Those of you who’ve heard this joke will have to be patient, because I think anyone speaking on dialectics should tell the story about Joseph Stalin. Stalin supposedly responded to any dissent by telling the dissident they didn’t understand the dialectic. Until one day his critics finally challenged him: Hey, you’re always talking about the dialectic, but we’ve never seen it. Whereupon Stalin reached into a drawer, pulled out a loaded pistol, and said: "Comrades, this is the dialectic."

The point is that dialectics is built up into a big mystical affair, an impressive array of mumbo jumbo to intimidate people. And so it’s no wonder people sometimes come up and ask me: just what the hell is dialectics?

I’ve given various answers, and the answers may have satisfied them but they never satisfied me. I would give a definition like: "dialectic means looking at things historically, in the course of their development". Which is true, but hardly the whole story.

Finally I decided the only way to make sense of it was to take that definition I just quoted and apply it to dialectics themselves. That is, to look at how dialectics have emerged in the history of human thought. This took me back to the Greeks, especially Plato.

Many elements of what we call dialectical thought are present in various Greek philosophers, but in this talk I’ll stick to Plato. You pick up his writings, and what do you find? Dialogues - the two words are related. The term dialectic is closely associated with a particular form of reasoning among the Greeks, the kind you find in Plato, where Socrates is discussing issues with other people.

Now what’s the aim of those dialogues? Not just to prove one person right and another wrong. The aim was for everybody involved, even Socrates, to learn something. Through the clash of ideas, through each person’s ideas stimulating those of the others, you aim to reach a new combination, a higher synthesis of ideas. This is a process of struggle for the truth, a struggle for higher insight.

In Plato’s Republic he makes Socrates describe the process of dialectical reasoning as follows: "Dialectic [means] treating assumptions not just as beginnings, but as steps and springboards for assault, from which we may push our way up to a region beyond the assumptions and reach the beginning of wisdom." And the translator adds this note: "The words seem to suggest an assault on a fortress wall, using steps and clinging to ropes or the backs of other men, reaching the top, and dropping onto the other side to finish the fight."

Plato thought this form of struggle for new insights was a higher form of reasoning than ordinary logic. The ordinary sort of logical reasoning, like you get in arithmetic or geometry, where you start from a certain premise and you deduce the fact that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the square of the other two sides of the triangle – that was very useful. But to get to higher, more divine forms of truth, you needed the creativity of dialectic.

Later, with Aristotle, the regular form of logic became dominant. And that was a good thing, since it made possible the development of science. Society hadn’t reached the stage where it could make full use of the dialectic. That didn’t happen until around 1800. So we leave the Greeks, and make a leap forward in history.

We leap forward to a time of rapid social and political change. Everything was in flux. Old, established, traditional ideas were being shattered. Above all there was a great revolution in France, which had a powerful impact on a young philosopher named George William Frederick Hegel.

I should warn you I’m going to oversimplify Hegel a lot. Here was man who began as something of a radical thinker. But because he came along a bit too early, before socialism emerged as a serious option, he ended up putting his philosophy into a mystical framework, and from there he drifted rightwards until he ended up as a well-known defender of the status quo. In order to move smoothly from Hegel to Marx, I’m going to oversimplify and put the stress on the radical ideas of the young Hegel, and the radical implications of some of the later work, which are there if you look for them.

Hegel belonged to one of the two great traditions of modern European thought: that of rationalism. This was a school of thought that began with the power of human thought, of human reason. You know that famous phrase that’s supposed to have come from Rene DesCartes: cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I exist". From starting points like these, the rationalists believed they could arrive at the truth about the universe through the power of human reason.

While their philosophical opponents, the empiricists, said that our knowledge of the world comes from the information we get from our senses, the rationalists said no: real wisdom comes through reason. While the empiricists placed a great emphasis on facing up to the specific facts before us, the rationalists had a certain hostility to mere facts.

This sounds mistaken, and it is mistaken, but even so it wasn’t simply mistaken. As you’ll see, there was a valuable tendency in their arguments, and they played a very important role in the development of western thought.

When the rationalists put reason above empirical facts, they were declaring their rejection of the facts of their day. They were revolting against the reality of their time. They lived in a world of backwardness and oppression, the world of decaying feudal oppressions that were an obstacle to progress. Their struggle to establish the primacy of reason was a struggle to create a world that would conform to reason – that would be a rational world.

To this tradition, Hegel gave a powerful boost by introducing the idea of negative thinking. Every situation, every reality contains contradictions, he argued. New situations arise out of the crisis of the old. The continual progress of change through contradiction, up to and including the trump of the French revolution, is a triumphant progress of reason.

This was idealism: the notion that ideas are the decisive thing in changing the world. We know that’s wrong. But he was getting at something. He was getting at the important truth that the world changes because of the revolt of forces within society.

A philosophy with such revolutionary implications could hardly fail to include a critique of the society of his own time. And in fact Hegel’s early work contains some comments on capitalism that could come straight out of Marx.

He disliked the way capitalism divided people from each other, atomised them, fragmented them. He pointed out that the economic system was not collectively planned, but was anarchic. It was based, he said, on an "incalculable, blind interdependence", it "moved hither and yon in a blind, elementary way, and like a wild animal called for strong permanent control and curbing." He even distinguished between concrete and abstract labour, as in Marx’s Capital. The labour process was out of control, and therefore "abstract".

Hegel disliked the organisation of capitalist society, and wanted to overturn it. That was a major feature of his early work; it was negative thinking, an attempt to make a rational challenge to an irrational society. Finally, Hegel didn’t think correct ideas fell from the sky. He understood that all progress was the product of labour and struggle.

In the introduction to the Phenomenology of Mind, he wrote that nothing of importance is ever achieved without "the seriousness, the suffering, the patience and labour of the negative". And he understood that people transform themselves through this struggle, this "labour of the negative". I’m emphasizing this point because Marx emphasized it. Hegel, wrote Marx, "grasps the nature of labour and conceives man as the result of his own labour".

There was just one problem, and Marx was quick to point it out. The only labour Hegel had in mind was intellectual labour, the activity of human consciousness. After all, Hegel was a philosopher in the rationalist tradition.

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There is a very popular little story about what Marx did to Hegel. It goes like this. Hegel was an idealist. His dialectics were fine, except that they were idealist dialectics. Hegel thought ideas determined everything. But Marx was a materialist. He understood that ideas were just the reflection, or perhaps we might better say they were determined in the "last instance", by material factors. And so he took that dialectical method of Hegel’s, and gave it a materialist basis. As the saying goes, with Hegel the dialectic was standing on its head, and Marx had to set it right.

Now this is all fair enough. It had better be, because I repeated every bit of it the last time I spoke on this topic. But we live and learn, and it seems to me that this little story misses the really important thing Marx did.

From what I’ve said about Hegel, it should be clear that in many areas of his thought, he was definitely on to something. With his youthful hostility to emerging capitalism, his understanding that history develops by clashes and contradictions, his desire to end economic anarchy, even his stress on labour, he was struggling in thought for something very important. And when you read the remarkable chapter in the Phenomenology of Mind about the relationship between master and servant, where the master exploits the servant, the servant does the productive labour, but because of this productive labour the servant will end up on top in the end … you can see that he was very, very close.

But not close enough, because he was missing something absolutely fundamental. He needed an organising principle. For that he needed the organised workers’ movement and the class struggle. He didn’t have that. So instead he concocted all kinds of mystical rubbish about the Absolute Spirit moving through history. It’s this Absolute Spirit which resolves the contradictions, ends capitalist anarchy, does all that pain and labour of the negative.

Of course, this is really just a philosophical version of God. It’s a religious method, and it led Hegel further and further to the right, until he ended up a supporter of the government of his day.

What Marx does that’s really important is get rid of the Absolute Spirit, and base the dialectic on the activity, the labour and above all the class struggles of real human beings.

With Hegel, you get the impression that History, with a capital "H", rolls along of its own accord, because the Absolute Spirit dwells in it. In contrast to Hegel, here’s what Marx says:

Negative thinking is not enough, says Marx. You have to find a way to translate the ideas into action. "The weapon of criticism is no substitute for the criticism of weapons." The class enemy has material force, and "material force can only be overthrown by material force". But, he adds, "theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses". OK, but where do we find the mass of people who can become the carriers of radical, subversive ideas?

"This is our answer," writes Marx. "In the formation of a class with radical chains." He doesn’t mean heavy chains. By a class with "radical chains" he means a class whose oppression makes it the enemy of – the dialectical negation of – everything about the capitalist society that gave it birth. "A class with radical chains, a class which is the dissolution of all classes" – he means a social force that can only liberate itself by creating a classless society, "a class which is the total loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat."

And with this answer we’re off and running. For Marx, the revolt of philosophy against an oppressive world has to find its realisation in the revolt of the working class. The contradictions that the philosophers have traced in the realm of ideas are actually reflections of contradictions in society – class antagonisms and the like. And if you really want to understand the history of the world in terms of labour, you have to start with real productive labour, the labour of the working class.

And having said this, I think we can now properly understand the so-called "laws" of dialectics that everyone talks about. In discussing them, I’ve probably forgot one or two of them. I didn’t go look them up, because I don’t place a great importance on them in and of themselves. Talking about a few will be enough.

1. The first point is that everything in the world is constantly changing, constantly in flux. This is a very old idea that appeared in ancient Greece. It means that no form of society is permanent. Neither is human nature. Human beings change the world around them, and change themselves, all the time. Sometimes this takes a revolutionary form. This first point leads to a second:

2. That we’re not bound by formal logic. Formal logic, the kind of reasoning developed by Aristotle, starts with the principle of non-contradiction: you can’t be something, and yet be the opposite of that something, at the same time. A = A. Therefore A is not equal to not-A. Or as John Molyneux puts it, the cat is either on the mat, or not on the mat.

This is the logic on which arithmetic is based, and most forms of everyday logical argument. I want to stress that we don’t repudiate formal logic. We don’t say it’s wrong. It’s correct and useful for a great many things. Try doing your income tax without being guided by Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, and you’ll end up in trouble.

But in the realm of human history, we’re dealing with constant change. A given person may be a strike-breaker one week, then end up joining the strike the next. Later on, they may become demoralised and once again cross the picket line. Or take capitalism, which started out as a progressive form of society, but is now a reactionary obstacle to human development.

So when you look at history, A is not always so different from not-A. A can turn into not-A. If the cat is in motion, there is a point where it is both on and off the mat.

So our second principle of dialectics is to move beyond the law of non-contradiction, which asserts the incompatibility of opposites … and set up a law of contradiction, so to speak, which asserts the unity of opposites. And from here it’s not hard to get to point three:

3. Everything gives rise to its opposite.

Human beings engage in labour and struggle, build up forms of social organisation, but having done so they become dissatisfied with these forms. Their labour creates new ways of producing goods to which these old forms of social organisation aren’t suited. Their class struggles threaten these forms politically.

For example, the capitalist class emerged within the feudal society of the middle ages, felt that this feudal society was an obstacle to its development, and shattered it in a series of revolutions. Today we have a mass working class which has an interest in destroying the society that gave it birth.

Things give rise to their opposites. This leads to clashes, and sometimes to the destruction of one or both of the contending forces. In such situations, society can change very rapidly. Which brings us to the fourth dialectical principle:

4. A gradual, slow, quantitative change can lead, at a certain point, to a qualitative change.

Once again I’ll take an example from the real of human activity. You’ve probably had the experience of arriving early for a demonstration. There’s nobody there but a few left paper sellers. Then a few more people roll up, including one or two well-known cranks. Then a few more real people. The numbers grow by ones and twos. This goes on for a while, and we find ourselves saying: Christ, this is going to be small. And then quite suddenly we realise the crowd has swelled. The atmosphere changes dramatically. The demo is going to be a success.

This is the passage from gradual, quantitative change to sudden qualitative change. The example is trivial. The best example is social revolution. In a given society, things gradually get worse and worse, people are more and more unhappy. But nothing much happens. Then suddenly the mood changes, revolts break out, a revolutionary situation emerges.

How is this possible? Remember we said everything in society is always changing. But some things change faster than others do: change is uneven. Some workers become radical faster than others. Some sections of the ruling class are less able to adapt with the times than others. Now if you imagine all the different aspects of society changing at different rates, then at some point you’re going to get a knotting up, a contradiction; that contradiction holds things back for a while, then it explodes. Things leap forward. Or backward, for that matter.

Lenin spent months reading Hegel. Then at one point in his notebooks it’s obvious he got very excited, and in the margins he wrote: "Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!" He had found in Hegel’s philosophy the logic of revolution.