Modern dialectical materialism

The most characteristic form of early religion is animism--the notion that everything, animate or inanimate, has a spirit. We see the same kind of reaction in a child when it smacks a table against which it has banged its head. In the same way, early humans, and certain tribes today, will ask the spirit of a tree to forgive them before cutting it down. Animism belongs to a period when humankind has not yet fully separated itself from the animal world and nature in general. The closeness of humans to the world of animals is attested to by the freshness and beauty of cave-art, where horses, deer and bison are depicted with a naturalness which can no longer be captured by the modern artist. It is the childhood of the human race, which has gone beyond recall. We can only imagine the psychology of these distant ancestors of ours. But by combining the discoveries of paleontology with anthropology, it is possible to reconstruct, at least in outline, the world from which we have emerged.

In his classic anthropological study of the origins of magic and religion, Sir James Frazer writes:

"A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural. To him the world is to a great extent worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to their pity, their hope, and their fears. In a world so conceived he sees no limit to this power of influencing the course of nature to his own advantage. Prayers, promises, or threats may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the gods; and if a god should happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own person, then he need appeal to no higher being; he, the savage, possesses in himself all the powers necessary to further his own well-being and that of his fellow-men." (8)

The notion that the soul exists separate and apart from the body comes down from the most remote period of savagery. The basis of it is quite clear. When we are asleep, the soul appears to leave the body and roam about in dreams. By extension, the similarity between death and sleep ("death's second self," Shakespeare called it) suggested the idea that the soul could continue to exist after death. Early humans thus concluded that there is something inside them that is separate from their bodies. This is the soul, which commands the body, and can do all kinds of incredible things, even when the body is asleep. They also noticed how words of wisdom issued from the mouths of old people, and concluded that, whereas the body perishes, the soul lives on. To people used to the idea of migration, death was seen as the migration of the soul, which needed food and implements for the journey.

At first these spirits had no fixed abode. They merely wandered about, usually making trouble, which obliged the living to go to extraordinary lengths to appease them. Here we have the origin of religious ceremonies. Eventually, the idea arose that the assistance of these spirits could be enlisted by means of prayer. At this stage, religion (magic), art and science were not differentiated. Lacking the means to gain real power over their environment, early humans attempted to obtain their ends by means of magical intercourse with nature, and thus subject it to their will. The attitude of early humans to their spirit-gods and fetishes was quite practical. Prayers were intended to get results. A man would make an image with his own hands, and prostrate himself before it. But if the desired result was not forthcoming, he would curse it and beat it, in order to extract by violence what he failed to do by entreaty. In this strange world of dreams and ghosts, this world of religion, the primitive mind saw every happening as the work of unseen spirits. Every bush and stream was a living creature, friendly or hostile. Every chance event, every dream, pain or sensation, was caused by a spirit. Religious explanations filled the gap left by lack of knowledge of the laws of nature. Even death was not seen as a natural occurrence, but a result of some offence caused to the gods.

For the great majority of the existence of the human race, the minds of men and women have been full of this kind of thing. And not only in what people like to regard as primitive societies. The same kind of superstitious beliefs continue to exist in slightly different guises today. Beneath the thin veneer of civilisation lurk primitive irrational tendencies and ideas which have their roots in a remote past which has been half-forgotten, but is not yet overcome. Nor will they be finally rooted out of human consciousness until men and women establish firm control over their conditions of existence.

Division of Labour

Frazer points out that the division between manual and mental labour in primitive society is invariably linked to the formation of a caste of priests, shamans or magicians:

"Social progress, as we know, consists mainly in a successive differentiation of functions, or, in simpler language, a division of labour. The work which in primitive society is done by all alike and by all equally ill, or nearly so, is gradually distributed among different classes of workers and executed more and more perfectly; and so far as the products, material or immaterial, of his specialised labour are shared by all, the whole community benefits by the increasing specialisation. Now magicians or medicine-men appear to constitute the oldest artificial or professional class in the evolution of society. For sorcerers are found in every savage tribe known to us; and among the lowest savages, such as the Australian aborigines, they are the only professional class that exists." (9)

The dualism which separates soul from body, mind from matter, thinking from doing, received a powerful impulse from the development of the division of labour at a given stage of social evolution. The separation between mental and manual labour is a phenomenon which coincides with the division of society into classes. It marked a great advance in human development. For the first time, a minority of society was freed from the necessity to work to obtain the essentials of existence. The possession of that most precious commodity, leisure, meant that men could devote their lives to the study of the stars. As the German materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach explains, real theoretical science begins with cosmology:

"The animal is sensible only of the beam which immediately affects life; while man perceives the ray, to him physically indifferent, of the remotest star. Man alone has purely intellectual, disinterested joys and passions; the eye of man alone keeps theoretic festivals. The eye which looks into the starry heavens, which gazes at that light, alike useless and harmless, having nothing in common with the earth and its necessities--this eye sees in that light its own nature, its own origin. The eye is heavenly in its nature. Hence man elevates himself above the earth only with the eye; hence theory begins with the contemplation of the heavens. The first philosophers were astronomers." (10)

Although at this early stage this was still mixed up with religion, and the requirements and interests of a priest caste, it also signified the birth of human civilization. This was already understood by Aristotle, who wrote:

"These theoretical arts, moreover, were evolved in places where men had plenty of free time: mathematics, for example, originated in Egypt, where a priestly caste enjoyed the necessary leisure." (11)

Knowledge is a source of power. In any society in which art, science and government is the monopoly of a few, that minority will use and abuse its power in its own interests. The annual flooding of the Nile was a matter of life and death to the people of Egypt, whose crops depended on it. The ability of the priests in Egypt to predict, on the basis of astronomical observations, when the Nile would flood its banks must have greatly increased their prestige and power over society. The art of writing, a most powerful invention, was the jealously guarded secret of the priest-caste. As Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers comment:

"Sumer discovered writing; the Sumerian priests speculated that the future might be written in some hidden way in the events taking place around us in the present. They even systematized this belief, mixing magical and rational elements." (12)

The further development of the division of labour gave rise to an unbridgeable gulf between the intellectual elite and the majority of humankind, condemned to labour with their hands. The intellectual, whether Babylonian priest or modern theoretical physicist, knows only one kind of labour, mental labour. Over the course of millennia, the superiority of the latter over "crude" manual labour becomes deeply ingrained and acquires the force of a prejudice. Language, words and thoughts become endowed with mystical powers. Culture becomes the monopoly of a privileged elite, which jealously guards its secrets, and uses and abuses its position in its own interests.

In ancient times, the intellectual aristocracy made no attempt to conceal its contempt for physical labour. The following extract from an Egyptian text known as The Satire on the Trades, written about 2000 B.C. is supposed to consist of a father's exhortation to his son, whom he is sending to the Writing School to train as a scribe:

"I have seen how the belaboured man is belaboured--thou shouldst set thy heart in pursuit of writing. And I have observed how one may be rescued from his duties [sic!]--behold, there is nothing which surpasses writing…

"I have seen the metalworker at his work at the mouth of his furnace. His fingers were somewhat like crocodiles; he stank more than fish-roe…

"The small building contractor carries mud…He is dirtier than vines or pigs from treading under his mud. His clothes are stiff with clay…

"The arrow-maker, he is very miserable as he goes out into the desert [to get flint points]. Greater is that which he gives to his donkey than its work thereafter [is worth]…

"The laundry man launders on the [river] bank, a neighbour of the crocodile…

"Behold, there is no profession free of a boss--except for the scribe: he is the boss…

"Behold, there is no scribe who lacks food from the property of the House of the King--life, prosperity, health!…His father and his mother praise god, he being set upon the way of the living. Behold these things--I [have set them] before thee and thy children's children." (13)

The same attitude was prevalent among the Greeks:

"What are called the mechanical arts," says Xenophon, "carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonoured in our cities, for these arts damage the bodies of those who work in them or who act as overseers, by compelling them to a sedentary life and to an indoor life, and, in some cases, to spend the whole day by the fire. This physical degeneration results also in deterioration of the soul. Furthermore, the workers at these trades simply have not got the time to perform the offices of friendship or citizenship. Consequently they are looked upon as bad friends and bad patriots, and in some cities, especially the warlike ones, it is not legal for a citizen to ply a mechanical trade." (14)

The radical divorce between mental and manual labour deepens the illusion that ideas, thoughts and words have an independent existence. This misconception lies at the heart of all religion and philosophical idealism.

It was not god who created man after his own image, but, on the contrary, men and women who created gods in their own image and likeness. Ludwig Feuerbach said that if birds had a religion, their God would have wings. "Religion is a dream, in which our own conceptions and emotions appear to us as separate existences, beings out of ourselves. The religious mind does not distinguish between subjective and objective--it has no doubts; it has the faculty, not of discerning other things than itself, but of seeing its own conceptions out of itself as distinct beings." (15) This was already understood by men like Xenophanes of Colophon (565-c.470 B.C.), who wrote "Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods every deed that is shameful and dishonourable among men: stealing and adultery and deceiving each other…The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed, and the Thracians theirs grey-eyed and red-haired…If animals could paint and make things, like men, horses and oxen too would fashion the gods in their own image." (16)

The Creation myths which exist in almost all religions invariably take their images from real life, for example, the image of the potter who gives form to formless clay. In the opinion of Gordon Childe, the story of the Creation in the first book of Genesis reflects the fact that, in Mesopotamia the land was indeed separated from the waters "in the Beginning," but not by divine intervention:

"The land on which the great cities of Babylonia were to rise had literally to be created; the prehistoric forerunner of the biblical Erech was built on a sort of platform of reeds, laid criss-cross upon the alluvial mud. The Hebrew book of Genesis has familiarised us with much older traditions of the pristine condition of Sumer--a `chaos' in which the boundaries between water and dry land were still fluid. An essential incident in `The Creation' is the separation of these elements. Yet it was no god, but the proto-Sumerian themselves who created the land; they dug channels to water the fields and drain the marsh; they built dykes and mounded platforms to protect men and cattle from the waters and raise them above the flood; they made the first clearings in the reed brakes and explored the channels between them. The tenacity with which the memory of this struggle persisted in tradition is some measure of the exertion imposed upon the ancient Sumerians. Their reward was an assured supply of nourishing dates, a bounteous harvest from the fields they had drained, and permanent pastures for flocks and herds." (17)

Man's earliest attempts to explain the world and his place in it were mixed up with mythology. The Babylonians believed that the god Marduk created Order out of Chaos, separating the land from the water, heaven from earth. The biblical Creation myth was taken from the Babylonians by the Jews, and later passed into the culture of Christianity. The true history of scientific thought commences when men and women learn to dispense with mythology, and attempt to obtain a rational understanding of nature, without the intervention of the gods. From that moment, the real struggle for the emancipation of humanity from material and spiritual bondage begins.

The advent of philosophy represents a genuine revolution in human thought. Like so much of modern civilisation, we owe it to the ancient Greeks. Although important advances were also made by the Indians and Chinese, and later the Arabs, it was the Greeks who developed philosophy and science to its highest point prior to the Renaissance. The history of Greek thought in the four hundred year period, from the middle of the 7th century B.C., constitutes one of the most imposing pages in the annals of human history.

Materialism and Idealism

The whole history of philosophy from the Greeks down to the present day consist of a struggle between two diametrically opposed schools of thought--materialism and idealism. Here we come across a perfect example of how the terms used in philosophy differ fundamentally from everyday language.

When we refer to someone as an "idealist" we normally have in mind a person of high ideals and spotless morality. A materialist, on the contrary, is viewed as an unprincipled so-and-so, a money-grubbing, self-centred individual with gross appetites for food and other things--in short, a thoroughly undesirable character.

This has nothing whatever to do with philosophical materialism and idealism. In a philosophical sense, idealism sets out from the view that the world is only a reflection of ideas, mind, spirit, or more correctly the Idea, which existed before the physical world. The crude material things we know through our senses are, according to this school, only imperfect copies of this perfect Idea. The most consistent proponent of this philosophy in Antiquity was Plato. However, he did not invent idealism, which existed earlier.

The Pythagoreans believed that the essence of all things was Number (a view apparently shared by some modern mathematicians). The Pythagoreans displayed a contempt towards the material world in general and the human body in particular which they saw as a prison where the soul was trapped. This is strikingly reminiscent of the outlook of mediaeval monks. Indeed, it is probable that the Church took many of its ideas from the Pythagoreans, Platonists and Neo-Platonists. This is not surprising. All religions necessarily set out from an idealist view of the world. The difference is that religion appeals to the emotions, and claims to provide a mystical, intuitive understanding of the world ("Revelation"), while most idealist philosophers try to present logical arguments for their theories.

At bottom, however, the roots of all forms of idealism are religious and mystical. The disdain for the "crude material world" and the elevation of the "Ideal" flow directly from the phenomena we have just considered in relation to religion. It is no accident that Platonist idealism developed in Athens when the system of slavery was at its height. Manual labour at that time was seen, in a very literal sense, as a mark of slavery. The only labour worthy of respect was intellectual labour. Essentially, philosophical idealism is a product of the extreme division between mental and manual labour which has existed from the dawn of written history down to the present day.

The history of Western philosophy, however, begins not with idealism but with materialism. This asserts precisely the opposite: that the material world, known to us and explored by science, is real; that the only real world is the material one; that thoughts, ideas and sensations are the product of matter organised in a certain way (a nervous system and a brain); that thought cannot derive its categories from itself, but only from the objective world which makes itself known to us through our senses.

The earliest Greek philosophers were known as "hylozoists" (from the Greek, meaning "those who believe that matter is alive"). Here we have a long line of heroes who pioneered the development of thought. The Greeks discovered that the world was round, long before Columbus. They explained that humans had evolved from fishes long before Darwin. They made extraordinary discoveries in mathematics, especially geometry, which were not greatly improved upon for one and a half millennia. They invented mechanics and even built a steam engine. What was startlingly new about this way of looking at the world was that it was not religious. In complete contrast to the Egyptians and Babylonians, from whom they had learnt a lot, the Greek thinkers did not resort to gods and goddesses to explain natural phenomena. For the first time, men and women sought to explain the workings of nature purely in terms of nature. This was one of the greatest turning-points in the entire history of human thought. True science starts here.

Aristotle, the greatest of the Ancient philosophers, can be considered a materialist, although he was not so consistent as the early hylozoists. He made a series of important scientific discoveries which laid the basis for the great achievements of the Alexandrine period of Greek science.

The Middle Ages which followed the collapse of Antiquity were a desert in which scientific thought languished for centuries. Not accidentally, this was a period dominated by the Church. Idealism was the only philosophy permitted, either as a caricature of Plato or an even worse distortion of Aristotle.

Science re-emerged triumphantly in the period of the Renaissance. It was forced to wage a fierce battle against the influence of religion (not only Catholic, but also Protestant, by the way). Many martyrs paid the price of scientific freedom with their lives. Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake. Galileo was twice put on trial by the Inquisition, and forced to renounce his views under threat of torture.

The predominant philosophical trend of the Renaissance was materialism. In England, this took the form of empiricism, the school of thought that states that all knowledge is derived from the senses. The pioneers of this school were Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704). The materialist school passed from England to France where it acquired a revolutionary content. In the hands of Diderot, Rousseau, Holbach and Helvetius, philosophy became an instrument for criticising all existing society. These great thinkers prepared the way for the revolutionary overthrow of the feudal monarchy in 1789-93.

The new philosophical views stimulated the development of science, encouraging experiment and observation. The 18th century saw a great advance in science, especially mechanics. But this fact had a negative as well as a positive side. The old materialism of the 18th century was narrow and rigid, reflecting the limited development of science itself. Newton expressed the limitations of empiricism with his celebrated phrase "I make no hypotheses." This one-sided mechanical outlook ultimately proved fatal to the old materialism. Paradoxically, the great advances in philosophy after 1700 were made by idealist philosophers.

Under the impact of the French revolution, the German idealist Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) subjected all previous philosophy to a thorough criticism. Kant made important discoveries not only in philosophy and logic but in science. His nebular hypothesis of the origins of the solar system (later given a mathematical basis by Laplace) is now generally accepted as correct. In the field of philosophy, Kant's masterpiece The Critique of Pure Reason was the first work to analyse the forms of logic which had remained virtually unchanged since they were first developed by Aristotle. Kant showed the contradictions implicit in many of the most fundamental propositions of philosophy. However, he failed to resolve these contradictions ("Antinomies"), and finally drew the conclusion that real knowledge of the world was impossible. While we can know appearances, we can never know how things are "in themselves."

This idea was not new. It is a theme which has recurred many times in philosophy, and is generally identified with what we call subjective idealism. This was put forward before Kant by the Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley and the last of the classical English empiricists, David Hume. The basic argument can be summed up as follows: "I interpret the world through my senses. Therefore, all that I know to exist are my sense-impressions. Can I, for example, assert that this apple exists? No. All I can say is that I see it, I feel it, I smell it, I taste it. Therefore, I cannot really say that the material world exists at all." The logic of subjective idealism is that, if I close my eyes, the world ceases to exist. Ultimately, it leads to solipsism (from the Latin "solo ipsus"--"I alone"), the idea that only I exist.

These ideas may seem nonsensical to us, but they have proved strangely persistent. In one way or another, the prejudices of subjective idealism have penetrated not only philosophy but also science for a great part of the 20th century. We shall deal more specifically with this trend later on.

The greatest breakthrough came in the first decades of the 19th century with George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel was a German idealist, a man of towering intellect, who effectively summed up in his writings the whole history of philosophy.

Hegel showed that the only way to overcome the "Antinomies" of Kant was to accept that contradictions actually existed, not only in thought, but in the real world. As an objective idealist, Hegel had no time for the subjective idealist argument that the human mind cannot know the real world. The forms of thought must reflect the objective world as closely as possible. The process of knowledge consist of penetrating ever more deeply into this reality, proceeding from the abstract to the concrete, from the known to the unknown, from the particular to the universal.

The dialectical method of thinking had played a great role in Antiquity, particularly in the naive but brilliant aphorisms of Heraclitus (c.500 B.C.), but also in Aristotle and others. It was abandoned in the Middle Ages, when the Church turned Aristotle's formal logic into a lifeless and rigid dogma, and did not re-appear until Kant returned it to a place of honour. However, in Kant the dialectic did not receive an adequate development. It fell to Hegel to bring the science of dialectical thinking to its highest point of development.

Hegel's greatness is shown by the fact that he alone was prepared to challenge the dominant philosophy of mechanism. The dialectical philosophy of Hegel deals with processes, not isolated events. It deals with things in their life, not their death, in their inter-relations, not isolated, one after the other. This is a startlingly modern and scientific way of looking at the world. Indeed, in many aspects Hegel was far in advance of his time. Yet, despite its many brilliant insights, Hegel's philosophy was ultimately unsatisfactory. Its principal defect was precisely Hegel's idealist standpoint, which prevented him from applying the dialectical method to the real world in a consistently scientific way. Instead of the material world we have the world of the Absolute Idea, where real things, processes and people are replaced by insubstantial shadows. In the words of Frederick Engels, the Hegelian dialectic was the most colossal miscarriage in the whole history of philosophy. Correct ideas are here seen standing on their head. In order to put dialectics on a sound foundation, it was necessary to turn Hegel upside down, to transform idealist dialectics into dialectical materialism. This was the great achievement of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Our study begins with a brief account of the basic laws of materialist dialectics worked out by them.

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