Hello all, I want to study Hegel’s dialectical materialism. Can you suggest some lucid material?
(Post on Facebook Marxist Internet Archive )
We can all see that this is a rather naive question. The person asking was under some vague impression that as a leftist they should understand dialectical materialism, and that this had to do with Hegel. But the answers to it were in a sense even worse, revealing a level of ignorance and scientific backwardness that has handicapped the left for a couple of generations.
Some responded that dialectical materialism was invented by Marx not Hegel. That is wrong, it was invented by another German proletarian philosopher Joseph Dietzgen:
Yet, it is not sufficient to dethrone the fantastic and religious system of life; it is necessary to put a new system, a rational one, in its stead. And that, my friends, only the socialists can accomplish. Or, if the doctors of philosophy think this language too presumptuous, I will put it differently, though the meaning remains the same: our social-democracy is the necessary outcome of a non-religious and sober way of thinking. It is the outcome of philosophic science. Philosophers wrestled with the priests in order to replace a non-civilized mode of thinking by a civilized one, to replace faith by science. The object is achieved, the victory is won. Cannibal religion of primitive ages was softened by Christianity, philosophy continued in its civilizing mission, and after many untenable and transient systems produced the imperishable system of science, the system of democratic (dialectic) materialism.(https://www.marxists.org/archive/dietzgen/1870s/religion.htm)
Idealism, which derives its name from the circumstance that it sets the idea and the ideas, those products of the human head, above and before the material world – both in point of time and importance, this idealism has started very extravagantly and metaphysically. In the course of its history, however, this extravagance has toned down and become more and more sober till Kant himself answered the question which he had set out to solve, viz.: “Is Metaphysics at all possible as a science?” in the negative; Metaphysics as a science is not possible; another world, that is, a transcendental world can only be believed and supposed. Thus the perversion of idealism has become already a thing of the past, and modern materialism is the result of the philosophical and also of the general scientific development.
Because the idealist perversity in its last representatives, namely Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, was thoroughly German, its issue, dialectical materialism, is also a pre-eminently German product.
Idealism derives the corporeal world from the mind, quite after the fashion of religion where the great spirit floats over the waters and has only to say: “Let there be,” and it is. Such idealist derivation is metaphysical. Yet, as mentioned already, the last great representatives of German idealism were metaphysicians of a very moderate type. They had already emancipated themselves considerably from the transcendental, supernatural, heavenly mind, – not, however, from the spell-bound worship of the natural mind of the world. The Christians deified the mind, and the philosophers were still permeated to such an extent with this deification, that they were unable to relinquish it – even when the physical human mind had already become the sober object of their study – making this intellect of ours the creator or parent of the material world. They never tire in their efforts to arrive at a clear understanding of the relation between our mental conceptions and the material things which are represented, conceived and thought.
To us, dialectical or Social-Democratic materialists, the mental faculty of thinking is a developed product of material Nature, whilst according to the German idealism the relation is quite the reverse. That is why Engels speaks of the perversity of this mode of thinking. The extravagant worship of the mind was the survival of the old metaphysics.(https://www.marxists.org/archive/dietzgen/1887/epistemology.htm)
But nobody on the Marxist Internet list advised the poster to go study Dietzgen. Instead a whole bunch of ‘hegelian marxists’ were advocated: Marcuse, Lukacs, Colletti etc.
But the bigger question of why waste your time with Hegel was left aside. As an undergrad, under the influence of public lectures by the Trotskyist Gerry Healy, I read the Logic, Phenomenology of Spirit and good part of the Philosophy of Nature along with Lenin’s notes on Hegel. I must say it was a total waste of time.
Even as an undegrad I was struck by the way the author pretended to deduce things from premises, which went far beyond what the premises would support. The dialectical logic looked awfully like a conjuring trick used to distract attention whilst the desired conclusions were introduced as if by magic.
Later, I think as a second year student, I read Bachelard and Althusser whose skeptical views on Hegel reinforced my own hostile impression.
It is an odd paradox that Marx and Engels, the most prominent Communists theorists developed their own historical materialism in a process of root and branch criticism and demolition of Hegelianism of German philosophy of the 1840s ( The Holy Family, The German Ideology). But today in the 21st century almost the only reason that Hegel is studied is because many Marxists believe that Hegel’s ideas were in some way fundamental to understanding historical materialism.
It is notable that in the German Ideology, not only do Marx and Engels make no mention of dialectics, let alone a positive reference to it but they quite specific in their rejection of Hegel. Speaking of the young Hegelian school they write:
Far from examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This dependence on Hegel is the reason why not one of these modern critics has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system, however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel. Their polemics against Hegel and against one another are confined to this — each extracts one side of the Hegelian system and turns this against the whole system as well as against the sides extracted by the others. To begin with they extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as “substance” and “self-consciousness”, later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such as species “the Unique”, “Man”, etc.
The idea that Marxism was based on dialectical rather than historical materialism goes through two stages. First Dietzgen invents dialectical materialism in the 1870s and claims that the theory of social democracy is based on it. At the start of the 20th century it was still recognised that Dialectical Materialism was Dietzgen’s innovation. The dialectical materialism of Dietzgen then became the official philosophy of Social Democracy and then of Communism. Since Marx’s Historical Materialism was also the official theory of both movements, dialectical materialism was projected back onto Marx and Engels and supposed to be their ‘method’. This is formalised in texts such as Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Stalin gave no credit to Dietzgen but instead projects the whole of diamat back onto Marx and Engels claiming that they had got diamat from the ‘rational kerenel’ of Hegel.
Later, during the cold war, a wave of Western Marxists arose who, despite their anti-stalinism had so imbibed Stalin’s statement about Marx using the rational kernel of Hegel that they went back to study Hegel in order to try to understand Marx. Trotskyists like Healey demanded that their followers study Hegel’s logic if they were to understand revolutions.
Marx had remarked :
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm)
The horrible paradox is that a tradition that Marx himself had decisively rejected in the 1840s came, a century later, to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of late 20th century marxists.
The problem is that if you read a very out of date logician like Hegel, you cut yourself off from a century and half of advance which has long since shown the futility of the whole Hegelian idealist project. The point about Turing, brought out brilliantly by the more recent Turingist Greg Chaitin in his books is that as he puts it ‘you can not get two kilos of theorems from one kilo of axioms’. Hegel wants to derive all sorts of things from the dialectical development of negation, but what Chaitin and Turing prove is that you can never derive more from a logical system than is contained in your initial axioms. Hegel only appears to do it by sleight of hand where he introduces conclusions that he wants that are actually unsupported by his axioms. If you are willing to allow that sort of handwaving nonsense you completely depart from all science and materialism.
You have the absurdity of Marxists using computers and the internet to discuss anachonistic terms like dialectical versus formal logic when their very activities are entirely depependent on other logicians and materialists like Boole, Shannon and Turing about whom they know little or nothing. Without Booles logic and Shannon’s demonstration that this could be implemented in switching circuits, there would be no digital electronics. Without Turing no mechanisation of thought, without Shannon’s information theory no wifi or internet.
If you want to understand logic Hegel is the last person to study. If you want to understand complex systems as they change, study Markov theory cybernetics and process algebra not Hegel.
Paul Cockshott's Blog 
Good read, one the reasons I ended up breaking decisively with the Grantist tendency within Trotskyism a few years after leaving the Socialist Party of England, having been a member from 2004-2012 was over dialects.
It became clear to me while watching the factional struggle between the short lived Marxist World group and the SP leadership and their zombie loyalists that dialects had immunized their brains from critical thinking.
Time and again when the opposition presented detailed criticisms of their analysis, program, organizational theories backed up with empirical data they were met with the phrase, “YOUR NOT THINKING DIALECTICALLY!” Where the very factual errors that were exposed were instead inverted to show their ideas contained “contradictions,” hence they engaged with reality while the ideas of the opposition were “vulgar materialists” or “mechanical materialists.”
It’s a process not dissimilar to the old Emperors New Cloths allegory, with much of the membership of political sects that process to have their politics based on dialectical materialism in awe of the the leadership who have used this mumbo jumbo to mystify the entire process of political analysis through the promotion of a myth that the ‘enlightened leadership’ have mastered this profound way to perceive and comprehend reality that allow them advance their political ideas that are but it’s expression.
Thus we are left with the insane situation where members end up suppressing their own doubts over various political ideas and positions by blaming themselves for not ‘thinking dialectically’ where they imagine, if they were, they would understand that the supposed issues they have are only the product of non-dialectical thinking.
My liberation from the tyranny of dialectal materialism had an unusual source, while I was not as fortune as you with Bachelard and Althusser, I did pick up a copy of, ‘Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933-1935 Writings on Lenin, Dialectics and Evolutionism.’ It was not the notebooks themselves you understand but the extensive introductions to each one by Professor Philip Pomper who, in the introduction to the second notebook on dialectics, gave a real overview of the ideological fall out between Trotsky and Max Eastman over dialectics with Eastman’s various objections being summarized. This was, to put it bluntly, a far better and objective account of the dispute than I had previously been given in the Trotskyist doctrinaire literature I had been provided and recommended. This shattered my blind faith in the magic of dialects the SP had drilled into my head when I was an impressionable young man.
This was I should note before I left the SP and the aforementioned factional struggle took and I saw first hand how dangerous these ideas could be, prior to that I simply saw them as a relatively harmless bit of mysticism that certain people were using as a kind of psychological crutch and at best something that could help some people break out of more reactionary world views but i certainly had no use for it.
With my ideas hardening on just how counter-productive these Hegelian relics to Marxism and the socialism movement I sort out more critical material and came across the anti-dialectics website ran by Rosa Lichtenstein,
http://www.anti-dialectics.co.uk/
Are you familiar with her work comrade and if so what is your impression of some of the, in my view, impressive lengthy essays debunking dialectical materialism?
Still breathing and thinking Dominic. Just to note that in my Glasgow debate with Peter Taaffe, where I was defending Marx’s theory of the LTRPF (which Marx described as “a double edged dialectical law”) I was described as putting forward an extremely undialectical position. The fact is that the vast majority of self proclaimed Marxists wouldn’t know dialectics if it bit then in the arse.
40 years ago! i attempted to read Hegel – my learning wasn’t driven via academia – doh!!! I just couldn’t get any sense out of it! you sum it up nicely! “Please waste no time on Hegel!”
More like 50 years ago. Your implication was that at 18 I was too young and stupid to understand Hegel.
On the contrary I was young and bright enough to recognise idealist dross.
I wasted some time reading substantial parts of 3 of Hegels books.
Of course, as a communist I was not reading them for academic reasons any more than I read Capital, TSV, Materialism and Empiro Criticism, Cornforth, Althusser, Darwin, Bachelard, Keynes, Mandel, Kuhn, Archaeologie du Savoir etc as course material. I read them to get a better economic and philosophical grounding as a communist.
Nor is it that Foucault and Hegel are deeper and more valuable than the other authors, it is that I could see that they were pretentious idealism and the other stuff was not.
What books would you recommend for absolute beginners on Markov theory cybernetics or process algebra? I’ve looked into a few, but they all seem use a mathematical notation that I’ve never learned.
Read papers by Jane Hilston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Hillston
As preliminaries read Hoare and Milner, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/3-540-10235-3 , http://www.usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf
Has anyone written systematically about how finding the Hegelian influences on Marx’s thought helps to develop Marx’s thought, or at least counter “idealistic” interpretations of his thought? I’m thinking of some dream that we are heading for a beautiful overcoming of contradictions and antagonisms, for a realisation of humanity’s possiblilities by the overcoming of a class of real historically bad/reactionary people by real historically good/avant garde people. At least it seems that is how some imagine communism and it’s a mirroring of the whole journey of Absolute Spirit thing at best and a fairytale at worst isn’t it? Thanks for your work and any pointers.
You might want to check out Althusser’s For Marx
Brilliant. Thanks.
Arthur Schopenhauer made the point the entire nation of Germany should have had national guilt over letting Hegelian phillosphy hold sway.
Today it would make more sense for Leftists to write scathing critques of post modernist thinkers such as Lacan, Deluze, and Foucalt, but no most just uncritically accept their ideas.
Paul, you write that Marx and Engels were “quite specific in their rejection of Hegel. Speaking of the young Hegelian school … ” [etc.]
But, as you yourself point out, the text quoted is a critique of (self-appointed) Hegelians seeking to “correct” or “improve” Hegel, and as far as I can see says nothing against Hegel as such.
Marx and Engels’ attitude here appears to be similar to that which you and I might adopt to the “20th-century Marxists” and their attempts to “correct” and “improve” Marx (and similar, of course, to Marx’s reported quip that he himself was not a marxist).
Elsewhere Marx expressed great appreciation for Hegel (“that mighty thinker”), as we know.
At least one advantage of the dialectical approach is that it may educate one to consider that even mistaken ideas can be distorted expressions of a rational kernel, rather as unsuccessful political experiments may nonetheless prefigure societies which only further historical development can make materially possible.
Can you provide any introductory titles on Markov theory? (I do know some linear algebra and probability theory.). Thanks!
That’s cool to write essays based on texts you don’t understand. I get the annoyance of something going over your head so then you must create a negative discourse to make yourself feel smart again.
The problem is not Hegel throwing cards over my head but him dealing them out of his sleve.
Please read this thread, comrade Cockshott!
https://bunkerchan.xyz/leftypol/res/290148.html#470008
Thanks some interesting stuff
Thankfully, this Marxist has still kept away from Hegel.
However, you suggest studying Markov theory cybernetics and process algebra. Why couldn’t dynamics from physics be up to the task for complex systems as they change?
Not sure about this, Paul:
“but what Chaitin and Turing prove is that you can never derive more from a logical system than is contained in your initial axioms.”
Try this for size:
Premise: All horses are animals.
Ergo: The head of horse is the head of an animal.
There is ‘more’ in the conclusion than there was in the premise.
Not really Rosa. You need three additional premises:
1. There exists a set of heads
2. Heads can be heads of other objects
3. Horses have heads
Otherwise you would be allowed nonsense like: the wings of horses are wings of animals, or the square root of a horse is the square root of an animal.
Not really, the conclusion follows from the premise on its own. The conclusion doesn’t need heads to exist, as we can see from this argument:
All horses are animals
A leprechaun sat on a horse is a leprechaun sat on an animal.
The conclusion still follows from the premise even though leprechauns do not exist.
But let’s looks at your ‘extra premises’:
“3. Horses have heads.”
If a horse had no head it wouldn’t be a horse. Anyone who knew how to use the word “horse” would know they have heads. That’s why the conclusion follows from the single premise.
“2. Heads can be heads of other objects.”
Similar point. Anyone who knew how to use the word “head” would know heads can be heads of other ‘objects’, like horses.
“1. There exists a set of heads.”
You’re assuming sets exist, which is a far less plausible assumption than heads existing.
Anyway, you seem to allow horses to exist, so if they exist, so do heads.
Hence, I maintain my original claim:
There is ‘more’ in the conclusion than there was in the premise.
Not really, the conclusion follows from the premise on its own. The conclusion doesn’t need heads to exist, as we can see from this argument:
All horses are animals
A leprechaun sat on a horse is a leprechaun sat on an animal.
The conclusion still follows from the premise even though leprechauns do not exist.
But let’s looks at your ‘extra premises’:
“3. Horses have heads.”
If a horse had no head it wouldn’t be a horse. Anyone who knew how to use the word “horse” would know they have heads. That’s why the conclusion follows from the single premise.
“2. Heads can be heads of other objects.”
Similar point. Anyone who knew how to use the word “head” would know heads can be heads of other ‘objects’, like horses.
“1. There exists a set of heads.”
You’re assuming sets exist, which is a far less plausible assumption than heads existing.
Anyway, you seem to allow horses to exist, so if they exist, so do heads.
Hence, I maintain my original claim:
There is ‘more’ in the conclusion than there was in the premise.
No, in a formal system you can not assume anything. You are saying that anyone who knew about horses would know they have heads. That is an example of implicit premises.
The Chaitin point is about information theory. He is saying that the theorms of a formal system are bounded by the information content of the axioms.
You are doing what I accuse Hegel of. Sneaking in premises based on prior usage of language.
On sets, I am refering to them since I was treating your statement all horses are animals, as being an english translation of the set theoretic statement that the set of horses is a subset of the set of animals.
If you are to make any inductions from your statement you require a prior axiomatised logic to which you are providing an additional axiom relating horses to animals. Unless you translate the statments into a formalism they can not be logically manipulated. The simplest formalism for what you were expressing is a set theoretic one.
For some reason my answer was posted twice! Please delete one of them, Paul. Thanks! 🙂
Surprisingly naive criticism. Marx’s materialism is a direct continuation of Hegel. A materialistic interpretation of Hegelian idealism, if you will. And there is a lot of evidence for this in the texts of Marx himself, not to mention “Capital”, which is an example of the application of materialistic dialectics. The question of whether to read Hegel is really not so simple. Someone it will help, someone-no. This requires a lot of time and effort, which may not be justified. But one important thing must be understood: there is no materialism without dialectics, and the renunciation of dialectics is the renunciation of materialism. At the very least, a consistent materialism.
I agree about the time and effort. I would suggest that the time and effort would be better spent getting a good understanding of mechanics. The idea that there is no materialism without dialectics seems falacious. Better to study Lucretius. No materialism without atomism. Rather than dialectics get some grip of mechanics, particularly statistical mechanics and QM. If you want to read a modern materialist try Huw Price.
But QM specifically rejects any mechanics as an explanation of QM. so far only field theory is used, electro-magnetic and gravitational field.
That is not what Jean Bricmont and the Bohmians say
Doesn’t Engels extensively talk about dialectics though in many of his works? Doesn’t Marx praise Dietzgen’s dialectical materialism in the Second Edition of Volume 1 of Capital?
I am writing a critique of the “idealist materialism” initiated by Engels and continued by other authors. I agree with you about the bad Hegelian heritage in Marxism, but about Althusser, in his works, despite the supposed scientific effort, didn’t he end up falling into pseudoscience when trying to transform dialectical materialism into an infallible method?
I do not think Althusser ever tried to transform DIAMAT into an infallible method, no.
What about Hegel on entanglement and quantum physics? So far there’s been no explanation how the spin of an entangled electron can identified at a distance far beyond the possibility of any transmission of information at the speed of light? The identification of opposites at distance might be an answer. Nobody reads Hegel on evolution, yet it was Hegel who introduced the concept of progressive change in social structures, although, of course, not a progression to any fundamental, unchanging truth.
Time symmetry of phsical laws requires it