development of science itself shows the inadmissibility of the old mechanistic assumptions. These assumptions have force only in the very limited sphere of the study of the mechanical interactions of discrete particles. In physics they were already shattered with the development of the study of the electro-magnetic field. Still less are they admissible in biology, in the study of living matter, and still less in the study of men and society.
The Correction of Mechanistic Materialism
When we bring into the open and reject these assumptions of mechanistic materialism, then we begin to see the need for a materialist doctrine of a different, of a new type—a materialism which overcomes the weaknesses and narrow, dogmatic assumptions of mechanism.
This is dialectical materialism.
Dialectical materialism understands the world, not as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which all things go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.
Dialectical materialism considers that matter is always in motion, that motion is the mode of existence of matter, so that there can no more be matter without motion than motion without matter. Motion does not have to be impressed upon matter by some outside force, but above all it is necessary to look for the inner impulses of development, the self-motion, inherent in all processes.
Dialectical materialism understands the motion of matter as comprehending all changes and processes in the universe, from mere change of place right to thinking. It recognizes, therefore, the infinite diversity of the forms of motion of matter, the transformation of one form into another, the development of the forms of motion of matter from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher.
Dialectical materialism considers that, in the manifold processes taking place in the universe, things come into being, change and pass out of being, not as separate individual units, but in essential relation and interconnection, so that they cannot be understood each separately and by itself but only in their relation and interconnection.
In dialectical materialism, therefore, there is established a materialist conception far richer in content and more comprehensive than the former mechanistic materialism.
[23] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, Chapter IV.
[24] Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 11, “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,” Chapter V, Section 2.
[25] Engels, Anti-Dühring, Part I, Chapter VI.
[26] Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Chapter III, N. Y., 1940.
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