From G.L.
In some Marxist currents, supposedly “undialectical” thinking is treated almost as a theoretical mortal sin. Anyone who does not speak of qualitative leaps and negation is liable to be dismissed as metaphysical. This procedure replaces the investigation of a determinate object with a test of whether a statement conforms to a philosophical canon. The method is not developed through an analysis of the object but imposed upon it in advance. An influential codification of this mode of thought is found in Stalin’s 1938 text Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Dialectics appears there as a general doctrine of nature and thought. The productive forces drive historical development, the relations of production must adjust themselves to those forces, and the party derives its political line from scientific knowledge of this process. Stalin inherited a field of partly compatible and partly competing formulations in which the materialist conception of philosophical materialism and general dialectics had been systematised in different ways.
The ingredients were already available. Plekhanov had turned the materialist conception of history into a monist philosophy and searched for a material factor capable of carrying the explanatory burden of social life as a whole. Kautsky wrote about lawful development, though he objected when crude followers tried to derive a poem or a battle directly from an economic base, much less every parliamentary vote. Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism added an epistemological argument. It defended an objective reality independent of consciousness, treated thought as the activity of a material organism and invoked practice in the discussion of truth. Bukharin presented historical materialism as “Marxian sociology”, organised around causality and equilibrium under the sign of historical necessity. Engels had already extended dialectics across natural and social processes. Marx left the most difficult inheritance, since the form-analysis of Capital stands beside programmatic passages in which history assumes a progressive order.
Stalin’s distinctive contribution was to simplify and combine elements of this inherited tradition and make it binding for theoretical and political judgement.
1. A General Logic for Different Objects
Stalin declares dialectics to be the general method for understanding nature and society and the same basic pattern is supposed to operate everywhere: things are interconnected, they change, quantitative changes become qualitative changes, and internal contradictions drive their development. These types of general determinations, as abstract descriptions, may identify limited similarities between different processes. But they do not, however, provide a method for determining the specific object. Still less can a necessary direction of history be deduced from such propositions.
The dialectical method therefore holds that no phenomenon in nature can be understood if taken by itself, isolated from surrounding phenomena, inasmuch as any phenomenon in any realm of nature may become meaningless to us if it is not considered in connection with the surrounding conditions, but divorced from them; and that, vice versa, any phenomenon can be understood and explained if considered in its inseparable connection with surrounding phenomena, as one conditioned by surrounding phenomena. – Joseph Stalin, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism”, “Nature Connected and Determined.”
Stalin’s general reference to connection does not determine which relations constitute the object. A commodity is also connected with the weather during its transport, the colour of its packaging and the personal preferences of its seller. Not every connection has the same explanatory significance. The decisive question is whether a category grasps a determinate social form or merely classifies different objects under a general term. Marx begins Capital with the commodity and the analysis leads to the value-form and to money. The transformation of money into capital, however, presupposes additional social conditions: producers must be separated from the means of production, labour-power must exist as a commodity, and its consumption must produce surplus-value. The proposition of universal interconnection supplies none of these mediations and cannot determine which connections constitute the particular object.
2. Development, Transition and Contradiction
Stalin distinguishes between apparently durable phenomena that are already declining and initially fragile phenomena that are emerging. He treats the latter as ultimately invincible and describes development as an “onward and upward movement”.
The classification is circular within the developmental doctrine: what counts as genuinely new and historically ascending is already selected through the stage-schema that the alleged law is then invoked to confirm. The new is supposed to prevail because it is historically progressive, while its alleged progressiveness is established by assigning it the role of the ascending and ultimately victorious force. The emergence of a social form therefore proves neither its emancipatory content nor its permanence. Fascist movements can be expanding and historically novel, but a Stalinist classification excludes them from the genuinely ascending because that category already contains a judgement about the direction of history. Stalin’s concept has a dependence of the classification upon the historical conclusion it is supposed to establish. Capitalist crises are forms of motion of the capitalist mode of production, so likewise, they do not prove that capitalism is “historically dying”.
Stalin’s error consists in turning that similarity into a universal law of development and then using it to deduce the necessity of a revolutionary leap rather than a reformist transition. Under the heading of contradiction, Stalin treats different kinds of opposition as instances of one general developmental principle. The problem with this, is that the general term does not specify the mediation through which a particular opposition reproduces itself, generates a determinate motion or creates the conditions of its abolition. Calling something a contradiction does not establish how its opposed moments are constituted or what consequences follow from their relation. When taking capital and wage-labour as an example, their relation is explained through the separation of producers from the means of production. Capital commands the conditions of production meanwhile wage-labourers must sell their labour-power because they lack independent access to those conditions. The capitalist depends upon labour-power as a means of valorisation; workers depend upon the wage as their means of subsistence. The dependence is mutually mediated but asymmetrical as a class relation. This antagonistic relation can produce wage struggles and broader political confrontations, without abolishing itself. So long as the struggle concerns the conditions under which labour-power is sold, it remains within the wage-form rather than necessarily challenging the compulsion to sell labour-power. The designation “contradiction” has explanatory value only when the particular relation and the conditions of its possible abolition are specified.
3. The Productive Forces as the Motor of History
The second feature of production is that its changes and development always begin with changes and development of the productive forces, and in the first place, with changes and development of the instruments of production. Productive forces are therefore the most mobile and revolutionary element of production. – Joseph Stalin, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism”, “Historical Materialism.”
Stalin acknowledges modes of production do not exist independently of the material conditions, but conceptualizes a unique correspondence between productive forces and relations of production and a universal law of revolution. The development of productive forces already takes place within determinate relations of property and rule. Under capitalist conditions the use of technology is shaped by control over labour and competition. Technology must also fulfil material tasks and produce determinate use-values. Its technical content cannot be reduced to capitalist valorisation, but its selection and deployment are shaped by the imperatives of valorisation. The problem is not resolved by defining the productive forces more broadly to include collective labour, productive knowledge, experience and skill.
Capitalism’s historical emergence involved the expropriation of peasant producers and state violence. These processes can nevertheless recur as conditions and means of capitalist reproduction. The distinction between genesis and reproduced form cannot be turned into a separation between a violent past and a purely economic capitalist present. Equally, the division of labour does not automatically produce commodity production. Within a capitalist firm, numerous partial labours are combined according to a plan without the workers exchanging their respective products with one another. The development of the productive forces may expand material possibilities for production oriented towards social need, but it may also strengthen the power of capital. Stalin turns this conditional relation into an invariant transition rule. The productive forces become the determining element, while the relations of production must eventually come into correspondence with them. The objectivist and developmental implications of Marx’s schema are thereby rendered more unequivocal. The working class appears as the executor of an outcome already prepared by history.
4. The German Ideology: A Break with Idealism and Its Limits
The prehistory of this construction does not begin only with Stalin or with Engels’s dialectic of nature. The German Ideology already contains a contradictory transition from the critique of philosophy to a general materialist conception of history. Marx and Engels oppose the Young Hegelians, who explain social rule through philosophical concepts and false consciousness. So long as real relations remain untouched, their criticism can only replace one set of ideas with another. Against this approach, Marx and Engels begin from real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live. This marks a fundamental break with explanations of history through ideas. People produce their lives under inherited conditions and alter those conditions through their activity. Their criticism of the “true socialists” is especially relevant. Marx and Engels argue that these writers detach communist ideas from the real movements of which they are expressions and force them into an arbitrary connection with German philosophy. This criticism can also be structurally turned against the later Stalinist doctrine of subordinating material connections to an all-encompassing philosophical schema.
The problem in The German Ideology is that forms of social intercourse (Verkehr) and productive force at times function too directly as historical explanatory principles.
The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour. – Marx and Engels 1845–46, part I, “Feuerbach.”
Forms of ownership are identified too directly with stages of the division of labour. The specific political, legal and class processes through which a determinate property order is produced and reproduced remain underdeveloped. A anti-idealist critique and a still schematic theory of history therefore coexist in the text. The German Ideology is not a mature methodological foundation but a transitional work and a document of theoretical self-clarification. Marx and Engels break with idealist philosophy of history without yet fully replacing it with an elaborated analysis of determinate social forms.
5. Engels: A Universalising Precedent
In Anti-Dühring, Engels explicitly places nature, society and thought within a common dialectical framework. With this, he provided an influential precedent for treating highly abstract patterns across nature and society as objective universal laws.
The difference between Engels and Stalin is that Engels also recognises a limit to the formula. He refuses to treat the general formula as a substitute for concrete scientific investigation and rejects the notion that dialectics could function as a proof-producing device independently of such investigation. The problem is not simply that Engels identifies highly abstract patterns across heterogeneous processes. Scientific laws may legitimately apply to different kinds of phenomena. If the formula is defended merely as a highly abstract philosophical description, it cannot bear the explanatory and political weight later assigned to it. If it is defended as an objective scientific law, its domain and distinctive explanatory consequences remain unclear. The negation of the negation identifies no mechanism and establishes no conditions under which the alleged law would or would not apply. It yields no distinguishable explanation or prediction that could not already be obtained from investigating the particular process. Once a process has been analysed, a wide range of developments can retrospectively be arranged as an initial form, its negation and a negation of that negation. Engels’s own qualification thus exposes the limited epistemic content of the formula. Yet he continues to present it as an objective and universal law of nature, history and thought.
In Stalin’s presentation, the broader methodological requirement that general dialectical propositions cannot substitute for the investigation of particular processes becomes practically ineffective. General dialectical structures function as an authorised canon against which social analysis and political practice are measured.
6. Marx’s Historical-Developmental Formulations
Marx’s critique of political economy largely investigates capitalist motion through determinate social forms. Alongside this, Marx formulates general historical-developmental propositions. The clearest evidence is the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
Marx argues that people enter into relations of production corresponding to a given stage in the development of their productive forces. At a certain point, those productive forces come into conflict with the existing relations of production. Relations that had been forms of development become fetters, and an epoch of social revolution begins. Marx adds that no social order disappears before all the productive forces for which it provides sufficient scope have developed, while “new superior relations of production” do not replace older ones before their material conditions have matured within the old society. He describes historical and modern bourgeois modes of production as “epochs marking progress” in society’s economic development. These statements do not by themselves say that every matured historical possibility must automatically be realised. They initially formulate necessary conditions: an old formation does not disappear before certain productive capacities have developed, and new relations do not replace the old before their material conditions exist.
The deterministic and teleological implications arise from the broader structure of the passage. Marx arranges modes of production as epochs of progress and presents the bourgeois formation as the conclusion of humanity’s antagonistic prehistory. The result is a strongly objectivist and developmental model containing deterministic and teleological implications. The conflict between productive forces and relations of production becomes a general schema for transitions between historical formations. It does not necessarily follow that Marx prescribes the identical sequence Asiatic–ancient–feudal–bourgeois to every society. The passage nevertheless posits a general transition schema and combines it with a progressive ordering of historical epochs. Stalin arrives at this model by finding substantial historical-developmental propositions in Marx, but rendering their relationship more invariant and unequivocal. The productive forces become the determining element, and the relations of production must eventually come into correspondence with them. A determinate order of property and class cannot be derived unambiguously from a given state of the productive forces. As argued above, this remains true when productive forces are understood broadly to include technology, cooperation, productive knowledge, experience and skill. These capacities are themselves organised within social relations and do not prescribe a unique property or class order. Marx also supplies no general criterion by which the developmental capacity of a social formation could be judged exhausted.
Particular property and class relations may demonstrably block particular technical or social developments. What cannot be inferred from the productive forces alone is a general endpoint at which a formation has completed every development for which it is supposedly sufficient. The schema contains a teleological implication where existing development is interpreted as the maturation of superior relations and ultimately as the conclusion of antagonistic prehistory. Capital often operates on a different level. There, objective necessity means a compulsion arising from determinate social forms.
Three levels must therefore be distinguished. A form-specific law designates an objective compulsion arising under determinate social conditions. A historical tendency designates a direction of development produced by such compulsions. A deterministically structured transition schema, by contrast, posits a general mechanism through which one social formation gives way to another. Marx’s analysis of capitalist forms largely operates on the first two levels. The 1859 Preface moves towards the third without reducing every historical transition to an automatic outcome. In Capital, Marx speaks of tendencies operating with “iron necessity” and writes that the more industrially developed country shows the less developed the “image of its own future”. In its immediate context, Marx is addressing German and continental European readers and comparing their capitalist development with that of England. When generalised beyond Marx’s immediate comparison, however, the formulation suggests a uniform historical path. Marx himself also resisted the transformation of his account of Western European primitive accumulation into a universal path of development for all peoples, as different historical environments could produce different results, and no overhistorical theory could serve as a “universal passport” for their explanation.
This reveals an unresolved tension within Marx’s work between the analysis of historically determinate social forms and more general historical-developmental formulations. The analysis of capitalist forms is worked out systematically in Capital, whereas the universalising tendency is concentrated in particular programmatic and historical passages and is sometimes qualified by Marx’s own later remarks. Historical claims nevertheless enter the form analysis, while form-specific insights restrict the reach of broader developmental propositions.
7. Materialism, Consciousness and Social Forms
Stalin moves among several distinct questions: whether nature exists independently of consciousness, what bodily basis thought possesses, how knowledge arises, how ideas are socially produced and what political function they perform. Stalin first treats ideas as reflections of material life. He then identifies “advanced” ideas by their correspondence to the “needs” of material development and assesses their political significance by their capacity to organise and mobilise the masses. The argument thereby moves between social origin, correspondence to reality, historical progressiveness and political efficacy without establishing the relation among them.
Citizens pursue private interests within a general legal and political order. It’s a form of thought generated and confirmed through social practice. The state appears as the representative of the common interest because it confronts competing private persons as an independent public power and subjects them to generally valid laws. This separation from particular interests is real: no private owner can by private means establish the legal and coercive conditions presupposed by the competition of all. The state secures these conditions as a general order, but the generality it enforces is not socially neutral; it is the political form in which wage-labour and competition are constituted and reproduced. Class position therefore produces neither automatic knowledge nor an unambiguous political interpretation. The injuries people experience may be interpreted as personal failure or insufficient national unity. Communist consciousness requires a critique of the forms through which those experiences are produced and interpreted. Stalin’s theory, instead of explaining these mediations, combines claims and grants the party authority to identify which ideas allegedly express the objective course of history.
8. Stalinist Historical Materialism and Party Rule
Stalin maintains that the proletarian party must formulate its programme and practical activity according to the laws of development of production and the economic development of society.
Hence, if it is not to err in policy, the party of the proletariat must both in drafting its program and in its practical activities proceed primarily from the laws of development of production, from the laws of economic development of society. – Joseph Stalin, “History of the Communist Party of The Soviet Union,” Chapter Four.
A party claiming scientific knowledge of objective historical laws can present its political will as the execution of historical necessity. This is a central epistemic legitimating function of Stalinist historical materialism. It was surely not the only source of Stalinist legitimacy, as claims concerning external danger and national power also mattered. The contribution of historical materialism was to present party decisions as scientifically warranted expressions of an objective historical process. Bolshevik party rule had political and material preconditions that that unfolded unevenly during the first post-revolutionary year, the NEP period and the subsequent consolidation of one-party rule.
Stalinist historical materialism naturalised the institutional separation of the party-state apparatus from the producers once that separation had become consolidated. In its theoretical self-description, the party does not appear as a particular organisation with its own interests and means of power. It presents itself as the scientific organ of the working class and the conscious bearer of objective development. A claim to superior theoretical knowledge does not by itself transform an organisation into a substitute subject, but the step towards it occurs when the claim to special historical knowledge is used to authorise political command over the producers and to treat their independent judgement as partial, backward or objectively reactionary. When this claim attributes a special historical mission to the organisation and replaces the independent formation of the producers’ will, the organisation becomes a substitute subject.
A dictatorship of the proletariat requires the proletariat to bring the conditions of production under its collective control and dismantle rather than consolidate a political apparatus standing over the producers. This criterion follows from Marx’s account of proletarian rule as a transformation of political power. His analysis of the Commune concerns the reorganisation of public power through responsible and recallable organs rooted in the working population. Engels similarly connects the abolition of class divisions with the state’s loss of its function as a separate power standing over society. As state intervention in social relations becomes superfluous, the government of persons is displaced by the administration of things and the direction of processes of production.
By this criterion, the consolidated Stalin-era party-state order did not constitute socialism or a dictatorship of the proletariat. This is a theoretical conclusion drawn from the social position of the producers and the structure of political power. By the mid-1930s, the economic command system combined predominant state ownership in industry, central planning, branch-specific People’s Commissariats and hierarchically managed enterprises. Effective political direction was concentrated in the Politburo, while the Council of People’s Commissars constituted the highest executive and administrative organ of government. Party direction and economic administration were institutionally interconnected within the command system, standing apart from the producers. Enterprises did not operate under the direct collective control of those who worked in them. Production decisions were imposed through an administrative chain of command.
Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism disputes, reformulates and combines in different ways elements within the Marxism of the Second International and the developing Soviet teaching tradition.
Neither crisis, nor the development of the productive forces, nor class antagonism generates communism by itself. Communism is not a law of history.
Communism would require the conscious practical abolition of the producers’ separation from the conditions of production, of wage-labour, value mediation, competition, class rule and political power separated from society. It would entail the abolition of exclusive property titles over the social means of production and the appropriation of those means by the associated producers.
