Modern science furnishes an abundance of material which completely confirms Engels’ assertion that “in the last analysis, nature works dialectically.” The discoveries of science since Engels died completely confirm this view.

“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, naïve, 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.” (Engels)[37]

Let us compare this to another quotation from Hoffmann:

In the world of quantum, particles are incessantly appearing and disappearing. What we would think of as empty space is a teeming, fluctuating nothingness, with photons appearing from nowhere and vanishing almost as soon as they were born, with electrons frothing up for brief moments from the monstrous ocean to create evanescent electron-proton pairs and sundry other particles adding to the confusion.[38]

The rise of chaos and complexity theory indicates a welcome reaction against the stultifying reductionism of the past. Yet very little attention has been paid to the pioneering work of Hegel, Marx and Engels. This astonishing fact is largely to be explained by the widespread prejudice against dialectics, partly as a reaction against the mystical way that dialectics was presented by the idealist school after Hegel’s death, but mainly because of its connection with Marxism. Hegel’s dialectics have been described as the “algebra of revolution”. If the law of quantity and quality is accepted as valid for chemistry and physics, the next step would be to apply it to existing society, with most unfortunate consequences for the defenders of the status quo.

The scientific writings of Marx and Engels cannot be separated from their revolutionary theory of history in general (historical materialism), and their analysis of the contradictions of capitalism. These are evidently not very popular with those who currently possess a monopoly of economic and political power, and who control, not only the newspapers and television companies, but also hold in their hands the purse strings that determine the fate of universities, research-projects, and academic careers. Is it surprising that dialectical materialism is a taboo subject, which is systematically passed over in silence, except when it is denounced as unscientific mumbo-jumbo, by people who have clearly never read a single line of Marx or Engels? True, a small number of brave souls have raised the question of the contribution of Marxism to the philosophy of science, but even then, such mentions are frequently hedged round with all kinds of qualifications, aiming to show that dialectics may be valid for a given field of science, but cannot be accepted as a general proposition.

Nowadays, the idea of change, of evolution, has deeply penetrated the popular consciousness. But evolution is generally understood as a slow, gradual, uninterrupted process. As Trotsky put it, “Hegel’s logic is the logic of evolution. Only one must not forget that the concept of ‘evolution’ itself has been completely corrupted and emasculated by university professors and liberal writers to mean peaceful ‘progress’.”

In politics, this common prejudice finds its expression in the theory of reformist gradualism, where today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better than today. Sadly, human history in general, and the history of the 20th century in particular, provides precious little comfort for the supporters of this tranquillising view of the social process. History knows long periods of gradual change but this is by no means a continuous and smooth process. It is interrupted by all kinds of explosions and catastrophes: wars, economic crises, revolutions and counter-revolutions. To deny this is to deny what everyone knows to be true. So how do we regard these phenomena? As sudden, inexplicable outbreaks of collective madness? As accidental “deviations” from the gradualist “norm”? Or, on the contrary, are they to be seen as an integral part of the process of social development – not accidents but the necessary outcome of tensions and stresses that build up gradually and unseen within society and which, sooner or later, must force their way to the surface, just as the pressures that accumulate along a fault-line in the earth’s crust result in an earthquake?

Any attempt to banish contradiction from nature, to smooth out its rough edges, to subject it to the neat rules of formal logic, as the gardeners at Versailles subjected rude nature to the rules of classical geometry, is doomed to fail. Such efforts may well have a soothing effect upon the nerves, but will prove to be utterly useless to arrive at an understanding of the real world. And what is true for inanimate and animate nature is also true for the history of human society itself, despite the stubborn attempts to demonstrate the contrary. The history of society reveals the selfsame tendencies – the inner contradictions that impel development; the rise and fall of different socioeconomic systems; the long periods of gradual “evolutionary” change, punctuated by sudden upheavals, wars and revolutions, which stand at the crossroads of every great historical development. Are such striking phenomena merely to be shrugged off as accidents, temporary and unfortunate deviations from the alleged evolutionary “norm”? Or irrefutable proof of the stupidity or inherent wickedness of human beings?

If this is the case, then all attempts to arrive at a rational understanding of human development must be abandoned. We are compelled to echo the opinion of Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire who described history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” But if, as we firmly believe, human history proceeds according to the same dialectical laws that we observe throughout nature (and why should the human race claim the unlikely “privilege” of being entirely exempt from objective laws of development?) then the pattern of human history for the first time begins to make sense. It can be explained. It can even – within certain limits – be predicted, although predictions of complex phenomena are not as straightforward as ones involving simple linear processes. This applies just as much to predicting an earthquake or the weather as it does to anticipating the movement of society. No one can say for certain when the city of Los Angeles will fall victim to a catastrophic earthquake, but one can predict with absolute certainty that such a thing will happen.

Despite the most strenuous efforts to deny the validity of dialectics, the latter always takes its revenge on its most hardened detractors. The conservative geological community has been compelled to accept continental drift, the birth and death of continents, which they once laughed out of court. Biologists have been compelled to accept that the old idea of evolution as a gradual, uninterrupted process of adaptation is one-sided and false; that evolution takes place through catastrophic qualitative leaps, in which death (extinction) becomes the precondition for birth (new species).

At every turn, the wealth of material furnished by the natural sciences compels scientists to adopt dialectical conclusions. However, they soon become uncomfortably aware of the potentially “subversive” implications of such ideas. It is at this point that they hasten to resort to all kinds of embarrassed disclaimers and subterfuges in order to cover up their tracks. The usual get-out is to protest ignorance concerning philosophy in general. Like Oscar Wilde’s “love that dare not speak its name”, these authors who wax eloquent about everything under the sun, find themselves utterly unable to pronounce the words dialectical materialism. At best, they insist, in effect, that dialectical materialism is valid for their own narrow speciality but has no application to the broader field of science or (perish the thought!) to society at large.

It is surprising that even those proponents of the theory of chaos who come quite close to a dialectical position display a complete lack of knowledge about Marxism. Thus, Ian Stewart and Tim Poston could write in Analog (November 1981) the following lines:

So the ‘inexorable laws of physics’ on which – for instance – Marx tried to model his laws of history, were never really there. If Newton could not predict the behaviour of three balls, could Marx predict that of three people? Any regularity in the behaviour of large assemblies of particles or people must be statistical, and that has quite a different philosophical taste.[39]

This is completely off the mark. Marx did not base his model of history on the laws of physics at all. The laws of social development must be derived from a painstaking study of society itself. Marx and Engels devoted the whole of their lives to such a study, based upon a colossal amount of carefully collected empirical data, as even the most superficial examination of the three volumes of Capital alone will reveal. Incidentally, both Marx and Engels were highly critical of mechanical determinism in general and Newton in particular. The attempt to establish some parallel between Marx’s method and that of Newton and Laplace is without the slightest foundation.

The closer chaos and complexity theory moves to an examination of existing society, the greater is the potential for arriving at an understanding of the contradictions of capitalism:

“But in the United States, the ideal is maximum individual freedom – or, as [Brian] Arthur puts it, ‘letting everybody be their own John Wayne and run around with guns.’ However much that ideal is compromised in practice, it still holds mythic power.

“But increasing returns cut to the heart of that myth. If small chance events can lock you into any of several possible outcomes, then the outcome that’s actually selected may not be the best. And that means that maximum individual freedom – and the free market – might not produce the best of all possible worlds. So by advocating increasing returns, Arthur was innocently treading into a minefield.”[40] (Brian Arthur is an economist and one of the theoreticians of complexity.)

Stephen Jay Gould, who has made an important contribution to current evolutionary theory, is one of the few Western scientists who has openly recognised the parallels between his theory of “punctuated equilibria” and dialectical materialism. In his book, The Panda’s Thumb, he says the following:

If gradualism is more a product of Western thought than a fact of nature, then we should consider alternative philosophies of change to enlarge our realm of constraining prejudices. In the Soviet Union, for example, scientists are trained with a very different philosophy of change – the so-called dialectical laws, reformulated by Engels from Hegel’s philosophy. The dialectical laws are explicitly punctuational. They speak, for example, of the ‘transformation of quantity into quality.’ This may sound like mumbo jumbo, but it suggests that change occurs in large leaps following a slow accumulation of stresses that a system resists until it reaches the breaking point. Heat water and it eventually boils. Oppress the workers more and more and bring on the revolution. Eldredge and I were fascinated to learn that many Russian palaeontologists support a model similar to our punctuated equilibria.

Palaeontology and anthropology are, after all, only separated by a very thin wall from the historical and social sciences, which have potentially dangerous political implications for the defenders of the status quo. As Engels pointed out, the nearer one gets to the social sciences, the less objective and the more reactionary they become. It is therefore encouraging that Stephen J. Gould has come quite close to a dialectical point of view, despite his obvious caution:

Nonetheless, I will confess to a personal belief that a punctuational view may prove to map tempos of biological and geologic change more accurately and more often than any of its competitors – if only because complex systems in a steady state are both common and highly resistant to change.[41]

In the 19th century, Marx ironically pointed out that most of the natural scientists were “shamefaced materialists”. In the last half of the 20th century, we have a still greater paradox. Scientists who have never read a word of Marx or Hegel, have independently arrived at many of the ideas of dialectical materialism. We are firmly convinced that the future development of science will confirm the importance of the dialectical method, and that those who pioneered it will finally obtain the recognition which has been denied them.

  1. Engels, F. Anti-Dühring, p. 24.

  2. Hoffmann, B. op. cit., p. 210.

  3. Quoted in Stewart, I. op. cit., p. 40.

  4. Waldrop, M. op. cit., p. 48.

  5. Gould, S. The Panda’s Thumb, pp. 153 and 154.