When we come to examine everything in the material world, we find that they exist only as a consequence of movement. Constant flux is the nature of matter. Everything exists in space-time, even a black hole. Natural laws govern this movement, as with the laws of gravity, laws of thermodynamics, and so on. Biological species are also the product of movement from the chemical processes that led to the creation of organic molecules, and development of cells, through the evolution of species via The Law of Natural Selection.
As Marx describes, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and in his Preface to Capital I, the evolution of social organisms, modes of production, can be analysed by a similar scientific and materialist method that requires no divine intervention for its explanation. The natural law that drives the evolution of social organisms is The Law of Value, as every society seeks to maximise the production of use-values, using the labour it has available, i.e. reducing the unit value of each item. It is driven to raise social productivity, which means revolutionising the forces of production, which, in turn, creates new productive relations, and new social relations built upon them.
“Thus, the movement of history produces social relations; industrial movement gives us industrial products, etc.” (p 99)
If material things are reduced to abstractions, and the nature of material things is movement, then, these movements, or laws of motion, can be reduced to abstractions too.
“If one finds in logical categories the substance of all things, one imagines one has found in the logical formula of movement the absolute method, which not only explains all things, but also implies the movement of things.
It is of this absolute method that Hegel speaks in these terms:
“Method is the absolute, unique, supreme, infinite force, which no object can resist; it is the tendency of reason to find itself again, to recognize itself in every object.” [Logic iii]” (p 99)
Marx sets out the Hegelian method of the dialectic by which an idea (thesis) splits into two opposing ideas.
“The struggle between these two antagonistic elements comprised in the antithesis constitutes the dialectical movement. The yes becoming no, the no becoming yes, the yes becoming both yes and no, the no becoming both no and yes, the contraries balance, neutralise, paralyse each other. The fusion of these two contradictory thoughts constitutes a new thought, which is the synthesis of them. This thought splits up once again into two contradictory thoughts, which in turn fuse into a new synthesis. Of this travail is born a group of thoughts. This group of thoughts follows the same dialectic movement as the simple category, and has a contradictory group as antithesis. Of these two groups of thoughts is born a new group of thoughts, which is the antithesis of them.” (p 100)
But, as soon as this new thought arises, it posits itself as thesis, and the process begins again. Similarly arises a group of thoughts, and the same dialectic process occurs with this group as applied to the simple category. Out of this process of the group arises the series, and from the series the system.
“Apply this method to the categories of political economy and you have the logic and metaphysics of political economy, or, in other words, you have the economic categories that everybody knows, translated into a little-known language which makes them look as if they had never blossomed forth in an intellect of pure reason; so much do these categories seem to engender one another, to be linked up and intertwined with one another by the very working of the dialectic movement.” (p 101)
This is the absolute method that Proudhon sought to apply, but Marx says, in fact, he had never managed to scale the heights of this ideological scaffolding, only reaching “the first two rungs of simple thesis and antithesis; and even these he has mounted only twice, and on one of these two occasions he fell over backwards.” (p 101)
No comments:
Post a Comment