Socialist Outlook : SO/13 - Autumn 2007

Letters

Dear Socialist Outlook

Andy Kilmister, Roy Wilkes

I was very interested to read Roy Wilkes’ article on the dialectics of climate change in SO12. The account of climate change itself and the feedback mechanisms involved were excellent. However, I’m not completely persuaded by the more theoretical part on dialectics.

There is an underlying issue here about the extent to which dialectical thought can actually be applied to natural processes as opposed to social processes (as posed in Lukacs’ criticisms of Engels) about which Marxists have taken different views. Leaving that on one side though I am not sure about the way in which Roy is using Engels here. The idea of the transformation of quantity into quality seems to me ambiguous in this context. For Hegel, as I understand him, this is very much about the process of abstraction - so that, for example, the quantitative removal of social constraints with the rise of individualism results in a concept of freedom and choice which is radically unstable (since for Hegel meaningful choice presupposes necessity) and thus forces a dialectical development onwards. That kind of process, which is based on the inability to conceptualise phenomena when they are viewed one-sidedly from an abstract point of view, seems to me quite different from the kind of feedback mechanisms Roy is describing; there is a kind of analogy, in the sense that in each case quantitative changes result in a qualitative development, but the nature of the processes isn’t the same. I think what I’m trying to say here is that there doesn’t seem to me to be any real obstacle to describing the kind of processes Roy is analysing in terms of conventional logic. They were after all uncovered by scientists using that kind of approach in the first place. Complex feedback mechanisms leading to abrupt and sudden changes aren’t necessarily dialectical contradictions. So I am not sure what the references to dialectics are actually adding in this case. A better philosophical structure here I would suspect is the catastrophe theory developed by Rene Thom in the 1970s and now rather neglected - another idea from that period which was not originated by Marxists but, like many of the ecological ideas of that time, seems ripe for critical appropriation in this context.

Comradely,

Andy Kilmister

Roy Wilkes replies:

In Defence of the Dialectics of Nature

Rene Thom’s catastrophe theory isn’t a philosophical structure at all but a mathematical model based on a series of equations. Mathematical modeling can be useful for describing phenomena and can even be used to make predictions. But to suggest that nature reflects a mathematical model rather than vice versa is to abandon materialism altogether. This is of course what Hegel does with his interpretation of the dialectic, which is why his view of the transformation of quantity into quality is indeed very different from the one I describe. But assuming we accept a materialist view of history, and therefore also of nature, the question arises, what sort of materialism? Marx and Engels rejected both the mechanistic determinism of Democritus and the contemplative materialism of Epicurus and Feuerbach. If we want a philosophical structure that is practical and which also accurately depicts material reality, we need to examine the underlying processes in history – both human history and natural history.

Throughout nature we see that the driving force of all change is the unity and struggle of opposites: positive and negative; matter and antimatter; wave and particle; male and female. There is even a fundamental contradiction at the level of scale, with quantum uncertainty holding sway at the sub-atomic level (and thereby furnishing us with a physical disproof of mechanical determinism), while the predictability of general relativity dominates at the level of galaxy clusters. The materialist dialectic also helps us develop a fuller understanding of biological processes: Stephen Jay Gould has demonstrated that the evolution of species occurs in ‘punctuated equilibria’ rather than as a smooth process of gradual change. In my article I try to show that climate change, even when it predates human history, is also a dialectical process, and one which arises out of the struggle between positive and negative feedbacks.

At its most fundamental, the dialectic expresses the contradiction between being and non-being. Does this apply only in the idealised Hegelian sense, or does it have a basis in material reality? Stephen Hawking postulates the Big Bang as a quantum uncertainty event which gave rise to positive energy (electromagnetic and kinetic) and negative energy (gravitational) in equal measure, and whose net quantity is therefore zero, thus allowing the universe to come into being without contravening the first law of thermodynamics and without recourse to a divine creator. And what is that if not the negation of the negation at the very heart of all material reality?

There are of course scientists who develop an understanding of natural processes using conventional logic, as Andy suggests. But to borrow Trotsky’s analogy in his correspondence with Burnham (who also rejected the dialectic,) a skilled worker may well turn out a good piece of work with a blunt tool, but how much better the work proceeds when the tools are sharpened!

Lukacs and others were wrong to suggest that it was Engels alone who applied the dialectic to our understanding of nature. Marx viewed the dialectical relationship between human beings and nature as only one part of the relationship between nature and itself, since humankind is very much part of nature. For Marx, the materialist dialectic is a tool for understanding the whole of nature, not just one of its parts.

But does any of this matter politically? I would argue that it does. Just as Marx and Engels saw the need to combat the ‘bourgeois socialism’ of Proudhon and others, which sought to make bourgeois production more social without altering its essential character, so too do we have to combat the bourgeois environmentalism of much of the contemporary green movement. And we have to do so not just at the ‘practical’ level of policy but also at the level of ideas. We have to confront both the mechanistic determinism of the green technocrats and the idealist naturalism of, among others, the gaiaists. And for this task the materialist dialectic is undoubtedly the sharpest tool we have at our disposal. Our aim is after all to build a class consciousness that is revolutionary, practical and firmly rooted in material reality.

Andy Kilmister is Senior Lecturer in Economics at Oxford Brookes University, where he researches industrial restructuring and structural change in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. Andy is a member of the International Socialist Group and of the editorial collective of the journal Labour Focus on Eastern Europe. He is co-author of ’Critical and Post-Critical Political Economy’.

Roy Wilkes

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