31)The Law of the Transformation of Quantity into Quality.

The Marxists hold that they have discovered the law in accordance with which the changes of nature occur. They call this law “the Law of the Transformation of Quantity into Quality and vice versa.”17 In what follows we shall discuss the transformation of quantity into quality and neglect the reverse operation, since this is not a matter that Marxists give much attention to. According to this law, as we have already seen, “the process of development” is (a) one in which a number of insignificant and gradual changes in the quantity of something are abruptly succeeded by a marked change in its quality, and (b) one in which these abrupt changes are not accidental but are “the natural result” of the preceding quantitative changes. Stalin says (c) that these changes of quality are “an onward and upward movement,” (d) that they are a “development from the simple to the complex,” and (e) that they are “from the lower to the higher.” With this sort of change is contrasted the sort of change that nature is held not to undergo, namely gradual changes, “movement in a circle,” “simple repetition of what has already occurred.” Stalin quotes Engels to the effect that Darwin had helped to prove this law by showing that the organic world had evolved from the inorganic, and refers to the following illustrations of it given by Engels: the sudden change of water into steam when the temperature is raised, and to ice when the temperature is lowered; the melting points of metals; the critical points of temperature and pressure at which gases are converted into liquids, etc. Engels had also cited, as examples of the law, the fact that chemical combination takes place only when the combining substances are in the proper proportions—“Chemistry can be termed the science of the qualitative changes of bodies as a result of changed quantitative composition”18 —and Marx’s statement that to become capital a sum of money must be more than a certain minimum. Incidentally, in this passage Marx says: “Here, just as in the natural sciences, we find confirmation of the law discovered by Hegel in his Logic, that at a certain point, what have been purely quantitative changes become qualitative

32)The Law of Unity and Struggle of Opposites

This law occupies a central position in materialist dialectics and is of universal methodological significance. No phenomena exist in the world outside the process of infinite development, the process of the formation of opposing aspects and their mutual transformation within each whole, and outside the process of their contradictory interrelationships. Characterizing an object as subordinate to the law of unity and struggle of opposites points to a source of general movement and development to be found not somewhere outside the object, not in metaphysical or supernatural forces, but within the object, in its self-motion and development. This law focuses on the disclosure of the inner mechanism and the dynamic of self-motion. It enables us to understand any whole as a complex and divided system, containing elements or tendencies that are directly incompatible. It allows us to interpret any given structure in such a way that it is permeated by the logic of its historical formation. The law of the unity and struggle of opposites removes the illusion of finality from any organic form of existence in nature and society. It focuses on the transient nature of such forms and their transition to higher and more developed forms through the exhaustion of their potentials. For example, in biological evolution the formation of new forms of life occurs precisely through the unity and struggle of opposites in heredity and variability. In physical processes the nature of light was explained precisely by means of the unity and struggle of opposites appearing, for example, as corpuscular and wave properties; this, moreover, cleared the path fora “drama of ideas” in physical science, whereby the opposition and synthesis of corpuscular and wave theories characterized scientific progress. The most basic expression of the unity and struggle of opposites in the world of commodity capitalism is that of use value and value; the most highly developed oppositions in capitalism are the working class and the bourgeoisie, because the capitalist emerges as the personification of capital, “the creation of labor which stands in opposition to labor”

Contradiction as a source of development .

Term adapted from its ordinary meaning by Hegel and Marx to refer to dialectical conflicts in history and society. According to Marxist theory, contradiction is a tenet of dialectical reasoning rather than a logical error. Contradiction is held to be present in all phenomena and to be the principal reason for their motion and development. In Dialectics of Nature, Engels presents examples from both natural science and mathematics intended to defend this proposition. However, the doctrine of contradiction as the main source of development is most easily understood with respect to society. Marx and Engels argued in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that, ‘the history of society is the history of class struggle’. Social classes, particularly bourgeois and proletarians under capitalism, found themselves with contradictory interests, and their interaction produced not only historical but social transformation. Marx and Engels predicted the victory of proletarians and the eventual abolition of class relations. Given the ubiquity of contradictions, Soviet ideologists were faced with initial difficulty in characterizing social relations under socialism. They resolved the problem by developing the notion of antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions; thus, unlike bourgeois and proletarians under capitalism, workers and peasants in the Soviet Union did not have antagonistically contradictory interests, merely non-antagonistically contradictory ones. In Hegelian and Marxist writing the term is used more widely. A contradiction may be a pair of features that together produce an unstable tension in a political or social system: a ‘contradiction’ of capitalism might be the arousal of expectations in the workers that the system cannot requite. For Hegel the gap between this and genuine contradiction is not as wide as it is for other thinkers, given the equation between systems of thought and their historical embodiments.