You can read the original Russian version here.
The following short article was published in Russian by Viktor Kotelnikov after the death of Alexei Razlatsky. It is presumably from Razlatsky’s notes and not originally intended to be published.
Marxism as a Revolutionary Science
Marxism is not only an advanced science, but a revolutionary worldview at the same time. This thesis has been repeated a thousand times. But to an analytical mind, it does not seem like a convincing axiom, especially since the world of modern philosophy puts forward a multitude of schools and movements that consider themselves Marxist but are not overly concerned with revolutionary struggle. The fact that they are accused of “pseudo-Marxism” is not convincing; this accusation itself is derived from the same unconvincing axiom.
Such an assessment is much easier to accept. Marxism — including materialist dialectics — is a science that predictably forecasts the paths of social development and determines the opposing forces within it. And choosing one’s own position in this struggle is already an ethical question, it is a personal matter for everyone. For many, this is enough. In reality, however, there remain a lot of “unresolved” questions. What is ethics, ethical choice? How and under what influence is a particular ethical position formed? Is it ethical to speed up the course of events, to fight for the future to come sooner?
The solution, however, is not to refine the concept of ethics, nor to provide a stream of answers to numerous “unresolved” questions. Simply put, the thesis proposed at the beginning is correct, absolutely correct! It should not be viewed as an axiom; it is proven concisely and convincingly.
- Marxism — materialism in general — is advanced knowledge, a science that is not completely free from error, but capable of overcoming any of its own errors. A person who declares himself a Marxist already propagates this knowledge at least by his own authority, not to mention that he can also conduct active propaganda;
- Various strata of society and, most importantly, the working-class, acquiring materialistic knowledge (especially economic and sociological), are becoming increasingly aware of their position in society. Among the working-class, this inevitably gives rise to an awareness of the need to change the existing situation, an understanding that it has sufficient strength to occupy a dominant position in society — that is, it gives rise to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat;
- To propagate Marxism (that is, with inevitability: the labour movement, the proletarian socialist revolution) and to fight against the revolutionary movement or at least not to support it is eclecticism, it is stupidity, it is by no means Marxism. One must either consistently follow through to the end — that is, by promoting the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat through the propagation of knowledge, promote everything else as well, or reject the revolution and, accordingly, categorically refuse to propagate materialist knowledge.
The most poisonous thing about the second path is the propaganda, under the guise of Marxism, of idealistic theories that oppose the revolutionary movement. This is a brazen deception, blatant meanness, a struggle by deception for one’s own domination or to please the ruling class.
In this light, Lenin’s criterion is very understandable, as he repeatedly said that anyone who does not bring their convictions to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a Marxist. There are no options here. Either one is a Marxist and fights in every way for the dictatorship of the proletariat, or one is not a Marxist. And whether this is due to meanness or personal delusion is a secondary question. Either knowledge and the dictatorship of the proletariat, or deception, falsification of science, obscurantism and bourgeois society, freedom for the chosen few, human rights and the most important right of all — the right to oppress and exploit others through deception.
Principles of Materialist Dialectics
1: The unity of the world
The world is singular, unique and whole. It is matter moving in space and time.
This is identical to the law of universal interconnection of phenomena in nature.
Two consequences of contradictions:
Consequence 1 (ontological): The world is constantly changing, it cannot be studied completely as a given. Any of its specifics are contradictory, as they continue to change.
Consequence 2 (logical): We cannot comprehend the world as a whole at once without distinguishing individual objects within it. But each object bears all its connections with the rest of the world, and these connections belong to its essence. No object exists outside its connections with the whole world; this determines its inseparability from the world. In this sense, any object turns out to be identical to the whole world, and epistemologically, knowledge about any object is identical to the entire body of knowledge of humanity in general.
[If we consider the world as a universe U that unites all objects, then it follows directly that
A ≡ U
that is,
A ≡ AUĀ
(this is a disjunctive, not a conjunctive connection!)]
2: The essential nature of cognition
Humanity (and humans) are not machines for abstractly and sequentially comprehending the properties of the world. We strive to comprehend the world to the extent and in the directions that are essential to our existence and our life activities.
Only this allows us to do the impossible: to single out individual objects, to single out from the infinite multitude of their connections those that are subject to study.
The result of this is that, while we are incapable of obtaining unified knowledge about a unified world, we are capable of advancing in this direction as much as we want, acquiring partial knowledge.
The consequence of this is the concreteness of truth. We discard countless aspects of the cognisable because they are irrelevant to us today, right now. Tomorrow this may change.
3: The universal contradictions of the world and knowledge
The world is contradictory in that it is constantly changing. Any stability in it is temporary, instability is constant. The world constantly eliminates its instabilities, moving on to more stable forms, but even those are not absolutely stable – and therefore the process of of change is endless.
Consequence: the continuous development of the world. Movement backwards, to less stable forms, is impossible, except for local fluctuations.
[Special note: the universal law of organisational development of matter — the law of the steady decrease of entropy]
Our knowledge is doubly contradictory, since in addition to the world’s own contradictions, it also includes the contradictory nature of our localised research.
4: The world is comprehensible in its development
This is the main principle of materialistic dialectics. Unlike previous forms of cognition, which studied temporarily stable forms, dialectics brought historicism to the fore. For humanity, it is not only essential whether practical knowledge is applicable today, but also whether it will be applicable tomorrow, what factors it must take into account in order to make changes, etc.
Dialectics itself represents the unity of historical and logical approaches. But while logical laws had been studied earlier, historical laws, the laws of dialectical development, had to be extracted directly from the historical experience of humanity. There are three of them:
- The law of the unity and struggle of opposites;
- The law of the transition of quantity into quality;
- The law of negation of negation.
These laws are an extremely abstract reflection of the processes taking place in time; they are the laws of the developing material world.
It should also be noted that these are the laws of immanent development of contradictions. When applying them, it is important to accurately identify the essential contradictions of the process under study (and the essential opposites, the sides of these contradictions). Conversely, when certain opposites exist , it is very important to accurately determine to which phenomenon they belong, because it is precisely to this phenomenon that the laws of development apply. Here it is important to clearly understand that in a correctly defined situation, the elimination of one opposition simultaneously leads to the elimination of the second opposition and the entire phenomenon as a whole. For example, the productive forces of bourgeois society and capitalist production relations are opposites within the framework of capitalist production; they are sides of its and only its internal contradiction. The contradiction between the capitalist class and the proletariat is the contradiction bourgeois society.
The external influence of one object on another can always be understood as a connection between these objects, in which some of their properties manifest themselves as opposites. But in this case, only this connection, and not the objects themselves, can be subject to the laws of dialectics.
5: Formal (Aristotelian) logic is undoubtedly correct
It is an abstract reflection of the laws of nature accessible to direct human experience and is fully confirmed by centuries of human experience. Dialectics accepts it in its entirety, without the slightest doubt.
The idea put forward by many authors that dialectics destroys formal logic, rejects it, is a pure illusion that obscures the essence of the matter.
The general formula of formal logic is as follows: if certain premises are true, then the conclusion is also true.
The dialectical approach, without in any way destroying this formula, merely points out:
- Premises cannot be considered absolute. They inevitably contain internal contradictions, since they are a certain concrete knowledge about the world, which cannot but be contradictory. This means that each premise must be understood along with its opposite, which may prove to be more significant under certain conditions;
- A sufficiently rich system of logical constructions derived from a certain set of premises may encounter the fact that the conclusions obtained in it will not correspond to reality. In other words, conclusions that correspond to certain real facts can only be obtained by replacing some premises with their opposites;
- Any logical system that accurately describes a series of facts and finds that some of its conclusions contradict real facts can be modified by replacing the initial premises so that all known facts correspond to the conclusions obtained in the new system.
It is easy to see that all three guidelines are specific reflections of the three historical laws of dialectics. In other words, these are the same laws applied to the historical process of development of our own logical knowledge about the world. It is no coincidence that the wording of the instructions contains such dynamic moments as “may encounter” and “may be brought” — these moments themselves arise only in the course of the development of logical knowledge; they do not exist, just as there can be no contradictions in the case of the static existence of a logical system.
In addition, it should be said that all — absolutely all — mathematics is identical to formal logic. In other words, it is the application of formal logic to certain sets of abstract premises, which are called postulates or axioms. Accordingly, all axioms are internally contradictory. This also applies to those areas where the axiomatic construction is not yet complete or formalised: it is simply that the axioms are implicitly hidden in the explanatory reasoning.
6: Dialectics is an art
The laws of development, which are an essential part of dialectics, have a destructive rather than a creative power for our knowledge. They predict only the inevitability of unpredictable changes, encounters with previously unknown phenomena. This is natural; it means that concrete knowledge about the world cannot be obtained a priori, but is formed only through perception and logical comprehension of new properties, new aspects of the world.
The logical (formal-logical) interpretation of facts cannot take place without the destructive influence of dialectics. We cannot comprehend facts that contradict our knowledge without destroying the idea of the validity of the postulates and initial assumptions we have accepted.
There is a need to search for new postulates. Knowledge of dialectical laws helps in this, but does not allow the search process itself to be formalised. Here , both the laws of development and the formal-logical laws fail, since with the destruction of the assumptions , the entire formal-logical system of previous knowledge is destroyed. In the new system, facts (conclusions) that were previously directly related may find themselves in a multiply mediated relationship, and vice versa.
However, in completed (at any stage) knowledge, all facts are again represented by a strict and consistent formal-logical system. The work continues until all contradictions are hidden within the postulates. This representation is not uniform. In some cases, we are satisfied with the introduction of postulates of this kind: “a certain law applies up to a certain limit, and beyond that, another law applies.” This does not mean that subsequently no premises will be found that allow the entire range of phenomena to be described by a single general law. Thus, before the emergence of the theory of relativity (i.e., before the construction of its postulates), physicists were forced to distinguish between dynamics in mechanical processes and in light phenomena.
Formally, the process of cognition can be represented as follows: There is an unlimited set of abstract premises and an infinite system of formal-logical conclusions derived from them. They form a kind of infinite network. The researcher’s task is to place all known facts in the nodes of this network, i.e. at the points where the premises and conclusions from them are located. In doing so, it is necessary that:
- Certain abstractions are made which correspond unambiguously to certain properties of real phenomena;
- The number of premises for obtaining all conclusions related to the facts should be minimal.
After that, all conclusions related to unused premises are cut off, and the remaining premises are interpreted in a natural scientific sense on the basis of established one-to-one correspondences, are interpreted in a natural scientific sense, and conclusions that are present in the formal system but are not related to any facts are also interpreted in a natural scientific sense and are considered as the basis for decisive control experiments capable of confirming or refuting the obtained formal-logical system (i.e., theory).
Much could be formalised in practice if it did not turn out that in the work of establishing a one-to-one correspondence between properties and certain abstractions, we are faced with an absolutely analogous scheme of actions. Therefore, the success of the matter is often decided by a successful guess about the commonality of the nature of certain properties or phenomena.
7. The social significance of dialectics.
Nowhere in nature do revolutionary changes leading to previously unknown results occur with such intensity as in people’s minds, in social relations, in nature transformed by humans. Social reality forces the researcher to constantly restructure logical systems.
If we also consider that the organised class actions of the proletariat and its revolutionary practice are generally impossible without a reliable materialist theory, the decisive importance of dialectics becomes obvious.
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