Dialectical Materialism: In Laws, Categories, and Practice. - book reviews

Monthly Review, May, 1991 by William Ash

Dialectical Matieralism: Its Laws, Categories, and Practice by Ira Gollobin. New York: Petras, 1986. 608 pp. Available from Riverrun Press, Inc., 1170 Broadway, New York, NY 10001. $51.40 cloth, $14.60 paper.

Over thirty years ago, Ira Gollobin began preparing himself to write a primer on Marxist philosophy. Numerous interruptions necessitated by his work as an attorney representing people attacked in the Cold War witchhunts became an integral part of work on the book, providing many opportunities for practical testing of his formulations of the concepts of dialectical materialism. In these 600 pages, in a down-to-earth, lively style, is a lifetime of theory and practice dedicated not only to the meaning of scientific philosophy, but also to showing how it can and should be used practically.

The book begins with a chapter on Workers and Scientific Philosophy," that is, Marxist philosophy, dialectical materialism. While some Marxists think of dialectical materialism as relevant only to politics, for which it does provide vital insights, Gollobin makes clear that it involves an overall approach to the whole of reality, that it is the sole general science which pervades every other science. For Gollobin, dialectical materialism is the science of the very general, of those aspects always present in all things-cum-processes (including human consciousness), plus those aspects always present in rational thought. These aspects consist of certain very general laws and categories. Knowledge of dialectical materialism helps provide a sustained, profound alertness and sensitivity in using these laws and categories in matters great and small.

Gollobin shows how pre-scientific views develop through practice into scientific views, in each section of the book. Each subject with which Gollobin deals is put into an historical context. Not only is the Marxist position on that subject presented, in quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, and others, but also the anti-Marxist views of such modern philosophers as Karl Popper, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, Sidney Hook, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Sartre's philosophic views as an existentialist are quoted extensively and may come as a surprise to many. Gollobin treats the pre-scientific and anti-scientific as integral parts of the elaboration of the scientific.

Gollobin provides a clear exposition, with numerous illustrations, of the key aspects of the laws of dialectics: the unity and conflict of opposites, the transition of quality into quantity and quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation. Of course, these "laws" of dialectics are not prescriptive rules imposed on thinking any more than the laws of nature are rules imposed on matter by some supernatural law-giver. The laws of dialectics are formulations of our understanding of the nature of things. There can "be no question," as Engels put it, "of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it."

Gollobin follows this exposition with a section titled "Categories of Dialectics of the Object." He explains that each of such sets of categories as appearance and essence, form and content, the relative and the absolute, contingency and necessity, and particular and general, is a dialectical pair of very general, polar, inseparable opposites, neither of which can be comprehended without the other.

Next, under the heading "Dialectics of the Subject," Gollobin deals with very general epistemological concepts such as abstract and concrete, analysis and synthesis, and theory and practice, with the same wealth of illuminating exposition and relevant quotations.

In the last chapter, on wisdom, Gollobin writes: Class society places its imprint on wisdom. The musings of the sage .... and the guile of the rulers ... have been acclaimed as wellsprings of wisdom, while the masses' hard earned experience and insights, gained in labor and class struggle amid a multitude of afflictions, have been denigrated by oppressors as responses, sometimes docile, sometimes violent, of beings little above the level of brutes. On the contrary, as regards the oppressed, those with the most practical experience are the wisest and most capable. All wisdom comes from the masses." (Mao) ...... The wisdom of tens of millions of creators creates something incomparably higher than the greatest prediction of genius." (Lenin)

Finally, there is an addendum on the historical experience of socialist revolution and consolidation in the USSR and the People's Republic of China. Gollobin's conclusion is that However distorted or finally lifeless socialism has become in the practices of certain governments professedly socialist and certain communist parties, capitalist society's accelerating signs of decay endow socialist concepts, ever more refined and developed, with heightening vitality.

I cannot recommend Ira Gollobin's Dialectical Materialism too highly as a book of study and reference to Marxists, to those who want to know about Marxism, and to those who are simply interested in philosophy.