A Law of Dialectics Explained

There’s a law of historical dialectics that says, if you try to destroy something, the first thing that happens is you make it stronger.

It’s a little like the law of motion that says, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, but it applies to historical and not merely physical entities.

The law can be derived from certain characteristics of subjectivity: it is aware when its destruction is threatened, and it is free to avoid or overcome the threat. Just as this is true of individual subjective beings, it is also true of the larger historical entities – classes, parties, nations – made up in part of these beings.

The law also has objective grounds, but they are a bit harder to express.

Dialectical movement begins with the working out of a contradiction within the entity thereby put in motion. It ends in the negation of the entity in favor of a new unity. The new unity is realized as one among the possibilities for the old – specifically the possibilities for resolving the contradictions of the old.

All of this, the old contradiction, the possibilities for resolving it, and what, having been negated, is now absent, belongs to objectivity as real moments of historical existence.

We’d like to see the necessity of this; and if we could, that would confirm what we would like to believe about the tendency of human history as a whole.

But really, at the time the contradiction is felt strongly enough to begin the dialectical movement, there is no guarantee which of the equally objectively existing possibilities the movement will begin with, or subjectivity will seize upon.

That’s why it’s possible to make mistakes, not just from, say, a political or military standpoint, but from a dialectical standpoint. Because we do know that the tendency of human history is progressive, and in favor of the many rather than, or finally at the expense, morally, politically and economically, of the few.

Thus, when there is an open threat, subjectivity puts things in motion, and when the threat is destruction, seizes upon every possibility.

Just so…

…and here follows the application of the law, in my next post.