The Dialectical Conception of Development
Maurice Cornforth
5. The Dialectical Conception of Development
Whereas the older philosophies considered that the universe always remained much the same, a perpetual cycle of the same processes, science has demonstrated the fact of evolution. But while recognizing the fact of evolutionary development, bourgeois thinkers have tried to understand and explain it in fantastic, idealist terms. And they have conceived of development as being always a smooth, continuous process, not recognizing the occurrence of abrupt breaks in continuity, the leap from one stage to another.
Following up the ideas of Hegel by taking up the revolutionary side of his philosophy while freeing it of its idealist trammels, Marx and Engels established the dialectical materialist conception of development. The key to understanding development in nature and society and the leaps and breaks in continuity which characterize all real development—lies in the recognition of the inner contradictions and opposite conflicting tendencies which are in operation in all processes.
This discovery by Marx and Engels was a revolution in philosophy and made of it a revolutionary weapon of the working people, a method for understanding the world so as to change it.
The Idea of Evolution
We have seen that the corrections of the mechanistic standpoint made by dialectical materialism are fully justified by and have a basis in the advance of science. Indeed, the advance of science itself has shattered the whole conception of the universe held by the older, mechanistic materialists.
According to that conception, the universe always remained much the same. It was a huge machine which always did the same things, kept grinding out the same products, went on and on in a perpetual cycle of the same processes.
Thus it used to be thought that the stars and the solar system always remained the same—and that the earth, with its continents and oceans and the plants and animals inhabiting them, likewise always remained the same.
But this conception has given way to the conception of evolution, which has invaded all spheres of investigation without exception. Nor was it scientific investigation alone which produced the idea of evolution. Science does not advance in isolation from society as a whole. The idea of evolution was generated out of the rise of industrial capitalism itself.
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence of all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”[27]
The industrial capitalists saw themselves as the bearers of progress. And as they thought progress was the law of capitalism, so they saw it as the law of the whole universe.
So there was made possible a great advance in the scientific picture of the universe. We find developing a picture of the universe, not as static, as always the same, but as in continual progressive development.
The stars did not always exist—they were formed out of masses of dispersed gas.
Once formed, the whole stellar system, with all the stars in it, goes through an evolutionary process, stage by stage.
Some stars, like our sun, acquire planets—a solar system. Thus the earth was born. As its surface cooled, so chemical compounds were formed, impossible in the high temperatures of the stars.
Thus matter began to manifest new properties, non-existent before—the properties of chemical combination.
Then organic compounds were formed out of the complex linking of carbon atoms. And from organic matter the first bodies arose which began to manifest the properties of life, of living matter. Still new properties of matter emerged—the properties of living matter.
Living organisms went through a long evolution, leading eventually to man. With man, human society was born. And still new processes, with new laws, arose—the laws of society, and the laws of thought.
What comes next?
Capitalist science can go no further. Here it ends, since capitalist science cannot contemplate the ending of capitalism. But socialist science shows that man himself is about to embark on a new phase of evolution—communist society, in which the whole social process will be brought under his own conscious, planned direction.
All this is the evolutionary history of the material universe.
Apart from the last point, it may be said this is all common knowledge. Bourgeois thinkers know this as well as Marxists, though they often forget it. But Marxism does not only stress the fact that everything in the world goes through a process of development. What Marxism found out was how to understand and explain this development in a materialist way.
The discovery of Marxism was the discovery of the laws of materialist dialectics. And that is why Marxism alone is able to give a fully scientific account of development and to point out the future path.
This is the meaning of Marx’s great discovery—how to understand change and development in a materialist way, and therefore how to become masters of the future.
Idealist Conceptions of Change and Development
How did bourgeois thinkers try to account for the universal change and development which they discovered?
Let us consider what some of them have had to say over a period of more than a century.
Hegel said that the whole process of development taking place in history was due to the Absolute Idea realizing itself in history. Herbert Spencer said that all development was a process of increasing “integration of matter,” and he put this down to what he called an “Incomprehensible and Omnipresent Power.” Henri Bergson said that everything was in process of evolution, due to the activity of “the Life Force.” Fairly recently, a school of British philosophers has coined the phrase “emergent evolution.” They pointed out that in the course of development new qualities of matter are continually emerging, one after the other. But as to why this should happen, one of the leaders of this school, Professor Samuel Alexander, said that it was inexplicable and must be accepted “with natural piety,” while another of its leaders, Professor C. Lloyd Morgan, said that it must be due to some immanent force at work in the world, which he identified with God.
Thus in every case some fantasy, something inexplicable and unpredictable, was conjured up to explain development. And so, when they thought about the future, all these bourgeois philosophers of evolution either thought, like Hegel, that development had now finished (Hegel taught that the Absolute Idea was fully realized in the Prussian State of which he was a distinguished employee), or else regarded the future as unfathomable.
Nowadays they begin to give up hope altogether and regard everything—past, present and future—as incomprehensible, the result of forces no one can ever understand or control.
It is the same story in the sciences. The cosmogonists, who study the evolution of the stars, appeal to a mysterious creation to start the process off. The biologists who study the evolution of organic life appeal to a series of unpredictable accidents (the random mutations of genes) as the basis for the whole process.
Such ideas are, however, unscientific. Why? Because they assert that the processes they are supposed to be investigating take place without any cause. True, the assertion is often made under a cloak of “scientific” objectivity and humility: it is not positively stated that no cause exists, but only that we have at present no clue as to what the cause, if any, may be. But such reservations do not materially alter the nature of the theories in question. For the fact remains that to say that matter was created, to say that “mutations” occur spontaneously, is to say that something happens for no reason, without any discoverable cause. Such statements do not deserve to be called even provisional scientific hypotheses but are simply idealist inventions, fantasies. Science may not yet know why something happens, but to say that it happens for no reason is to abandon science.
A second defect in the evolutionary ideas of most bourgeois thinkers is that they regard the process of evolution as a smooth, continuous and unbroken process. They see the process of transition from one evolutionary stage to another as taking place through a series of gradations, without conflict and without any break in continuity.
But continuity is not the law of development. On the contrary, periods of smooth, continuous evolutionary development are interrupted by sudden and abrupt changes. The emergence of the new stage in development takes place, when the conditions for it have matured, by a break in continuity, by the leap from one state to another.
Hegel was the first to point this out.
With every period of transition, he observed:
“It is as in the case of the birth of a child; after a long period of nutrition in silence, the continuity of the gradual growth in size, of quantitative change, is suddenly cut short by the first breath drawn—there is a break in the process, a qualitative change—and the child is born.”[28]
But Marx alone followed up this profound observation of Hegel. As for the ensuing bourgeois thinkers, although the investigations of science, and common experience itself, clearly demonstrate that development cannot take place without discontinuity, without abrupt transitions and the leap from one state to another, they have nevertheless in their general theories tried to make unbroken continuity the law of evolution.
This prejudice in favor of a smooth line of evolution has gone hand in hand with the liberal belief that capitalist society will evolve smoothly—through orderly bourgeois progress broadening down “from precedent to precedent,” as Tennyson once expressed it. To have thought differently about evolution in general would have implied that we would have to think differently about social evolution in particular.
The Dialectical Materialist Conception of Development
The problem of understanding and explaining development in a materialist way—that is, “in harmony with the facts conceived in their own and not in a fantastic connection”—is answered by dialectical materialism.
Dialectical materialism considers the universe, not as static, not as unchanging, but as in continual process of development. It considers this development, not as a smooth, continuous and unbroken process, but as a process in which phases of gradual evolutionary change are interrupted by breaks in continuity, by the sudden leap from one state to another. And it seeks for the explanation, the driving force, of this universal movement, not in inventions of idealist fantasy, but within material processes themselves—in the inner contradictions, the opposite conflicting tendencies, which are in operation in every process of nature and society.
The main ideas of materialist dialectics, which are applied in dealing with the laws of development of the real material world, including society, will be the subject of the following chapters. But this is how Lenin summed them up:
The essential idea of materialist dialectics is:
“The recognition of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature.... This alone furnishes the key to the self-movement of everything in existence. It alone furnishes the key to the leaps, to the break in continuity, to the transformation into the opposite, to the destruction of the old and emergence of the new....
“In its proper meaning, dialectics is the study of the contradiction within the very essence of things.
“Development is the struggle of opposites.”[29]
From Hegel to Marx
Where contradiction is at work, there is the force of development.
This profound conception was first put forward by Hegel. But he worked it out in an idealist way. According to Hegel, the whole process in the material world, in space and time, is nothing but the realization of the Absolute Idea, outside space and time. The Idea develops through a series of contradictions, and it is this ideal development which manifests itself in the material world. If things in space and time are forced to go through a series of transformations and to arise and pass away one after the other, that is because they are nothing but the embodiment of a self-contradictory phase of the Absolute Idea. For Hegel, the development of real things was due to the self-contradictoriness of their concepts: where the concept was self-contradictory, the thing which realized that concept could not be stable but must eventually negate itself and turn into something else. Thus instead of the concepts of things being regarded as the reflections of those things in our minds, the things were themselves regarded as nothing but the realizations of their concepts.
This is how Engels summed up the materialist criticism of Hegel.
“Hegel was not simply put aside. On the contrary, one started out from his revolutionary side... from the dialectical method. But in its Hegelian form this method was unusable.
“According to Hegel, dialectics is the self-development of the concept. The absolute concept does not only exist—where unknown—from eternity, it is also the actual living soul of the whole existing world....
“According to Hegel, therefore, the dialectical development apparent in nature and history, i.e. the causal interconnection of the progressive movement from the lower to the higher, which asserts itself through all zig-zag movements and temporary setbacks, is only a miserable copy of the self-movement of the concept going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain.
“This ideological reversal had to be done away with. We comprehended the concepts in our heads once more materialistically—as images of real things instead of regarding the real things as images of this or that stage of development of the absolute concept.
“Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion—both of the external world and of human thought—two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously in the form of external necessity in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents.
“Thereby the dialectic of the concept itself became merely the conscious reflection of the dialectical motion of the real world and the dialectic of Hegel was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing before, and placed on its feet again....
“In this way, however, the revolutionary side of Hegelian philosophy was again taken up and at the same time freed from the idealist trammels which in Hegel’s hands had prevented its consistent execution.”[30]
This materialist understanding of dialectics is the key to understanding the forces of development within the material world itself, without recourse to outside causes.
This discovery arises from the whole advance of science and philosophy.
But above all it arises from the investigation of the laws of society, an investigation made imperative thanks to the very development of society—from the discovery of the contradictions of capitalism, explaining the forces of social development, and thereby showing the way forward from capitalism to socialism.
That is why bourgeois thinkers could not answer the problem of explaining the real material forces of development in nature and society. To answer this problem was to condemn the capitalist system. And here they had a blind spot. Only the revolutionary philosophy of the vanguard of the revolutionary class, the working class, could do it.
Marx’s discovery of the laws of materialist dialectics showed us how to understand the dialectical development of nature. But above all it showed us how to understand social change and how to wage the working-class struggle for socialism.
This discovery revolutionized philosophy.
It signalized the triumph of materialism over idealism, by doing away with the limitations of the merely mechanistic materialism of the past.
It likewise spelled the end of all “systems” of philosophy.
It made philosophy into a revolutionary weapon of the working people, an instrument, a method for understanding the world so as to change it.
Summing up the essential ideas of materialist dialectics Stalin wrote:
“Life always contains the new and the old, the growing and the dying, the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary.
“That in life which is born and grows day after day is invincible, its progress cannot be checked. That is to say, if, for example, the proletariat as a class is born and grows day after day, no matter how weak it may be today, in the long run it must conquer. Why? Because it is growing, gaining strength and marching forward. On the other hand, that in life which grows old and is advancing to its grave, must inevitably sustain defeat, even if today it represents a titanic force. That is to say, if, for example, the ground is gradually slipping further and further back from under the feet of the bourgeoisie, and the latter is slipping further and further back every day, no matter how strong it may be today, it must, in the long run, sustain defeat.”[31]
Thus the materialist dialectics of Marx shows us the way forward and gives us unshakable confidence in our cause.
[27] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Chapter I.
[28] G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, Preface.
[29] V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, Russian Edition.
[30] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, Chapter IV.
[31] Joseph Stalin, Anarchism or Socialism? Chapter I, Moscow, 1950.
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