Vol. 72/No. 48      December 8, 2008

BY GEORGE NOVACK  
These lectures deal with the ideas of materialist dialectics, the logic of Marxism.

Has it struck you how exceptional a project this is? Here are members and sympathizers of a revolutionary political party under government persecution in the midst of World War II, the biggest war in world history. These industrial workers, these professional revolutionists, have come together, not to discuss matters and decide upon measures requiring immediate action, but for the purpose of studying a science which seems to be as remote as higher mathematics from everyday political struggle.

What a contrast to the malicious caricature of the Marxist movement deliberately drawn by capitalist hands! The possessing classes depict revolutionary socialists as demented individuals who delude themselves and others by fantastic visions of a workers’ world. The capitalist rulers are like children who can’t picture a world in which they don’t exist and in which they aren’t the central figures.

They claim to be guided by logic and by reason. Yet it takes only one look at the world today to determine who is irrational and who is sane: the capitalists or their revolutionary opponents. The present monarchs of society have run amok and are behaving like maniacs. They have plunged the world into mass murder for the second time in a quarter of a century; put the torch to civilization; and threaten to destroy along with themselves the rest of humanity. And the spokesmen for these unbalanced people presume to call us “crazy” and our struggle for socialism evidence of “unrealism.”

No, the shoe is on the other foot. In fighting against the mad chaos of capitalism for a socialist system free from class exploitation and oppression, wars, crises, imperialist enslavement and barbarism, we Marxists are the most reasonable individuals alive. That is why, unlike all other social and political groupings, we take the science of logic so very seriously. Our logic is the indispensable instrument for prosecuting the struggle against capitalism and for socialism.

The logic of the materialist dialectic is, to be sure, quite different from the prevailing logic of the bourgeois world. Our method, like our ideas, is, as we propose to prove, more scientific, far more practical, and also far more “logical” than any other logic. We maintain with greater comprehension and comprehensiveness the fundamental principle of science that there exists an inner logic of relations throughout all reality and that the laws of this logic can be known and transmitted to others. The social world around us is only superficially senseless. There is method even in the madness of the capitalist class. Our task is to find out what the most general laws of that inner logic of nature, society, and the human mind are. While the bourgeoisie are losing their heads, we shall try to improve and to clarify ours.

We have excellent precedents for this kind of enterprise. During the early months of the First World War, Lenin, in exile at Berne, Switzerland, resumed his study of Hegel’s logic simultaneously with developing his Bolshevik program of struggle against imperialist war. The impress of this theoretical work can be discerned in all his subsequent thinking, writing, and acting. Lenin prepared himself and his party for the coming revolutionary events by mastering dialectics. In the first months of the Second World War, while conducting the fight against the petty-bourgeois opposition in the Socialist Workers Party, Trotsky stressed time and again the crucial importance of the method of materialist dialectics in revolutionary socialist politics. His book, In Defense of Marxism, revolves around this theoretical axis.

Here, as in all our activities, we are guided by the leaders of scientific socialism who taught the dialectical truth that there is nothing so practical in proletarian politics as the right method of thought. That method can be only the method of materialist dialectics we are going to study.  
 
Preliminary definition of logic
Logic is a science. Every science studies a particular kind of motion in its connections with other modes of material motion and seeks to discover the general laws and specific modes of that movement. Logic is the science of the thought process. Logicians investigate the activities of the thought process which goes on in human heads and formulate the laws, forms and interrelations of those mental processes.

Two main types of logic have arisen out of the two main stages in the development of the science of logic: formal logic and dialectics. These are the most highly developed forms of mental motion. They have as their function the conscious understanding of all forms of motion, including their own.

Although we are primarily interested in materialist dialectics, we shall not proceed at once to consider the dialectical method of reasoning. We shall approach dialectics indirectly by first examining the fundamental ideas of another kind of reasoning: the method of formal logic. As a method of thought, formal logic is the polar opposite of materialist dialectics.  
 
 
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