(v) The Laws of Dialectical Development

Engels considered that these laws can be reduced in the main to three:[1]

(a) The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa

This law expresses the fact that change in nature and society does not simply involve a slow and continuous increase or decrease in the growth of things. At a certain point, new qualities emerge as a sharp “break” with the past or “leap” into the future occurs. Bourgeois thinkers often say that “there is nothing new under the sun” as though all we can do is to arrange different hands from the same old pack of cards! Marxists disagree. Just as in nature gradually decreasing or increasing the temperature of water (a change in quantity) causes it to turn into something quite different, ice or steam (a change which is qualitative), so in life generally, gradual changes of degree which do not affect the essence of a thing reach a point when the thing itself changes its character and a new entity emerges.

Thus in South Africa for example, for a long period of time the old tribal systems slowly disintegrated as the people were forced to leave their homes and work down in the mines, on the farms and in the factories, until a “leap” occurred and a new identity was born. People now saw themselves not merely as Tswanas, Zulus, Xhosas, etc., but as Africans, a qualitative change in the people's outlook, This made it possible on the one hand to form the ANC as a national political organisation and for the ANC, once formed, to fight for the development of a national consciousness among wider and wider sections of the people. This qualitative change in the people's outlook giving them a new sense of identity did not simply take place “overnight”: it had been building up gradually, bit by bit, for many years before. But changes in degree do not take place for ever: a point is reached when they become changes in kind and something new is created.

But what causes this change to build up in this way? This aspect is focussed upon in

(b) The law of the unity and struggle of opposites.

We have already noted that change arises from within things as a necessary part of their development. The elements which make up an object in nature or in society are at once connected with one another and at the same time, in a state of constant struggle or, as we often say, “contradiction." Every thing therefore constitutes a “unity of opposites." Capitalists for example, cannot exist without exploiting wage workers, while these workers cannot survive without selling their labour power to a capitalist. They are at once “united"—for each depends upon the other—but as the class struggle shows, they are also “opposites," for this unity is manifest through an ongoing struggle.

This is an important law of dialectics because it helps to identify the reason why everything in the world must continue to develop. Of course, not all “struggling opposites” or contradictions should be looked at in the same way and Marxists generally distinguish between antagonistic contradictions, when a struggle cannot be resolved without victory for one side and defeat for the other, and non-antagonistic contradictions, when differences are resolved in a way which leaves all the constituent elements intact. Thus, whereas under capitalism, the contradiction between worker and capitalist is an antagonistic one, under socialism, contradictions remain but with the gradual disappearance of classes, antagonism dies out.

At all times, in other words, the unity and struggle of opposites continues, for without the operation of this law in nature and society, no real change could take place at all.

But what is the relationship between the old and the new as change occurs? This is demonstrated by

(c) The law of the negation of the negation.

Negation in dialectics, as Engels has pointed out, does not mean simply saying no, or declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes.[2]

"Negation” involves the movement of something from an old stage to a new and higher stage, so that the elements of the old are carried forward and reworked into the new. Just as capitalism “negated” feudalism by using the former serfs and craftsmen in its new labour force, so socialism “negates” capitalism by building upon its social production and advanced technology. When we speak therefore of the “negation of the negation” we do not merely mean that something has changed twice over. We mean that there has been a spiral development upwards, carrying the past into the future, remaking it in the process.

Negation therefore has a negative side which conservatives ignore when they think that there is no real “break” in development, so that, for example, they forget that the African worker who has spent years of his life living and working in the cities, struggling with his comrades for more money, better conditions and the right to belong to a trade union, is a very different sort of person from his grandfather or grand mother who lived in a tribal community farming the land in the period before colonialism. Ironically white supremacists are often acutely conscious of the force of this “negation” when they argue that Africans are supposedly too “primitive” to understand the complexities of trade unionism and would therefore use their trade unions as political weapons in the struggle against apartheid! But if negation has a negative side, it also has a positive side, which anarchists and ultra-leftists ignore when they fail to see that revolutionaries must build upon the traditions of the past, carrying over what is healthy and democratic and discarding what is backwards and reactionary. This is clearly a crucial task for African revolutionaries to undertake.

Hence the law of the negation of the negation helps us to understand change both as a break with the past and yet at the same time, a development from it. Having looked briefly at the three general laws of the dialectical development, we are now in a position to consider my final point relating to [...click "Next"]