Chapter III
Mutual Penetration of Opposites!
Not only does every unity contain within itself polar opposites but these
internal opposites are mutually connected with each other; one aspect of a
contradiction cannot exist without the other. In capitalist society the
bourgeoisie is connected with the proletariat, the proletariat with the
bourgeoisie; neither of these two classes can develop without the other, because
the bourgeoisie cannot exist without exploiting the labour of others and the
hired proletariat cannot exist without selling its labour power to a capitalist,
seeing that itself it does not possess the means of production.
This mutual connectedness and mutual conditioning of contradictory aspects of
actuality has also been stressed by the Party in its struggle on two fronts on
the question of the character of N.E.P.
“When a policy like that of the N.E.P. is adopted, both aspects must be
preserved: the first aspect, which is directed against the régime of
militant communism and has as its aim the securing of what is known as the
free market, and the second aspect, which is directed against complete
freedom of market and has as its aim the securing of a regulating role by
the state over the market. Abolish one of these aspects and you will no
longer have the N.E.P.” (Stalin).
We see the same indissoluble connection of contradictory aspects in all the
processes of objective actuality. There is no mechanical action without its
counteraction. The chemical dissolution of atoms is indissolubly connected with
their union. Electrical energy declares itself in the form of opposite
electricities – positive and negative.
“The existence of two mutually contradictory aspects, their conflict and
their flowing together into a new category,” wrote Marx, “comprises the
essence of the dialectical movement. If you limit yourself to the task of
warding off the bad aspect (for the preservation of the ‘good’ aspect
corresponding to it, as Proudhon demanded) then by the separation of these
aspects you put an end to the whole dialectical process.”
Opposites are not only found in indissoluble, inalienable connection, but
they cross over and mutually penetrate each other.
Thus process of production in a capitalist factory is simultaneously an
aggregation of capitalist productive relations (for example the relations
between the capitalist and the worker), and an aggregation of productive forces
(the labour of the workers and the means of production). Development from
manufacture* to machine production is not only a change of productive
forces, but a development and spreading of new productive relations. The union
of the labour force of the workers and the means of production is simultaneously
a connection of productive forces and a connection of people in the process of
production, which together make up the relation. The division of labour in
manufacture is a relation in production and emerges also as a productive force.
* Manufacture, strictly speaking,
means “by hand” (Latin, manus) not by machine. It refers therefore
to the period before machino-facture and steam power.
On the basis of this mutual penetration of capitalist productive forces, and
capitalist relations in. production, the process of ever intensifying
contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie is also developed.
The mutual penetration of opposites, the transition of one opposite into
another, belongs to all processes. But to uncover and reveal this mutual
penetration, a careful, concrete analysis of the process is required.
The interests of the proletariat and the working peasantry in the U.S.S.R.,
classes opposed to each other both on account of their historic past and their
relations to the means of production, are nowadays beginning to coincide. With
regard to fundamental questions of socialist construction, the peasant, as
worker, appears as the ally of the proletariat. The peasant is interested in the
strengthening of the proletarian dictatorship, because it guards him from having
to return the land to the landlords and delivers him from exploitation by the
kulak.* The peasant is interested in the socialist development of
agricultural economy because this is the best method of raising agricultural
economy to a higher level. The peasant is interested in the industrialization of
the country because this creates a material basis for raising the level of
agricultural economy and guarantees the defence of the country from the
encroachment of capitalists and landlords. Here we have the coincidence of the
interests of the proletariat and the peasantry. Not until conditions were
favourable for the rapid expansion of socialist industry on the one hand and for
a mass movement of the peasants towards collectivization on the other, was it
possible to unite the private-property interests of the peasants with the
general interests of socialism.
* Kulak, lit. fists. The tight-fisted,
well-to-do peasant. “He may be a good manager, a man of enterprise and
initiative, but as long as he exercises his talents for his own benefit, for
the benefit of individualism, he is a great danger, a great enemy and must
be wiped out” (Hindus, Humanity Uprooted).
The first form of this combination was the N.E.P., which at the end
of the civil war made possible the improvement of individualistic peasant
economy and its co-operation on the basis of what is called the free market,
under state control. In this way, the raw material and provisions for socialist
industry were guaranteed. The combination of peasant economy and large-scale
industry became ever closer as socialist relations in industry and trade, the
industrialization of the country, the development of machine-tractor stations
and of the system of collective contracts with the state kept growing and were
confirmed. The result of this policy is that now, on the basis of direct
collectivization of individual peasant holdings, N.E.P. has become a form of
combination of the private-property interests of the peasantry with the
interests of socialism, and this leads to the growth and strengthening of
socialist relations. The world-historical strategic significance of N.E.P. is
determined by this fact, that the Party set up this policy on the basis of a
profound analysis of the course and development of the contradictions of the
transitional economy and. the indissoluble connection of the opposite tendencies
of their mutual penetration.
We have emerged into the period of socialism and we are experiencing the last
stage of N.E.P. – that is a contradiction! We are proceeding to a final
liquidation of classes and we are strengthening the financial system and credit
organizations; we have adopted cost-accounting, we keep the purchasing power of
the rouble stable and along with the organized economic strengthening of the
collective farms we encourage the development of collective farm trading. But we
do this because the strengthening of the financial system and the state banks is
at the same time helping us to take stock of our economic position, to plan more
exactly and to introduce disciplined business control. The cost-accounting
system, the introduction of socialist planning into the workshop, the brigade,
and the collective farm. The development of collective farm trading strengthens
the bond between the proletariat and the collective-farm peasants. An example of
the analysis of the mutual penetration of opposites is given by Stalin in his
solution of the problem of the relation of national and international culture
under socialism.
“The encouragement of cultures that are national in form and socialistic
in content,” said Stalin, in his report to the Sixteenth Assembly, “under
conditions of proletarian dictatorship in one country, with the ultimate aim
of welding them into one general socialist culture (one both in form and
content), with one general language, for the day when the proletariat shall
have conquered and socialism have spread all over the world – in this
conception we find the truly dialectical character of the Leninist approach
to this question of national culture.”
“It may be objected that such a way of stating the question is
‘contradictory.’ But do we not meet with similar contradictions in the
question of the State? We are for the withering away of the State. And yet
we also believe in the proletarian dictatorship, which represents the
strongest and mightiest form of State power that has existed up to now. To
keep on developing State power in order to prepare the conditions for the
withering away of State power – that is the Marxist formula. It is
‘contradictory’? Yes, ‘contradictory.’ But the contradiction is vital, and
wholly reflects Marxian dialectic.
“Or for example, the Leninist statement on the right of the constituted
nations of the U.S.S.R. to self-determination, even up to the point of
cuffing adrift from the Soviet Union. Lenin sometimes used to put his thesis
on national self-determination in the form of this simple statement,
‘disunity for unity.’ Just think – disunity for unity! It smacks of paradox.
All the same this contradictory formula reflects that vital truth of Marxian
dialectic which enables the Bolsheviks to overcome the most formidable
obstacles that beset this national question.
“The same thing must be said about the question of national culture;
there is an efflorescence of national cultures (and languages) in the period
of proletarian dictatorship in one country but the very purpose of this is
to prepare the conditions for the extinction of these separate cultures and
the welding of them into one common socialist culture (and one common
language) when socialism shall be victorious over the whole world.
“Whoever has not understood this feature of the contradictions belonging
to our transitional time, whoever has not understood this dialectic of
historical processes, that person is dead to Marxism.”
In the transitional period, when the masses of builders of socialism have not
yet “divested themselves of the skin of the old capitalist Adam,” when
individualist habits and survivals are not yet outlived even in the ranks of the
working class (to say nothing of’ the peasantry and old intelligentsia), we have
to deal with many cases of the divergence of personal and social interests. But
the Communist Party does not brush aside this actual contradiction and does not
idealize actuality. It proceeds from the principle that the development of
socialist relations for the first time in history makes widely possible such a
“mutual penetration” of personal and social interests as will lead, not to the
crushing of personality, but to its real and full development along the same
line as the interests of all society. This “mutual penetration” is manifested in
the form of piece-work, the insistence of differential wages according to the
quality and quantity of the work done, the bonus system, diplomas and other
awards for exceptionally good work and other forms of encouragement designed to
enlist all the powers of the individual in the service of society.
“Mutual penetration” of opposites is also characteristic of the processes of
our knowledge.
One of the basic contradictions of human knowledge is, as we have already
seen, the contradiction of relative and absolute truths.
We have the same mutual penetration in the relationship of the particular and
the general which are reflected in our ideas. The particular does not exist
except in relation to the general. The general exists only in the particulars.
Every generalization only approximately grasps all the particular objects. Every
particular thing partly enters into the general.
The universal laws of development, reflected in the categories of
materialistic dialectic, can be understood only on the basis of the mutual
penetration of opposites.
“Dialectic shows,” writes Engels, “that to hold that basis and
consequence, cause and action, identity and difference, being and essence,
are unalterable opposites, will not bear criticism. Analysis shows the
presence of one pole in latent form within the other, that at the determined
point one pole goes over into the other and that all logic is developed only
from the moving of these two opposites in one another’s direction.”
Lenin used to call this “mutual penetration” of opposites – the identity of
opposites. To disclose the mutual penetration, the identity of opposites in any
process is the central problem of our theory of knowledge, of materialistic
dialectic.
Aptly enough, Engels, in defining the three basic laws of dialectic,
formulated the law of movement through contradictions as “the law of the mutual
penetration of opposites.”
Lenin defined dialectic as “the teaching of how contradictions may be and are
identical; under what conditions they are identical; how they turn into each
other and so become identical; why the mind of man must not accept these
opposites as dead or frozen but as living, conditional, mobile, the one always
in process of turning into the other.”
To understand how opposites become identical is only possible by means of a
careful, concrete and profound analysis of the process, by a study of the
movement of all its basic aspects at its different stages, of all the conditions
and possibilities of their transitions.
The mutual penetration of opposites, being the expression of the basic
scientific laws underlying the process, becomes possible and is realized only in
some particular complex of conditions.
The wage labourer is a living identity of opposites since he is the basic
productive force of capitalism and all material commodities and at the same time
is divorced from the means of production, possesses nothing except his hands,
and is exploited by another class. Such a mutual penetration of opposites
becomes possible only under the conditions of the capitalist system of
production.
The development of a culture, national in form, and international in content,
the strengthening of the state power for the creation of the conditions leading
to its decline, become possible and necessary only under the proletarian
dictatorship. The development of cost accounting in order to strengthen the
financial system for the development of socialist planning is necessary in the
period when it is still impossible to replace money in any way, and is possible
only until the conditions for doing away with money shall have been created. The
raising of the productivity of labour by enlisting the personal interest of the
worker, by encouraging the more highly qualified workers, by the preferential
treatment of shock-brigaders, is possible only in the conditions of proletarian
dictatorship and because increase in the productivity of labour is the decisive
condition for constructing a complete socialist society and for the transition
to a communist society with its principle of distribution according to needs.
The understanding of this aspect of the law of the unity and conflict of
opposites has made possible a correct analysis of the economic situation, of the
mutual relations of classes and parties and consequently has determined the
policy of our Party. Lenin wrote:
“We have all been learning a little Marxism; we have been learning how
and when it is possible to unite opposites. Even more important is the fact
that the revolution has compelled us to be continually uniting opposites in
practice. But let us remember that these opposites may be united so as to
obtain either mere discords or a symphony.”
Such a dialectical combination of opposing policies which appeared absolutely
incompatible to the Mensheviks was the policy of our Party in relation to the
Liberals in the period of the Zemstvo campaign* “to keep distinct in
order to strike together.” On the basis of such a combination was built the
policy of the party in relation to the peasantry at different stages of the
revolution, the combining of the interests of the proletariat and of the poorer
peasants to bring about the socialist revolution, the policy of union with the
well-to-do peasantry after the eighth assembly of the Party.
* Zemstvo campaign. The zemstvos
or provincial assemblies were created in 1864 and consisted of a number of
elected delegates of landowners and peasants. Their powers were restricted
in 1890 but in 1905 in response to public opinion they regained some of
their independent initiative. The question then was to what extent
revolutionary socialists should participate in these bodies.
A clear model of the combination of opposites in the policy of the Party is
found in the “Six Conditions”* of Stalin which introduced business
methods and payment by results into Soviet industry and which, while giving
every kind of support to the old intelligentsia, took steps to create, in the
shortest period possible, numerous cadres of workings class technical experts.
This “combination of opposites” in the policy of our Party is directed towards
social development in a determined direction and was always worked out in
practice on the basis of an accurate and concrete study of objective
contradictions. That is why this combination always resulted in victory for the
party line. That is why we have got from it a “symphony,” not mere discords.
* “The Six Conditions” of Stalin, were
laid down in his speech to the leaders of industry in June 1931. Stalin
asserted that a new situation had been created by the development of
industry and that this required new methods of working. He enumerated six of
these including rationalization, payment by results, personal responsibility
for the job, technical education, encouragement of the intelligentsia and
business accounting.
A combination of opposites
that does not issue from a faithful reckoning with objective conditions and
facts is an eclectic combination and cannot lead to the victory of the
determined trend of development, but instead to its defeat. Thus the Mensheviks
constructed a whole policy of struggle for a bourgeois democratic revolution on
the basis of an eclectic combination of the interests of the proletariat with
those of the liberal bourgeoisie, which combination ignored the
irreconcilability of those interests, ignored the concrete conditions of the
development of Russia, ignored the peasantry as the basic ally of the
proletariat in this revolution, and handed the hegemony in the revolution to the
liberal bourgeoisie, to whose interests it subordinated those of the
proletariat. Such a combination led, as we said, to discord, to the defeat of
the bourgeois democratic revolution.
The right opportunists in the U.S.S.R. held it necessary to combine the
interests of the proletariat with those of the peasantry in such a way as
neither to harm the kulak by curtailing his tendencies to exploit – rather to
enable him to develop them – nor to prepare or carry out the policy of
liquidating the kulak as a class. They held it was necessary to combine for many
decades the small scale individualist peasant economy with large scale
socialistic production. This combination is eclectic and impossible, for it
falls to realize the impracticability of continuing a long drawn-out development
of a double system – large scale socialist industry on the one hand, and on the
other, decaying peasant economy, that economy which every hour and every minute
gives birth again to capitalism. This combination ignored the irreconcilability
of the interests of the proletariat and the capitalist elements. Such a
combination would inevitably lead not to a victory for socialism but to a
bourgeois restoration. Gradualist socialists seek theoretically to base their
betrayal of the interests of the working class and their furious war against
communism on an eclectic combination of the irreconcilable class-antagonists –
the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – as given in the doctrine of the
“evolution of capitalism into socialism.”
The group of Menshevist idealists, in spite of its repeated declarations on
the unity of opposites as their mutual penetration, has in its analysis of
concrete problems distorted both the proposition itself and the facts under
investigation. The mutual penetration of opposites has in essence been reduced
by them to the more limited notion that opposites presuppose each other. It is
this abstract approach, this approach “in general” without concrete analysis,
that has prevented the Deborin group from rightly understanding the dialectical
unity of the historic and the logical in knowledge, the unity of theory and
practice in revolutionary struggle and the actual relationships between the
proletariat and peasantry in revolution.
The study of mutual penetration, of the identity of opposites, demands a
concrete enquiry into the contradictory aspects of a process in its movement and
development, the conditioning and mobility of all its facets, their conversion
into each other.
But those mechanists who hold themselves to be Marxists do not understand
movement by means of contradictions. The mechanistic view has been very clearly
and directly expressed by Bukharin in his Theory of Historic Materialism.
“In the world there exist differently acting forces directed one against
the other. Only in exceptional cases do they-balance each other. Then we
have a state of rest, i.e. their actual conflict remains hidden. But it is
sufficient to change one of these forces, and immediately the internal
contradictions will be manifest, there will ensue a breakdown of
equilibrium, and if a new equilibrium is established, it is established on a
new basis, i.e. with another combination of forces, etc. What follows from
this? It follows that ‘conflict of opposites,’ i.e. the antagonism of
differently directed forces, does indeed condition movement.”
According to Bukharin, there exist forces independent of each other and they
act on each other. It is this external collision of differently directed forces
that conditions movement. While Lenin requires to know in the first place the
internal contradictions of a process, to find the source of self-movement,
Bukharin requires the determination of external forces that collide with each
other. Lenin speaks of the division of the unity, requires the disclosure of the
internal identity of opposites, the establishment of the concrete character of
the connections of opposing aspects and their transitions. Bukharin requires the
mere finding of independent forces. He understands the law of the unity of
opposites mechanically, because he proceeds from the mechanics of a simple
collision of forces independent of each other, as the general notional “model”
which is suitable to explain every phenomenon. Such a reduction of an internal
process to a conflict of independent forces inevitably leads to the seeking of
the cause of change outside the process, in the action of its environment.
From the mechanistic understanding of the unity of opposites proceeds the
theory of organized capitalism, which holds, as fundamental for the epoch of
imperialism, not the internal contradictions of each country, but their external
contradictions on the world arena.
On the mechanistic understanding of contradictions is constructed the
Trotskyist theory that denies the possibility of a socialist victory in one
country. Trotsky recognizes, as basic and decisive in this question, not the
internal contradictions of our Soviet economy (which are being resolved within
the country), but the external contradictions, the contradictions between the
Soviet Union and capitalist countries. Trotsky holds that it is these last that
determine the development of soviet economy and so only a resolution of these
contradictions can lead to a complete victory of socialism in our country.
Bukharin, like all mechanists, identifies contradiction with antagonism. That
is wrong. Those contradictions (carefully distinguished by Marx and Engels in
their analysis of the complex forms of development of class society) are
antagonistic, in which the struggle of indissolubly connected opposites proceeds
in the form of their external collisions, which are directed on the part of the
dominant opposite so as to preserve the subordination of its opposite and of the
type of contradiction itself; and on the part of the subordinated opposite – to
the destruction of the dominant opposite and of the contradiction itself as
well.
The contradiction of any process is resolved, not by some external force, as
think the mechanists, but by the development of the contradiction itself. This
is true also in regard to antagonistic contradictions. But in the course of
development of an antagonistic contradiction at its different stages, only the
premises for its resolution are prepared and ripen. The contradiction
itself at every new stage becomes ever more intensified. An antagonistic
contradiction does not pass beyond the stages of its partial resolution.
Thus the periodic crises of capitalism are a violent form in which the
contradictions of a given cycle of capitalist reproduction find their
resolution; but in relation to the contradictions of the capitalist means of
production as a whole, these crises emerge only as landmarks of the further
intensification of these contradictions and of the ripening of the forces making
for the violent overthrow of capitalism.
Antagonistic contradictions are resolved by the kind of leap in which the
internal opposites emerge as relatively independent opposites, external to each
other, by a leap that leads to the abolition of the formerly dominant opposite
and to the establishment of a new contradictions. In this contradiction the
subordinated opposite of the previous contradiction now becomes the dominant
opposite, preserving a number of its peculiarities and determining by itself the
form of the new contradiction, especially at the first stages of its
development.
But in contradictions that do not have an antagonistic character, the
development of the contradiction signifies not only the growth of the forces
making for its final resolution, but each new step in the development of the
contradiction is at the same time also its partial resolution.
Not all contradictions are antagonistic. Thus the relationships of the
proletariat and the peasantry are not of an antagonistic character – in both
classes we find a number of common interests. In a class society the
contradictions of the basic classes are antagonistic and are resolved in
antagonistic form. In developed socialist society there will be no class
struggle, no class antagonism. “It is only in an order of things,” says Marx,
“in which there will be no more classes and class antagonism, that social
evolutions will cease to be political revolutions.”*
* Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.
But Bukharin, because he identifies contradiction with antagonism, holds that
in general there will be in this case no contradictions at all.
This is what
Lenin wrote in answer to that assertion: “Quite wrong. Antagonism and
contradiction are by no means the same. Under socialism the first will vanish,
the second will remain.”
If in developed socialism there were no contradictions –
contradictions between productive forces and relations in production, between
production and demand, no contradictions of technique, etc. then the development
of socialism would be impossible, then instead of movement we should have
stagnation. Only in virtue of the internal contradictions of the socialist order
can there be development from one phase to another and higher phase.
But each step in the development of socialism will denote not only a ripening
of the forces making for a developed communist society, but also an
immediate partial resolution of the contradictions of socialism. Just in
the same way, each new stage in the transitional period denotes not only a
growth of the forces making for socialism (which can enter into being
once the leap to a new order is made), but also an immediate
construction of socialism, a partial resolution of the most basic contradiction
of the transitional period.
The identification of contradiction with antagonism leads on the one hand to
the Trotskyist assertion that the contradictions between the proletariat and the
peasantry are of the same character as those between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie, i.e. are relations of class antagonism. On the other hand, it leads
to right-opportunist conclusions. The right-opportunists maintain that the
relations of these classes are not antagonistic and are, therefore, not even
contradictory.