Dialectical materialism: Does the philosophical foundation of Marxism stand up to the test of events?

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A six-part series which explains how this controversial world outlook evolved through history idealism. It seems clear-cut enough; let's defend their answers in a logically consisThe most fundamental question "What is? What is it that exists?

What is Being? What is the world 16 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1991 Following is the first of a series of articles on the philosophical foundations of Marxism. The articles are based on classes given by Cliff Conners at the Socialist Action national educational conference in August 1989.

"One of the principal propositions of dialectical materialism asserts that nothing can be fully understood unless and until its entire course of development has been disclosed and grasped." — George Novack The purpose of these classes is to redirect some of our attention to our ideological roots. We are confronted with some extremely complicated political issues right now. I'm thinking particularly of the immense changes that are taking place in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. If we are able to make sense of what's happening now in those places, it is due to the fact that we and our predecessors have worked out, on the basis of many years of experience, a coherent picture of how societies develop and change—a science of society.

But that general historical framework rests on an even more general understanding of how the world works. The ultimate foundation of our analysis of current political events, then, lies in the fundamental philosophical principles of Marxism, that is, the method of thinking called dialectical materialism.

Even a perfect understanding of dialectical materialism, of course, can't guarantee accurate political conclusions. But without a solid philosophical foundation, political activity is nothing more than a series of accidents. So let's step back for a moment and reconsider some of the most general philosophical questions that human beings have been grappling with for thousands of years In this class, I'm going to concentrate mainly on materialism. Later, we'll focus more on dialectics. In practice, we wouldn't want to separate the two, but it's a convenient way to divide the subject into two classes.

When I hear the word "materialism," the first thing I think of is Samuel Johnson's response to idealists who claim that material objects exist only in our minds. He kicked a large stone, it hurt his foot, and he said that no further proof was necessary.

It is tempting to think that this is all that has to be said about materialism and just dismiss all the idealist claptrap out of hand. But unfortunately, it's not that simple. Philosophical idealism has a strong material basis in class society, as we will see, and consequently it also has a strong basis in human psychology.

On top of that, the philosophical positions of idealism are by no means as frivolous or foolish as they seem when we think about Dr. Johnson kicking the stone. Materialists like ourselves can't simply ignore or brush aside the arguments of idealism; it is necessary to understand them and answer them.

Neither materialism nor dialectics began with Marx, of course. Both had their origins in the world of the ancient Greeks. To understand something as fully as possible, it is necessary to understand how it developed, from the very beginning. So let's start at the beginning and work our way forward to the class struggle of today.

The first philosophers The beginning of philosophy took place on the Ionian coast, an area in Asia Minor which is now part of Turkey, but which in the 6th century B.C. was colonized by Greeks.

The most fundamental question in philosophy was the first one that was tackled by those ancient Ionians: "What is? What is it that exists? What is Being? What is the world made of?"

The older Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations developed elaborate myths to explain where the world came from and what it was made of, but these were supernatural explanations that were to be accepted on the basis of religious authority. The Ionian Greeks in the 6th century B.C. were apparently the first to attempt to interpret the world in terms of observed natural processes.

They came up with a number answers, and they debated and tried to tent way. The tirst in the line of lonian philosophers was Thales, and his answer was: Water. Everything in the world, in the final analysis, comes from water. A little later another philosopher, Anaximenes, asserted that the ultimate stuff of which the world was made was not water, but air. And other answers were suggested. Heraclitus believed the ultimate element was fire.

In spite of the diversity of these answers, they all had one thing in common: all agreed that the world was made of some fundamental material element. They sought the causes of things and events within nature itself. This was a revolutionary change from the supernaturalistic cosmologies of the Egyptians and Sumerians. The first philosophers, then, were materialists, and materialism is as old as philosophy itself.

The Greek idealists The materialist outlook did not remain unchallenged for long, however. A school of philosophers based in Elea developed the notion that the world we think we know-the world we see with our eyes and feel with our hands—is not real at all. It is all an illusion. And the way you can tell that it is an illusion is because it changes.

If something really exists, they believed, then it would be permanent and unchanging. Take yourself, for example; what kind of existence did you have a hundred years ago? What kind of existence will you have a hundred years from now?

Anyway, it seemed to them that any concept of being-of existence-that only had to do with things that are here today and gone tomorrow was trivial; not worth much. If something is real, if something exists, it has to exist past, present, and future.

If the world around us—the one we can see and touch—is not permanent and eternal, and therefore is not real, what is? Well, nothing in our experience is permanent and eternal, but we can still imagine something that lasts forever and doesn't change. We can form a mental picture. The only true, unchanging reality, then, must be somewhere in the realm of thoughts, or ideas, rather than in the material world. This is the central tenet of idealism, and so the fundamental battle lines in philosophy were drawn-materialism versus idealism.

Idealists believe in the priority of mind over matter; that is, that in the creation of the world mind, or thought, or some kind of intelligence came first, and then matter came later. Materialists believe the opposite: that the material world existed prior to and independently of mind; that mind is something that developed from the evolution of matter.

The Atomists The early idealists raised some important questions about the problem of change in the material world. Another materialist school of thought came up with an answer. These were the atomists, who said that the world is made up of extremely small pieces of material they called atoms.

These atoms, they said, combine to make up all of the larger things we see in the world. The atoms themselves are permanent and unchanging, except that they move around a lot, and when they move the things that are made up of them change. In this way the atomists thought they could account for change in a world with a permanent material basis.

In those early days of philosophy, materialism remained the predominant trend. But that came to an end in Athens in the 4th century B.C. with what has been called the Socratic revolution. From a political standpoint, it would be more accurate to call it a counterrevolution. Socrates founded an idealist school of thought that was developed, in different ways, by Plato and Aristotle, and for at least the next 2000 years idealism dominated philosophy.

The Ionian philosophers had begun by studying the physical world. Socrates and Plato shifted the focus of philosophy from the world of nature to the world of human society. In itself, this was a positive contribution to extending the scope of philosophy. But the way they went about it was not so positive: they took human psychology as their model of the world as a whole and imposed the laws of thought and consciousness on nature. That was the basis of their idealist outlook.

Now-that's a very brief thumbnail sketch of the origins of materialism and idealism, but let's look a little deeper into the matter. Let's ask, first, why did philosophy originate when and where it did? Why were the Ionian Greeks the first to philosophize, rather than the Egyptians or the Sumerians? And then, let's also consider why it was, a couple of hundred years later, idealism was able to triumph over materialism and remain dominant for 2000 years.

Why did philosophy come about?

The way we approach these questions has to do with our own philosophical position. If we were idealists, we would say that the ideas were the determining factor, that the Egyptians and Sumerians were simply mentally underdeveloped; that the Ionian Greeks had superior minds.

But since we're not idealists, and we don't believe that ideas have an independent reality of their own, we aren't satisfied with that answer. As materialists, we look (continued on next page)

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"The plebians became a real political force. They fought for their interests by waging strikes and rioting and generally creating social turmoil.' SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1991 17 (continued from preceding page) for some explanation that connects the ideas of these ancient peoples to their material circumstances.

The Ionian Greeks looked at the world in a new way because they were living in a new world. Their social environment was so radically different from that of the Egyptians and Sumerians that it gave rise to an entirely different kind of consciousness.

The central feature of the Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations was their agricultural base. Social relationships were largely determined by the fact that their food supply depended on a system of tight, centralized control over the water supply. Survival, then, required a totalitarian form of social organization that dominated every aspect of their peoples' lives, including their thinking.

All leaming and knowledge was monopolized by conservative priestly castes who were themselves subordinate to absolute monarchs. Such a social climate nourishes traditionalism and discourages original, creative thought. It should not be surprising, then, that radically new cosmologies did not surface or take root in Egypt or Sumer.

On the other hand, very different forms of social organization were beginning to develop in the Greek world, and especially on the Ionian coast, in about the 8th century B.C. Here the economies were not based totally on agriculture; a considerable amount of mercantile activity began to develop.

The increasing role of commerce in the economy led to a growth in the numbers and importance of nonagricultural social classes—namely merchants, manufacturers, artisans, shipbuilders, and sailors. I'm not suggesting that these new social classes represented a majority of the people. Even in the cities, "they were a minor fraction of the population, but their very existence introduced a new dimension into the quality of the community and its structure." (M.I. Finley)

The new Greek settlements that grew up on the Ionian coast were trading centers. They exported oil, wine, weapons, pottery, jewelry, and clothing and imported grain, fish, wood, wool, metals, and slaves. These port cities were populated by immigrants from all over the Greek world and elsewhere, as well as by the natives of Asia Minor. They were people of diverse backgrounds who were away from their traditional settings and exposed to a variety of foreign outlooks and customs.

The existence of this multilingual, multiethnic population in a commercial economy during an economic boom created a situation conducive to intellectual ferment.

New forms of government As the merchant and artisan classes grew in strength, new forms of government developed. First, the hereditary kings who originally ruled the independent Ionian city-states were replaced by the rule of aristocracies of noble families. Then later, by the middle of the 7th century B.C., the aristocracies were overthrown by coalitions of merchants and manufacturers. Then, in the 6th century, these merchant oligarchies were replaced by tyrants.

The words "tyrant" and "tyranny" have very bad connotations today, but they didn't at first. Tyranny was a new form of goverment that reflected the development of class struggles between the rich merchants and the ordinary people, the plebians.

The plebians became a real political force. They fought for their interests by waging strikes and rioting and generally creating social turmoil. Then some prominent politician would step forward and claim to represent the interests of "the people." If he succeeded in winning the leadership of the plebian masses, this politician would seize power and set up a tyranny. These tyrants were something like the familiar populist demagogues of the modern world (like Peron of Argentina or Qaddafi of Libya).

Within a generation or two, the tyrants became what their name implies todayrepressive and unpopular-and then they, too, would be overthrown and replaced, in some cases by democratic republics.

On the Ionian coast there was one city in particular that stood out as the most dynamic; that was Miletus. It had experienced an unprecedented maritime expansion. This one city had established 90 colonies all around the Black Sea, and had a virtual monopoly of trade in that important area. This colonization of the Black Sea area began about 650 B.C.— that is, only about 50 years before the first philosopher, Thales, appeared in that city.

Today if you try to think of a name symbolizing extreme wealth, "Rockefeller" or "Trump" or "Leona Helmsley" might come to mind, but in the ancient world the personification of wealth was King Croesus of Lydia. The thriving economy of Miletus enriched its upper merchant class to the point where King Croesus himself went to the bankers of Miletus when he needed to borrow money.

But as the upper classes got richer in Miletus, the plebians got stronger, too. A tyranny was established in 604 B.C.; it was thrown out a few years later; there were two generations of political turmoil; a constitutional regime came to power; then a new tyranny; and finally a democratic government was established that ruled Miletus until it fell to the Persians in 546.

These rapid shifts in government reveal a population that was politically active and difficult to suppress or intimidate. The social climate was one in which thought and speech were relatively unchained; it was a tumultuous "marketplace of ideas.' Socrates It isn't surprising that this environment stimulated new ways of looking at the world; it would be surprising if it had not.

The merchant economy Those individuals who have become known to us as the first philosophers and first materialists were not simply Miletians; they were a product of the Miletian merchant class—either themselves merchants or under the influence of merchants. That is to say they were not detached ivory-tower thinkers; they were prominent and active citizens of Miletus.

Thales, for example, is reported to have been a shrewd businessman. We have this account of Thales' activity from Aristotle: "It is said that, having observed through his study of the heavenly bodies that there would be a large olive crop, he raised a little capital while it was still winter, and paid deposits on all the olive presses in Miletus and Chios, hiring them cheaply. and so made a large profit."

Whether this anecdote is based on fact or not, it illustrates the perceived connection between commerce in Ionia and the origins of philosophy.

Many of the specific ideas of the Ionian philosophers can be traced directly to the economic activities going on around them. I mentioned earlier that Anaximenes believed that air was the primordial element of the material world. He explained, for instance, that clouds are produced from air by a process he called "felting." Felting was a word used to describe an important manufacturing technique that involved subjecting woven materials to high pressure. It is clear that Anaximenes derived philosophical ideas from analogies drawn from the productive activities of the time.

I also mentioned that Heraclitus believed that fire was the primordial substance. Listen to the metaphor he used to express this idea: "All things are an equal exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods are for gold and gold for goods." Again, it is obvious that the commercial activities surrounding Heraclitus had a great impact on his thinking.

In general, the mercantile economy created fertile ground for philosophy because participating in commerce affects the way a person looks at the world and the things in it. Although merchants may handle a great variety of products, what they're really interested in is reducing them to a single general dimension, namely the monetary value as expressed in a commodity's price. Trade prompts the merchant "to institute comparisons, enables him to discover the general element in the mass of particular details, the necessary element in the mass of accidentals, the recurring element which will result again and again from certain conditions." (Karl Kautsky.)

That is exactly the way that Thales and the other early materialists approached the question of what the world is made of: they were trying to discover the general element in the mass of particular details.

The point I've been illustrating at some length here is that materialism did not originate by great minds thinking thoughts of pure reason in a vacuum, but were a product of material circumstances, a product of the class struggle in the ancient world. That is what is summed up by the materialist epigram "Being determines consciousness."

(Part Il of this series will appear in the October issue of Socialist Action.)

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