On June 10, 2024, the Press Organization of Unity–Struggle–Unity met with representatives and theorists of the Russian and Romanian pre-party formation known as Workers’ Paradigm. This meeting was conducted with the mistaken understanding that the Workers’ Paradigm were Marxists. After the meeting, we discovered that they were in fact mechanical materialists. After lying (by their own later admission) to gain access to our internal communications network and some preliminary friendly conversation, members of the Workers’ Paradigm began to seek topics on which we could have a debate; rather than attempting to establish unity, it became clear that the W.P. members were interested in proving to USU’s membership that our understanding of Marxism is fundamentally incorrect.

Despite the fact that USU explicitly does not have political discipline outside of our minimum commitments — that it is, in fact, a place where factions are permitted and encouraged to grow — and despite the fact that we were quite clear that we do not have a “party line” on the People’s Republic of China, the W.P. mechanists insisted on having a meeting where they would (so we found out) put forward the thesis that the People’s Republic was not engaged in socialist construction. They then demanded that we defend the People’s Republic.

We declined to do so, not for any fear of tackling the subject, but because there were sufficient errors in the W.P.’s arguments that they required a thorough refutation before we could begin to have any constructive conversation. In essence, the W.P. thesis was that every socialist state reduces the size of state employees and its “state bureaucracy” until it reaches a “state of the whole class.” W.P. did not cite any reasons for this belief, but in fact referred to it as a “law” of socialist development. When pressed, they could only reference empirical data that they believed “proved” the existence of this law.

It was here that we began to suspect that the W.P. group did not have a deep understanding of dialectics. After further analysis, we were proved correct: the W.P. group rejects dialectical materialism in favor of pure mechanics, and their theorists referred back to the somewhat obscure Soviet debate between the mechanists (such as Stepanov and Bukharin) and the dialecticians (such as Deborin). This subsequent argument clarified the depth of the W.P. group’s commitment to mechanism and made it abundantly clear that they could in no sense be considered Marxist.

We bring up this short-lived controversy to demonstrate dialectical materialism to our readership and to help our readers understand the difference between dialectics and mechanics. This difference is an important one, because the general corpus of Western materialism is one of mechanical materialism. Mastering dialectics is much more difficult because of it. We must all be wary of falling into the trap that the W.P. group stumbled into.

Logic as the Basis of Argument

The fundamental issue of the W.P. group’s mechanical materialism is its refusal to apply logic to questions of “science.” Logic is a mathematical/epistemological system that helps outline arguments and conclusions. Where W.P. conjured up the “law” of dwindling state bureaucracy, they cited that “all observed societies that have engaged in socialist construction have diminished the size of their state and removed bureaucratic excesses.” Therefore, this “law” states that all societies engaged in socialist construction must diminish the size of their state and remove bureaucratic excesses.

But this is not how logic works. It is not how laws work.

A law cannot be proven by evidence. This is of critical importance. There is nothing you can see or experience that can prove that a law exists. Observation of the material world cannot, by itself, establish a necessary connection between cause and effect. Observation provides us with the raw material to establish connections and posit laws. Laws are not proved by evidence. A law may be supported by evidence, or it may be disproved by evidence. A proof comes by way of a necessary logical connection established between evidentiary premises. By referring only to the observable world, the mechanists make it impossible to draw any conclusions whatsoever.

Logical syllogisms — the basis of all argument, conclusions, and serious scientific inquiry — are constructed from a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. To establish a law, one must establish a logical connection between evidence.

Major Premise: This premise contains a general statement. The truth of that statement should be established by empirical evidence. For instance: Humans are mortal.

Minor Premise: This premise contains a specific statement. For instance: Socrates is human.

Conclusion: This is a combination of the necessary effects of the major and minor premises. Example: Socrates is mortal.

If we were to discover, through empirical research, that Socrates was immortal, we would know we had a flaw with one of our two premises. Either Socrates is not a human, or humans are not necessarily mortal. This is the basic, fundamental, mode of drawing conclusions. It allows us to see the chain of logical connections, and can act as a proof. A valid proof for the dwindling of the state under socialism would need to include a major premise such as: “Socialist production causes a dwindling of the state.” But this would simply beg the question, deferring the answer to a subsidiary proposition. What about socialist construction causes the dwindling of the state? By burying the “work” necessary to get to the outcome, the W.P. group (and all mechanists, such as the bourgeois positivists and economists) simply hide the question somewhere else.

Study Logic, Study Dialectics

Logic is not the end of study, but only the beginning. The W.P. group’s evidence that socialist construction was not occurring in the People’s Republic of China relied on the fact that the superstructure, here the political form of the state, cannot do anything other than express the exact makeup of its economic base in society. This reduces dialectical materialism to a simple machine, where causes and effects follow in one-sided succession. We must not forget that “Dialectics is the teaching which shows how opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical — under what conditions they are identical, transforming themselves into one another — why the human mind should take these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, transforming themselves into one another,” as Lenin taught in his “Conspectus on Hegel’s The Science of Logic.”

The historical conditions, the circumstances in which something comes into being, must be analyzed to understand the thing. Truth cannot be abstracted. “There is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete,” as Lenin wrote. The superstructure of any given society is not a simple or mechanical expression of its economic basis, but rather is the result of processes occurring over time, with both a past and future. To analyze them as a disconnected sequence of still images is to essentialize them and make them metaphysical concepts.

Although economic relations are always the primary aspect of the base/superstructure pair, economics are not always “in command” at any given time. This would defy dialectical motion. In any given constellation of facts or events, superstructure must temporarily be primary. Failing to understand this reflux of base upon superstructure and superstructure again upon base makes dynamic analysis into something dead, static, and metaphysical — something incompatible with historical materialism or dialectical reasoning.

We have seen this same mechanism at work in the public discourse on Marxism. A thing is this or that, it is or it is not, it possesses an essential feature or it lacks that essential feature. For the Marxist, however, things do not possess essential features in and of themselves but rather are in relations with other things and it is from those relations that attributes arise. As Lenin wrote in On the Question of Dialectics, “The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their ‘self-movement,’ in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is then the ‘struggle’ of opposites. The two basic (or two possible, or two historically observable) conceptions of development (evolution) are: development as decrease and increase, as repetition, and development as a unity of opposites (the division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation).”

Defeat the Mechanist and Study Dialectics

Failure to comprehend the true nature of matter and development, the laws of dialectical unity and growth, leads to deeply flawed analysis. “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” We can go farther. Without correct revolutionary theory there can be no correct revolutionary movement. We must defeat the mechanistic tendency that suffuses and invades Western science and study dialectics together so that we come to a deep and intimate understanding of the nature of contradictions and self-development. The Workers’ Paradigm group made basic errors in logical analysis because they did not sufficiently study logic, which is the foundation of science. Logic isn’t something that we are simply born knowing; it is acquired through experience. That experience can be refined by study, and in fact has already been refined by others into the rules of logic. By studying and mastering the forms of logic and its syllogisms (that’s how arguments are constructed), Marxists can more quickly analyze the flaws in their own arguments and the arguments of others and much more easily diagnose where the argument has gone astray.