2.2 The dialectical materialist concept of the society and nature 

Engels outlines in chapter I of Anti-Dühring a philosophical-historic overview of the appearance of the scientific socialism. In the introduction, the communist leader displays how the utopian socialism derives directly from the French Illuminism, from the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class. The rationalist bourgeois stance placed itself  in the condition of initiating the correct thought, and this was one of the limits of the French materialism of the 18th century. The German idealism appears as an indirect product of the Great French Revolution, 1789, and it will be Hegel who will reach its culminating point. Hegel demonstrates that the development of human thought is a process, it possesses a history whose development presents a series of internal needs. Such a dialectical planning of the different forms of thought, in evolution, as well as  the determination that in each one of these stages there was something true, are the greatest asset of Hegel and, according to Engels, his most merit was the “ resumption of dialectics as a supreme form of thinking”. One of the major faults of the Hegelian philosophy was just its idealistic character,  rather than finding out the real linkages ( social and economic) that would take to the evolution of the forms of thinking, Hegel replaces these linkages by logical-abstract conclusions that, most of the times,were accurate in their content but represented a reversed form to see the world and, therefore, worthless, in that condition, to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. 

The critique to the Hegelian mystification of the dialectics led to materialism, not the former mechanistic materialism of the 18th century but the “modern materialism”, in Engels’ words, “essentially dialectical”. This understanding of the world comes up as the historical materialism in Marx’s thought, in 1848, for the first time explainning in scientific words ( theoretical and practical) which were the material conditions of production that determine, ultimately, the changes in the right, politics and ideology fields. And that the contradictory economic forces were the base of the political revolutions that from time to time would shake the history of the humankind. Finally, it was the class struggle the motor of history. In Engels’ words: “We owe to Marx these two great discoveries: the materialist concept of history and the disclosure of the mistery of the capitalist production by means of the surplus-value”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring). 

And why does this essentially dialectical modern materialism comes up firstly, in its complete form, in the study of history and not in the study of the organic and inorganic nature? Engels explains: 

“Nevertheless, while the turnaround in the nature vision can only occur inasmuch as the research  has provided it the corresponding positive material of knowledge, longer before historical facts had been established which resulted a decisive switch in the history conception. In 1831, in Lyon, it happened the first uprising of the workers; from 1838 to 1842, the first  national movement of the workers, the ones of the English Chartist movement reached its peak. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie came to the fore in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe, in the same proportion where developed, on the one hand, the big industry and, on the other, the newly conquered political domain of the bourgeoisie”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring). 

The historical materialism, the Marxist philosophy, was a product of the class struggle. Likewise it happened the development of the dialectical materialism in the nature sciences, but in this case in an indirect way, linked more closely to the industrial development and the scientific experimentation. But the discovery of the historic and evolutionary character of the Cosmos and the organic nature was  ongoing. Back in the 18th century, Kant, before becoming the founder of the German idealism, launches the theory of the solar system formation from the nebulae. This important philosophical hypothesis attacked directly the metaphysical foundation of Newton’s celestial mechanics which postulated a Universe on the move but without transformation, without history; that is, the celestial bodies have always been turning around that way. Laplace, 50 years after Kant, performed Mathematics calculations which confirm, still in theory, Kantian hypothesis. And 50 years after Laplace, Engels informs us, with empirical measurements one proved the origin of the solar system from the other celestial bodies, the gas nebulae. But before such a confirmation, Darwin, in 1859, with his great oeuvre On the Origin of Species presented a rational explanation to the enormous variability of the living species on Earth. Although, as Engels points out, Darwin did not investigate the cause of the mutations, he reaches the major accomplishment to explain the living species evolution without the need of a creative metaphysics force. The dialectical materialism reached that way great results not only on the historical explanation of humankind but as well the history of cosmos and life history. 

“ ( … ) materialism synthesizes the most recent progresses of the science of nature according to which the nature also has its history in the time – as much the cosmic bodies as the species of organisms that inhabit them under favourable circumstances appear and disappear, and the cicles, as far as they allow themselves to legitimate, take endlessly most impressive dimensions. In both instances, materialism is essentially dialectical and do not need any philosophy situated above other sciences”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring, our bold). 

Materialism in the natural sciences, being defined as historical, in the same way it occurs in the society explanation, takes over the condition of “essentially dialectical”. Dialectics when seeking the origin of the movement in the things themselves ( and not out of them as metaphysics vision does), understanding everything as a chaining, a movement, an objective coming and decaying, is not, on the other hand, just a method of thinking but a world concept. 

“All these processes and methods of thinking do not fit the framework of the metaphysical thought; For the dialectics, conversely, that conceives things and their conceptual portraits essentially in their nexus, in its triggering, movement, in its coming and decaying, processes like the ones previously mentioned are some other confirmations of its own way to proceed. Nature is the proof of dialectics and we have to affirm about the modern science of the nature that it provides for this proof an extremely plentiful material and everyday larger, proving this way that in nature things happen, ultimately, in a a dialectical and not metaphysical manner”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring, our bold).  

Nature and the abundant results of the natural sciences constitute the proof of dialectics. They constitute the proof of what Hegel perceived as a reversed reflection in the human spirit and Marx replaced pulling it upwards in his historical materialist concept. Becoming the proof the dialectics, in turn, nature served as well as a comprovation of the material unity of the world, condition that a series of valid laws to the organic and inorganic nature, becoming effective in the development of society and thinking. The dialectics of nature strengthens, this way, the materialist concept of the world. 

2.3 The different forms of the movement of matter    

The great Engels, in Anti-Dühring, demonstrates that the scientific advance in the 19th century reached the understanding that, as well as the human society, cosmos and organic nature have their particular history. The immediate meaning of Engels’ philosophical conclusion is, as we saw previously, the universality of dialectics. In turn, this universality has not been reached by a philosophical speculation but by the systematization of the positive results of different branches of science. The necessary outcome of the universality of the dialectics and the confirmation of the Monist concept of the world. That is, there are not different worlds or unsurmountable spheres between them. There is not a world of ideas, separated from the world of the things, as defended by Plato. There is a unity of the world and this unity is disclosed by its history; the history of the Cosmos arises in the history of the Earth’s organic life, the history of Earth organic becomes from the history of the human society; and, in turn, the material history of society is the foundation of the history of its thought.  

For Engels, therefore, it was the development of the sciences which ensures the unity of the world. Before these discoveries, from which we can stress the names of Marx and Darwin, the Monist concept of the world could consist in a philosophical advance but it still situated in the speculative ground. In this regard, Spinoza’s defence that the world was constituted of only a substance was an advance with regard to the dualism of Descartes and his two substances: the wistful thing versus extensive thing. In the same way that Hegel, when founded his idealism in the movement of the concept ( unique) represented a progress in relation to Kant’s dualism with his world of the phenomenon separated of the world of essence ( or the thing in itself ). However, Spinoza’s and Hegel’s concepts, brighter than they could be, were situated, although only in the ground of the philosophical speculation, as an abstract systematization of the accumulated knowledge so far. 

That is why for Engels it does not make any sense Dühring’s ontology that tries to substantiate the world unity in the abstract concept of the being. The resumption of this concept by Dühring represented an attempt again to place philosophy above the sciences and from the concrete point of view only the replacement of a concept by another: either in place of  Spinoza’s substance or Hegel’s concept. Engels demonstrates that it is the class struggle history itself, production and scientific experimentation, that proves the universality of dialectics and materialism. The philosophy, from then on, should find itself imbricated in science and not separated or above it. The scientific results and the class struggle advance confirmed this material unity of the world. 

 “The unity of the world does not consist in its being, although its being is an assumption of its unity, provided it needs first to exist before being able to be just one. Because the being is, in a general way, an open question beyond the limit of our visual ray. The real unity of the world consists in ites materiality which has been proved not by means of the fraseology of a juggler but by means of a long and lasted development of the philosophy and the science of nature”. (Engels Anti-Dühring, our bold). 

This is the great philosophical synthesis of Engels: “the unity of the world is its materiality”. And the determination “materiality” is not a mere substitute to being, substance and concept. The materiality is not a pure determination without any quality, as Engles would demonstrate some years later, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of the classic German philosophy; the matter consists in something existing, anterior and independent of the subjective observation and, besides, can be known, in its essence, by consciousness. As Engels demonstrates in Anti-Dühring, the concept of being is completely insuficient to demonstrate the unity of the world: 

“When we mention of being, and only the being, the unity can only consist in [what] all objects it is dealing with, they are, they exist. They [the objects] are synthetized in the unity of this being and no other, and the common allegation is that all are not only, and it cannot confer no other property, either common or not common, as well to exclude provisionally from the analysis all the properties of this kind. Because, just as we get away a milimeter of the basic and simple fact that the being competes to the whole of all those things, the differences among those start appearing before our eyes – and the fact that these differences consist that some are white and other black, some inanimated, some perhaps imanent and others perhaps transcendent can not be solved on being assigned to all of them, uniformly a simple existence”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring). 

That is why the Marxist philosophical concept is not ontological but materialist and dialectical. For this reason Engels, based on the assumption that everything that exists qualifies this existence like: different forms of the matter movement. The world existence, the individuals, is not something that needs to be justified to the proletariat. The life conditions of their  producing class relieve them of the philosophical questioning on the world being and our thinking being real or not. That is why the existence, the being in general, is an assumption to what a justificative to the dialectical materialism is not necessary but what is necessary is to find out the objective laws that rule such a reality to transform them. As the great Karl Marx pointed out in 1845 on his Theses on Feuerbach: 

“The question to know if it is possible to the human thinking an objective truth is not only a question of theory but a question of practice. It is in the praxis that the human being has to prove the truth, it means, reality and power, the ground character of his thinking. The controversy on the reality or no-reality of thinking, isolated from praxis, is a pure Scholastic issue”. ( Marx, Theses on Feuerbach). 

That is, the power of a thinking, its truth, is in the capacity of transforming the reality; or as Chairman Mao synthetized: “ the practice is the criteria of the truth”. In Anti-Dühring and, subsequently, in Dialectics of Nature, Engels outlines four forms of movement for the matter: the lifeless nature, the live organisms, the history of society and the thinking. The thinking is, therefore, a form of way of the matter and, like any movement, thinking is a contradiction in which the two aspects as unity of opposites are: the social practice and knowledge; it does not exist social practice without consciousness, there is no consciousness without social practice; and in some determined conditions the social practice transforms itself into theory when this same practice is systematic under a rational form, in turn, under determined circumstances, the knowledge converts itself into practice in the transforming action. 

Therefore, the question “Is thinking a matter?” it is, indeed, a scholastic questioning and badly placed since presupposes an ontological response. Thinking , as well as society, life and physical bodies are a material and dialectical relation, they are in themselves a contradiction and their two aspects contradictory and interdependent.  For the modern science it does not occur the seeking of a substance of thought. It is the responsibility of the science to find out the laws that rule this form of movement of the matter. As to the materiality to thinking, we have learned with comrade Lenin the precise definition that it has its origin from the practice and only the practice can prove it, “ the conscience is an internal state of the matter” (Lenin, Materialism and Empiriocriticism), and with Chairman Mao that it comes from the practice, does not appear from anything, does not fall into our hands and does not sprout from our brain, that is, it comes from the social practice in its three kinds: the fight for production, the class struggle and the scientific experience. This Leninist-maoist definition must be understood from the society point of view as the social practice determining the social consciousness and, under the organic point  of view, the human brain as an organ of thinking.

2.4    The universality of contradiction and the negation of negation

The definition of the world as a unit between different forms of the movement of matter is a very important philosophical leap. Since it is implicit in the definition the common materiality to all forms of movement – a materiality that is not a mere being or a substance but the objectivity itself, with its independence and antecedence in relation to the subject – as it is also implicit the dialectical  and contradictory character of this unity. After all, if there were not differences it would not make any sense to mention the unity, and as Chiarman Mao demonstrates: every difference is a contradiction. The Marxist Monism, therefore, is a contradictory unity of the world, since all movement is the movement of something material, as well as every movement, even the simplest, is a contradiction. 

“ The movement is the way of existing the matter. Never and nowhere there has been matter without movement. If the simple mechanic movement from one place to the other contains in itself a contradiction, this is more true in relation to the highest forms of the matter movement and, in a very special way, the organic life and its evolution”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring, our bold). 

In the two chapters named Dialectics, Engels indicates the two dialectical laws: the reversion of quantity into quality and the negation of the negation. As Anti-Dühring is a polemic oeuvre, Engels has his arguments, in a certain way, conditioned by the postulations of his opponent. And Düring, in his criticism to The Capital will just turn against the relations presented by Marx on the correspondence of certain historical, economic and social phenomena with these two dialectical laws. Engels demonstrates that the dialectics for Marx is not a category a priori which serves as a parameter for corroborating the truth of a certain concept. For instance,when Marx affirms that, under certain historical circumstances, an amount of money changes into capital, he does not want to ascertain the law of the “reversion of the quantity into quality”, he is simply, from a scientific discovery of a social phenomenon, demonstrating its correspondence with a particular general law of different forms of the matter movement: 

“ As in the nature science it is proved here the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel in his Logic that the merely quantitative alterations, having reached a certain point, are converted into qualitative differences”. ( Marx, The Capital, our bold). 

Likewise, when Marx relates the appearance of the capitalist class with the dialectical law of negation of the negation, he is not affirming that it is this philosophical law that makes necessary the disappearance of capitalism. Conversely, Marx, after demonstrating the inerent need to the capitalist mode of production which leads to its inevitable disappearance, relates the movement for the appearance and disappearance of the capitalist property of the means of production with the law of negation of the negation. 

“The capitalist way to appropriate the assets, as a result of the capitalist mode of production, that is, the capitalist private property, is the first negation of the individual private property based on the work itself. But the capitalist production creates its own negation with the fatality of a natural process. It is the negation of the negation. This second negation does not reestablishes the private property but the individual property having as a foundation the achievement of the capitalist era: the cooperation and the common ownership of the soil and the means of production generated by the work itself”. (Marx, The Capital, our bold). 

Engels’ statement is quite rich about these laws, showing mainly the universality of dialectics in all forms of the movement of the matter. The examples of the reversion of the quantity into quality and the negation of the negation overarching since the lifeless nature, life, society and as even thinking. However the most important in these chapters, even in the examples of these two laws, is the demonstration of the universality of the contradiction. And this demonstration had an importance as much general for the statement of the materialist dicalectics as specific for the rare polemic with Dühring: 

“The first and more important formulation [Dühring’s] fundamental logic properties of being referes to the exclusion of the contradiction. The contradictory [for  Dühring] is a category that can only be proper of a combination of ideas but never of reality”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring). 

Over the past 20th century, many revisionist trends accused the comrades Engels and Stalin of naturalism and determinism for wanting to find dialectical laws in nature. It is interesting to observe how the thoughts of those revisionists is based in the same arguments of Düring’s which, in turn, are  nothing but updated versions of the Kantian idealism. For, justly, for Kant dialectics is restricted to the confines of human reason or as Hegel demonstrated: “in respect to the purity of things, Kant confines the contradiction to the men’s consciousness”. The universality of the contradiction is another important philosophical synthesis done by Engels in his work Anti-Dühring. 

“ ( … ) processes that, by their nature, are antagonistic, containing inside a contradiction, the reversion of an extreme in its opposite ( … ). The infinity is a contradiction and it is replete of contradictions. It is already a contradiction to pretend that a infinity is composed exclusively of infinities and, however, it is what happens. ( … ). The action of contradiction would be the end of infinity. ( … )we have already mentioned that the superior Mathematics has as one of its main fundaments the contradiction ( … ). However, everything changes completely as long as we examine thigs in their movement, alteration, life, reciprocal incidence, one over the others. In this case, we envolve ourselves immediately into contradictions. The mechanic movement itself from one place to the other can only be completed in such a way that, at the same moment, a body is in one place and simultaneously is in another, a body is in the same place and it is not there. And the continuous putting and the simultaneous resolution of this contradiction are precisely the movement”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring, our bold). 

Finally, we have a bright synthesis of the dialectics and its universality: 

“Dialectics is nothing more than the science of the universal laws of the movement and the evolution of nature, human society and thinking”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring).   

Chairman Mao Tsetung, in his On the Contradiction, establishes that the law of contradiction is the only fundamental law of dialectics. In this work, the most important fundamental law of the 20th century is presented in a most complete way. As Chairman Gonzalo teaches us, with Maoism we arrive at the philosphical Monism: just one law. However, to the absolute universality of the law of contradiction it would be necessary, as assumption, the establishment of the universality of dialectics. And this was the work of the great Engels on his bright systematization of Marxism in its three constitutive parts.