This volume is a translation from the French original which appeared in 1965. It is a concise and critical examination of Soviet philosophical thought since the death of Stalin. The study is restricted to dialectical materialism probably on the supposition that this crucial area would provide significant clues to the status of Marxist philosophy as a whole in the post-Stalin period. The author discloses that Soviet philosophers, even before the 20th Congress, had already begun to criticize as thought-stifling Stalin's (...) dogmatic views on diamat. De-Stalinization has encouraged the renewed serious study of Hegel and the rediscovery of the importance of the categories for philosophical synthesis. But the author finds Soviet philosophic thought still barren of originality. Soviet philosophy is found to be the least critical of all philosophies. The easiest way to discredit Soviet philosophy, the author asserts, would be to translate one of their contemporary texts on the history of philosophy! Planty-Bonjour does not make any comparisons between the interplay of philosophers and working scientists in the western world and in the U.S.S.R. He reports that diamat is of no particular use to working Soviet scientists and that it has lost practically all control over scientific activity. The main body of the book is devoted to a critique of the Soviet notion of category and to the dialectification of the categories. In the author's view, Soviet philosophers are inevitably led to a dead-end by the incompatible and nonjustified concepts that the real is rational and that the real is matter. This incompatibility makes diamat inherently incoherent. Hegel's dialectic cannot serve as a means of avoiding the problem of transcendence toward which the basically realistic attitude of Soviet philosophy is leading. A genuine dialogue between Soviet philosophers and spiritualist philosophers is possible only if the former drop the dialectic of nature and allow the realistic tendency in their philosophy to develop.--H. B. (shrink)

This book was originally published in French in 1965. The great bulk of the citations from Soviet works are from sources in the period 1956-1960. Planty-Bonjour’s book is concerned with the ‘categories’ of dialectical materialism; the scope of his study is restricted to the post-Stalin era.

An introduction to the basic ideas of philosophy as a science, materialism, the categories and laws of motion of nature, society and human thought, dialectics, the theory of knowledge.

A law is one of the basic concepts of the dialectical materialist conception of determinism as a philosophical theory of the objective interrelationship and mutual conditioning of phenomena in the material and mental world. A law establishes a rigorously determined connection among circumstances, i.e., a totality of derivative components and conditions of their actions and results. By overlooking the existence of two different levels—the concept and the objective reality corresponding to it—some philosophers erroneously interpret Marx's theses concerning the approximateness (...) of the realization of the laws of society. Let us take, for example, Marx's thesis that "In general, in capitalist production general laws are realized in a very confused and approximate way, merely as a prevailing tendency, as a kind of average among constant fluctuations that is never solidly established."1 Some investigators see this as an objectively existing social law in itself, attributing to it an "inexactitude" of operation, variation, and approximation, instead of seeing it as a specific application of a particular law. They thus forget that Marx said, in the Foreword to the very first volume of Capital: "The question does not specifically have to do with a greater or lesser degree of development of the social antagonisms that derive from the natural laws of capitalist production, but rather lies in these laws themselves, these trends, which operate and are realized with iron necessity.". (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of dialectical materialism. The author, being a supporter of this theory, offers a self-critical assessment of its foundations. He argues that the predecessors of Marxism constructed their systems with the confidence that they were building the true and only true philosophy. This utopian idea shared by Marx, Engels, and their successors was refuted by subsequent developments in philosophy. Indeed, philosophy by its very nature is pluralistic and interminable. Self-critical Marxism must recognize the legitimacy not (...) only of dialectical materialism, but also of other philosophies no matter how much they may differ in their content. This is supported by analysis of the main categories and problems of dialectical materialism—the laws of dialectics, matter, evolution, consciousness, and truth. (shrink)

Western materialism and dialectics are different from their Chinese analogues. The informed perspective presented here may rouse a sensitivity to these differences in a tongbian reading of Marxist philosophy on the part of Chinese intellectuals; Marxism is no longer exactly what it is understood to be in the Western tradition. Ai Siqi's discussions of "materialism" and "the interpenetration of opposites" exemplify how Chinese Marxism draws on tongbian to read Marx and Engels in a distinctly different way. Little in Ai's thought (...) can be identifiable with Engels' law of unity of contradiction, where all motion consists of the interplay of attraction and repulsion, and the form of motion is what physics terms "energy." Following Hall and Ames on correlative thinking in the Chinese tradition, it is argued that certain Western cosmological assumptions have led to differences between Western Marxism and particular philosophical currents in the Chinese tradition, and that Chinese Marxism has developed from a culture and tradition that cannot be understood fully in terms of Western categories. (shrink)

It has often been pointed out that the Marxian theory of value contains some inconsistencies, usually in relation to the concept of abstract labour. However, the contradiction between the concept of labour and the concept of validity with which Marx operates in Capital has never been discussed. A detailed analysis shows that this concept of validity refers to the process of abstraction which is carried out by the participants of the exchange process. Only the rigorous comprehension of this process of (...) abstraction can illuminate that for which the concept of abstract labour was developed: the unity and universality of value. On this basis, the paper criticises the Marxian development of the money-form and presents an alternative approach that builds on the aforementioned concept of validity. This concept is formulated in more depth by recourse to the works of Hegel, Simmel and Adorno. Furthermore, the paper reconsiders the dialectical development of categories in the light of this alternative conception of the money-form as totality and abstraction. Finally, the distinction between simple circulation and the process as a whole is explored and it is argued that, according to the novel reading proposed, it acquires a fundamental significance. (shrink)

Two points of contact are explored between contemporary philosophy of science and Dialectical Materialism. The first point deals with the interaction view of metaphor as an exemplification of the law of the unity of opposites. The contradiction is then noted between the strategy and tactics of much analytical philosophy and the lesson to be learnt from this account of metaphor. The concern to change category habits into category disciplines rules out the process of conceptual change of the interaction view. (...) G. A. Paul's dismissal of Lenin's theory of reflection is then criticized in the light of the interaction view. (shrink)

The article discusses the category of interest, which is an explanatory category of social phenomena in materialist ontology, particularly the Marxist variety. The considerations are guided by Hegel’s conviction that every category taken in abstraction loses its exploratory value, so instead of asking for such an ultimate basis for explanation, one should investigate what else should be assumed for something – interest – to really mean something. Following this advice, the text carries out a conceptual analysis of the categories (...) of life, teleology and identity and their mutual relationship based on Hegelian philosophy. Overcoming the ambiguity of Hegel’s argument makes it possible to uncover the dialectically negative identity of spirit that is society and nature, which, transferred to the dimension of social relations, makes it possible to talk about the internal connection of interest with its negation, which is disinterestedness. It turns out that interest can only mean something if it is related to disinterestedness, which, again, on the grounds of social relations and especially class conflict, proves to be the interest of the possibility of being disinterested. In the final part of the article, the result of these considerations is referred to Hegelian social philosophy, where it turns out to be reflected in the relation between the two main categories of ‘ethical life’ and ‘moral life’ usually devalued by interpreters. At the same time, the relation between these categories corresponds to the relation between the universal model of the bourgeoisie with their economic interests and the disinterested representatives of the general estate. (shrink)

The idea that human history evinces a pattern of development rooted in the propensity of human beings toward technical forms of rationality is fundamental to Marx's materialist conception of history. Yet the "dialectic of forces and relations of production" as traditionally conceived in historical-materialist discourse has found only weak expressions in social formations dominated by precapitalist modes of production. The hypothesis is advanced that the role of simple commodity production and exchange in such formations may be decisive to the emergence (...) of cognitive faculties capable of giving a systematic impulse to the development of science and technology, and therefore to a precapitalist forces-relations dialectic. This suggests a new way of appreciating Marx's "ranking" of the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production as "progressive epochs" in the development of human society, while illuminating the socio-historical provenance (and sources of variability) of the categories of human thought. (shrink)