Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method
By Bertell Ollman
This spring, I was Zooming with several colleagues. One of them mentioned this book, and another recommended it as well. “It’s so good,” Colleague 1 remarked. “Soooo good,” Colleague 2 affirmed.
I ordered the book immediately, because I really needed an explainer on dialectics. I mean, yes, I have read a lot about dialectics, and I’ve recently tried my hand at differentiating among different applications of dialectics, but the term’s used in at least two senses, with considerable slippage among them.
On one hand, dialectic is sometimes understood as the now common-sensical notion that:
Things change over time and relative to each other; change is the only constant.
Elements in a given system mutually adjust. In a relatively stable system, elements are held in tension and constantly work out these tensions. The result might be a new equilibrium, but not a permanently stable system, as new tensions develop.
Systems sometimes reach tipping points, points at which small differences add up and precipitate larger systemic change.
Dialectic is thus a description of how elements, and more importantly the relations among elements, change in a system.
This understanding of dialectic yields an open field of possibilities. Here, systemic constraints are hard to predict, confounding the older and simpler idea of stability and clear monocausal relations. To provide one example, evolutionary theory challenged the older understanding of fixed species reproducing, instead arguing that species evolve to address changes in the environment, and in evolving, they change the environment for other species around them. Evolution isn’t a fixed linear path (contra how it is often depicted in science fiction) but rather a dispersion of various mutations, some of which might succeed in the changed environment.
On the other hand, dialectic is sometimes – especially in Engels, Lenin, and Stalin – understood in a much more closed way:
The essential logic of nature, one that underlies all processes, and ultimately teleological (Engels).
Since it’s teleological, dialectic is a process that inevitably leads to specific outcomes, especially communism (Stalin).
Dialectic is thus a prescription or prediction, telling us how a system – specifically an economic system – will change as it resolves its tensions.
This understanding of dialectic yields a closed field of possibilities. It lays out imperatives. For Stalin, it justified extending the dictatorship of the proletariat from a short transitional period to an “entire historical era.”
There’s (ahem) a tension between these two senses. Marxists have emphasized the former, but have tried legitimizing the latter. This is true of Marx, but especially Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.
How does this relate to Ollmann’s book? On page 1, he argues that “Marxism … offers us a tale of two cities: one that claims to have freedom but doesn’t, and another that possesses bountiful freedom for all, but few know where it is or how to get it. The first city is called ‘capitalism’ … The other city is called ‘communism.’” (p.1).
For those who might object that communist regimes have so far not really been associated with freedom for all, Olmann hastily adds:
This city [communism] can’t be found on a map, because until now it only exists in the shadows of the first city. … The capitalists have managed to keep communism a well-guarded secret by using their power over the mike [microphone] … to ensure that no one learns that communism is really about freedom, while endlessly repeating the cannard [sic] that something called ‘communism’ was already tried in a few underdeveloped countries and that it didn’t work. (p.1; cf. p.155 for an explicit denial of “what happened in the Soviet Union and China”)
In other words: if you say that communism hasn’t worked, Olmann says that’s because it has never actually been tried. Just as Christ’s Second Coming us always on the horizon, or Dippin’ Dots is always characterized as the ice cream of the future, communism hasn’t come into its own yet, but it is an inevitability – according to this line of thought.
Olmann adds that Marx’s focus isn’t capitalism or communism, but rather their internal relations, and “how communism evolves as a still-unrealized potential within capitalism and the history of this evolution, stretching from earliest times to a future that is still far in front of us” (pp.1-2). That is, Marx’s focus is dialectic, which, when he applied it to capitalism, allowed him to contemplate how this capitalist system could (would) eventually evolve into communism.
Here on p.2, I had an epiphany due to my recent readings.
The first is Latour’s Aramis, which I grow to appreciate more each time I read it. In Aramis, Latour investigates the failure of a cutting-edge autonomous train system in France, and he discovers that the system failed in part because its stakeholders each had a different, ideal notion of the train system. None of them were willing to compromise on this system, and their desires were incompatible, so the system could not come into being. They all loved the idea of Aramis, but only if it fit their ideal versions – and thus they loved it to death.
The second is Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism. I’ll just quote from my review of that book:
Boltanski and Chiapello agree with Weber's basic thesis but argue that capitalism continues to reinvent itself. They argue that the "spirit of capitalism" is the "ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism" (p.8) and that this ideology has periodically had to change in order to address and incorporate critiques (p.19). In fact, the authors identify three "spirits" of capitalism at different periods—familial, bureaucratic, and globalized—each of which were in tune with their time periods (p.19). The third spirit, which is what we are living through today (or at least were in 1999), must restore meaning to the accumulation process, combined with social justice (p.19).
More broadly, they say, critiques function as a motor for capitalism, which must align with other values to survive. Capitalism relies on its enemies' critiques to identify moral supports, which it then incorporates (p.27). (For a quick example, think in terms of social entrepreneurship.) In rhetorical terms, capitalism concedes critiques and adjusts its argument to address them. Paradoxically, this means that capitalism is the most fragile when it is triumphant (p.27)—when it doesn't have a critique to incorporate.
To put it back into Latourean terms, capitalists generally haven’t loved capitalism to death: they haven’t insisted on it being pure, perfect, or ideal. They have kept evolving it, reinventing it, by incorporating critiques. You might be able to find some capitalist idealists who will conclude that real capitalism hasn’t been tried yet, but they are considered marginal. People criticize systems as not being purely capitalist (ex: welfare! Social security!) but no one makes excuses by saying capitalism has never been tried.
Putting these two texts together gives us a new insight into Ollman’s two cities. Perhaps, as Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, capitalism succeeds because it incorporates critiques. And perhaps communism remains understood as some future accomplishment because the previous attempts at communism have not incorporated critiques; instead, they are dismissed as not really communism because they do not meet the ideal that communists have in mind.
But without trying versions and incorporating critiques, how could communism emerge? So here we are, 175 years after the Communist Manifesto was published, with a string of communist efforts that real people fought and died over, all of which have been denied because they turned out not to be perfect. Real communism has never been tried! But the price of success is a string of previous failures, and denying those failures makes success impossible. Communism is meant to somehow spring inevitably from the failures of capitalism, rather than emerging from trial and error, adaptation and maladaptation – that is, from dialectic in the first sense (description). The only way to get to this inevitable, ideal version of capitalism is dialectic in the second sense (prescription, prediction).
As we get into Ch.2, Olmann adds (?) that dialectics is not “a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history,” but “Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world” (p.12). That is, he specifies the first meaning of dialectics above (description). He says,
Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the common-sense notion of “thing” (as something that has a history and has external connections with other things) with notions of “process” (which contains its history and possible futures) and “relation” (which contains a part of its ties with other relations). … it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and establishes units (the dialectical term is ‘abstracts’) in which to think about the world. (p.14)
Olmann says that dialectical relations include
identity/difference
interpenetration of opposites
quantity/quality
contradiction (p.15)
Of these, contradiction is the most important, since it focuses on the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation (p.17). Here, Olmann swerves back to the second meaning of dialectics above (prediction): “Capitalism’s fate, in other words, is sealed by its own problems, problems that are internal manifestations of what it is and how it works and are often parts of the very achievements of capitalism, worsening as the achievements grow and spread” (p.18). In contrast to (unnamed) nondialectical thinkers, who only think in terms of serial causality, dialecticians can (like Marx) understand how mutual dependence among elements will unfold: “for Marx … tracing how capitalist connections unfold is also a way of discovering the main causes of coming disruption and coming conflict” (p.18).
(Olmann continues to dance across this line – for instance, later he claims that capitalism “was not only a possible development out of class society, but it was made likely by the character of the latter, by the very dynamics inherent in the division of labor once it got underway” (p.98, in which I would characterize as the first meaning of dialectics). And later still, he claims that Marx’s historical examinations aren’t teleological – Marx simply looks at today’s conditions and then asks: what past conditions led here (p.118)? Yet Marx looks at the capitalism of his day and concludes that “capitalism cannot go on much longer” (p.123)).
Olmann makes a few concessions here:
Dialectical thinkers may play down details in the process of generalizing.
Dialectical thinkers sometimes move too quickly “to push the germ of an idea to its finished form.”
Dialectical thinkers sometimes “overestimate the speed of change.” (p.19)
Moving on. In Chapter 3, Olmann turns to social relations. Rather than examining “facets” of a single thing, dialectics focus on relations or interdependencies (p.25). In Chapter 4, he turns to internal relations, where he argues that in discussing interrelations, we are describing the system in which things exist (p.41). And in Chapter 5, he discusses abstraction, which Marx uses in four distinct ways:
The mental act of subdividing the world (p.61)
The result of this process (parts) (p.62)
“A suborder of particularly ill-fitting mental constructs” (p.62)
“A particular organization of elements in the real world – having to do with the functioning of capitalism – that provides the objective underpinnings for most of the ideological abstractions mentioned above” (p.62)
Olmann sounds a theme here that shows up elsewhere in the book – the theme that critics just haven’t put the time into really understanding Marx (see also p.109). He acknowledges that Marx uses terms with considerable slippage (like “abstraction”) and switches between levels of analysis without much signaling, and consequently non-Marxists have trouble reading Marx properly (p.94). Similarly, he explains Engels’ reductive presentation of dialectics in his Dialectics of Nature by claiming that Engels is writing about dialectics at a broad level, Marx at a human level (p.97).
Moving on, we get to Chapter 9, “Why Dialectics? Why Now?” And here we return to the theme of impending communism that was begun in Chapter 1. Olmann acknowledges the collapse of the USSR, but warns (like Marx) that capitalism can’t go on much longer (pp.158-159) and assures us that communism still lays concealed inside capitalism (p.159). Capitalism is “becoming impossible,” creating the conditions for communism (p.159). And here we begin to see the real differences between this dialectics, the second sense of dialectics, and Latour’s Aramis and Boltanski & Chiapello. For dialectics, the conditions create an inevitable progression: the principle of quantitative change yielding qualitative change means that the system will collapse into a new equilibrium rather than being negotiated and evolving in unpredictable ways. Every knee will bend, every tongue will confess.
Having stepped into the second meaning of dialectics, Ohlmann must end by hopping back into the first meaning, conceding that “the projections of the future obtained through the use of the method outlined here are only highly probable” and noting that Marx himself conceded that an unlikely alternative outcome would be “barbarism” (p.168). (Surely many, many other possibilities exist in a highly complex system, but most of that complexity can be waved away through Abstraction.) Olmann finally provides us with a figure of dance steps that he terms the “dance of the dialectic”:
Analyze
Historicize
Visionize
And organize! (p.169)
But as implied in this review, the dance of the dialectic seems to also include two other steps interspersed throughout the dance: first a leap to Describe, then gathering strength for the powerful leap to Predict, followed by a hasty conciliatory hop back to Describe, and repeat as opportune.
I’ll stop here. The remaining chapters are useful, but not (in my judgment) core to the book, and this review is long enough.
So what did I think of the book? Although I think readers can recognize my frustration with dialectics, this book was indeed “soooo good,” as my colleague promised, because it helped me to think through dialectics as a method, and specifically this duality between description and prescription – admittedly, probably too simple a characterization, but it was enough to help me understand what has always put me off about dialectics. If you’re similarly struggling with what is meant by this method, or how to apply it, or how to better understand the works of Soviet psychologists (as I am), definitely pick it up.
(2003).
Posts
