Negation: The Heart of Materialist Dialectics
Note: To help in the fight for communism, ICWP is creating new study and discussion materials on the communist philosophy of dialectical materialism. This is a draft of one small part of these materials. Please comment and criticize to make it better.
The word “revolution” has different meanings in different settings. The blades of a fan rotate at so many “revolutions” per minute. Social “revolutions” occur when one social class takes power by violently overthrowing the ruling social class. It is similar with “negation.” In dialectical materialism, it means something that happens in an on-going process.
When a plant produces seeds and dies, that is a kind of negation. This negation has two sides. The seeds that are produced are new, but the plant is destroyed. Something old is gone and something new is the result. That is what dialectical negation means: destruction or rejection of something that exists and the creation of something new.
In a lifetime of growth, most of the cells in a person’s body are negated. They die and are replaced by new ones. At the end his book Capital, Marx wrote that the capitalist mode of production produces its own negation. That is, the working class destroys capitalism and creates communism to replace it.
Negation usually happens over and over again in the development of a process or system. Historical change is not a smooth and gradual process, but a series of negations, big or small, that create new situations. What happens after two negations?
Since every negation destroys something and also produces something new, a second negation takes place in a different situation than the first one, so it produces a different situation, even if it is similar to what happened before. History does not go in circles, even when similar situations happen again.
The result of a new series of racist police murders (a negation) is not exactly like the last one, although the politicians say the same things again. The massive uprisings about the murder of George Floyd across the US show this clearly.
Marx described the rise of capitalism as a negation, since the property of masses of peasants and handicraft producers was taken from them by capitalists. The second negation, where the working class destroys the capitalist class, will not take us back to small agriculture and handicrafts, but forward to communism. In the case of the plant that died, the seeds can produce a new plant that is similar to the old one, but also different is some ways.
“Negativity” means the tendency to negate something. Negativity is a fundamental concept of dialectical materialism. It is the key ingredient of a dialectical contradiction. In communist philosophy two things are called “opposites” if they are different but influence and depend on each other. Parents and children are opposites in this sense, even when they are not in conflict.
Two things are in a dialectical contradiction with each other if they are opposites and their relationship has negativity. The worker-capitalist relation is a perfect example of this. Under capitalism workers need wages from capitalists in order to live. Capitalists need workers to exploit in order to make a profit. Workers and capitalists are opposites and their relation is negative, so they are in a dialectical contradiction.
Like all contradictions, the worker-capitalist contradiction can only be ended by the negativity between the two sides increasing to actual negation. That negation is communist revolution, which destroys the capitalists and begins the creation of communism, the new result of the negation of capitalism. Capitalism constantly generates racism, nationalism, sexism and other divisions of the masses in order to control us. The only way to negate these things is to negate the capitalist system. This negation, Marx wrote, “proceeds with the necessity of a natural process.” Join ICWP and take part in moving this negation forward.
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