Commentary From Allen Gindler on Mises.org:
Dialectic! What a powerful concept that explains everything and nothing at the same time in the Soviet reality. Any changes in the economic, social, foreign, or military policies of the Soviet Union were considered in their natural movement and rationalized by the materialist dialectic. For example, the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) after war communism was dialectic; the conclusion of the nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany after many years of mutual dislike and criticism was dialectic; even the chronic lag of the Soviet economy in providing essential goods also found dialectical justification.
Eventually, however, the word "dialectic" became a subject of jokes for those of us living under Marxist regimes. We could see the enormous difference between the theory and the reality, and we ridiculed Marx's dialectic, as it was perceived to explain everything and nothing simultaneously.
But what is "dialectic," anyway? Antony Sammeroff had an excellent article on the subject of dialectical materialism and Mises's critique of it. It is, simply put, a specific way of using historical events to illustrate why the world is the way it is. In the Marxian context, it often involves showing why the status quo was always inevitable, and has proceeded according to Marxist economic "science."
Sammeroff writes:
Marx theorized that human history is best viewed as a series of class struggles between social forces that have contradictory interests. For example, the class struggles between slaves and their masters, between feudal lords and their subjects, and—in his day—the class struggle between capitalists and their workers. He believed that seeing history as the history of class struggle had better explanatory power than viewing it through other lenses, such as the history of ideas, technological innovations, or military conflicts.
In fact, properly viewed through the lens of class struggle, history would naturally subsume those other ways of seeing the world and illuminate the context in which they unfolded, particularly when it came to technological innovation, which Marx thought would ultimately determine the struggle of the age. He wrote, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” Mises summarizes Marx's view as follows: “These forces are the driving power producing all historical facts and changes.”
Dialectic has a long history and different interpretations. Still, we will rely on Hegel's version, as he authored three laws of dialectic: the unity and conflict of opposites, the mutual transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation. He suggested a path of arriving at the truth that has a triadic structure: a particular phenomenon (thesis) is manifested within its contradictory aspect (antithesis), which requires a resolution (synthesis) that negates their logical opposition. Concerning one of the main questions of philosophy—what is primary, matter or idea?—Hegel was a representative of idealism, and his philosophy was better described as dialectical idealism.
On the contrary, Marx was an adherent of materialism, and his disagreement with Hegel's idealism had to be resolved dialectically. In other words, Hegel's idealism could be considered the thesis, and Marx's materialism, which he borrowed from Feuerbach, was the antithesis. As a result of the third stage of the triad—synthesis—the birth of a new thesis was expected, since it is assumed that synthesis will resolve the contradiction and lead to the creation of a new paradigm.
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Arbitrary Descriptions of Class Groups
One of the key problems with Marx's imprecise use of the dialectic can be found in his arbitrary use of economic classes.
In general, many parties can participate in a conflict, but Marx preferred to limit himself to the realm of dichotomy, according to the dialectical law of the unity and conflict of opposites. In a capitalist society, he saw two opposing sides—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Mises repeatedly stated that the classification of the members of a capitalistic society according to their position in the social division of labor was unwarranted and made sense only in the framework of Marxism itself but not outside of his teachings.
But even if we accept the Marxist classification, one may ask why the doctrine did not address peasants, who constituted a significant section of the populations of Germany and England during the time of Marx, and of course, the so-called petty bourgeoisie.
Marx abstracted himself from the uncomfortable strata of the population that did not fit very well into his theory of scientific socialism. Instead, he hypothesized that the poor would get poorer and the rich richer, which, at the limit, would lead to all the wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few. The majority would be the poor proletariat. That is, all the peasants would lose their land and become farm laborers, and the petty bourgeoisie would also cease to exist. Mathematicians have a method in which a function's behavior is investigated in the limit, but studying society is not math, and such operations are unscientific. [read more]
In the article the author says that Marx predicted the self-employed small business owner would disappear. Or maybe he wished they would… After all they are less dependent on the State. And the socialists and far-Left can’t have that.
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