Using Dialectical Logic to solve today’s problems

Gerry Gold

International Friends of Ilyenkov

Ilyenkov sums up - and sets us on course

The radical, materialist rethinking of … [Hegel’s] logic (dialectics) …. was linked with affirmation of the objective reality of the universal …

… a law-governed connection of material phenomena… . in the context of a self-developing totality or aggregate…

…all the components of which were related by virtue of a unity of genesis….

Dialectical Logic chapter 11

‘a unity of genesis’

the commodity

Exchange Value Use Value Value

Money-commodity Commodity

Commodity

{More} Money

Money

Commodity Commodity

Money

{More} Money

Commodity

the commodity and money..…a “contradiction in determinations”

Marx found the source of surplus value in labour-power:

– a commodity whose actual consumption is a process whereby labour is embodied, whereby therefore value is created.

Dialectical Logic, Chapter 10

…today’s capitalist crisis

What form do these contradictions take in 2014?

How are they resolved?

The worldwide financial and economic crisis that blew up in 2007/8 arose from unprecedented tension between the two “poles” of value and use-value

Exchange Value Use Value

Increased tension led to ‘globalisation’

Lehman collapse sends shockwave round world

What the crisis expressed was the contradictions within and between

– the cheapening of the labour which produces commodities

– the saturation of world markets– the unprecedented volume of global credit.

Exchange Value Use Valueglobalisation

Volume of commodities

Diverse forms of credit - forms of exchange-value - were stretched far beyond their limits in attempting to sustain the expansion of production and consumption.

By 2008, global debt was 300% of GDP - higher in many countries.

This contradiction was intensified by new forms within the capitalist economy:

commodities that • appeared “free” or “weightless” • integrated consumers into the global market• commoditizing their identities through the Internet

The contradictory reciprocal relation between value and use value was negated into a global crisis, which endures.

A further negation of the negation is emerging by way of China’s banking system.

Exchange Value Use Value

As the principal contradictions within the capitalist economy developed as cause, their effects were equally transformational:

• A proliferation of waste (Marco)• A qualitative change in global climate as a result

of the dependence on carbon fuel (Penny)• A qualitative change in the form and role of the

modern state, leading to an inner-crisis (Paul).

the dialectical logic driving the rise and demise of capitalist society

The forming of the capitalist, commodity system appears in Marx’s theoretical analysis as a complicating of the chain of connecting links through which the poles of value, mutually attracting and at the same time excluding each other, have to pass.

The path of the reciprocal transformation of value and use-value becomes longer and longer, and more and more complicated, and the tension between the poles increases.

The relative and temporary resolution of the tension takes place through crises, and its final resolution is through socialist revolution.

Dialectical Logic Chapter 10

Using dialectical logic we can (following Marx) – extrapolate from the germ-cell of the

commodity to the social relationships that arose and came to constitute today’s capitalist society

– demonstrate the logic of today’s crises in the internal contradictions of capitalism.

Capitalist globalisation creates its own opposite

Billions now communicate through previously unimagined channels: – promoting their creative products, – bypassing corporate control and – organising the overthrow of brutal regimes.

Capitalist globalisation creates its own opposite

Hundreds of thousands of creative individuals develop the constantly changing foundations of the web, superseding the model of privately-owned products protected by patents and copyright with a new regime and collective products legally constrained to be freely available to all.

Capitalist globalisation creates its own opposite

The electronic foundations for a participative, global and local democracy are under construction.

Negation of the negation Ilyenkov’s “socialist revolution”

To resolve the crisis we must transform the opposites through conscious practice:

• replacing the exploitation of labour with not-for-profit production

• Replacing exchange value with use-value as the main focus of production

• instituting co-operative ownership in place of private ownership

• creating new forms of democracy to give effect to this strategy.