Michael Lebowitz
Dialectical Views
by Humphrey McQueen
‘A dialectical view of laws and tendencies’
This item is the second in a sequence to spotlight aspects of Michael Lebowitz’s dialectical critique of political economy. The exercise aims to add to the intellectual weaponry at the disposal of the working class as we confront the crisis of the accumulation of capital.
The first of Lebowitz’s writings to be considered will be ‘Marx’s falling rate of profit: a dialectical view’ [Canadian Journal of Economics, IX (2), May 1976, pp. 232-54.] This commentary introduces what materialists mean by ‘dialectics’.
Laws and tendencies
Dialectics are built into the phrase ‘the law of the tendency’. The mechanistically-blighted will insist on knowing how a ‘law’ can be only a ‘tendency’?; and vice versa, how can a mere ‘tendency’ uphold a ‘law’? The answer depends on the definition of ‘law’. In the practice of human affairs, laws apply to the extent of ‘all other things being equal’. Indeed, interactions among conflicting interests mean that laws will always be actualised as tendencies.
The impress from a variety of factors does not eliminate the law-boundness of social life. Many of those counter-forces will accord with other laws. Not every act is random. The social metabolism is not chaotic. Patterns persist. We can know which social, political and economic outcomes are most likely. Of course, we can never predict when and where those results will appear with the precision of an astronomer announcing an eclipse.
‘The law as such’ is possible only in a social vacuum. Such experiments are not possible in human affairs where we cannot control for temperature and pressure.
Yet, the positing of an ideal type has to be the starting point for any analysis of the concatenation of events. How else are we to penetrate that multiplicity? Thus, as a materialist dialectician, Marx begins with an unadulterated concept in ‘the law as such’. He goes on to relax more and more of his assumptions until his portrayal of his model/law encompasses as much of the contingency of life as it is possible for the human mind to hold.
In introducing materialist dialectics, two cautions are pertinent.
First, nothing is established by analogy. The presence of law-bound patterns in human affairs does not depend on the existence of laws in nature, whether for the life or physical sciences. Such laws do exist. I am content to leave it someone who knows more about both particle physics and population genetics than I do about history to tell us whether those three domains share the same structured dynamics.
Secondly, ‘dialectics’ can do nothing. On the contrary, it is living and breathing materialist dialecticians who interpret the world by changing it and change the world through interpreting it. A materialist cannot activate the category of ‘dialectics’ and remain a materialist. To declaim that ‘dialectics’ shows us ‘this, that or the other thing’ is to abandon materialism for Philosophical Idealism. Of course, one can be an Idealist dialectician, like Hegel. It is a moot point whether being a dialectical Idealist is more or less revolutionary and Marxist than being a mechanistic materialist.
Because materialist dialectics exist only in social practices, it is past time to consider what Marx meant by ‘the law of the tendency’ in terms of the human activities that affect the rate of profit.
To move on from these rudimentary remarks about materialist dialectics, we shall need to think ever more dialectically. Only through developing a dialectical caste of mind will we absorb the fullness of how ‘the law of the tendency’ operates. By identifying how ‘the law’ is being manifested in the present crisis we acquire a dialectically materialist approach to demystifying problems.
Next: TBA