Communist Philosophy: One into Two? Two into One? Or Something Else?
Posted by Mike E on September 22, 2010
How the non-Maoist schema thesis-antithesis-synthesis is often depicted
by Mike Ely
Badili Jones recently wrote “Dialectics for Community Organizers. (first appearing on Freedom Road’s site).
Revolutionaries need to understand change well, so we need to elevate the visibility of dialectics and its controversies. I welcome the chance Badili has given us to engage with dialectics — and with the verdicts he chose to embed in his popularization.
When we raise dialectics, the question forces itself to the fore: Which dialectics? It is linked to our previous controversy: Which mass line?
There has been sharp conflict inside of communist philosophy over the concept that there are “normal” forms of negation, and therefore typical motion inherent to certain contradictions. This has been struggle over how ground our worldview in full appreciation of contradiction, conflict, accident, anomaly, complexity, particularity and unpredictability.
That is why it jumps out when Badili elevates of two particular formulas within his discussion of dialectics:
- Negation of the Negation,
- Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis.
My own views on communist philosophy are in a process of transformation, so I naturally don’t want to jump at Badili’s controversial statements in a knee-jerk way. But, it needs to be pointed out when someone promotes aging orthodoxies — when we should be examining these very concepts critically, and when we should be appreciating the effort of communists like Mao to break with precisely those same mechanical formulas.
Adopting these two particular schema would be a step backward for a communist movement that needs creative reconception. Especially because these particular schema have been associated with non-revolutionary and semi-religious tendencies within the ranks of communists.
Badili writes:
“Dialectics is the logic of change. There are three parts to this logic:
1. The unity and contradiction of opposites. Contradiction is inherent in everything and everything contains its opposite.
2. Quantitative changes become qualitative changes. For example, if we keep turning up the heat under water (quantitative change) eventually we will get steam.
3. Negation of the negation. Sometimes this is referred to the idea of the synthesis, of a thesis and an antithesis. “
Eric opened the door to a critical examination of this passage:
“…the content of dialectics that is presented here is deeply mistaken. “One divides into two,” what Mao believed to be the principal aspect of dialectics, never appears here. Instead, the piece uses the Soviet revisionist formulation “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” That formulation is associated with the view that the struggle of opposites come together into a synthesis (also known as triadism). It was used to promote Khrushchev’s theory of peaceful co-existence between the USSR and the USA. It has been used in this country to promote reformist strategies. The piece also includes the related over-emphasis on quantity and quality (instead of transformation of things into their opposites), which couples with the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”
I want to comment on this controversy (while not commenting here on the many other important points raised by Badili’s piece).
Conflict within communist philosophy
There has been (as you can imagine) a great deal of debate over dialectics since it was adopted as a communist theory by Marx and Engels. I assume Badili is referring to the well-known schema thesis-antithesis-synthesis, when he writes:
“Negation of the negation. Sometimes this is referred to the idea of the synthesis, of a thesis and an antithesis.”
Here Badili is promoting two schema derived from Hegelian philosophy and are associated with assumptions of inevitability and teleology that I think we should be discarding as outdated.
Mao opposed the idea of “negation of the negation” (and also the tendency to elevate “quantity to quality” in a way that serves gradualism). Rather than reversing Mao’s verdict on this, I think we should embrace it as a kindred attempt that undermines reformist thinking within communism.
Frankly, I was startled to see anyone put forward this particular schema “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” In my own political life, I have mainly encountered this schema when non-communists (and anticommunists) “taught” to students “what communists believe.” And (in my experience) we communists were always quick to say this was a falsification, and that it took a crude version of The Hegelian Dialectic and sought to impose it on Marxists — without bothering to engage what we Marxists have actually been saying. This “triad” was put forward in college philosophy survey courses that portrayed Marxism as something lifeless and schematic, and that rather consciously avoided/denied the contributions of modern Marxists (and particularly Mao and Maoists) to communist thinking.
The controversy over thesis-antithesis-synthesis emerges among Maoists over its whole conception: over how it sees the development of opposites, how it sees the resolution of their opposition, and strangely isolated way that it conceives of their operation.
Within Previous Revolutions: Opposed Views of Dialectics
The Maoists (in Mao’s time) led a struggle over philosophy that insisted that conflicts and contradictions were not typically resolved (mitigated) through merger. And that it is not the task of communists to constantly find “the golden mean” to mitigate contradictions. In other words, they argued against the view that the conflicts of opposites should be resolved by some kind of blending into a synthesis — but instead described the resolution of contradiction as “one eats up the other.” (Again, see Mao’s discussion of this, available as a separate post.)
The theory of “combine two into one” in China was associated with (rested upon, alluded to) earlier non-revolutionary forms of dialectics — that took great harmony as its goals. This view of resolution had great influence among both Chinese nationalists and communists during early periods of their revolution. (And only later, at a certain point in the development of the socialist revolution, did Mao more and more explicitly criticize the view that communism was a kind of great harmony after class conflict.)
The theory of “combine two into one” is not just “some things fuse and combine.” It is an active call for “combine” — i.e. it is a discussion of how the subjective factor (i.e. consciously acting humans) should deal with contradiction. One place to explore how this question was posed during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is the essay called “The Theory of ‘Combine Two into One’ Is a Reactionary Philosophy for Restoring Capitalism.” The theory of “combine two into one” (which was embraced and promoted by China’s capitalist-roaders in the 1950s and 60s) has now morphed (in their unfortunately victorious hands) into the ongoing campaigns of China’s new post-Mao rulers for harmony and “harmonious society” (within a capitalist social order riddled with oppression and resistance). From a theory for mitigating class conflict under socialism it has moved on to become a system for mitigating class conflict under capitalism.
Fixed schema… or the emergence and resolution of complex contradictions
Opposites don’t emerge in reaction to an initial thesis. This schema is often associated with the idea that contradiction emerges when a event or force produces a reaction (its antithesis) at a certain stage of development. It is opposed to a view that sees contradictory poles in constant contention — from the beginning of a process (and in some ways even before).
Did the proletariat develop in reaction to the industrial bourgeoisie? As an antithesis? Or were they born together in that process called capitalism, as it emerged from previous processes, and as its classes emerged from previous classes?
There are several things involved in this critique of thesis-antithesis-synthesis:
First, is the resolution of contradiction a merger of opposites into a synthesized oneness?
This conflict over synthesis appeared during Stalin’s line struggle with Bukharin over whether to organize new campaigns of class struggle. There was a related engagement with the philosophical argument that contradiction only emerged at a certain point in a process. It appears elsewhere (for example in Trotsky’s metaphor of the “parallelogram of forces”). And it appeared as part of sharp struggle in China over whether to “consolidate New Democracy” or press forward the socialist revolution — should the class struggle in China die a natural death, petering out, or would it erupt in new ways to resolve new and sharpening contradictions?
Second, this model is highly schematic, and tied to a notion of typical motion. The very structure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis involves isolating single contradictions in metaphysical ways that are not possible in reality. The schema trains people in views that lack of contingency. There is little no room for accident, no structure for a complex of other (including external) contradictions. In other words, this schema is (for good reasons) closely associated with notions of typical or inevitable motion — i.e. as if certain contradictions are “typically” resolved in particular ways.
One way it emerges in popular discussion: People who view change in terms of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” sometimes speak of The Dialectic of History (singular) as if our human events are part of one huge unfolding of a single, defined and overseeable process. Maoists with a different view speak of the dialectics of nature and society (plural) which assumes a great many complex interactions with much less predictability and prophetic oversight.
In short, this schema of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” is associated closely with downplaying the role of contradiction through the existence of things and processes, and with various kinds of inevitabilism and teleology brought into communism from other philosophy — and which many modern communists have been working to remove.
In the revolutionary movement in China, there was discussion of two opposing views of dialectics: the theory of one point (which held that “two becomes one”), and the Maoist theory of two points (that holds that “one becomes two.”)
Badili Jones is putting forward the Theory of One Point here — the one that Maoists in China associated with revisionism, reformism and capitalist restoration.
Non-examples:
In his essay Badili gives two examples for thesis-antithesis-synthesis:
“For example the idea of “Unity-Struggle-Unity or “Practice-Theory-Practice.” Starting with unity and applying the opposite of struggle we ideally would arrive not at the level of unity that we started with but at a higher level of unity. Simply stated, this means that change is not circular or linear but more or less change is cyclical.”
Neither of these two Maoist concepts are an example of (or an application of) the idea of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
When the contradictory parts of an existing unity erupt into struggle, they are resolved by one aspect eating up the other. Or, to be more precise, the best resolution is when incorrect ideas are eaten up by more correct ideas — that is our goal in the struggle.
The question of “practice, theory, practice” is more complex (and I hope to return to it in the future) –however for our purposes here it is enough to say that, the resulting practice is not a “synthesis” of previous practice and theory. These just aren’t examples of this schema.
A theory of incremental change
In Badili’s three parts of dialectical logic he includes this one:
“Quantitative changes become qualitative changes.”
Let’s just ask this true? Do small quantitative changes (additions, accretions, mini-steps) build up and (over time) “become” qualitative change? Is that how large changes happen?
Note: Badili’s formulation is markedly different from seemingly similar communist discussions of this. Look (for example) at Stalin’s famous phrase:
“Qualitative change leads to qualitative change.”
Is there significance in that seemingly minor difference of wording?
Hasn’t Badili changed dialectics from a theory of qualitative leaps and turned it into a theory of gradual, incremental change?
Look at Badili’s example of a trip to New York. It is true that in a linear journey each little quantitative change suddenly adds up and (bingo!) there you are crossing the line to New York. (One step follow another, then the journey ends.) But does that example apply (for example) to social change? Do we really take one little step after another and then suddenly find we have arrived — and are liberated?
Is this vision of “quantitative change becomes qualitative change” one we should promote among community organizers. Often community organizers of the NGO sphere already think that incremental reforms will slowly grow into better conditions… Isn’t dialectics actually a way of understanding that big radical changes need leaps and ruptures (i.e. revolution)?
Is Badili’s formulation the same as the concept that quantiative change leads to qualitative change (i.e. that qualitative change is a big leap, but the basis for its emergence is laid before the leap itself).
All throughout this essay by Badili, there are subtleties of formulations that champion a vague notion of “change” but not leaps in state (i.e. revolution). There is discussion of change but not resolution of contradiction through leaps and conflict.
Is it really sufficient to argue for vague notions of change? How different is this from Obama’s “change we can believe in”?
Badili himself asks in his essay: “How does this relate to organizing?” That is a question worth discussing.
Carl Davidson said
The so-called ‘triad’–thesis, antithesis, synthesis–came from the Hegelian era, not so much from Hegel himself, but those trying to simplify his rather complicated way of putting things. Same with quantity into quality, and other things used by Engels. Science by the time of Marx and Engels, when the period of the Second Law of Thermodynamics was new, used a lot of this as their ‘cutting edge’ for that time.
Science, however, has since moved on. It rests on a lot of the past, but discards a lot, too. Best to set some of this aside.
I’m a monist, so if I don’t take ‘one divides into two’ as fundamental, I don’t go anywhere. So yes, I’m for the theory of two points, to a considerable degree.
As for Mao’s version of it, it’s very much in tune with The Tao, which starts with a circle, then divides it into two, with both opposing, which is why the squiggly line divides the circle, to show dynamic tension, or contradiction. Each half is also a different color. Then each half is divided into two again, drawing a smaller circle of a different color in each. This is to show the interpenetration of opposites.
So Mao was very much in tune with the Taoist/Buddhist and thus more dynamic side of Chinese culture. The more static side is Confucius.
But here’s where I’ll reveal my ‘revisionism,’ at least as some might call it. Both the dynamic and the static are needed–the static to defend life, the dynamic to change it.
So if you look back at the Tao this way, two combine into one–call the red or white half of the original circle dynamic, and the dark side static. Both are necessary; neither can serve its nature without the other.
The art is knowing which to emphasize and when.
In either case, its not a bad model for big picture thinking, or even approaching more finite problems.
Buckminster Fuller was also a monist. He started with ‘Universe;’ he wouldn’t even put the article ‘The’ in front of it, because it presumed one standing outside of it, which was simply bringing religion in the back door to him. He divided it into two as well, energy and know-how. Energy was always constant, but know-how always grew. This was the source of wealth, to his way of thinking. Knowhow was unlimited, so in this aspect, both Universe and the future were open-ended. For a treat, read his little book ‘Operators Manual for Spaceship Earth.’ You’ll learn more than you might think!
Dewey and James were also monists. They also wanted to reject and break free of the old Hegelian triad, which they saw as closed system dogma. In their critique, they put out the instrumental theory of truth, which is more modern and more in tune with what scientists do when they’re doing science. but they also retained contradiction and the dialectic–but not as a closed system.
So yes, put aside the old Catechisms. They may make for training good believers, but not for making good scientists or critical thinkers.
Toddy said
Maybe I’m misreading, but I don’t see anywhere in Badili’s piece a commitment to “inevitability,” nor–and I literally laughed at both Mike’s, and earlier Eric’s attempts to wed the piece to it–pro-Soviet revisionism. There seems to be an increasing polemic against Freedom Road over the course of several posts here, so I will assume that the attempts to resurrect “lines of demarcation” around upholding (or not) the Soviet Union by incredibly creative reading-between-the-lines of Badili’s piece is somehow related.
The thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing doesn’t seem wholly distant from the “one becomes two” formulation, and indeed in contact with FRSO comrades I felt like their handling of the topic was much more inventive than what either Badili or Mike has put out–which indeed are both rehashings (certainly not reconceptions!) of “baroque” (again, lol) formulations of…wait for it…diamat.
To unite with something in Badili’s piece, I’d say that at base the lesson of dialectics is that the only inevitability is change. Explaining how that occurs, its particular form, etc., seems much more difficult, especially when we seek to do so in universal ways.
Isn’t it the case that in fact one thing may divide into two, and eventually those two may rejoin in a new form? Can’t it also be the case that two things could become one, and then from that new whole two new things could emerge? Who says that the synthetic form must contain two unchanged parts in some new iteration? Can’t the synthesis in fact be the swallowing up of y by x, and in the process x has become z as it has changed in the process of swallowing?
Certainly probably less studied in the subject than any of the formidable and well read voices represented here, I’d say that I’m not convinced of the totality of truth of any of the formulations of dialectics presented here–not Stalin’s, not Mao’s, and not the one attributed by Eric to the Nepalese (a thing becomes its opposite). And again, maybe it’s the understudying of the question–but to be fair to myself I have done a good deal of reading on this–but I don’t see how any of those are inherently mutually exclusive outside of the partisan and sectarian allegiances that bore debate about the concepts out.
Mike E said
Todd writes:
On this point, I agree. In fact, that is what “one divides into two, one eats up the other” refers to. This view is historically being ruled out when someone promotes “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”
Toddy writes:
The inevitability is not explicitly articulated in Badili’s piece (nor did I say it was).
Inevitably is part of the package that has previously arrived together with negation of the negation. Negation of the negation is a theory that over-estimates the inherent and assumable logic of outcomes. Inevitability is embedded there, whether Badili articulates that or not.
Whenever we confront the problems of previous communist inevitabilism (including teleology and a shallow triumphalism) we quickly come into engagement with negation of the negation — that is because negation of the negation is a philosophical vehicle that has served the tendency of some Marxism to assume that outcomes are inherent in the dynamics of a process.
Why?
These issue of negation of negation was confronted among communists during the great line struggles in the 1960s. That is objectively true. The rearguard defense of negation of negation was put forward quite militantly by by pro-Soviet forces internationally (including during Line of March’s anti-Maoist polemics within the U.S.) That is objectively true (and relevant).
Part of the transformation of Marxism into a state-legitimizing ideology in the Soviet Union involved an elevation of Hegelian concepts (and this became more and more acute as that state became less revolutionary).
No one is trying to “wed” Badili or his piece to pro-Soviet revisionism. We are simply pointing out (factually) that he is promoting a set of concepts opposed by Mao, and sharply upheld by the non-revolutionary and pro-Soviet forces.
You are the one reading between the lines:
We are discussing philosophy here, not the Soviet Union’s history. And we are discussing controversies that are ongoing, not trying to “resurrect lines of demarcation.”
I have argued (repeatedly and consistently) that we should not regroup around old lines of demarcation. And I don’t think we should casually promote old orthodoxies around dialectics either.
Tell me more about your views on this. My understanding is different.
These concepts aren’t merely “distant” — they are historically in sharp opposition. “Thesis-antithesis-synthesis” is one classic and widespread popularization of the anti-revolutionary theory of “combine two into one” — an attempt to universalize a theory of dying out of contradiction (i.e. often in service to peaceful transition and the dying out of class struggle).
Yes, I agree with you precisely…. who says it only goes one way? What does it mean to universalize one schema? (And isn’t that really what the Nepalis’ are raising?)
I would be eager to learn from their handling of the topic. Share some please.
Yous accuse me of:
I did not endorse any of the “lines of demarcation” here.
Speaking for myself, i think the whole field of Marxist dialectics needs to be looked at deeply — in light of modern experience, science and philosophy. In other words, you are mistaken if you think my essay is arguing for going back to embrace this or that form of diamat (the Soviet era codification of Marxist philosophy).
I was pointing out that if we are going to discuss the dialectics of the previous communist movement, we should at least appreciate those formulations that break with inevitabilism, and identify those formulations that represent previous Marxism’s most mechanical schema.
Toddy writes:
I’m not convinced either.
If someone presents such formulations of dialectics, we have an obligation to discuss it in a fresh way without a decade-old legacy of assumptions.
But let’s put it another way: I’m not ready to say which view of contradiction we should embrace and promote. But I do know several theories of dialectics we should definitely NOT promote. And that’s what we are talking about here.
Should we uphold the negation of the negation, not?
Is there one great “Dialectic of History” or not?
Does each event in the universe move through “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” or is there some other (more complex, messy, contingent and contradictory) form of motion that is universal?
Are specific processes sufficiently discrete that we can identify a single law of motion for them, or are we always dealing with multiple interpenetrating processes and many contradictions?
chuckie K said
One into many. Many into one. That’s why Capital fills three volumes and remains incomplete.
Toddy said
Mike, I’d repeat myself by saying that I don’t understand how these ideas are necessarily mutually exclusive outside of the history of sectarian and partisan debate that have surrounded them. So, you say that things are part of a “package,” or are “associated” with; that is, even though Badili has not said them, and has not applied them in that way, the entire controversy that used to surround certain concepts is resurrected.
I’m not quite certain that I care much for the supposed package to which ideas once belonged, or stances on the Soviet Union that are associated with them, but am much more concerned on a philosophical level with engaging those ideas apart from historically situated debate about them.
So, it is said that synthesis and negation of the negation are used to promote peaceful coexistence and the end of the class struggle. Is that necessarily the meaning of that philosophical concept? Couldn’t the heavy bureaucratic “socialist” state produce its negation?
The inventive application of these concepts in my experience was just that: we should not view thesis-antithesis-synthesis as a closed and singular process, but a continued chain of contradictions and syntheses. You say that we agree on the idea that x can swallow y and in so swallowing become z, but that in fact this is “one devours the other” and historically repudiates thesis-antithesis-synthesis. But how does it historically repudiate it outside the context of debates in which the side that (mechanically) upheld the t-a-s formulation against the one-into-two formulation?
How is it that x cannot be thesis, y cannot be antithesis, and z is the synthetic formation borne out of a process of x overtaking, devouring y? Just because x has overcome y, has devoured it, does not mean x is so much so the same that we can simply say “x has eaten y.” Isn’t x changed by the eating, by its defeating y? Isn’t it something new? And can’t that something new also divide into two, and one part will overtake another, and in so overtaking become something new…or even its opposite?
I’m happy that I learned and started to grapple with this after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, and the infighting that Mike, Badili, and other veteran comrades were so deeply involved in. And learning them separate from that I think really does produce different meaning for those concepts to me than to them. I very much appreciate that the application of these were used to justify certain concepts, but I’m unconvinced that there’s “something in them” that’s necessary to do so.
I.e., I never would imagine thinking that t-a-s would mean that we would think, well, gee, the class struggle is over. Isn’t the synthesis itself just some new thesis? Or some new thing that itself will negate? Or be swallowed?
Tell No Lies said
In Leszek Kolakowski’s “Main Currents in Marxism” he present a useful short history of dialectics in philosophy. According to him, “the negation of the negation” appears first in the work of the medeival Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart, who was tried for heresy (but disappeared before he could be punished), though it has some antecedents in earlier Christian reworkings of Greek philosophy. The negation of the negation is used to explain why a perfect God would feel compelled to create an imperfect world, and in particular humans. The argument is that through the world’s struggle to overcome its finiteness or imperfection, that is to say to negate the original negation of God’s perfection and to reunite with God in a renewed Absolute, God achieves an even fuller perfection. Or something like that.
Its not hard to see the continuities between this and Hegel but also with Marx’s notion of the realization of species being and the notion of modern communism as a renewal of the conditions of primitive communism negated by the emergence of class society, but now on a higher plane.
I think we should be careful not to recapitulate the stance of the Catholic Church re: Eckhart and ourselves treat the negation of the negation as a heresy because Mao opposed it. Rather we should understand its seductive appeal and what made it heretical as well as what is ultimately problematic in it. That is to say we should understand it dialectically. The belief that what seems in this society so unlikely, namely the negation of its negation of some original state of grace, is instead a teleological certainty can be a profound source of strength in the face of repression. And it is for that reason that it can also be perceived as threatening to the powers that be. Of course there is also something profoundly unthinking and conservative in that certainty as well, which is why it can also be appropriated as a pillar of state ideology.
This is one reason why it can be dangerous to think that what we need is a “return to Marx.” Marx’s own writings are contradictory. While on balance it seems clear to me that he rejects this schematic view of the dialectic it is also the case that he lapses into it at moments, especially when he is attempting to present his views in brief or in a popular form. Not surprisingly it is precisely these writings that are elevated to the status of “classics” and separated from the larger context of his whole body of work. Even if Marx understood the limitations of these more schmatic presentations it is only in the light of the experiences of trying to build socialism in the 20th century that the real dangers they represent become apparent.
Mike E said
TNL writes:
I agree.
The belief that socialism and communism are inevitable can be empowering for the oppressed (whose victory can otherwise seem so very unlikely.
When the followers of Nat Turner (or Tecumseh and his prophetic brother Tenskwatawa) thought their uprisings were endorsed and protected by profound spiritual forces, it was also empowering and emboldening. The belief in inevitable victory can help carry besieged or defeated forces through their hard times.
No one should doubt the utility of triumphalist conviction. The problem is: it isn’t true. It doesn’t capture reality.
Triumphalism is comforting, but it involves a kind of self-deception that prevents a sober assessment of challenges and problems.
“The people united can never be defeated.” Really? Are things that simple?
The universe is not some great karma machine that dispenses justice. Human society is not some great unfolding of predetermined contradictions where communism is the only possible outcome. New resistance does follow great defeats. The workings of capitalism do gather potential gravediggers and put them through hell. But nothing guarantees victory.
We need to discard the trappings of inevitabilism — including the negation of the negation, and the mechanical materialist ladder of societies (i.e the off-and-on socialist belief that human society moves necessarily from primitive communalism, to tribalism, to slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism and finally (tada!) to socialism and communism.)
And in many ways, the discarding of those trappings (like the discarding of religious thinking and its false comforts generally) can help clear the ground for sober and new calculation.
For the communist project, discarding inevitabilism in fact allows us to place the needed effort on our own creative action: We have a chance at success only if we think and execute well. There is not some god of History who guarantees us a second chance (and certainly not ultimate victory).
It is not enough to just “suck it up” in our own hard times, we must “think it through.”
While I agree with TNL in his reluctance to “return to Marx” — I also want to caution against blaming Marx for all of this. A great deal of mechanical thinking was brought into his Marxism, then enforced and codified at various points.
A lot of what people think is “in Marxism” is not there…. There is for example a passage in Badili’s essay that says:
But, in fact, communist theory has recognized that capitalist crisis did not have a “cyclical nature” for most of the twentieth century — and dealing with the changes brought about by capitalism’s global expansion was part of Lenin’s theory of imperialism. And similarly, assigning “overproduction” (of commodity goods) a key role in crisis is the theory of non-Marxist and tradeunionist analysis (and this underconsumptive theory has been correctly criticized by communists for decades).
The belief in inevitablism has its origins in the cultural views of capitalist European society in the 19th century — which had a giddy belief in its own limitless progress that infected many socialist parties as well. It is ironic (after the horrors of World War 1 and 2) that communists should be among the carriers of that long exhausted view of inexhaustible progress.
The relative isolation of socialist revolutions-in-one-country, the collapse of the first wave of communist revolutions, the restoration of capitalism in previous socialist states, the emergence of nuclear weapons, the now-unmistakable ecological impact by humans, and the indisputable dynamism of a vicious capitalism have both raised more and more acutely the possibility that we may not inevitably resolve the horrors of capitalism through progress.
Reality is not so comforting. Making progress requires quite a bit more new thinking and great new works. And the proclamation of earlier communist triumphalism would now be much less comforting and credible than before World War 2.
For example, while Marx did think there was a larger arc propelling society from class society to classless society, he and Engels did open the Communist Manifesto with a nuanced description:
Note the historically accurate caveat, ” or in the common ruin of the contending classes,” which says so much in our situation — where the collisions on a world scale may result in “revolutionary reconstitution” or “common ruin.”
Mike E said
Toddy writes:
It is true that when someone promotes a concept that we may choose to return to the controversies over that concept. Is that so wrong?
So, yes, if we are going to evaluate “negation of the negation” (which Badili advocated without explaining in any detail) we do need to go back to its well-established and long-articulated) meaning. Badili was alluding to a concept in previous Marxist thinking (negation of the negation) and relying on our investigation of that previous thinking to flesh out his meaning. Why should we not go there? How can we not?
After all, if we promoted “negation of the negation,” we would not be advocating something unheard of — but (with a sweep of the arm) embracing “all that” (going back to Marx). Or else concepts and common language have no meaning.
I am not against understanding old controversies. I think young communists (and young communist movements) need to master and internalize the lessons of previous controversies. What i’m against is mechanically assuming that old lines of demarcation apply today.
How can you understand dialectics without understanding Mao’s criticisms of Stalin’s philosophy? I don’t think you can. That doesn’t mean we must turn Mao into our “last word” orthodoxy.
Badili wants to resurrect and promote “negation of negation” — I think that is the wrong direction for a new revolutionary movement.
Badili wants to reverse Mao’s very provocative verdict on negation of negation. Is it wrong to explore Mao’s thinking on that? I think we have to.
Can we evaluate Marxist concepts anew? I think so. Can we do so “outside of the history of sectarian and partisan debate that have surrounded them”? No. Why would we?
That debate is a precious and indespensible part of what we have at hand. Unless you think reinventing the wheel in every sphere is somehow essential to reconception.
I think we stand on the shoulders of those debates and should grasp what was best in those past advances (not act in a very American way as if anything “fifteen minutes ago” is now irrelevant).
Mike E said
Toddy writes:
Clearly the restoration of capitalism is an act of material force. Counterrevolution means that one class (and one road) overthrows another class (and another road).
In that sense, the concepts of the capitalist roaders didn’t produce capitalist restoration — they, and their movement inside of socialism did.
But a movement (both of revolution and counterrevolution) needs an ideological superstructure. It needs justifications, guiding principles, schools, cadre training, and it needs its own philosophy.
And (in a number of key line struggles of the twentieth century), “two into one” was the philosophy of capitalist roaders in both Soviet Russia and Maoist China. It was their philosophy (and it was a way of expressing restorationist assumptions in the language of Marxism — which is after all what makes a revisionist different from any other counterrevolutionary).
I think you ask an interesting question when you say “Is that necessarily the meaning of that philosophical concept?”
Let me respond with an analogy. Is the concept of fate necessarily tied with defending the status quo in feudal conditions? Well, it is certainly tied (and well tied) to the feudal status quo.
Or imagine someone expresses a reactionary idea “All women are lying bitches.” How do we evaluate that? We both refute its truth (i.e. it is just not true) and we also point out its social role which is a separate matter (i.e. that misogynist ideas are used to justify a whole structure and culture of women’s oppression).
Now, lets go from crude reactionary ideas to the more subtle realm of two-line-struggle within communism: The idea that opposites merge or fuse or mitigate their conflict in a synthesis has a particular meaning.
Can’t simply we judge the idea by how it is used. And I don’t think we can judge an idea by who historically promoted it. I.e. we can’t just ideas in a utilitarian way.
I think we need a two level engagement with these two concepts (negation of negation and thesis-antithesis-synthesis). I think we need to engage whether they contain truth, and separately we need to understand the role they have played in the history of revolutionary struggle.
Mao’s argument on negation of negation was specifically about whether it is true, not whether it has proven useful to counterrevolutionaries.
Toddy writes:
That shows the limits of a purely textual read — as if we can “think” what something “would mean” without a deep understanding of its historical context. There are many wrong and reactionary concepts that may look quite reasonable to a simple textual read on paper — which is why when specific forces promote specific philosophical ideas it is worth looking at more than just the words, but also what the philosophical argumentation is in service to.
Over and over, revolutionary communist forces have fought to put contradiction at the center of their understanding of dialectics. And other forces (within these movements) have fought to subsume the struggle of opposites beneath other concepts. Why is that?
Toddy said
If one thing devours something else, haven’t two things become one very actually?
To wit, if I eat a pear–devour it–maybe I remain more in my own form than the pear does prior to its being eaten, and my eating it, but I am not the same as I was before I ate it. Two in fact have merged into one, and while one has certainly “won” out, if you will, we are synthesized into something new. (Of course, one will eventually become two as the changed pear and my body will hopefully part ways in a regular fashion.)
No one is saying that when two become one they remain the same but somehow are united in a way that they were not (and could not have been) before synthesis. But a contradiction–the pear, my hunger–has been reconciled, and while my line (nom nom) has won out over the other line (the pear as a whole), we are something new.
What I read here is one devours the other, but the devourer remains unchanged. I think this misses the important lesson of the t-a-s formula. But maybe I am misreading your claim.
Mike E said
A Specific Example
Take Badili’s concept:
Is this true?
Badili’s formulation is markedly different from previous communist formulations like Stalin’s famous phrasing (who wrote that:
Is there significance in that seemingly minor difference of wording?
Specifically, do we really believe that many, little quantitative changes become big changes in quality? Is that a theory of gradual change or not? Look at Badili’s example of “a journey” to New York… where (it is true!) each little quantitative change suddenly adds up and (bingo!) there you are crossing the line to New York.
Now let me ask you, is this vision of “quantitative change becomes qualitative change” one we can now apply to radical social change? Do lots of little adjustments and reforms suddenly “become” (i.e. add up to) the big radical change of system that we need?
Is Badili’s formulation the same as the concept that quantiative change leads to qualitative change (i.e. that qualitative change is a big leap, but the basis for its emergence is laid before the leap itself).
All throughout this essay by Badili, there are subtleties of formulations that (over and over) champion a vague notion of “change” but not leaps in state (i.e. revolution). (Hmmmm, putting forward vague notions of change against conservative notions of status quo and “back to the good old days”…. is that fashionable in American politics? Whose slogan is that?)
Should we associate these formulations with gradualism and reformism? Badili himself asks: “How does this relate to organizing?” Good question.
Mike E said
Toddy writes:
Only if your read is a textual one based on just one phrase. Again, that is the danger of “coming at the discussion” without understanding the larger philosophical context and political history.
Althusser describes two kinds of read: one is a simple reading of the text (divorced from all that). The other is a read that incorporates the context, that scours the text for voids and coding. We need to do such second reads together.
If you study the Maoist theory of dialectics (of which that phrase is just one pithy concentrate among many) you will see that of course Mao does not assume at all that the devourer remains unchanged…
When “one eats up the other” things “turn into their opposites” there too. The victor is transformed, new contradictions emerge (that inevitably contain elements of the old contradictions), the landscape is altered (even while it is still built up from elements of the old landscape).
Toddy said
[moderator snip of moderation issues]
Mike has (partially) quoted what my read of the “one devours the other” line here, and by that I mean my read of the interpretation being promoted by him–not my read of the Maoist concept generally. I have assumed that was the interpretation being promoted here as the idea that the one, having devoured the other, is something new–a synthesis of itself and what it has devoured–has not been repudiated, aside from reference to historical debate and the use and instrumentalization of that theoretical framework by people who, we agree, are revisionists.
Mike and I absolutely agree that who promotes something and what they promote it for are important. And we similarly agree in our disappointments with Badili’s presentation of dialectics, and what it is being used to promote.
But we disagree about the nature of the idea of thesis-antithesis-synthesis–in as much as I find some complement between it and the so-called Maoist formulation of dialectics. Maybe this is an ignorant and simple–”textual”–reading, but I don’t think so. In fact I think what I would allege is their complementary nature is in fact more truthful feeling than either taken on its own. I have crassly attempted to demonstrate what I mean by this, acknowledging that maybe I am wrong, with my example of eating a pear when I am hungry. (A pear…get it?!)
PatrickSMcNally said
Doesn’t Carl Davidson provide an interesting example of how the one-becomes-two thesis can be invoked? If I understand CD’s line of reasoning, there is one Democratic Party which he expects to see fracture into two or more fragments eventually. Hence, campaigning for Obama and other Democrats now can be justified on the grounds that the efforts will really be aiding a later faction after the split. Isn’t that similar to the way of invoking thesis-antithesis-synthesis to argue for peaceful coexistence?
Tell No Lies said
Toddy writes:
And then Mike suggests that it is Toddy reading between the lines. While I think Mike is sincere in his desire to avoid resurrecting old lines of demarcation, I also think old habits die hard. So, while I am in agreement with Mike’s critique of Badili’s use of certain formulations and don’t think their associations with Soviet Marxism are a stretch, I do think we should be careful about making assumptions about what those associations mean politically for Badili or FRSO. Though of course the question of what they mean is certainly one of interest.
FRSO’s writings probably get more attention here than those of many other groups because in spite of real differences, among the established socialist and communist groups out there in the US, their politics or at the very least their references are probably closest to our own and they are the group with which we probably have the most common history, recent or not so recent depending on the individuals. Given these histories though, I think it will take more conscious effort to avoid resurrecting old lines of demarcation.
Over the years I have had the responsibility in various capacities for teaching or leading studies of Marx and Marxism for people with little or no previous knowledge of the subject. And like many before me, I have struggled with how to present complex ideas in a short period of time in an accessible way and must admit to having fallen back on the triad and the negation of the negation a number of times before I came to appreciate what the stakes in the debates over those formulations really were. And frankly I am still learning this stuff. Which is to say that we are all carrying around various bits of unexamined doctrine the full implications of which only emerge when they get put out and are criticized.
Philosophy matters. But the practical political implications of particular philosophical stances are rarely straightforward or obvious. This is even more the case when the revolutionary movement is at a low ebb, when the numbers of folks able to engage questions of philosophy are small and when what engagement does take place occurs largely within and not between groups and trends. Having the right understanding of the negation of the negation, whatever that happens to be, is no guarantee of good political practice and having the wrong view may or may not matter either. Mastery of the the terminology of dialectics and actual dialectical thinking are two quite distinct things. The one can help with the other but my sense is that most of the best organizers are instinctive dialecticians and many of the folks who are best versed in these disputes couldn’t lead a kitten to play with yarn.
Carl Davidson said
The Democratic party is a bundle of contradictions–both within the upper classes and between them and the mediating organizations that pull in significant sectors of the basic masses of the workers and the oppressed. Not to mention their position in conflict with of groupings of the ruling class organized and the GOP, Tea Party and some on. To view it as a monolith doesn’t help much at all.
So yes, one divides into two on several levels here. But the basic concern is, first, to be positioned among the basic masses of our core alliance, the workers and the oppressed nationalities, and, second, to be able to help break them away, politically and organizationally, from their current position of being a subordinate and passive ally of sections of the ruling class. It’s not very easy to do this if you avoid the arenas they have chosen to manifest their political activism. the whole idea is to help create something new out of the breakup and division of the old.
One way of formulating it was that Obama was building a new bloc that excluded the PNAC crowd (preventive war vs Iraq) and others from the far right in Bush’s bloc. Neoliberalism was dividing into two at the top.
And the same time we were working to deepen that process, we were also trying to developing a new bloc, an alliance of socialists and Keynesians against the ‘reform’ neoliberals, Blue Dogs and the GOP right. Some of that is manifested in the Oct 2 March of DC.
Finally, on a much smaller level, we develop educational work around Marxism vs Keynesianism to build revolutionary organization, but this is still in its infancy, relatively speaking.
But I wouldn’t be too rigid about some of these old philosophical categories and phrases. They all have their good uses and limitations. Quantitative change building up to qualitative leaps still has some usefulness in the need to achieve critical mass and tipping points in the unfolding of organization building. Even Hegel’s ‘aufhebung’, which people are still arguing about, combining both ‘upheaval’ and ‘swallowing up’ to reach something new that includes the past but is different from it, as when a student ‘overcomes’ his teacher (Einstein overcoming Newton), has something to be said for it.
As the Buddhists say, the ideas are simply rafts to get you across the river. Once across, you can let them go. They are not the reality, just fingers pointing at the moon. Or ‘theory is grey, but life is green’–Lenin’s favored quote from Goethe.
Nelson H. said
Tell no lies says:
I have to say thanks here for an acknowledgement of something that I too have wondered about at points during these exchanges. I think remembering this fact, and an understanding that it is completely improbable that either group is the future revolutionary core, but rather a collection of folks who are overwhelmingly genuine revolutionaries should really guide how discussion takes place.
TNL is correct to point out real differences, and ones that short posts on comment threads may or may not help overcome (for instance, on the national questions, on questions of philosophy, on questions of organizational practice, on disagreements over the history of the RCP from 1976 till 2003, etc.)
I really welcome the above conversations’ handling of teleological errors, something I discussed previously in sharp exchanges that some folks here were around for and helped shape correct arguments (Celticfire, I’m thinking of you here).
One thing I had to wonder, reading the treatment of the “one devours the other” above is how we get at the synthesis Toddy points out.
In order to become a force with any chance of winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks didn’t start out as what they were in the early winter months of 1917.
In order for the Chinese Communist Party to win state power and begin the revolution’s consolidation this party was permanently, qualitatively altered over the course of struggle from an organization of a couple hundred who choose to engage huge percentages of their cadre in the everyday activities of the KMT. They didn’t spring onto the historical stage as the party that history demanded in order to win, facts of which I know Mike and other folks here are all too aware. And it was the engagement with the CCP’s opposite that changed it, the contradiction did in fact force a synthesis (not in a crude sense of two became one, but) in the sense the the antithesis which cleaved away from the thesis was itself remade through this crucible. The outcome was truly one of devourers and the devoured, but the elements of the former remained deeply entrenched within this new synthesis. (e.g. divisions between cadre form the cities and the base areas, capitalist roaders, support for women’s oppression, the hooligan laws which in part targeted lgbtq folks, etc.)
I think that the view on one divides into two and the rejection of the S-A-T as I am reading, in both ways, Mike propose is functioning in such a way as to reject erroneous teleological posturing and inevitability but then replace it with another error: that the will-be devourer is as she will be. In practice this shows itself as an assumption that “we have the correct line/understanding of philosophy/interpretation of history already figured out, and a correct conception of what proper practice looks like in hand. The aspect of the contradiction that will play its historical role of devouring is us, and we have little to change about who we are.”
I also think that this is a circular logic, which leads back to the real danger of rightism being initially opposed (peaceful transition, inevitability) as its adherents begin to explain away weaknesses. “Since we are ‘the opposite’ we’ve been waiting for, since our political line is correct, we will soon have all we need. We will have followers, we will have organization, and we will have revolution. We must gather forces and wait for our moment to present itself.”
It reminds me of what PUL called “left” sectarianism in Two, Three, Many Parties of a New Type?
I do not think that this is Mike’s intention. It is certainly not reflective of Kasama’s politics, at least as I understand them giving folks the benefit of the doubt. Although, I do think this error is where the argument goes once we give it legs.
r graves said
hey carl, have you written elsewhere at greater length about buddhism, taoism, and revolutionary theory? i’ve been intrigued by the bits and pieces you’ve brought up here and there in kasama threads.
kazembe said
Out of this two questions: 1) What do people think of Maurice Cornforth’s set on dialectics 2) Is it possible for Kasama or others to create a pamphlet on the history of dialectics?
Carl Davidson said
My politics and spirituality overlap, but they’re not the same. For the latter, I just keep it simple and practice it. I don’t even usually call myself a Buddhist, but more modestly ‘a student of The Way, a pilgrim on the road….’
But here’s a link to a piece I wrote back when Dan Quayle was vice-president where the spiritual, philosophical and political all come together a bit. It deals with dialectics, too. Some of you may find it of interest: http://net4dem.org/cdhome/pirsig.htm
Chris Cutrone said
@ Tell No Lies:
Marx’s writings are not self-contradictory on dialectics. The point is that it is difficult and problematic to try to express dialectical concepts using positive and hence non-dialectical language. One inevitably must present dialectics non-dialectically. Marx’s supposed “self-contradictions” are in fact his dialectical presentation.
I think that Mao on dialectics starts off on the wrong foot, and seeks to justify political actions with “dialectical” interpretation, but this is backwards. Dialectical recognition ought to motivate politics. Otherwise dialectics becomes an ideology.
A basic point: capital is dialectical. So we need to escape the dialectic of capital while we are condemned to participate in it. The negation of the negation is the negation of labor by its realization. A basic term of Hegel and Marx’s is Aufhebung, or as usually translated “sublation,” which means to simultaneously complete/realize and negate/abolish. This is what Marx thought about socialism in relation to capital. Socialism was the completion and realization as well as the negation and abolition of capital. Socialism as Marx understood it would be the dialectical transformation of capital. Furthermore, capital itself is not a static thing but rather a historically specific process of becoming, in which, for Marx, the socialist workers’ movement participates.
This is why, according to Marx, a one-sided opposition to capital that imagines that it is outside it won’t do. The only difference, for Marx, between the transformations of capital and the emancipatory potential of socialism is one of consciousness. The problem with most “Marxism” (and other non-Marxian socialism) is that it has been an apologia for/affirmation of capital because it has been an inadequate self-consciousness of it. Hence, “socialism” in the USSR and China could be considered an exacerbated form of capital — proletarianization. Because it existed in the context of global capital, it was not its antithesis but its local expression.
Only when “quantity changes into quality” and the preponderant force of the global working class is attempting a politics of “social democracy” (or, “communism,” if you will) in a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in which the workers themselves can self-consciously affect the conditions of labor at a global scale, can one begin to talk about the “negation” of capital. Not before and not otherwise. For Marx (and Lenin et al.) this seemed like an imminent practical possibility. Not today. That is why the dialectic has become degraded — and thus subject to such confused and confounding discussion.
Carl Davidson said
“Not before and not otherwise”? That’s the problem with the Hegian dialectic. We mortals only approach the Absolute; we never get there. In the meantime, there’s plenty of arrangements I’d find worth fighting for and defending, even if it’s only a small step in one part of the world. Here’s an example:
http://www.zcommunications.org/mondragon-diaries-5-days-on-the-cutting-edge-by-carl-davidson
Chris Cutrone said
@ Carl Davidson:
My point is not that there’s nothing worth doing until the millennium. My point was to re-establish what was meant by the Hegelian dialectic in Marx (and Lenin et al.). If it seems pie-in-the-sky, then we ought to at least admit that we’ve lowered our horizons, and not pretend that we are advancing the struggle when we’re actually falling behind it.
It’s not a matter of Mao not “getting” the dialectic, but that the dialectical conception of capital and socialism according to Marx was irrelevant to what Mao was actually doing, accumulating capital — proletarianizing the peasants — in China.
While it may seem like a stretch, I would argue that the Mondragon collectives, etc. are also a form of capital and not (necessarily a bridge to) its antithesis. As Marx put it in his Inaugural Address to the First International (1864):
“[H]owever, excellent in principle and however useful in practice, co-operative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. It is perhaps for this very reason that plausible noblemen, philanthropic middle-class spouters, and even kept political economists have all at once turned [nauseatingly] complimentary to the very co-operative labor system. . . . To save the industrious masses, co-operative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. . . .
“One element of success they possess — numbers; but numbers weigh in the balance only if united by combination and led by knowledge. Past experience has shown how disregard of that bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each other in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised by the common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htm
I’m very much in favor of decent forms of capitalism, but even the best are not free of the effects (ravages) of whole. I want not abortive attempts to transcend capital but a politics aimed at irreversible change.
redflags said
“a politics aimed at irreversible change”?
History is an ocean.
In any case, Chris, wonderful quotation of Marx. Some time ago I wrote a review of Naomi Klein’s The Take. Marx hits the nail I poorly pounded away at right on the head.
Political power may be an “old” goal for the workers, but apparently the capitalists never get tired of it. Instead of que se vayan todos, Argentina got que sera, sera. Where ten years ago the utopian left was carried away by Zapatista poetics, they’ve moved on to Argentina where limited goals can still seem visionary and romantic. The Take’s implicit argument for surviving capitalism instead of overthrowing it should give those most inspired by the events in Argentina pause. A revolutionary situation lapsed because the people, and the social movements which gave voice to their highest aspirations, were unable and unwilling to seize the moment. Capital still rules Argentina, even after it fled.”
Carl Davidson said
“Unable and Unwilling to seize the moment’ covers a lot of sins, doesn’t it? It’s the grunt work, both theoretical and plain old organizing, in the long march through the institutions, including the parliaments, that too many of our revolutionaries don’t have a taste for, IMHO.
Ajagbe said
“It is the negation of negation. This re-establishes individual property, but on the basis of the acquisitions of the capitalist era, i.e., on co-operation of free workers and their possession in common of the land and of the means of production produced by labour. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, arduous, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch11.htm
Giselda said
“And similarly, assigning “overproduction” (of commodity goods) a key role in crisis is the theory of non-Marxist and tradeunionist analysis” ……. a bit off subject but would appreciate a link that might elaborate on this point (or overproduction from a Maoist point of view)
Chris Cutrone said
@ Giselda et al.:
From Marx’s standpoint, the most important “overproduction” is the overproduction of *workers*, i.e., the “industrial reserve army.” This is the social contradiction of capital. Value, for Marx, is the effect of a social relation, not between capitalists and workers, but among workers as members of society. Capital eliminates jobs while maintaining labor as the form of social mediation. This is the fundamental dynamic that conditions the labor market (globally, as well as in local context) and concrete forms of production (and consumption) and hence the circumstances in which capitalists pursue their profits — and in which workers consume and reproduce (their own labor power and also themselves). The fact that there is always someone to take your job means (your own potential, as well as the other’s) “immiseration.”
The point is not to achieve social solidarity among the workers such that socialism would mean finding everyone a job (full employment, or, on the other hand, zero employment, all production being done by automated machines, is a capitalist utopia), but rather the circumstances in which the workers themselves can enforce conditions such that both the compulsion to work and the threat of immiseration through unemployment can be overcome as a (default) social principle (of capital). This is the task of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In a post-capitalist society, some may “work” while others may not, but this will be according to inclination not proletarianization. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Concretely this means dethroning labor as the overriding social principle. But such an overthrow can only be accomplished by those most directly affected by it: “Those who labor must rule.”
That’s “dialectics.”
Carl Davidson said
It may be ‘dialectics,’ but aren’t you skipping over something here? In a socialist society, if you want to eat, you still have to work–unless you’re too young, ill, or a pensioner, or willing to go door-ro-door, monk-like, with your begging bowl.
For some time into the new order of ‘the d of the p’, it’s ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their work.’ Once we approach conditions where the amount of labor time in any given commodity approaches zero and the length of the working day approaches zero, ie, fully cybernated production, wherein we have a global economy of abundance and the working class itself is abolished, along with all others classes, then we can talk about ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.’
That’s dialectics, too.
BTW, Blanc and Saint Simon brought the concept into the socialist movement before Marx, but its roots are in the New Testament:
Chris Cutrone said
@ Carl Davidson:
That’s true.
My concern is that what has been called “vulgar Marxism” has made it so that means and ends are confused, as if the valorization of labor was the end-goal of socialist politics. Also, it is important to note that at an international/global scale, the compulsion to work cannot and will not be universally enforced. I.e., the point would not be to put all the peasants and others (lumpenized slum city dwellers) to better labor, but perhaps the majority of the world’s population will in fact become the “too young, too old or too infirm” to work.
About the New Testament and pre-Marxian socialism (Blanc et al.), I would distinguish the former from the latter. The latter intuited a potential of capital that is not the case with the Christian millennium.
The (historically) bourgeois category of labor would dissolve, and different human activities would no longer have to be subsumed under the category of (“socially useful”) work. In this sense, work would abolished/realized/overcome, in a qualitative transformation of what counts as valuable human activity. One important way in which this would the case would be its unhitching from time as a measure.
So, yes, if you want to eat you must work — but only insofar as labor is actually necessary. The former is a political demand, the latter a technical issue. Socially, it may be needlessly destructive to demand that everyone works — become proletarianized. The dialectical difficulty is that this is actually something to be adjudicated politically by the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and so we should avoid projecting into the future something to be determined in freedom.