Quality Conspicuous By Its Absence

This is the (slightly edited) text of a letter a supporter of this site sent to the editors of Socialist Review. They chose not to publish it.

Comrades,

John Rees (in Socialist Review, November 2008) is to be congratulated for failing to mention the many fatal objections there are to dialectical materialism. Space allows me to consider only two.

In line with others who accept this theory, John simply helped himself to the word "contradiction", and yet he failed to say why the things he called "contradictions" merited the use of that word. For example:

Quite simply, there is a contradiction between the drive to accumulate and the blind competitive nature of the market. Both are indispensable to capitalism, but they cannot coexist in a stable form.

But, if there were a contradiction here, it would be something like this: "In capitalism, there is a drive to accumulate and there isn't"; or perhaps, "Capitalism is governed by a blind competitive market and it isn't."

Of course, John may be using this word in a new, and as yet unexplained sense. If so, what is it?

In fact, we need not allow that question to detain us for too long, for, as John knows only too well, his use of "contradiction" was borrowed from Hegel, who in turn 'obtained' it from his unwise attempt to state the so-called 'Law of Identity' [LOI] negatively. From A = A he 'derived' what he thought was also the 'Law of non-contradiction' [LOC]: "A cannot be A and at the same time not A" -- which isn't even, of course, a contradiction! [Why this is so is explained here, and here.]

But even if it were, the LOI concerns the alleged identity of an object with itself, whereas the LOC concerns the logical connection between a proposition and its negation. The LOC is not about objects (let alone their identity), and the LOI is not about propositions. Indeed, if a proposition were an object, it could say nothing, and if it wasn't self-identical, it wouldn't be a proposition to begin with, and so could say nothing determinate.

So, it is from this very basic error that Hegel's claim that everything is 'contradictory' derives, not from a scientific analysis of reality. That, and tradition are the only reasons comrades use this word today in the way John does. This is not to deny that capitalism is unstable, but it is to deny that we can learn anything at all about it from that Christian mystic, Hegel -- upside down or even 'the right way up'.

The second serious problem concerns Engels's first 'law', the "transformation of quantity into quality". John illustrates this 'law' with the hackneyed example of water suddenly turning into steam at 100 degrees C:

Indeed this is a feature of many different sorts of change, even in the natural world. Water that rises in temperature by one degree at a time shows no dramatic change until it reaches boiling point when it "suddenly" becomes steam. At that point its whole nature is transformed from being a liquid into a vapour.

But, there are many changes in "quality" in nature and society that are not sudden. For example, all metals melt from solid to liquid slowly, and so does glass, plastic, toffee, butter and chocolate. John neglected to mention these -- perhaps since they refute his claims. Now, we could only use this 'law' to explain social change (in the way that John attempts) if it had no exceptions -- otherwise it cannot be a law but a merely convenient metaphor we use subjectively whenever it suits us, but which we ignore when it doesn’t.

And even the example John considers only works because he has left the term "quality" undefined. This is no mere quibble; the way that Hegel defined this term in fact means that John's example fails to be an illustration of this 'law':

Quality is, in the first place, the character identical with being: so identical that a thing ceases to be what it is, if it loses its quality. Quantity, on the contrary, is the character external to being, and does not affect the being at all. Thus, e.g. a house remains what it is, whether it be greater or smaller; and red remains red, whether it be brighter or darker. [Hegel, Shorter Logic, p.124, §85.]¹

[This is an Aristotelian definition of "quality".]

But, water as ice, liquid or steam is still H₂0; no new "quality" (in Aristotle’s or Hegel's sense) has emerged. Boiling or freezing water does not make it "cease to be what it is".

On the other hand, if John means something else by "quality", what is it?

John also ignores the countless "qualitative" changes in nature and society that fail to conform to this 'law'. Many of these are detailed at a site I and several others help maintain (address at the end); more specifically, here.

Now, these are just two of the many serious flaws that undermine this theory. Small wonder then that it has presided over 150 years of the almost total failure of Dialectical Marxism.

Indeed, it's high time we allowed practice to deliver its clear verdict: dialectics has been refuted by history.

More details can be found at the site I help run:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/

In solidarity,

Nemesis

Note

1. The Glossary at the Marxist Internet Archive makes this sense of "quality" even clearer:

Quality is an aspect of something by which it is what it is and not something else and reflects that which is stable amidst variation. Quantity is an aspect of something which may change (become more or less) without the thing thereby becoming something else.

Thus, if something changes to an extent that it is no longer the same kind of thing, this is a 'qualitative change', whereas a change in something by which it still the same thing, though more or less, bigger or smaller, is a 'quantitative change'.

In Hegel's Logic, Quality is the first division of Being, when the world is just one thing after another, so to speak, while Quantity is the second division, where perception has progressed to the point of recognising what is stable within the ups and downs of things. The third and final stage, Measure, the unity of quality and quantity, denotes the knowledge of just when quantitative change becomes qualitative change. [Quoted from here.]

Word count: 1080.

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