Say's Law that supply creates its own demand, and so there can be no general overproduction of commodities is false, as Marx shows, but the supply of commodities is also a demand for money, the general commodity, just as the demand for commodities, is also a supply of money, exchanged for them.
“None of these processes and modes of thought fit into the frame of metaphysical thinking. But, for dialectics, which grasps things and their conceptual images, essentially in their interconnection, in their concatenation, their motion, their coming into and passing out of existence, such processes as those mentioned above are so many corroborations of its own procedure.” (p 27)
The real test of dialectics, Engels says, however, is Nature. Modern science has shown that Nature works dialectically, not, simply, reproducing what already exists, as had previously been thought, and which continues to be represented by the reactionary notions about a “balance of Nature”, but by a process of continual change, of evolution, which implies not balance (stasis), but imbalance (dynamics), not an equilibrium, but a dynamic disequilibrium.
“In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that the organic world of today - plants, animals, and consequently man too – is the product of a process of evolution going on through millions of years. But, since the natural scientists who have learned to think dialectically are still few and far between, this conflict of the results of discovery with traditional modes of thinking, explains the endless confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of teachers as well as students, of authors and readers alike.” (p 28)
Even Newton worked on the basis of metaphysics, of a solar system that, having been created, continued, unchanged, for eternity. Meanwhile, Kant, on the basis of dialectics, drew the conclusion that, if it was born, it also had a death, of necessity.
“Half a century later, his theory was established mathematically by Laplace, and after another half century, the spectroscope confirmed the existence in cosmic space of such incandescent masses of gas in various stages of condensation.” (p 28-9)
Of course, since then, cosmology has developed much further. We know that not only are stars and solar systems born, but that, also, when they die, they produce the basic elements for the creation of new stars etc.
“This new German philosophy terminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and this is its great merit — the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is for the first time represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt was made to show internal connections in this motion and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of humanity itself.” (p 29)
The task, therefore, was to apply this same method to human social development, as used to understand all other processes of evolution and development. To understand the fundamental drivers of the process – The Law of Value – and how it manifests in each mode of production. As Marx puts it in his Letter to Kugelmann, explaining The Law of Value,
“Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labour of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labour in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labour is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products.
Science consists precisely in demonstrating how the law of value asserts itself.”
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