Political Theory for Smarties: Dialectics
We are in a new political period. The period of explosive socialist growth that was kicked off by Bernie Sanders in 2016 came to an end sometime in the year after the uprising of 2020. Now, we find ourselves in a period of right-wing reaction but also shifting fortunes for the Left. This new period is disorienting for all of us, but particularly for those that have only known the period of explosive growth.
Adjusting to this new period will require developing our tools of analysis to understand the period we are in, the balance of class forces around us, and the shifting terrain that we are fighting on. The foundational tool to understand this is dialectics. I hope readers will bear with me because explaining dialectics is difficult since you’re essentially explaining life.
Every socialist needs the ability to see the world as it actually is: riddled with contradictions. Dialectics allows us to process this so we can navigate and resolve these contradictions. But before explaining what it means to see the world dialectically, it helps to contrast a dialectical view against the standard way that we are taught to see: a static, binary, and linear view.
Static Age
All too often, we hear that “once a _______, always a _______”. You can fill in the blank yourself. Often, this is applied to negative personality traits, and most often to “criminality”. But it also gets applied to people’s political perspectives. Everyone that voted for Trump is treated as hopelessly lost, incapable of shifting their ideas based on discussions, observations, experiences, changing world events, etc. Conversely, all people that voted for Bernie are expected to be close to socialist politics and it is taken for granted that they won’t politically backslide.
What I’ve recently heard is that “abolitionists are too anarchist” and can’t build movements/organizations that will persist. In all of these examples, the snapshot of where people, movements, or organizations are at in a given moment is taken as unchangeable, static.
Binary Thinking: Good or Evil
The “common sense” of capitalist thinking is that, in addition to being static, life is all binaries. People are good or evil, successes or failures, men or women, Black or white, law-abiding or criminal, deserving or undeserving, citizen or undocumented, straight or gay, etc. This is the dominant way of thinking under capitalism and it manifests in every aspect of our society. From the glorification of celebrities and “success stories” on one side, to means tests and prison systems on the other.
This way of thinking also gets applied to world events. A bit of news is treated as only being “good” or “bad”, instead of realizing that within any “good” piece of news, there is the danger of complacency and in any “bad” news there is the potential for new opportunities.
Linear Thinking: The March of Progress and Accumulation
Static and binary thinking are usually accompanied by linear thinking, or seeing the path from point A to point B as a straight, gradual line. We see examples of this as children, when we are told that if we study and work hard, we will progress to a steady job, small family, nice house, and eventual retirement. We also see examples in the concept that history is naturally on a path to scientific and social progress, only taking time instead of struggle.
We even see this in many socialist circles that would have us believe that the solution to capitalism is simply to accumulate more organized socialists and more socialist politicians. As one comrade put it, “sometimes it feels like people think that socialists are supposed to recruit 50% + 1 of society to a socialist organization and then call the question on the revolution”.
So far, we’ve looked at the standard way we are trained to view the world. Now, let’s switch to a dialectical view.
Life in Process
Unlike the static view of the world, what we need to remember is that things are always in process. Individuals are constantly taking in lessons from life, (from lived experiences, observations in world events, etc.) and applying those lessons to their lives. People are capable of being stagnant. Many of us can probably think of a friend who has barely changed since high school. But most people are constantly learning over the course of their lives and developing in new directions.
The same is true regarding politics. Speaking for myself, I was opposed to engaging electoral politics through the Democratic party, back in 2016. My initial reaction to Bernie Sanders was that he was a joke. But as I observed his electoral wins against Hilary Clinton, I realized that there was a political shift happening and I switched from laughing at Sanders to supporting him. Similarly, I had considered myself opposed to abolitionism because it was “too anarchist” for me. But the explosion of the Uprising made me realize that again, there was a political shift happening, and that the abolitionist movement was our modern revolutionary movement.
The point I want to underline is that my own understanding of the world was in process, taking in the snapshots of life. In other words, the snapshots only make sense when we process them into a motion picture.
Beyond Good or Evil
In contrast to the binary view, there is the view that most things in life exist along a spectrum and because they can stretch out across the spectrum, it is possible for something to simultaneously exist at two contradictory points.
This view acknowledges that most things in life are full of contradictions. Every person you know, including yourself, has been both charitable and greedy, helpful and hurtful, hardworking and lazy, etc. All people also routinely cross the spectrum of gender norms, romantic norms, artistic and political norms, etc — or are at least capable of doing so.
Again, this isn’t just about people: this is also about world events. For example, after the Capitol Riot, people debated if it had been productive or destructive for the far-right. The New York Times put out a surprisingly dialectical analysis: it was both. It had been destructive in that it got several individuals arrested, including many far-right leaders, causing groups to splinter. But it was also productive in that several people saw the riot as an inspiration to either become lone wolves or else build more resilient organizations that could engage local and electoral politics. The two contradictory positions were simultaneously true. Leaning into this contradiction, some of us in Chicago came to the conclusion that we needed to form an antifascist working group in order to help resolve it.
Beyond Straight Lines
Just as life is not static, and not binary, it is also not linear. In the life of any individual, there will be periods of “normalcy” or equilibrium accompanied by moments of crisis and success. The joys of finding love accompanied by the pain of heartache. The triumph of starting a career followed by the terror of layoffs. The satisfaction of physical fitness accompanied by the devastation of illness and injury. In other words, the life of any individual will combine forward and backward motion. Combined, these contradictory periods produce the totality of our existence and the reservoir that we draw from to learn life’s lessons.
At the world scale, history follows similar patterns. Entire civilizations have risen and fallen, from ancient Egypt, to the Aztecs, to the feudal orders of Europe. Peppered between the rise and fall were periods of stability, success, and crisis. Similarly, political movements also follow non-linear paths. While the US legalized abortion in 1973, and countries like Mexico, Argentina, and Ireland are recently moving forward with abortion rights, now we see the US move backwards as the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade.
We also see that while there can be longer or shorter periods of social equilibrium, they can give way to abrupt crises like economic depression, wars, and pandemics. Similarly, those crises can trigger explosions of their own. World War I, for example, set the stage for the Russian Revolution of 1917. The pandemic of 2020 triggered the uprising, which was able to mainstream abolitionist politics in a matter of weeks even though modern abolitionists have been organizing since (at least) 2001. In other words, life will involve gradual progress and regress, but it will also involve abrupt ruptures that quickly push movements further ahead or drag them behind.
When referencing these ruptures, Lenin stated: “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Ruptures create a situation where “desperate times call for desperate measures” and the radical ideas that would seem “fringe” during “normal times” suddenly make sense to large swathes of the masses, creating openings for both the far-left and the far-right. This means that crises are potentially revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary, opportunities.
The Point is to Change It
If we tie these threads together, I would summarize dialectics as a way of viewing the world that understands that:
- Life is constantly in process
- All aspects of life exist along a spectrum, which means it is possible for two contradictory things to be simultaneously true
- Life moves forward, backward, and experiences ruptures in either direction
- It is up to human activity (i.e. organizing and class struggle) to either resolve the contradictions or preserve them
This is all in contrast with a capitalist view of the world which is static, binary, and linear: and you just have to deal with it.
The overarching contradiction we face is capitalism itself. Capitalism is a class system that is destroying our lives and the world itself. But it is also a system that has produced the science, technology, social classes, and social organization to end all classes and create a new system of economic and political democracy that could save the world. So dialectics isn’t just about better understanding the world for the sake of understanding. Instead, it is a tool to understand the world in order to resolve the contradictions and build up the revolutionary rupture from capitalism to socialism, and finally into full abolitionism.
