First of all, I need a frame of reference not only as a point of departure but as a set of guidelines to be used in interpreting and criticizing a variety of ideas, theories, and formulations. For me this starting point can only be what Marx and Engels called the dialectical mode of thought, as contrasted to the metaphysical mode of thought which, paradoxical though it may seem, had been brought to its highest level of development by the methods and successes of modern science. But before we get to that, a few words must be said about what I understand to be the Marxist meaning of materialism.
For Marx and Engels materialism, as even a cursory reading of the first hundred pages of their joint work The German Ideology should make clear, is simply the obverse and alternative to idealism. It holds that ideas do not have an independent or primary existence; that they emanate from humanity and society; and that humanity and society are integral parts of a nature that existed before there was (terrestrial) life, including human life, and will continue to exist after it has become extinct. Dualities such as matter vs. spirit or mind vs. body are thus pseudo-problems; the infinite variety of nature is a manifestation of different modes and levels of organization of the ultimate building blocks of the universe (if indeed there are any such ultimate building blocks, a question about which the best scientists nowadays seem to be very unclear but the answer to which, if one were to be forthcoming, would in no way affect the validity or relevance of the Marxist conception of materialism). There is thus no unbridgeable divide between nature and society, nor, as a consequence, between natural and social sciences. Every science has as its object to understand/explain some aspect of reality; but since all aspects of reality have special problems and characteristics, it follows that each science has at least in some measure to devise its own methods and procedures, and that the ease and extent to which reliable knowledge can be attained vary widely from one to another. This, however, is no reason for reserving the term “science” for the more successful ones and denying it to those with less tractable subject matters.
With so much by way of introduction we can go on to consider the dialectical mode of thought. And here I want to introduce two quotations, one lengthy and one brief, from Engels’ Anti-Dühring, in my opinion a masterpiece of exposition and clarification that has too often been neglected or put down precisely because it was addressed to a popular audience rather than to an elite of self-anointed experts. The first quotation occurs in the first chapter of Part I, entitled “General”:
When we reflect on nature, or the history of mankind, or our own intellectual activity, the first picture presented to us is of an endless maze of relations and interactions, in which nothing remains what, where, and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes out of existence. This primitive, naive, yet intrinsically correct conception of the world was that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and also is not, for everything is in flux, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away. But this conception, correctly as it covers the general character of the picture of phenomena as a whole, is yet inadequate to explain the details of which this total picture is composed; and so long as we do not understand these, we also have no clear idea of the picture as a whole. In order to understand these details, we must detach them from their natural or historical connections and examine each one separately as to its nature, its special causes and effects, etc. This is primarily the task of natural science and historical research—branches of science which the Greeks of the classical period, on very good grounds, relegated to a merely subordinate position, because they had first of all to collect materials for these sciences to work upon. The beginnings of the exact investigation of nature were first developed by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period, and later on in the Middle Ages were further developed by the Arabs. Real natural science, however, dates only from the second half of the fifteenth century, and from then on it has advanced with constantly increasing rapidity.
The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and natural objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms—these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature which have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of investigation has also left us as a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in their isolation, detached from the whole vast interconnection of things; and therefore not in their motion, but in their repose; not in their life, but in their death. And when, as with the case of Bacon and Locke, this way of looking at things was transferred from natural science to philosophy, it produced the specific narrow-mindedness of the last centuries, the metaphysical mode of thought.
To the metaphysician, things and their mental images, ideas, are isolated, to be considered one after the other apart from each other, rigid, fixed objects of investigation given once for all. He thinks in absolutely discontinuous antitheses.… For him a thing either exists, or it does not exist; it is equally impossible for a thing to be itself and at the same time something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in equally rigid antithesis one to the other. At first sight this mode of thought seems to us extremely plausible because it is the mode of thought of common sense. But sound common sense, respectable fellow as he is within the homely precincts of his own four walls, has most wonderful adventures as soon as he ventures out into the wide world of scientific research. Here the metaphysical mode of outlook, justifiable and even necessary as it is in domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the object under investigation, nevertheless sooner or later always reaches a limit beyond which it becomes one-sided, limited, abstract, and loses its way in insoluble contradictions. And this is so because in considering individual things it loses sight of their connections; in contemplating their existence it forgets their coming into being and passing away; in looking at them at rest it leaves their motion out of account; because it cannot see the woods for the trees. (New York: International Publishers, n.d., pp. 27–28)
The second quotation from Anti-Dühring comes from the Preface to the 1885 edition (seven years after the work was first published in book form):
It is … the polar antagonisms put forward as irreconcilable and insoluble, the forcibly fixed lines of demarcation and distinctions between classes, which have given modern theoretical natural science its restricted and metaphysical character. The recognition that these antagonisms and distinctions are in fact to be found in nature, but only with relative validity, and that on the other hand their imagined rigidity and absoluteness have been introduced into nature only by our minds—this recognition is the kernel of the dialectical conception of nature. (Ibid., p. 19)
I have included these passages from Engels rather than simply recommending that you read and study them for two reasons: first, because I believe that they constitute the clearest and at the same time perhaps the most neglected statement by either Marx or Engels of their basic way of thinking and apprehending the world; and second, because I am distressed by the extent to which the metaphysical mode of thought, the nature and limitations of which Engels so clearly exposes, has invaded present-day Marxism. If this invasion is to be effectively combated, as I am convinced it must be, this can be done not by criticizing one or another of its manifestations but by tracing it back to its root in a neglect or perversion of the fundamental tenets of Marxism.
Let me illustrate by what I think it is hardly an exaggeration to call the fetishization of the “mode of production” concept in a large and growing body of Marxist writing. I have no objection to the concept as such; in fact I think it can often be useful when carefully used as a tool of historical research. This involves, in Engels’ language, recognizing that the “distinctions” on which the concept is based are indeed “to be found in nature,” of which we recall society and history are integral parts, but “only with relative validity,” which in this case can be interpreted to mean with a great deal of validity in some times and places, with less in others, and perhaps none at all in still others. These are matters that can be established not by appeal to the concept itself but by actual investigation and analysis.
But what we are too often offered these days is a view of history consisting of a sort of smorgasbord of modes of production, variously combined and arranged to be sure, but without any recognition—again in the words of Engels—that