Canadian Marxist sociologists Murray EG Smith and Tim Hayslip have written a profound and wide-ranging book that aims to elaborate and popularize the principles of ‘dialectical reasoning’. The book’s full title is Thinking Systematics: Critical-Dialectical Reasoning for a Perilous Age and a Case for Socialism.
Karl Marx declared “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Smith and Hayslip add to this observation: “Philosophers have only interpreted human thinking in various ways. The need, however, is to improve it – greatly.” In the authors’ view, this need cannot be satisfied through never-ending controversies and discourses presided over by the philosophical cognoscenti, but only by equipping the masses of working people and youth with a cognitive framework for understanding a rapidly changing and increasingly perilous reality – namely dialectical reasoning. There are real contradictions, mediations and laws of motion in three distinct, but also interpenetrating, ‘ontological fields’: the natural, the social and the consciousness (human conscious activity).
Dialectical reasoning is essential if humans are to improve their understanding of the natural world, human society and the relationship between the two. The particular paradigm of critical-dialectical reasoning that the authors propose is named Thinking Systematics (TSS). TSS refers to methods and ways of thinking that encourage a more systematic (scientific) view of the world, one that substantially improves our ability to discover “objective truths about the current human condition and to revolutionise our individual and collective understandings of a larger world that most of us engage with far too passively.”
Throughout this 350-page book, the authors argue that TSS is necessary to cut through fake news and disinformation, to uphold facts over mere opinion, to defend the concept of objective truth against cultural and intellectual trends that permit or even encourage outright lying, and to increase rational thought against the irrational ideas generated by modes of thinking that rely on “blind faith” (both religious and secular), what Smith and Hayslip refer to as “fideism.”
According to the authors, TSS should be seen as a ‘toolkit for the mind’, designed to improve the ways we think about the world, tackle problems and analyse and evaluate information. “At its core is the insistence that a fully adequate understanding of our world and its problems requires serious attention to the specifically social forces at work within it.”So the acronym TSS refers not only to Thinking Systematics but also to Taking the Social Seriously.
How do the authors proceed? Besides giving considerable ‘weight’ to the category of ‘the social’ in analyzing the human condition and its relations to both ‘the natural’ and what traditional philosophy calls ‘the ideal’, they argue that we need to start from simple abstract concepts and build up to more complex ones. This follows Marx’s own approach to analysing scientifically the seemingly chaotic world that we live in.
Marx’s Capital does not begin with a discussion of the everyday, macro appearances of modern economies (e.g. GDP, taxes, tariffs, movements of money and banking). Instead, it starts with an analysis of the individual commodity, the tiny molecule of capitalist production, and its dual character as both use value and exchange value. The commodity, which he describes as the ‘elementary form’ of the wealth of capitalist societies, exists as a real, concrete phenomenon of everyday life under capitalism. Marx then takes his readers into more complex investigations and explanations of such phenomena as wage labour, capital, money, banking and capitalist crises.
The authors recognise that formal logic (e.g. A = A, but not B) is foundational and useful in many circumstances. But it is inadequate when dealing with change, both in nature and in society. Appearances can deceive. At one point, the authors present us with the example of a river. Each river has a unique and distinctive identity. Each plant is different from another, each animal is different. That’s formally logical: A = A , but not B.
But that only takes us so far. Rivers are moving and changing, acorns are seeding into trees, larvae are transforming into butterflies. As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, you can’t step into the same river twice because “upon those who step into the same river, different and again different waters flow.” Indeed, even the act of stepping into a river contributes to making it different from moment to moment. Formal logic is static and offers no method for understanding processes of change and contradiction. As Trotsky once said, formal logic is a snapshot, while dialectical logic is a movie. A is not always equal to A because it may have changed to B. As the authors say:“dialectical thought enjoins us to think temporally and to view the present itself as only a moment of history.”
How can these insights be applied to current problems and controversies? One example, in my view, is that dialectical reasoning can help us to understand the nature of the Chinese economy and state. Many say that it is capitalist; others say it is socialist. In my view, it is neither. How can that be? In formal logic A = A, but not B. So China must be either capitalist or socialist. But when thinking dialectically (and ‘systematically’), China can be seen as an economy undergoing change: it is ‘in between’.
In 1949, capitalism and landlordism were overthrown by a peasant army led by the Maoist Communists. The latter eventually nationalised industry and the land, and they tried, with limited success, to plan a mostly collectivized economy. But by itself this didn’t make China socialist: a large state machine was established, one controlled by a bureaucratic elite not accountable to the Chinese working class or indeed the peasant masses. Today, under its post-Maoist leadership, it has a sizeable capitalist sector trying to maximise profits with billionaires and wage labour.
None of this would exist in a truly socialist society – at least as Marxists would define it. “Socialist China” is no more a correct descriptor than “capitalist China.” If we rely on a strict formal logic, this is confusing. But dialectical reasoning cuts through the confusion by allowing us to see China through the lens of uneven and combined development and the concept of transitional forms.
In nature, Engels liked to use the example of the duck-billed platypus, a marsupial indigenous to Australia. The platypus lays eggs for its young – as reptiles do. But it is warm-blooded and suckles its young as mammals do. It is both reptilian and mammalian; both A and B. In the evolution of nature, it is a transitional species (transiting from reptile to mammal).
Another philosophical pillar of TSS is ‘monism’, as opposed to idealist dualism. What does this mean? Dualism claims that consciousness (thoughts and ideas) is separate from material reality. In contrast, materialism is monist; both the thoughts in our individual brain and the world beyond it are located in a material, objective reality. Our thoughts are the result of movements of energy in our synapses, cells in our nervous system. But according to TSS, following the Russian philosopher E. V. Ilyenkov, they are also the result of human social and cultural practices: the product of the social division of labour and accumulation of knowledge seeking to address concrete problems arising from human beings’ relations both to nature and to each other.
At the same time, the ‘outside, material world’ is real and, though subject to human activity, it exists independently of our consciousness. It existed before the advent of human thought — and thus before the concept of God emerged in our thoughts. When an influential subjective idealist of the 18th century, Bishop Berkeley, claimed that the ‘outside world’ exists only in the perceptions placed in our heads by God, the great English critic, Samuel Johnson responded: “See that rock, go give it a kick with your foot and then tell me it only exists in your head!”
A materialist conception of nature and the world enables us to cut through the nonsense of magic, religion and moralistic madness. A monistic, materialist conception of history drives a coach and horses through theories that see the march of history as the effect of kings, lords and rulers deciding the fate of the passive multitude and not the result of the activities of masses of people responding to the changing material and social conditions in which they live. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” (Marx. 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon).
Smith and Hayslip emphasise that dialectical reasoning and a monistic-materialist conception of reality lead ineluctably to practical projects to transform the world. And from all this flows the need to Take Socialism Seriously. TSS methodology requires us to consider socialism not just as a ‘good idea’ (still less, as a personal, subjective ‘preference’), but as an objective, scientifically verifiable necessity for the survival and future progress of humanity, and the sustaining of nature and the planet. Only socialism will bring real freedom from poverty, environmental disaster and the rule of the oligarchs.
As the authors say: “Elon Musk possesses a huge fortune not because he ‘earned’ it but rather because the rules of the game under capitalism permit capitalist investors like him to accumulate vast personal wealth at the expense of the larger working population. Musk has proven to be a particularly lucky and adept contestant in the game. But an appraisal of his personal attributes should in no way obscure this simple fact: outside of the socio-economic order based on private ownership of the productive assets of society and the pursuit of private profit through the exploitation of wage labour, a success of Musk’s type and magnitude is simply inconceivable.”
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