Dialectics and Alienation
(August 2009)
By Dave Winter
(Page 2 of 4 pages; click here to go back to page 1.)
Objectivity, Dialectics and the Left
Let’s cite here the most simple but widely misunderstood “law” of the dialectics, Marx’s most famous quote, “Being determines consciousness,” which means that the external world and its constant changes determine our subjective consciousness. The idealist thinks, on the other hand, that it is the other way around, that the external world is a reflection of one’s subjective consciousness. Trotsky clearly outlines the simple and supposedly obvious rule of dialectics by writing, “We call our dialectic, materialist, since its roots are neither in heaven nor in the depth of our ‘free will’ but in objective reality, in nature.” (In Defense of Marxism, p. 51) One can never become fully objective because we are only human beings who live in a world that is constantly changing. It is the practice of getting as close as possible to (understanding) the objective changing world that make us objective dialecticians.
Yet it is grasping objective reality, the supposedly simplest task for a dialectician to figure out, that all the socialist left fails to understand because of subjective alienation. The subjective person freezes the world, and his or her consciousness always lags far behind the movement of objective contradictions. In order to be objective, one should understand dialectical relationships and the continuously evolving contradictions between the general and the particular, which is the essence of being objective. So, for example, we cannot talk about capitalism in general but about capitalism and its evolving contradictions in a specific historical period. The subjective alienated person always mixes his or her subjective reaction with complex, constantly evolving, objective contradictions.
In a factional fight within the SWP in 1939-40, the petty bourgeois opposition mixed their appalling reaction to Stalin’s pact with the devil (Hitler) with the objective character of the Soviet Union, which remained a workers’ state. Because of the similar brutality of Stalin and Hitler, they also mixed up form and content, another fundamental rule of the dialectic. For the dialectician never confuses appearance and emotional reactions with the living contradictory reality underneath. One needs to see the flexible (the grey areas, not the emotional black-and-white areas) and constantly changing contradictions underneath the form (in this case, Stalin’s pact with Hitler). The brutality of Stalin did not change the basic social and economic reality that the Stalinist bureaucracy was still defending a workers’ state, and that its privileges rested upon the workers’ state’s existence at the time. Nor did the bureaucracy (which ultimately had a greedy bourgeois character) care with whom it made a pact, as long as its privileges and the borders of the planned economy (upon which its privileges rested) were under its control. Thus the form changed (Stalin’s brutality, which looked similar to fascist brutality) and the particular stage of the Stalinists’ relationship with imperialism changed, but not the essence of the Soviet Union.
Trotsky explained the relationship between the dialectician and objective reality:
“The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion. Dialectical thinking gives to concepts, by means of closer approximations, corrections, concretization, a richness of content and flexibility; I would even say “a succulence” which to a certain extent brings them closer to living phenomena. Not capitalism in general, but a given capitalism at a given stage of development. Not a workers’ state in general, but a given workers’ state in a backward country in an imperialist encirclement, etc.” (The ABC of Materialist Dialectics).
The great majority of left organizations, including the fake Trotskyist organizations, are structured as petty bourgeois organizations (many times with the some characteristics of a cult or a sect. This is the case particularly in the US and England) with a bourgeois emotional consciousness that is linked to non-dialectical petty bourgeois ideology or political positions. The terms I am using here are not insults or political attacks, but precise scientific definitions of the politics of these groups, and how their politics are connected to the group’s structure. By “petty bourgeois,” I mean groups in which what glues the individuals together is the herd mentality, the feelings of “I belong” that prohibit independent thinking. Such groups cast out any individual who expresses doubts about the group’s politics. These groups do not use the dialectic, but many times they are controlled by the political whims of the leaders. Even though such groups do not use the dialectic, dialectics controls every moment of their flat existence.
Let me explain what I mean. I have chosen the Healyites as a target. Yes, they are an easy target with some extreme features in comparison to other left groups. But they are an excellent group to illustrate the dialectics because they were the only fake Trotskyist international that made their version of the “dialectics” the center of everything. In the 1970s, Healy and company (ICFI) functioned like the Stalinists. The adhesion to the herd within its English (SLL) and American groups (WL) was based on feelings of terror and fear. Any member who raised minor criticisms immediately became a “renegade” of Marxism and an enemy of Dialectics. The Healyites correctly quoted a thousand times a day the laws of dialectics; that is, they were “teaching” the members about the dialectics by using the “dialectics” to terrorize the members and create fear within the organization. Their method showed the extent to which bourgeois society masked as “Trotskyists” controlled and ultimately destroyed thousands of subjective revolutionaries, all in the name of dialectics.
I was in the WL, and in 1974 I started a struggle within the WL. I was young, only 24 years old, and not very experienced. One day, I told Mike Banda (Healy's second in command) that their positions on the Middle East were very wrong because instead of criticizing the Palestinian leaders (Arafat) and the Arab bourgeoisie (Sadat), the WL praised them. (I later wrote a document about this.) So what should one expect from the so-called masters of the dialectics (Banda and Cliff Slaughter)? The ABCs of dialectics demand, first of all, objectivity. They had to check whether my claims that their press wrote articles uncritically praising Arafat and Sadat were correct. In addition, if my criticism was factually correct, then the obligation of the “dialecticians” was to explain to me, using the dialectical method, why I was supposedly wrong.
Instead, their US group (WL) reverted to methods from the Stone Age and the Middle Ages. They never discussed the contradictions of their positions (on the Middle East) with dialectical Marxism. My criticisms were never discussed. Instead, I became the enemy. Everybody was supposed to be cold toward me; I was an outcast. Finally, they prepared a Congress (1976), which most of the International Healyite leadership attended. Part of it was devoted to terrorizing me. If there is no human dialogue to evaluate the contradictions of a group’s politics, then the contradictions (dialectics) dominates every move of the group. In a very negatively charged atmosphere, I had to present my criticism. Then, every member had to denounce me as a renegade and (sometimes) as a spy of the SWP (one of the main opponents of WL at the time). In this herd-like controlled group, the topics on the table were not even mentioned. People stood there denouncing me with their hands shaking from fear. Why? Because if they used one or two “wrong” sentences in their denunciations, Banda, Slaughter or North would have come to the podium and denounced these comrades as renegades who failed to understand, yes, the dialectic.
This era was the beginning of the end for Healyism. With an internal life of such abuse, even centrist and fake-Trotskyist groups cannot be maintained. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Healyites were a typical centrist group. But with the evolution of extremely oppressive internal regime and more opportunistic politics (Healy became a Monarch, Kaddafi, a great revolutionary), the evolution of Healyism in a backward direction started to accelerate. I can say with confidence that at some point this quantitative backward direction took a leap and Healyism made a qualitative leap backward, becoming a monstrous illustration of fake-Trotskyism. This kind of evolution leads only to the “last” law of the dialectics, the negation of the negation.
If someone figures out one day how to take all of the atoms on earth, separate the electrons from the protons and keep a huge charge between them, that person will create a huge explosion like a supper-nova. That is what happened to Healyism. In 1985, the Healyite movement exploded spectacularly, like a sun that is condensed to the size of the earth, with all of the pressure that had built up. The ashes, thousands of disillusioned subjective Trotskyists, were lost and could not rise again as militant Trotskyists, for the same reason that a star, after the process of a super-nova is finished, can never shine again.
I can cite dozens of daily examples and illustrate how profoundly the absence of basic elements of the dialectics in the left’s arguments is connected to the deep alienation of the individuals and to their bourgeois emotional world. Here I will use a very basic example, very routine and typical, just to illustrate how one can see this with everything that the left does and writes. A few months ago (In the spring of 2009), the HRS was exchanging informal e-mails with a British group called Socialist Fight; specifically, with an individual named G.
G was moving leftward from his previous right-wing Trotskyist history, but he had one extremely reactionary bone in his system: Zionism. As a Marxist, he failed the elementary test of supporting the oppressed against the oppressor, by supporting the right of the Jews in Palestine (the oppressors) to self-determination at a time when the Zionists were in the middle of a genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. This position is the method of the petty bourgeois who cannot stand up against the pressure of imperialism; thus, G had adopted a social chauvinist/social imperialist position. This is not the place to discuss what is wrong politically with this position, which is common among leftists in the imperialist countries. (See the publications of the ILTF and historical material from our group on the topic.) Here, I simply want to state that this position (supporting the right of an oppressor nation to self-determination) is directly connected to alienation, because the petty bourgeois is capitulating to the propaganda of Zionism and imperialism; hence, the emotional herd mentality(conformism) of the petty bourgeois who does not have the courage to stand up to imperialist pressure and say loudly and clearly, “I stand without wavering for the destruction of the imperialist enclave (Zionism) in the Middle East, which can be carried out only by the oppressed (the Palestinians, and the Jewish workers who support them by totally breaking from Zionism)!”
In the case of G, as in all cases like this, the pro-Zionist position (the political source of his alienation) demonstrated the lack of the dialectic method, which could be seen in everything he wrote. Losing all ability to be objective, he did what all petty bourgeois “Trotskyists” do: If you cannot answer your opponents, accuse them of the worst things that come to mind. G used the worst insults in the Trotskyist movement; he wrote that the FLT is Pabloite. In the heat of the debate, I wrote back to G, saying:
“. . . before you rush to accuse the FLT of being Pabloite on Palestine, read the Transitional Program. Here is a section on the workers’ and peasants’ (farmers’) government.
‘The practical participation of the exploited farmers in the control of different fields of economy will allow them to decide for themselves whether or not it would be profitable for them to go over to collective working of the land – at what date and on what scale. Industrial workers should consider themselves duty-bound to show farmers every cooperation in traveling this road: through the trade unions, factory committees, and, above all, through a workers’ and farmers’ government.’ (Trotsky, The Transitional Program, my emphasis)
So I think that the FLT statement ‘for a non racist, democratic and secular Palestine State from the river to the sea, which can only be guaranteed by a workers’ and peasants’ government of the Palestinian masses organized and armed,’ is a good application of Trotsky’s method. There is nothing Pabloite about it.”
His reply was: “He (Trotsky) does not say, though, that it should lead a ‘democratic and secular Palestinian State,’ did he? Perm Rev Vs two stages?”
At the time, I did not write back because I thought that G was a lost cause and a waste of my time. But I am going to do it now using the laws of dialectics. Law number one: Being determines consciousness, or, the objective reality and your role in it determine your method of politics. In other words, this was a subjective emotional reply that distorted the position of the FLT. The FLT does not simply call for a “democratic and secular Palestinian State,” which is saying that the FLT has the program of Arafat and the PLO. Our “dialectician” “forgot” to mention the rest of the sentence which says “which can only be guaranteed by a workers’ and peasants’ government of the Palestinian masses organized and armed.” In other words, this is the method of Trotsky’s Transitional Program that I quoted above. For Trotsky, the need to pose the slogan of “a workers’ and farmers’ (or peasants’, in most colonies and semi-colonies) government” is a critical transitional demand. It is a popular way of calling for workers’ and peasants’ power based on the mass organizations of the “masses organized and armed,” which is understood by the masses. Such a demand can only be carried out with the leadership of the proletariat, and, if carried out successfully with a real revolutionary leadership, this can only lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what Trotsky had in mind when he raised it in the transitional program, and that is the way this demand is connected to the permanent revolution. If we go to the Palestinian masses today and call for the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” nobody in Palestine will understand this, and we will be prey to the assaults of the reactionary leaders of the Palestinians (even though all the democratic tasks in Palestine can really be implemented by the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the culmination of the permanent revolution). Yet the slogans of the IFLT are powerful transitional demands addressed to the present consciousness of the Palestinian masses which, if carried out, is likely to complete the revolution via the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
So G lost all objectivity in his argument by totally distorting what the FLT actually wrote. When dialectics masters you instead of you mastering dialectics, it will not leave you alone. When G could not break fully with Zionism and the social chauvinism of the imperialists, he embraced their method of thinking, which is reflected in the social democratic, “gradual two stages” road to socialism. When he attacks the FLT in “Perm Rev Vs two stages,” he is really arguing against himself. Once again, we see how dialectics controls the person who develops a “position” with social chauvinist emotions. Any solution with the “Jews’ right to self-determination and a state” is not any different from the two-state solution advocated by all the liberals, the “progressives” and the imperialist themselves. Thus, G’s road to socialism needs to go through the social democratic two stages as two capitalist countries (Jewish and Palestinian states) attempt to “resolve” the democratic and national tasks in Palestine. However, as long as the Jewish workers do not support the Palestinians in their tasks to smash the Zionist state and liberate their lands and homes which were brutally taken from them, Jews can have only a Zionist reactionary state, and their consciousness can only remain nationalist and reactionary. Furthermore, if the Jews support the Palestinians, there will be no need for their separate state. Their Zionist “state” has proven to be only an instrument of imperialism in the last sixty years.
So in the case of G, the lesson is: When you capitulate to social imperialist pressure, you can only end up with the pedantic Western thinking of “gradual changes” without the leaps of the permanent revolution.
Alienation, Dialectics, and the Crisis of Climate Change
The current ecological crisis is unrelenting. It has evolved to the point that mainstream scientists and politicians cannot avoid it any longer. The doom and gloom over climate change is beginning to affect their nerves. Physicist John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Obama administration, said, “There is nothing we can do to stop climate change in its tracks because emissions already in the atmosphere will eventually raise ocean temperatures.” This view of the Obama administration is becoming common among scientists. I will not repeat here how urgent the situation is. (See my appeal in A Dire Emergency Regarding Climate Change.)
At this point, most scientists agree that we are passing the point of no return, which means that at least certain levels of devastation will strike capitalist civilization because of climate change. These include millions or even billions of people suffering or dying from lack of water and food, as well as increasing devastating and unpredictable storms. Even a relatively mild change of temperature of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius will bring scarcity which the human race has not faced for thousands of years. If capitalism continues to function as expected (profit comes first) for the next ten to thirty years, and no drastic curtailment of green gases takes place, the changes could be so drastic that the human race could be wiped out along with the great majority of other living beings on the planet. As a matter of fact, even mainstream scientists are soberly telling us that we are in the middle of mass extinction of all species from every category (mammals, birds, fish)—a mass extinction that planet earth has not experienced for millions of years. Furthermore, what is also terrifying is that previous mass extinctions took thousands of years to develop, whereas now it is developing over a few decades. This is a great warning to the human race: Get rid of the profit system and private property, which destroy all life on the planet at the speed of light (relative to the pace of past mass extinctions), or die.
I will deal here with the dialectics of climate change and combine this with the dialectics of alienation, and explain why the horrible combination of both could only be (it may be too late) stopped with the socialist revolution; that is, when humanity finally starts to grow up from its infantile primitive stupid era of class societies.
Two periods from the history of planet earth show beautifully how nature and dialectics work when climate change is a normal natural development. The first example, an era 250 million years ago, is known as the Permian Era, a golden era of biodiversity that was about to come to a crashing end. Within just a few thousand years, 95% of the life forms on the planet were wiped out in the biggest mass extinction the earth has ever known. Paul Wignall, a British scientist, studied the causes for the mass extinction in South Africa. He arrived at a very interesting theory that can be only explained fully by dialectics. It started with massive Siberian volcanoes which released massive amounts of ash that blocked the sun. Gradual global warming took place due to the greenhouse gases released from the volcanoes. This process was really a gradual (social democratic) process that took 40,000 years, and some land animals gradually died out, while life in the seas was OK as the water temperature gently rose. “Then the seas gave up their frozen methane. In just 5,000 years, there was massive loss of species from the world’s oceans. In a third and final phase of the extinction, the Permian killer returned to stalk the land for another 35,000 years. By the end of that process, 95% of the Earth's species were extinct.” It took about 40,000 years for Planet Earth to warm up 4 degrees Celsius. This was the point of no-return, as the oceans started to release massive amounts of methane that cooked the earth gradually up to ten degrees warmer. This process still took thousands of years. At the end of this process, 95% of life on earth was gone. This is, of course, a summary of an extremely complex and contradictory process which we barely understand. But it is understood well enough that we can call it the social democratic stages of the Permian era. There is nothing in the dialectics that states that processes cannot be gradual.
However, if we turn off the macro-scope and turn on the microscope, we’ll see that the process was really far from gradual. At some critical point (about four or at most five degrees), the oceans warmed up to the point of no return; thus, quantity was transformed into quality, and the snowballing of catastrophic climate change was unstoppable.
An even more dramatic change took place 630 million years ago. I explained what happened in my article A Dire Emergency Regarding Climate Change:
“... [A]t the bottom of this (Arctic) ocean lies a time bomb of unimaginable proportions: a huge amount of methane that accumulated via organic decomposition 630 million years ago. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Scientists worry that as the temperature at the bottom of the Arctic ocean rises closer to the freezing point, a massive amount of this methane will be released into the atmosphere. In fact, in the last couple of years methane has started to bubble up from the bottom of the Arctic ocean at an increasing rate.“If the methane at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean is released, the effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will increase to at least 20 times greater than it is now. This can happen as fast as the flip of a switch, in geological terms — which means in decades, or perhaps as short a time as several years. ...
“About 630 million years ago, most of the earth was frozen, and the temperature was rising very slowly. This slow rise in temperature was transformed very suddenly into an extremely rapid one because a massive quantity of methane was released from the ocean into the atmosphere. When this happened, the earth was transformed in a matter of decades from an ice-covered planet into a tropical one. Tropical climatic conditions reached into the Arctic. When the temperature cooled again, the plants in the Arctic all died and decomposed, causing the deposit of a massive amount of methane, much of which still lies at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.” (Footnotes omitted; see linked version for source references.)
Here, the gradual “social democratic” changes were suddenly interrupted by a revolutionary leap; that is, the revolution that nature created was so massive and fast that in a matter of decades the planet was transformed from an ice-covered planet into a tropical planet, including what is known today as Alaska. Quantity was transformed into quality in a violent revolution, a super-nova. To save the planet and avoid any more versions of the above examples, the international socialist revolution must move like a violent super-switch within the coming decades. This is the last chance nature gives us. Our chances to survive and progress as a species depend on the emergence of a rational planned “green” economy with the emergence of non-alienated human beings. We either do it and make a revolutionary leap in human consciousness and development, or we could die as a species. If we fail, this could be the final negation of the negation for the human race.
In reality, there are many variants. While scientists know that we either have crossed or are about to cross the point of no return, nobody knows for sure the levels of catastrophe that will develop. These could be “mild” (“only” a few billion people die and humanity descends into acute barbarism, but survives) or severe (a scenario similar to the Permian era, or other eras of mass extinctions). What is clear, however, is that scientists are getting more nervous every year. They have their super-computers with millions of circuits that try to predict how quickly global warming is proceeding. Every year, scientists in the field report that global warming is proceeding faster than the super-computers’ predictions. So they adjust the super-computers (they need a “slight adjustment,” to use the words of Daffy Duck), and the following year, the scientists in the field report again that global warming is developing much faster than the adjusted super-computers. And why is this? We cannot explain this with formal logic; only a human mind that uses the dialectics can comprehend it.