Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF 2025] Dialectics of Nature: Engels on Dialectical Materialism as a Worldview

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

Jun 16, 2025   In this episode, Alyson and Breht explore Friedrich Engels' Dialectics of Nature, a bold and underappreciated attempt to apply dialectical materialism to the natural sciences. Often dismissed or misunderstood, this unfinished work offers a sweeping view of reality - from physics and chemistry to evolution, human consciousness, and ecological breakdown - through the lens of Marxist philosophy. Together, they unpack Engels' central claim that nature itself unfolds dialectically: through contradiction, motion, transformation, and interconnection. They cover the three laws of dialectics, Engels' materialist account of human evolution, his critique of mechanistic science, vulgar materialism, and metaphysical thinking, as well as his early warnings about capitalism's ecological consequences. Along the way, they connect these insights to Marx's concept of species-being, and reflect on what this revolutionary worldview offers in the age of climate crisis, hyper-alienation, and late capitalist decay. Finally, Alyson and Breht have a fascinating open-ended discussion about the existential and spiritual implications of dialectical materialism as a worldview. Whether you're new to dialectical materialism or looking to deepen your understanding, this conversation reframes Engels' work as a profound contribution not just to Marxism, but to the philosophy of science itself. Here are the episodes recommended for further listening in the episode: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 - Karl Marx On Contradiction - Mao Marxism 101: Intro to Historical Materialism (and the Necessity of Socialism) The Nature of All Things: Spinoza's Philosophical Odyssey All Dialectic Deep Dive Episodes ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/

Hello and welcome to Brad Minnis. My name is Allison. I am as always here with my co-host, Brett, and we have, what kind of feels like a throwback for us, actually, in a sense, where we are taking a text and really breaking this thing down in a very intensive way. And I'm super excited for this. The text we will be looking at for this episode is Friedrich Engels' Dialectics of Nature, which is real doozy of a text. honestly, it is a pretty overwhelming text to work with, so I think, you know, I'm really hopeful that we can take some time and draw out the lessons from this. This is an interesting text because it was also unfinished and incomplete at the time of Engel's death. It kind of in some sections, it's sort of notes and other sections, it's full chapters. And so there's a lot of work to kind of draw out the core points that are being made in it. But I think we've done a pretty good job here, and I'm very excited for us to get into it.

and I'm just hoping that it will be useful for you all. And we'll definitely talk about how what at times might feel very abstract here is, we think, really quite useful. Definitely. And Allison and I have been going back and forth. And actually, I think working, working for a sustained period of time, we had some rescheduling events that allowed us even more time to dive into the text. And as Allison said, kind of do our old school throwback scripted explanation of the text.

But instead of doing, as we have in the past, a sort of chapter by chapter breakdown, we just instead focused on the core concepts that we want to extract and explain. I think that's better because one of the things about a text like this written in the late 1800s is that the cutting-edge science of the time that Angles is drawing on has been updated, in some cases outdated. The basic ideas still hold true, of course, but if we were to get lost in that minutia, I think the overall episode would suffer. So we're going to bypass a lot of that, pull out some core concepts,

and highlight that. And I think by the end of this episode, the goal is that listeners will have an even deeper understanding of dialectical materialism, how it arose historically, what it means, and have some basis of wrestling with the idea of whether or not dialectical materialism cannot just be a political tool, but can be an overall worldview. It's sort of my belief, and we'll get into this in the final section, when Allison and I have a more organic discussion around some of the debates, that I think it is a worldview. And whether or not it is or not, I use it as such. And I have for a very long time.

And I think that comes out in my work whenever I talk about Buddhism, when I talk about Spinoza, it's very clear, I think, to long-time listeners that it is a worldview. It's a way of apprehending reality and its totality. And that's an explicit argument that Engels is making throughout the text. I do want to say a couple quick introductory comments that have come about in dialogue, specifically, actually, recently with some folks out in Northern California who are trying to replicate our socialist night school program. And we got on a call and we went back and forth. And I talked about how I taught a class on historical materialism and figured that I wouldn't get into dialectical materialism because I saw that as a little bit more advanced. And the comrades from Northern California were saying that they tried to do a whole class on. dialectical materialism. And as we went back and forth on that, something kind of emerged to me,

which is a two-sided point. There are plenty of people, Marxists, et cetera, who understand dialectical materialism, who could meaningfully and substantially even define it, but still don't apply it consistently. So it's one thing to understand something abstractly, even to understand it very well in abstract terms. It's another to apply it. So that's a pitfall. Some people, not many fall into. But on the other side, I want to encourage people. Because for me, personally, dialectical materialism was, I think, like, the last concept that I can say that I truly fully wrapped my mind around.

It took a long time for me to, like, fully flesh out the nuances and details of it. But importantly, I was already using it. So the message I want to give to people, like, especially, you know, Marxists who are listening to a podcast like this. If I asked you on the spot, in your own words, defined dialectical materialism, many of you would rightfully struggle with that definition. And the lack of that definition might make you feel like you can't defend the idea or you can't back it up. But let me just tell you that you're almost certainly using it, even if you can't fully define it or understand the philosophical nuances of it in a debate or a discussion about it. when you're connecting the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism and you're tying that to U.S. imperialism and you're tying imperialism to capitalism and you see that imperialism is globalized capitalism. When you're making those connections, you're practicing dialectical materialism. So I said that to a friend of mine and that made their response to me was, I would have really liked to hear that when I was developing as a Marxist because I was intimidated.

by the concept and the idea, but to hear somebody else say that it was hard for them to wrap their mind around it and that I'm actually already using it, even if I can't fully define it, that was helpful to him. So a lot of younger comrades or people that are still wrestling with this concept, you know, don't feel bad. You're probably already using it and continue to do so. So yeah, do you have any thoughts on that? I have one more comment before we get into it. But, Alison, do you have any thoughts on learning this material? Yeah, I think that's a good point overall that if you are engaging with the world through the framework of historical materialism, then you are also engaging through dialectical materialism, right?

You know, I did a training for a group in the UK recently where one of the things they really want emphasized is like, what is the relationship between dialectical materialism and historical materialism? And we actually talked a little bit about Stalin's formulation of it, where, you know, if you're doing historical materialism, you're doing dialectical materialism because that is the philosophical base upon which historical materialism rests, right? So historical materialism doesn't function absent that. And so, yeah, I think intuitively people are already doing it. Now, it gets scary if you're not familiar with philosophy when you go and try to read Lenin or Mao or Ingalls, and they start

talking about the negation of the negation, the interpenetration of opposites, right? These are like these very abstract terms that I think can be very overwhelming. I've remembered plenty of times feeling overwhelmed by these concepts. And I think the thing that I just want to encourage is, again, you're already used to thinking about the world in this way. You just don't have the language for it yet. So I'm hoping what we can do here is kind of use Engel's work to give you that language, right, to give you the labels and the concepts so that these trends and dialectics that I'm sure you've already observed when you're looking at society through historical materialism, suddenly become clearer concepts that you can then use and apply in other contexts.

Exactly. Yeah, I would say dialectical materialism is the highest level of abstraction when it comes to Marxism, because it is the broadest possible philosophical framework. The way I explain the relationship between dialectical and historical materialism is that historical materialism is the application of dialectical materialism to the evolution of human societies over time. Right. And we're going to get into a whole bunch of other examples of how does it apply when it comes to the development of biological life? How does it apply to physics and the cosmology of the universe, right? And through these examples, and how does it apply to like specific political instances? And in these examples throughout this text, I think it'll help you really drive home that point, that this is a broad philosophical framework.

It can be applied to many domains of knowledge. When we apply it to the evolution of human societies in particular, we call that historical materialism. And so I found that to be a helpful pedagogical approach to this question because the relationship between the two is often kind of fuzzy for people and making that explicit, I think, can really help from the outset. So ultimately, I think the worldview that will emerge from this text is in one sense, kind of obvious, right? But in another sense, it's also very challenging and complex and dynamic. And I think both those things are true at the same time. And I think you'll know what I mean as we go through this and start applying it to biology. to chemistry, to cosmology, and to politics, you'll see that there is an element that it's like,

oh yeah, this is not some hyper, surreal or even counterintuitive thing. This is actually just how the natural world operates. And I'm just now seeing it with increasing clarity. I'm not, you know, as I'll say in this conversation, we're not imposing a conceptual apparatus on reality. We're extracting lessons and laws of motion from reality itself by, studying reality. So all right, I think that's enough. Do you have anything else you want to say before we get into this? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, on that last part about like the study of reality and not trying to impose something onto it, I think I'll say upfront, right? This is an unpopular part of

Marxism in certain more academic-leaning circles, right? When people talk about Marxism as being like teleological or Marxism as totalizing, this is often the part that they point to. And, you know, there's been more recent developments in a lot of Marxist scholarship that are critical of this notion of worldview Marxism and often point to Ingalls as kind of the person who creates a lot of this worldview Marxism. So I think I do want to be careful up front that there is this critique that has been applied here and I think we'll be able to respond to that critique and show how what's being developed by Ingalls here isn't teleology per se, right? It's definitely a worldview. It's definitely foundational, but I don't think it's teleological. I don't think it's just brutally trying

to force a framework onto reality. This text is really the opposite of that, right? It's looking at the science at the time and seeing, oh, if we look at the science, it is interesting that dialectics does already map onto it, and that most of the breakthroughs that occur in the later scientific development are breakthroughs precisely because science goes back to a dialectics that already existed in philosophy more broadly. Exactly. Yeah. And to the teleology question, yeah, it's an interesting debate, and I think we've gotten into it many times over the years in different texts. And maybe we'll touch on it later in this text. But a similar analogous question would be to ask, is evolution via natural selection teleological? Right? Right. Does it have a predetermined end? Or is it an open-ended evolutionary process with certain laws that we can discern, but is not necessarily leading inevitably or deterministically to end? any one outcome. If you radically change the environment in which an organism exists, for example,

that organization will adapt or die, will radically change or go extinct. And we know all around the universe that natural environments are constantly being changed by internal or external pressures or whatever it may be. And so I think thinking about that, I think is helpful because evolution via natural selection, as we'll talk about in this episode, is dialectical and materialist. It's a concept that most people have a good grasp on because of education, you know, more or less teaching it in our society and people just having a pop cultural sense of how this thing works. But I wouldn't call it teleological. It's evolutionary. It's processual, but it's not deterministic or teleological. But okay, we'll get into that. So let's go ahead and get into

the text itself, Dialectics of Nature by one, Frederick Engels. And in this house, we defend, We defend angles. We love angles. You know, Marxism, it could easily be called Marxism Angolism. And I wouldn't bat an eye. It's just a bit of a mouthful. But let's go ahead and get into it. So angles begins dialectics of nature by tracing the historical emergence of modern natural science. The aim of this book, after all, is to argue for dialectical materialism as worldview, as a way of apprehending reality and natural phenomena as they actually exist. This requires a robust engagement with science since science is the primary mechanism by which human beings struggled to understand reality and nature. If dialectical materialism is not only a superior way of apprehending

reality, but the correct way of doing so, we should expect this to be confirmed through the hard sciences. Dialectical materialism is not a lens that humans merely interpret reality through, nor is it a concept we impose on reality itself, rather it is a recognition of how reality actually operates, an evolutionary process driven forward by contradiction, interconnection, and constant motion. Moreover, as historical materialists, i.e. as people who apply dialectical materialism to the evolution of human society, we also understand science as a fallible human creation, which itself emerged out of concrete historical and material conditions, has its own internal contradictions and is itself an open-ended evolutionary process.

Lastly, and importantly, our ability as human beings to fully grasp dialectical and historical materialism could only emerge at a certain time and place due to certain material conditions. Marx and Engels did not invent dialectical materialism. They merely lived at a specific juncture in human history and were engaged in a very particular form of investigation that allowed them to be the ones to first articulate. it. Given this, I often say that instead of Marx and Engels inventing dialectical and historical materialism, dialectical and historical materialism invented them. When you fully grasp that point, you will truly understand what these terms mean, I think. So now let's get into the text.

Engels opens his book with an eye on achieving two things, tracing the historical emergence and development of modern natural science, while at the same time critically engaging with that development to show both the seeds of dialectical materialism present at its birth, as well as the anti-dialectical conservative constraints imposed on science during its early development. Angles divides the birth and evolution of science into three rough eras, the 15th and 16th centuries marked by the Renaissance and Reformation, the 17th and 18th centuries marked by conservative and mechanical materialism, and finally the late 18th and 19th century up to the time. Engels was writing this very book in the early 1880s, marked by the return of dialectics back

into science. So let's briefly explore these eras. The birth of modern science in the 15th and 16th centuries emerged out of a revolutionary upheaval and rupture from the feudal middle ages, as European society was in its early transitionary phase towards what would become capitalism. In the century preceding the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Europe had already begun redisdemeanor. discovering classical Greek and Roman texts, sparking a renewed fascination with classical philosophy, art, and literature. The city's fall further accelerated this revival by bringing additional scholars and previously inaccessible manuscripts into Western Europe. At the same time, class struggle continue to rock the foundations of European feudalism. Angles writes about this beautifully,

stating, quote, While the burghers and nobles were still fighting one another, the peasant war in Germany pointed prophetically to future class struggles, not only by bringing onto the stage the peasants in revolt, that was no longer anything new, but behind them the beginnings of the modern proletariat, with the red flag in their hands and the demand for common ownership of goods on their lips. In the manuscripts saved from the fall of Byzantium, and the antique statues dug out of the ruins of Rome, a new world was revealed to the astonished west, that of ancient Greece. The ghost of the Middle Ages vanished before its shining forms. Italy rose to an undreamt of flowering of art,

which seemed like a reflection of classical antiquity and was never attained again. In Italy, France, and Germany, a new literature arose, the first modern literature. Shortly afterwards came the classical epochs of English and Spanish literature. The bounds of the old world maps were pierced. Only now for the first time was the world really discovered, and the basis laid for subsequent world trade and the transition from handicraft to manufacture, which in its turn formed the starting point for modern large-scale industry. The dictatorship of the church over men's minds was shattered.

It was directly cast off by the majority of Germanic peoples who adopted Protestantism, while among the Latins a cheerful spirit of free thought taken over from the Arabs and nourished by the newly discovered Greek philosophy took root more and more. and prepare the way for the materialism of the 18th century. End quote. So here we can see angles engaging in a magisterial articulation of a great historical transition into modernity, encompassing everything from class struggle to literature, from progressive religious movements to the rise of manufacturing.

He goes on to highlight the major thinkers of the day, showing how they thought in multidimensional ways that seamlessly flowed through many domains of knowledge. Leonardo da Vinci was an artist, engineer, and mathematician. Machiavelli was a statesman, historian, theorist, and writer. Martin Luther led the charge against the church's spiritual authority as Copernicus shattered the theological worldview with his heliocentric model, displacing humanity from its privileged position at the center of creation. The cutting-edge thinking at this time was not bound by specialization or constrained by tradition.

It was truly dialectical, expanse, revolutionary. These earthquakes of cultural advancement created reactionary backlash and conflict erupted everywhere. And herein lies another great lesson of historical materialism. World historical advancements always and everywhere are synonymous with a time of great tumult and class conflict. But after science emerged from its revolutionary womb and was tempered by the backlash that all novelty and progress invite, it entered its second phase, a phase of mechanistic materialism and scientific stagnation in the 17th and 18th centuries. Newtonian mechanics, Cartesian mathematics, and Galilean physics dominated early science,

advancing impressive but rigid theoretical frameworks. Science at this time became fixated on mechanical laws, eternal truths, and immutable principles. The natural world in the cosmos itself were subtly and not so subtly, viewed as static, eternal and tightly regulated, a clockwork universe set in motion by a divine creator. This view shaped not only the impersonal deism of America's founding fathers, for example,

but also the static and regulated design of their constitution, conceived as a perpetual mechanism guiding society indefinitely, similar to a clock's intricate machinery regulating the arc of its pendulum. And when it came to first causes, when scientific investigation ran

into the brick wall at the end of the chain of cause and effect, God was invoked once again to explain its origins, from Jefferson's declaration to Newton's planetary motion. There were figures who resisted the divine explanation and tried to explain nature in purely materialist terms, but since the materialism lacked a historical and developmental dimension, it too remained stagnant and underdeveloped. And that is precisely what we mean by mechanistic material.

a limited form of materialism, neglecting nature's dynamic, interconnected, and evolutionary processes, favoring instead a simplified and static clockwork universe. It's a type of reductionism that fails to grasp the true complexity and interrelatedness of things. But the dialectic marches forward, and this era too gave way to a return to dialectics and science, but at a higher level. Key philosophical and scientific breakthroughs in the late 18th and in the 19th century gradually revived a historical and dialectical view of nature. Ammanuel Kant's nebular hypothesis theorized the solar system emerged from rotating nebular clouds over time, rejecting a static solar system, as well as an explanation chain that ended at

divine creation. This theory was initially ignored, but it represented the first advancement of a view of the solar system as historical, a solar system that evolved materially. Geology challenged the static earth concept through fossil discoveries and Lyle's theories of gradual processes like erosion and sedimentation, bringing evolutionary dynamics to Earth's history. We could also talk about plate tectonics, for example. Similar breakthroughs in chemistry and thermodynamics followed, showing the fundamental energies of heat, magnetism, and electricity could be converted.

into other forms and that chemistry could bridge the gap between the organic and the inorganic, further dissolving traditional metaphysical barriers between life and non-life. The biggest discovery of this epoch, though, and one that we will dive into deeper later in this episode, is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection, which creeped onto the scene in the middle of the 19th century and brought the dialectical evolutionary and historical developmental dimension right to the heart of human and human. animal life itself. Biological organisms were not immutable, but in constant change. Humans were not created by God and placed on Earth, but evolved out of and through Earth itself,

driven forward by contradictions between organism and environment. No wonder Marx and Angles were elated when they first encountered Darwin's theory, immediately writing to him to praise his work. So in summary, the historical era of the Renaissance and Reformation represented the rupture from feudal and theological authority and had within it early seeds of dialectics. Early modernity then saw the development of science into a mechanistic and static worldview with theological residue, and this represented a regression away from dialectics and into metaphysics, while at the same time advancing materialism, albeit in a rigid and reductionist form. Finally, the late 18th and 19th centuries brought historical, evolutionary, and thus dialectical

elements back into materialist science. Every scientific domain from astronomy and geology to chemistry and biology began naturally embracing dialectical materialist elements as scientists approached deeper truths. None of these scientists or thinkers, aside from Marx and Angles themselves, necessarily understood their theories explicitly in those terms, of course. But nonetheless, the closer they got to truth, the more dialectical materialist their insights naturally became. Alison. Awesome. Thank you, Brett. Yeah, I think it is fascinating that Ingls opens this book with this history of science that really does look at science through dialectical materialist lens, right? Science itself, not as a static thing, but actually as a process that was shaped through

relationships between class struggle and historical development. It's a very cool application. And whenever I read Ingalls, I just get really excited about how excited he is at science, honestly. And it really shines through in this. Now, what is interesting, about this chapter, though, I think, is that Ingle's really also looks at the limitations of science and the way that science becomes constrained by ideology and also by metaphysics. You actually see this later on in the text as well, where for all the praise that Ingle's heaps on Darwin, he also becomes quite critical of some of the ideological assumptions that are smuggled into Darwin. And one of the things that we see in the introduction that Ingalls begins to tease out is the extent

to which philosophy and science became disjointed from each other, and much of the problems of mechanical materialism and metaphysics, which undergirded science during this moment, came from that disjunction. Ingalls emphasizes the extent to which Greek philosophy actually already contained a dialectical view of the world, albeit not one that was particularly developed or materialistic, but certainly was dialectical. Although the Greeks lacked scientificity, they had a deeper philosophical understanding. Engels writes that, quote, for the Greek philosophers, the world was essentially something that had emerged from chaos, something that had developed, something that had come into being, end quote. And in the context of all of the examples that Brett talked about, where dialectics comes back

into science, those are all precisely the scientific realization of this truth, that the geological history of the earth points to development over time, points to actually phases in the earth's development, separate eras of mass extinction and life coming back and development resetting over and over again. The Earth as we see it today becomes no longer something that has been here forever, but the product of processes and cycles and relationships between different forces. At the same time, again, we see this in evolution, right? The evolution is, again, the thing that Ingalls always comes back to, where we see the development. Species aren't eternal realities that God made at the beginning of time,

but rather they are things that emerge and have histories. The lack of an eternal existence of the universe and the idea that the universe is a thing which came into being was unfortunately lost by the natural sciences as they began to fall into their more ossified views of nature during the period of, you know, crass and reductive materialism. The natural sciences were during this period of their emergence still essentially tied to Christian theology, as Brett pointed out. And so they were able to justify their philosophically emaciated metaphysics with an appeal to a divine creator who set the world in order or in motion once and for all.

Many of these scientists were uninterested in philosophical speculation, and as a result of that, failed to recognize the fact that they had already imported specific metaphysical assumptions into their engagement with the world. At the same time, parallel to the development of this mechanical materialism, philosophy continues. to develop externally to the natural sciences, and it actually didn't tie itself down with the metaphysics which underpinned the natural sciences. Engels writes that, quote, it is to the highest credit of philosophy of the time that it did not let itself be led astray by the restricted state of contemporary natural knowledge. And that's from Spinoza, right to the great French materialists, it insisted on explaining the world from the world itself and left the justifications and details to the natural science.

of the future, end quote. And so even if the natural scientists were neglecting philosophy, philosophy was actually beginning to engage with the world in a new way. Spinoza, of course, in some ways, is perhaps the most theistic philosopher of all time because he argues that everything essentially is God. And yet within this is a sort of atheism from the perspective of the old appeals to God that tried to ground the world in God's creation or in some deity's creation. The universe itself becomes an imminent and transcended reality simultaneously in Spinoza's work in such a way that you really begin to break away from some of the false assumptions of mechanical materialism. And so philosophy did begin to pave the way for a return that would come

when science rediscovered the actual existence of dialectics. And of course, as we've pointed out over and over again, it's really Darwin that sets the stage for the realms of philosophy and science to once again be reunited. We'll talk about Engels' criticisms of Darwin later on in this episode, but there is just no question of the massive amount of respect and elation that Ingalls has at the ideas of Darwin. If you actually ever go and read the eulogy that Ingalls read at Marx's gravesite, it is Darwin who Ingalls compares Marx to favorably, saying that Darwin discovered the development of organic life as Marx discovered the development of human society. And so this really does represent a turning point, and in a sense a return to this insight that philosophy

had already had. Engels writes that, quote, thus we have once again returned to the point of view of the great founders of Greek philosophy. The view that the whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from the grains of sand to sons, from protists to men, has its existence in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change, only with the essential difference that for the Greeks was a brilliant intuition is, in our case, a result of strictly scientific research in accordance with experience, and hence also it emerges in a much more definite and clear form. End quote.

Science, in its phase of renewal, then enters into an increasingly dialectical understanding of reality. While Darwin allowed for a dialectical understanding of biology, astronomy too began to turn to the emergence of planets, the geological history of the Earth itself was unveiled, and finally we were able to break free from the constricting chains of metaphysics. What is frustrating to Ingalls and to contemporary readers like myself is the extent to which these insights were already present in philosophy all along. One does it need to wait for Kant to see a dialectical orientation towards ontology. Ingalls traces it all the way back to the Greeks, but there was a certain denigration

of philosophy that became a problem. And in this denigration, I think we can see. see errors of those schools of thoughts which seek to constrain the usefulness of philosophical speculation or which assume that the experience of the world as it is is all that's needed to understand reality. There's a kind of base empiricism which underlies the natural science era of mechanistic determinism that Ingalls criticizes. And this naive imperialism assumes that the ability to observe the world through sense data and then investigate further through experimentation provides all the possible insights that one might need to understand nature. And yet, the present state of existence that we observe is not eternal. It's a moment in time,

and one needs to be able to understand the nature of reality such that one can account for the temporal status of natural and social phenomena can trace their development across time. Philosophy is thus still required in order for the insights of empiricists to be able to operate in the world and have a broader coherence. An understanding of what kind of world we live in and its relationship to change in time is not a mere complementary contribution to the scientific understanding of reality, but is actually kind of fundamental to it that science has later confirmed. Philosophers have consistently been crucial in their ability to correct a sort of naive empiricism.

Aside from angles, we can think of skeptics like Hume, who rigorously outlined to the logic of induction in order to demonstrate the problematic assumptions at the core of this naive empiricism, and these ideas need to be. articulated and rendered into the scientific process. Now, none of this is to say that Ingalls is advocating for a retreat to abstract metaphysics or speculative philosophy. While Ingalls understands dialectics as a fundamental insight into reality, is one which is still confirmed for him in the natural world, and this is the really crucial part. It's not a principle

which is delivered from on high, but rather it is confirmed through the findings of science once science is able to interrogate and then break free from its own metaphysical stagnation. I'll hand it over to you, Brett. Yeah, that's so good. And that artificial separation between philosophy and science obviously still exists in today's world. And you'll often see people in STEM or even proper scientists themselves denigrate philosophy as useless. There's the famous Neil de Grouse-Tyson quote that we don't need philosophy anymore because we have science. And it speaks to this very thing that Angles is criticizing 150-some years.

ago, which is amusing, but also kind of sad. And then also Spinoza, you're going to hear Spinoza's name right up again and again, and I have actually a lot more to say about him throughout this script. But just one thing I wanted to quickly point out, the fact that Spinoza's philosophy can credibly be seen as both the most theistic philosophy ever and as raw, disgusting, vulgar atheism. Yeah. That is just testament to Spinoza's depth and the fact that, importantly, he transcends the

dualism of atheism into a non-dual state where both are equally true. You can credibly make both claims about Spinoza. And that's why he is absolutely wonderful. Marx and angles loved him and we love him as well. But let's go ahead and move forward. So the last part of this is title, nature is a dialectical and a materialist process. So we're getting a good understanding of dialectics. We understand, hopefully, by now, vulgar, reductionistic, mechanistic materialism. But now let's kind of make that materialist aspect clear and see what it adds to this. So Angles makes clear that the very structure of reality itself, as revealed by modern science, is both dialectical and materialist. When we say dialectical, we mean that nature does not consist of static, isolated objects that exist independently of one another.

Rather, it is a dynamic, interconnected totality in constant motion and development driven forward by contradiction. And by materialist, we underscore that this process unfolds entirely within nature itself. No external supernatural force needed to set the cosmos in motion, nor to direct it, sustain it, or intervene in it. There's no external consciousness or a consciousness that abides above the material process, directing it, putting it into motion, intervening in it, etc. The scientific breakthroughs of Angles' Isera and beyond demonstrates, this dialectical materialist

reality vividly. Kant and Laplace's nebular hypothesis showed the solar system itself as something historically emergent, arising from rotating clouds of cosmic dust and gas, continuously evolving and transforming through immense spans of time. Similarly, geological insights by Lyle

revealed Earth not as a static, timeless stage, but as a dynamic planet whose surface and geological structures were shaped through ongoing gradual processes. Meanwhile, once again, in Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection brought the dialectical process right to the heart of biology, showing life itself as an evolving interplay of contradiction and adaptation between organisms and their environments.

Advances in thermodynamics demonstrated that heat was not a separate phenomena but a form of energy convertible to mechanical work. Physicists such as Faraday and Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism into electromagnetism further dissolving previously rigid distinctions between fundamental phenomena. And building upon these unifications later on in the 20th century, after Engels had passed away, of course, Albert Einstein's mass energy equivalence, E equals MC squared, revealed a profound connection between matter and energy, showing they are interconvertible aspects of a single physical reality.

So taken together, these scientific discoveries don't merely affirm dialectical materialism as a theoretical lens. They reveal dialectical materialism as the essential. structure of reality itself. Nature is not fragmented or mechanistically static. It is processual, relational, historical, and evolutionary. And here is the profound philosophical punchline of this dialectical materialist worldview, which I will explore in even more depth later on.

Humanity itself is not something apart from or superior to nature. We human beings, with all our consciousness and complexity, are not alien observers passively witnessing nature from the outside, we are nature itself becoming conscious and self-aware through materialist processes. We are the earth come alive. Dialectical materialism thus offers a scientifically rigorous, logically unavoidable, and philosophically compelling insight, one with profound implications. We are the subjective side of an objective universe, an inseparable expression of cosmic evolution itself. To grasp dialectical materialism is, therefore, to realize with astonishing clarity that we are nature waking up to itself.

Dialectical materialism, by its very nature, is the philosophical foundation from which we can weave together all expressions of human life, from the scientific to the religious, from the philosophical to the artistic, and not as a conceptual imposition we make on reality, but as an acknowledgement that this is how reality already is. from this basis we can radically unify all seeming opposites into merely different aspects of a singular process while systematically avoiding all forms of vulgar materialism and crude reductionism we can overcome all forms of dualism philosophically which paves the way for us to transcend them experientially but i'll make this argument in full in an upcoming book i'm writing anyways now that we have a firm grasp of the scientific and philosophical trail that angles is blazing here we can move into an even deeper explication of the laws and nuances of dialectical materialism. Allison?

Yeah, so I'll go ahead and take us into this with the first one that we are going to look at, which is the unity and the struggle of opposites. But broadly, I will say, that Ingl's attributes all three of these laws to Hegel, but goes out of his way to insist that he's not just like re-articulating Hegel here, but he's taking these notions beyond the limitations that were placed on them by Hegel as a result of Hegel's own philosophical. idealism, right? And this is really the relationship that we always see articulated between Marx and Ingalls and Hegel and that they're interested in the structural aspects of Hegel's argument, but as Marx puts it, they turn him on his head by inverting his idealism and favoring a materialism.

Ingalls writes that, quote, we are not concerned here with a handbook of dialectics, but only with showing that the dialectical laws are really laws of development of nature, therefore, are also a valid for theoretical science. Hence, we cannot go into the inner interconnection of these laws of one another, end quote. So again, Ingalls is saying that he's not going to go into an insane amount of depth here, although I've drawn on some secondary sources to try to flesh it out beyond where he goes, but that these laws, which Hegel really understood his laws that covered thought and reason, actually are laws of natural development. And this is a much broader and more interesting claim that he tries to substantiate here.

Now, I'm going to look at some of the scientific examples that Ingls puts forward for this, and it's worth noting that science has changed since Inglis wrote this, so I'm not trying to say you should one for one take the scientific claims that Inglis makes, although I would say later developments around the idea of the conservation of energy have largely validated a lot of what Ingalls has to say around this, but that is a separate question that can be gone into in more depth. So we'll start with the first of these laws of dialectics, and thus the laws of development of nature, which is the unity and struggle of opposites. And here I'm actually going to quote a Marxist scholar Vijay McGill for a really, really simple

explanation, where in one sentence he says that, quote, the unity of opposites, which Linden describes as the most important of dialectical principles, states that a thing is determined by its internal oppositions, end quote. If you've listened to our episode of On Contradiction about Mao, you should be hearing connections there as well to Mao's notion of internal oppositions. Contradictions being the primary determinant of a phenomena. So that's all abstract. Let's try to make this more concrete. One can see this unity of struggle and opposites quite clearly in Engle's discussion of motion, actually.

And motion is not something which happens in isolation, according to Ingalls. When motion occurs, it's because bodies within the universe are acting on each other and are ultimately changing places with each other in some sense. And this might sound abstract, because sometimes, like, like when I move my body, it doesn't seem clear immediately and intuitively that this isn't something that is happening in isolation. But for example, I put my hand in front of my face and I move it around. My hand is not merely moving an empty space. Its motion displaces molecules in the air, and this motion itself is a complex arrangement of attraction and repulsion of bodies and space,

according to Ingalls. Inglis writes that, quote, hence the basic form of all motion is approximation and separation, contraction and expansion. In short, the old polar opposites of attraction and repulsion. It is expressly to be noted that attraction and repulsion are not regarded here as so-called forces, but as simple forms of motion, just as Kant has already conceived matter as the University of Attraction and Repulsion. What is to be understood by the conception of forces will be shown in due course. All motion consists in the interplay of attraction and repulsion. Motion, however, is only possible when each individual attraction is compensated by a corresponding repulsion somewhere else. Otherwise, in time, one side would get the preponderance over the other,

and then motion would finally cease, end quote. Thus, motion, which appears as a unitary phenomena, only exists because of the internal opposites of repulsion and attraction, according to Ingalls. This is a very simple understanding of the way opposites play out with motion, and Ingalls actually spends a chunk of the text demonstrating that repulsion and attraction are actually very complicated realities with many sub-phenomena, but the point still stands, and in Ante During, actually, Ingalls clearly moves from this example to the claim that the unity and struggle of opposites is a broader law in the development of the natural world. So I'll quote anti-during here just briefly. Engels writes that, quote, if simple mechanical change of place contains a contradiction, this is even more true of the higher forms of most. and matter, and especially of organic life and its development. Life consists precisely and primarily in this, that a being is at each moment itself and yet something else. Life is therefore also a contradiction, which is present in things and processes themselves, and which constantly originates and resolves itself as soon as the contradiction ceases. Life too comes to an end and death

steps in. We likewise saw that in the sphere of thought we cannot escape contradictions, and that, for example, the contradiction between man's inherently unlimited capacity for knowledge and its actual presence only in men who are externally limited and possess limited cognition, finds its solution in what is, at least practically for us, an endless succession of generations and infinite progress. So, if we want to understand motion, if we want to understand life, if we want to understand cognition, these phenomena are defined by and can only be understood based on the unity and the struggle of opposites that occur within them. And at various times in the history of phenomena,

there may be different predominant expressions of unity or opposition. Mao later develops this into the notion of phenomena in states of rest or in states of change. In the former, the unity of opposites is primary, although struggle still exists. While in the later, the struggle of opposites comes to the forefront. And we'll get into this a little bit when we look more into the ceaseless motion of the universe. But this idea applies not only to what is commonly conceived of as the natural world, but also to social phenomena which arise within history, which I will note, as Brett has argued, is still a part of the natural world, right?

But we conventionally think of these as somewhat separate. The development of all social phenomena is likewise driven by a struggle of opposites, and the calcification, however temporary, of a given social arrangement, is an expression of the unity of those opposites. Obviously for Marxists, this is expressed most clearly within class contradictions. The interests of the ruling class and the working class exist in fundamental opposition to each other. The transition from one historical stage to the next occurs on the basis of this opposition. When the struggle of opposites emerges within a given societal contradiction, we can have a revolution.

Revolutionary rupture occurs as society transitions from a state of rest into a state of motion, and that change occurs on the basis of the struggle of opposites. The necessary rupture then resolves itself through the transformation of the thing into its opposite. That is to say that the working class becomes the new ruling class in a sense and is transformed through the revolution, the seizure of state power, and thus a resolution of the contradiction finally takes place and the old social order dies as a new one emerges.

And yet we also have to recognize that we are not, constantly in states of revolution within society, right? Although revolutions do become inevitable at certain points, they are not constantly happening. Society spend decades or centuries in states of relative rest, during which time a unity of opposites can create the conditions for the stability. Despite the fact that the interests of the two boring classes remain fundamentally at odds with each other, their opposition can have a counterbalancing effect with historical eras of reform or cooperation. And is this loss of harmony and counterbalance, which ultimately creates the shift back to struggles later on. Such states of rest are fundamentally temporary as struggle rather than the unity of opposites

is the fundamental reality of the contradiction. And so both in what we can think of as the realms of the natural sciences and in society, we can see this transition between the predominance of unity, the predominance of struggle, and the way that both of them are fundamental to what a phenomenon is. Hopefully that makes some sense. I will be elaborating even more on this in a later section, but this is kind of this first notion of dialectics. Brad, I'll pass it over to you. Yeah, really, really good. And we're covering the three main laws that angles lays out in this text. And we're trying to give an example from science and nature, as well as one from politics and society, which Allison just did so well. Two really quick stories I just have to tell before I move on to the

second law, which is transformation of quantity and equality. But on the unity of opposites, I recently joined a Zen center, and the teacher, the Zen teacher was giving a speech, and he was talking basically about the unity of opposites. I think he might even have used that phrase explicitly. You know, this is in a Zen Buddhist context, nothing to do with Marxism or politics. But he talks about pressing the palm to the palm in like this ritualistic bow when you get up from your cushion after Zazen. And he's talking about each palm representing different sides of the opposite and bringing them together. in like a non-dual awareness.

So he's like, you know, light cannot exist without dark. Day cannot exist without night. Life cannot exist without death, good and evil. And then I also added to that self and other, right? That those are two opposites seeming opposites, but they're actually, they contain the implication of the other in their very being. What does day, like what is day without the concept of night? What is the concept of self without the concept of other?

It just dissolves into incoherency. So again, Buddhism has lots of these, if not materialist aspects, which I think that's where Buddhism often diverges from Marxism, it has the dialectical aspects, showing what Engels was saying earlier, that dialectist goes back deep into many different cultures, histories, and philosophies. And that's no exception here with Buddhism. And I'd also quickly note that Buddhism rejects the metaphysical, i.e. the static, unchanging concept of the self, which is the concept of non-of-e., of of no self, which I think is another dialectical concept. So interesting stuff there. We'll get into more of that as we go on. But the quick other second little story I want to say, which I think helps break up the deep dives we're doing and adds a little human element here. But I was in my master's course to try to get my master's in education to become a teacher. And I have to take these certain endorsement classes. And I find myself to my chagrin in like an intro human geography class. but I open myself up to it.

I go in it. You know, I get a good grade and I apply myself as much as I can, even though the material is very introductory and is not as intellectually engaging as some higher level courses can be. But in one of these classes, the teacher gets into like natural geography or whatever, and she asked the question to the class. She says, what is nature?

And this is resonant with something you just mentioned, Allison. There's a moment of silence. This isn't a very participatory class. I try not to over talk, so I wait for other people to speak first. And this one kid, God bless him. He raises his hand. These are all like 19, 19 year old. Right.

She says, what is nature? And he raises his hand. He just says one word. He says, outside. I thought that was awesome. And then other people kind of elaborate more on that. It's like, it's like the woods. And, you know, you go out into the forest or the ocean or something.

And then after everybody said something, I raised my hand and I just, I brought this complexity into it. I was like, there is no separation between, you know, human, human society and nature. You know, our philosophy and our art is just as natural as the rivers and the trees. And she says, yeah, that's good. That's good. Okay. We moved on and stuff. And it was just very funny.

But I just love the kid raising a hand and just saying outside. I was like, no, brother. Nature is in here too. Right. Okay. That aside, let's get into the second law of dialectical materialism in this text, which is the transformation of course. quantity into quality. So Angles describes this dialectical law as the process by which incremental

quantitative changes accumulate until they reach a tipping point resulting in a sudden qualitative transformation. So this is quantity or number of changes we could put it, piling up until they spill over into a shift of quality or the overall state of a thing. Put simply and purposefully being repetitive to drive the point home, small gradual adjustments eventually trigger significant shifts, fundamentally altering the nature of the thing in question. This isn't just a philosophical abstraction. It's something we see clearly in scientific phenomena. For example, consider water heating on a stove. Initially, the temperature rises slowly, degree by degree, with nothing remarkable happening. These incremental quantitative changes seem trivial, and by themselves they are.

Until suddenly, at precisely 100 degrees Celsius, the water undergoes a dramatic qualitative change. It boils, turning liquid into gas. This transition from water to steam illustrates vividly how accumulating small quantitative changes eventually precipitate a profound shift in quality. This also works in reverse, right? Turning room temperature water into ice by lowering the temperature degree by degree. In evolutionary biology, the law of transformation of quantity into quality is vividly illustrated in the process of speciation. Small incremental genetic mutations accumulate over many generations, quantitative changes that may seem insignificant on their own, like minor variations and traits like colorization, size or behavior, or they may not even be apparent at all, actually most of them aren't. But as these mutations build up as their quantity mounts, they can eventually reach a tipping point where a population becomes so genetically distinct that it can no longer successfully reproduce with the original group.

At that moment, a qualitative leap occurs, a new species emerges. Thus, the gradual quantitative accumulation of genetic change give rise to a fundamentally new form of life, another clear example of dialectics in nature. Here we can also see how contradiction drives things forward. Just like the contradiction of water in its liquid form and the presence of heat drives changes in the water's qualitative state. And just like contradictions between an organism and its environment drive evolution, natural selection working on the organism's genetics as the mechanism of its transformation over time. The speed of a gazelle and the speed of a cheetah are produced by the contradiction between them. The cheetah needs to run fast enough to catch the gazelle, and the gazelle needs to run fast enough to escape the cheetah.

An arm's race of speed commences, driving both animals to their biological limits with regards to how fast they can move their bodies through space. Indeed, reshaping their bodies themselves in the process. And remember, in neither example above are we imposing concepts on nature. We are merely observing how nature actually operates and extracting these general laws from it. This is how dialectical materialism stays tethered to reality and remains scientific in its approach. Now that we have an idea of how this law of dialectics works in nature and science, let's shift to the political realm. So politically, we see this dialectical law at work clearly in the buildup to revolutions. For instance, consider the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Decades of growing economic hardship, increasing political repression, and social grievances, accumulated gradually. Every small incident alone seemed insufficient to trigger drastic change. Yet, as these incremental pressures built up quantitatively, society reached a critical threshold, exploding suddenly into a qualitative shift, revolution. Zaris autocracy was overturned, and a radically new political system emerged, illustrating how long-term quantitative struggles can abruptly shift the very structure of society itself. This is both, continuity and rupture, right? A continuation of Russian history and culture, but a rupture from those aspects of its old forms that were constraining progress and creating unresolvable

contradictions. At this new stage of Russian political history, old fetters were severed, but new contradictions and new problems inevitably emerged, which themselves had to be faced and addressed. Here in the United States, we can see this process operating as well, both presently and historically. The abolition of slavery was a qualitative shift after decades of quantitative buildup. Countless slave revolts, contradictions in the founding documents in the existence of slavery, the example of the Haitian revolution just off the U.S.'s coasts, abolitionists organizing for years, the creation of the Underground Railroad, the economic contradictions between northern industrialization and southern agrarianism, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, etc., etc. Each of these

examples by themselves were not enough to overturn slavery, but each contributed crucially to a process that eventually spilled over into a qualitative shift in the state of slavery in the United States. If we were to take out several of these pieces from history, slavery would have almost certainly persisted longer than it did. If we removed all of them, slavery would not have been overturned at all. And again, what drove the shift from quantitative buildup to qualitative rupture? Contradiction itself. In our own time, we seem to be building towards some sort of transformation. This does not necessarily mean revolution, of course, as societies can have many forms of qualitative shifts. The shift from the gilded age to the progressive era to the New Deal and eventually into neoliberalism were significant

qualitative shifts in the nature of American government, economics, and social life, one could argue. Revolution and civil war are simply two of the more significant forms that qualitative change can take. In any case, we see many of the many of the things. quantitative changes in our society today. From the WTO protests in the late 90s to the anti-war protests in the early odds, to the rise of Occupy after the 2008 financial collapse, then onto the emergence of Bernie Sanders campaign, through the Black Lives Matter uprisings, anti-fascist formations, a strike wave, and the resistance to the genocide in Palestine. The working class and anti-imperialist forces have grown, despite immense reaction and

push back from the ruling class and the media. Moreover, during that time, the left itself has shifted, I would argue, from an anarchist-dominated posture through a more social-democratic posture to, I believe, an increasingly Marxist posture, representing a maturation process. That will be spicy to some, but I think most of you will go along with me on that. Economically, the contradictions also continue to mount with the cost of living crisis, a housing crisis, low wages, few opportunities, and a truly disorienting level of inequality, which itself turns around to further cannibalize and corrupt and already geriatric and corrupt political process.

I could continue on for hours, describing the quantitative buildup of changes and how they are being pushed forward by mounting contradictions, but I think you get the point. Those who do not understand dialectical materialism say things like, or historical materialism for that matter, say things like nothing ever happens, or take the black pill and feel hopeless that change will never come.

But those of us who do understand know better. Something has to give, and it will. What the qualitative shift looks like is unknown and, importantly, not predestined. It will be determined by struggle and organization and only truly made sense of in retrospect. But it is coming. This is unavoidable. Nature and thus human society, which is a part of nature, is in constant motion, always evolving subject to endless change.

This can be scary, but it's never boring. and by fully and completely embracing that everything, including yourself, is in constant flux, you can stop resisting that flow of change and become resilient in the face of it. But I digress. The next law of dialectics that Engels lays out is negation of the negation. So let's quickly get into that. Angles identifies this law as the dialectical process through which development proceeds by negating previous stages, then negating that negation.

effectively spiraling upward toward higher forms of complexity and integration. It is not merely the destruction of old forms, but their transcendence and incorporation into something newer and more advanced. Here again, we come upon the pattern of continuity and rupture, or as I often call it, transcendence and inclusion. It's never a full break from what came before it. How could it be? The new must emerge out of the old, as plants must emerge out of the soil.

The visual metaphor of an upward spiral is useful here to think about this process. To complicate it needlessly, it might be more apt to think of a double helix structure or a yin-yang symbol stretched out and upward into a spiral, representing the unity of opposites and the inherent role of contradiction. But in reality, such visual metaphors, even quite sophisticated ones, can only vaguely gesture toward the complex reality, as dialectical materialism simply cannot be condensed into a situation. single image or visual representation.

Scientifically, a powerful example of this law comes from evolutionary biology. Early simple life forms, single-celled organisms, were eventually negated by more complex multicellular organisms. The first negation didn't simply destroy life. It elevated it into greater complexity. Later, specialized, differentiated species emerged from these multicellular organisms, again negating prior forms. Each evolutionary stage both destroyed and preserved aspects of its predecessor,

demonstrating clearly this dialectical spiraling, negating previous stages and integrating them into higher forms of life. In political terms, this dialectical movement can be seen in historic transformations like feudalism giving way to capitalism and capitalism in turn creating conditions for socialism. Capitalism negated feudal relations by overturning aristocratic privileges, hereditary power, kind of, and localized economies, thus establishing broader social relations and industrialization. Yet capitalism itself contains contradictions, exploitation, inequality, crises, just to name a few, which lay the groundwork for its own eventual negation.

The socialist transition represents a further negation. It doesn't simply destroy capitalism's technological advancements or economic interconnectedness. Instead, it transcends capitalism by reorganizing society on, cooperative, egalitarian, and rationally planned lines. This process illustrates vividly how dialectical development moves forward, each negation overcoming previous contradictions, while integrating and elevating what is valuable from past stages. As historical materialists, we often talk about communism as a return to community at a higher level,

referencing the communal nature of primitive communism. To return to it at a higher level, once again evokes the spiral metaphor and implies a maturation process that had to go through the negation of community in the form of class society and then in the form of liberal individualism. Socialism and then communism is the negation of that negation. But when we return to community, we are no longer in a state of nature and in perpetual struggle with scarcity. We have developed the understanding, the science and the technology to return to the beauty and naturalness of communalism, having resolved the contradictions of scarcity and the contradiction of living in a state of nature vulnerable to its whims.

Moreover, we return to communalism not as separate and warring tribes, but ideally as a unified human species. The very notion of our in-group has been extended through this millennia-long dialectical process to include all of humanity into our tribe and probably all of earth, since a truly mature species would understand itself an intimate relation and deep connection with not just our own species, but with the earth as a whole. Sitting where we are in the later stages of capitalism and before even socialism becomes the dominant form of production, this seems utopian to many. But with the clarity that comes with hindsight, our species will one day look back on this whole process and understand it for what it is.

The fact that we, through an apprehension of dialectical materialism, can see this process while we exist within it, is a testament to its profundity and truth. In any case, now we have a firm grip on the three laws of dialectical materialism as laid out by angles. He provides us with profound philosophical clarity through these laws, and hopefully our examples have helped make even more sense of them for you. Understanding the unity of opposites, the transformation of quantity into quality, and the quality, and the the negation of the negation, empowers us to perceive and engage with reality, scientifically and politically, in a nuanced, historically aware, and dialectically sophisticated way. Allison? Awesome.

Very, very well said all of that. I'm so impressed by your ability to turn to contemporary examples as well and just try to ground everything. So hopefully for everybody, you know, it's not too overwhelming. But now that we have those kind of three core principles of dialectics, we're going to look at four other secondary points about dialectical materialism that Ingalls lays out. We're going to be a little bit faster here. These will have a little bit less depth,

but hopefully they will help to kind of ground your understanding of the three that we just talked about, because they all, in various ways, tie back to those primary three principles. So I'll go ahead, jump into the first one for us, which is the interpenetration of opposites, and the idea that all things are related and defined by their interaction, but they're not. Now here you should be hearing echoes of what I talked about with the idea of the unity and struggle of opposites, but we're going to deepen things a bit more. So, as I've discussed contradictions between opposites so far in this episode, I have for simplicity's sake spoken of opposites as obviously and totally distinct from each other. Repulsion and attraction understood at the most basic level seemed like totally distinct opposing forces. But Ingalls actually exists that as one dives deeper into these phenomena, their interpenetration becomes more clear, and it cannot be understood as fully distinct or separate phenomena.

On a very basic level, each takes on its meaning and its definition in relation and interaction with the other. This is a basic philosophical and dialectical insight. Even within moments of relative rest, the two oppositions within a contradiction are mutually constitutive in a way that demonstrates their interoperative. penetration. For example, if we think about this on the level of society, the working class is only ever the working class precisely because of its relation to the opposing class, which pays for its labor. Ingalls demonstrates another aspect of interpenetration quite simply in his expiration of cause and effect as well, which I think will make this a little bit easier to grasp, and then we can return to the social. He writes that, quote, we find in like manner that cause and effect are

conception to individual cases. But as soon as we consider the individual case and their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other. They become confounded when we contemplate that the universal action and interaction in which cause and effects are eternally changing places. So that is what is effect here and now will be cause there and then and vice versa, end quote. And so the interpenetration of opposites is clear here. Cause and effect which are understood as opposite to each other are only meaningful in relation to each other and are constantly transforming one into the other depending on which moment in a sequence or a process one is examining. The transformation of a thing into its opposite is a notion which arises to the forefront here.

Change becomes effect and effect becomes change depending on which relation one seeks to understand. For example, if we look at the proletariat, we see them as the working and subjected class when analyzing capitalism. But if we then look at the social, transition to socialism, they are no longer the subjected class. They become the dominant class within society. And so the interpenetration of opposites is really always at play, and opposites are always mutually co-constituating each other and transforming one into the other. Now, the second sort of secondary principle that I will talk about is the idea that everything is in motion, and that rest is really temporary, and motion is the actual default state of matter.

I've already hinted at this in my above discussion of the unity and struggle of opposites, but it follows from that dialectical principle that rest is a state which is fundamentally temporary within nature. Rest occurs when the opposing sides of a contradiction reach equilibrium, but the contradiction itself can't stay in that state indefinitely. Even in moments of relative rest, the struggle of opposites is still at play and it can rupture any moment just based purely on internal contradictions. And although the unity of opposites as an expression of the internal contradictions of phenomena, these contradictions also don't constitute the whole of reality.

But the interrelation of all phenomena means that there are external contradictions, which also exist. Dialectics shows that internal contradictions are primary, but it does not deny the existence of external contradictions or that they can impact the state of a given thing. These external contradictions can act on a phenomenon in such a way that they disrupt a state, of equilibrium achieved by the internal contradictory realities within the phenomena, and the state of rest which it might once have been in, inevitably transitions back into a state of change. Rest and motion also demonstrate the extent to which the interplay of opposites is tied up with the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa in an interesting way.

To quote Mao here, who really is engaging with all of this in non-contradiction, quote, there are two states of motion in all things, that of relative rest, and conspicuous change. Both are caused by the struggle between two contradictory elements contained within a thing. When the thing is in the first state of motion, it is undergoing only quantitative and not qualitative change, and consequently presents the outward appearance of being at rest. But when the thing is in the second state of motion, the quantitative changes of the first state has already reached its culminating point and gives rise to the disillusion of the thing as an entity, and thereupon a qualitative change ensues. Hence, the appearance of conspicuous change.

Such unity, solidarity, combination, harmony, balance, stalemate, deadlock, rest, constancy, equilibrium, solidity, attraction, etc., as we see in daily life, are all the appearance of things in the state of quantitative change. On the other hand, the disillusion of unity, that is the destruction of this solidarity combination, harmony, stalemate, rest, constancy, equilibrium, solidity, and attraction, and the change of each into its opposite are all the appearance of things in the state of qualitative change, the transformation of one process into the other. Things are constantly transforming themselves from the first into the second state of motion. The struggle of opposites goes on in both states, but the contradiction is resolved through

the second state. And that is why we say that the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary, and relative, while the struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, end quote. And so again, now does this interesting thing tying this notion back into the transition from quantitative to qualitative change. But the point is that rest from the dialectical perspective is always temporary, whether it is disrupted from external factors or if internal factors change such that struggle reemerges. The universe is not in a state of rest, but is in a state of motion. And this motion is absolutely fundamental to reality itself.

Brad, I'll pass it over to you. Yeah, and it's really brilliant and important to quote Mao there, because we have to understand that Angles puts out dialectics of nature. Mao's on contradiction is picking up these concepts. And what he does is he fleshes out the nuance. of contradiction in particular. So angles mentions contradiction. We understand it as the driver of change, the engine of change.

But there's so many nuances to be explored within contradiction itself. And what Mao does is precisely that. So he advances dialectical materialism through a concerted analysis of contradiction, building on the work of Engels here in the dialectics of nature. So obviously Allison and I have an episode on Contradiction. You can go listen to that next and really, really deepen your understanding of this stuff. But yeah, he's interested in primary and secondary, you know, antagonistic and non-intagynistic contradictions, the hierarchy of relationships within a contradiction. And so that's really,

really important work to flesh out some of these things that Angles doesn't quite get to in this work. And I think Angles reading on contradiction would be nodding in a pleasant approval for sure. All right. These last two principles, as Allison said, they feed into and are kind of nuances and fall out from the three laws. So they're secondary to the three laws, but they're important wrinkles to explore. So three and four. Three is that nature is historical. I'll be very quick here. Another core principle of dialectical materialism, which is deeply related to all the other principles and laws, is that nature is historical. Since it is in constant state of change and evolution, it has a past that is different from its present. And that past

led to and shape its present state. Lazy or metaphysical thinking often treats nature as timeless, right? Mountains as eternal, species as fixed, the cosmos as static, even and especially the idea that our very selves are a single, fixed, permanent thing, something the dialectics of Buddhism challenges head on. Dialectics

insists that nature itself has a history, and that history is inseparable from its present and its future. Engel shows this through geology, astronomy, biology, and chemistry. The earth form changed and cooled over time. Species evolved, adapted, and when extinct. Even chemical elements and celestial bodies have life cycles from atomic decay to the Milky Way itself.

Mountains rise and erode away. Ecosystems come together and collapse. The universe itself is not a completed structure but an ever unfolding process. This principle breaks from static and metaphysics and divine creation narratives by rooting nature and everything in it firmly in time and development. Just as human societies have histories, so too do stars, planets, life. forms and the matter that composes them nature is not the background for history it is historical um and that's really important socially we hear something as silly that all of us will think is silly like you know all that racism stuff is in the past you know like we elected a black president we had a black a lady run for

for president this last term racism is a thing in the past but once you understand these concepts race is a historical unfolding process whose president is shaped by its past it's never really past right everything is connected not only in space with each other and other in relation to other things and phenomena, but also temporally with its past and its future. And you cannot have the present if it was not birthed from something. And the soil from which the present and the future are birthed is the past. And so those things are actually ultimately not separable. And the very final little principle here is that matter is self-moving. And this is really fundamental to the materialist part of dialectical materialism. This last principle we will cover is, again, that matter is self-moving. Angles sharply rejects the need for any external force, divine or otherwise, to explain motion, life, or consciousness. To say that matter is self-moving is to say that it contains within itself the contradictions, tensions, and tendencies that drive its development. The motion of matter doesn't require a prime mover. It emerges from internal differentiation and struggle. This is evident in physics, right? For example, gravitational tension,

thermodynamic disequilibrium, in biology, natural selection, genetic mutation, adaptation, and even consciousness itself, which dialectical materialism sees not as an immaterial soul, but as a property that arises from the organized complexity of matter in motion, specifically in the human brain, but connected to everything else. Consciousness is matter reflecting upon itself. Dialectics reveals that the cosmos does not need to be explained by something outside of it, It explains itself. Motion is not imposed on matter.

It is inherent to it. From this follows one of the most profound philosophical conclusions. The universe is not a creation from something outside itself, but a self-developing and through the natural emergence of consciousness an increasingly self-aware process. Before we move on, I do have a quick digression. I hope you'll all indulge me in. When people trace back the history of the universe and hit the epistemological brick wall of what came before the Big Bang?

It's important to remember that postulating a universe or an infinite universe or postulating a multiverse, etc., is functionally the same thing as postulating a God in the sense that one leaves the realm of provability and falsifiability and enters the realm

of pure speculation by necessity. While these ideas emerged from within science and theoretical physics unlike the idea of God, they currently lack empirical confirmation and thus blur the line between rigorous materialist science and metaphysical projection. It is not, therefore, more scientific to assert the existence of a multiverse than it is

to assert the existence of a God. Both are ultimately, as of now at least, untestable metaphysical speculations. And more importantly, the same problem arises in both cases. How did God or the multiverse itself come into being? What created the creator or what came before the multiverse? All this does is push the explanatory. chain back a step, leading ultimately to an infinite regress, the God who created the God, who created the God, or the multiverse, who created the multiverse, who created the multiverse. The only honest and objective answer to the question of what came before the Big Bang is the following.

I do not know, and we probably can never know, since it exists outside of space and time, which is to say, outside of nature. Dialectical materialism apprehends reality as it exists in this universe. It, like science itself, is incapable of, and ultimately uninterested in addressing questions about anything outside of it, which is, by definition, supernatural. Dialectical materialism is focused on the natural world, which is why it rejects metaphysical thinking. And it rejects metaphysical thinking in both of its forms, right? In form number one, the form of a false apprehension of reality as static and unchanging,

as we've talked about. But also in number two, the form of wild speculation about things outside of the universe, which we cannot possibly know. Dialectical materialism is committed to the no ability of the material world within its limits and through practice. It simply doesn't make claims beyond its domain. If, hypothetically speaking, and this is me having fun, not anything Marx or Engel said or believed,

but if God existed in a way that dialectical materialism could apprehend, it would have to exist in Spinoza's sense as the totality of the objective and subjective dimensions of the universe's which is to say, God would have to exist not as something separate, static, or supernatural, but as something imminent and itself evolving. Such a God could not stand outside of nature, but would have to be one with nature itself. This would mean that you and I, in both our physical bodies and in our subjective consciousness, would be manifestations of God expressing itself as nature.

The stars, the mountains, the nebula, and the flowers would be aspects of God's one body, And the consciousness of frogs, owls, humans, aliens, and maybe one day AI would be aspects of God's one mind. This version of God dissolves radically and completely into nature. And you can see why Spinoza was accused of being an atheist in his time. If God is everywhere, he is nowhere. If he is everything, he is no thing. In the final analysis, perhaps Spinoza was just repurposing theological language to poetically argue for a thoroughly materialist philosophy. In any case, Spinoza was a crucial historical thinker in the advancement of materialism. Angles once wrote that, quote, Spinoza is the forefather of all modern materialism, including Marx's, end quote. And it is

unquestionably true that core Spinozist themes, naturalism, materialism, imminence, and the rejection of dualism, run through both their work and laid a sort of necessary philosophical foundation for the eventual construction of dialectical materialism itself. Anyways, let's get back to the text and move into the next section. Allison. Awesome. Yeah. So next we'll talk about Darwinian evolution as dialectical materialism, but obviously I have

to shout out how much I love the section on Spinoza. I think at the end, we'll probably go back to Spinoza once again in this episode because there's just no way of getting away from him. How important his conception of the universe honestly is. But getting back to the text. So I'm going to look a little bit at the next section where Ingalls discusses the work of Darwin and also some of his writings about Darwin and the notes at the end of this text, where we start to see the critical aspects of Darwin. And I think in both we see Engel's incredible appreciation for the work that Darwin developed and how it contributed to the dialectical materialist understanding of the world,

and also an interesting critique of the scientific limitations of Darwin that further elaborates dialectics in an interesting way. So we've discussed it already, but for Ingalls, the work of Darwin represents just an absolutely massive contradiction to a dialectical understanding of the natural world. It is the work of Darwin, you know, in his work, the totality of biological reality becomes unmoored from the great chain of being, this divine metaphysics that had been dominant for so long in European thought and which had been smuggled into mechanical materialism, albeit in less explicitly spiritual forms. biology was transformed from an eternal reality to an imminent and emergent reality into a process. In the Darwinian understanding of the origin of species, a given species has to be understood as a product of complex interactions between biological processes and the material world around them. The evolution of species is driven by competition within given ecological niches, and species emerge and then reproduce through their ability to adapt to these changing realities. Thus, a dialectical understanding of biology is just unquestionably baked into Darwin's theory of evolution, and specifically a materialist understanding of biology as well. It is the material realities that constrain the reproduction of the species, that constrain the conditions in which adaptation can occur in.

And so biology is not its own realm separate from geography or geology or all of these other fields, but is precisely the product of the interplay of these material realities. And so it's not hard to see why this becomes such a transformational moment in this development of science for Ingalls. Again, as I said before, it is Darwin that he compares Marx to and his eulogy for Marx. This is really an incredible contribution. And yet at the same time, I think it's interesting in this text that Ingalls remains critical of Darwin. In the later parts of this, he argues that Darwin, though thoroughly dialectical, still muddies the realities of natural development in some ways. And I think by just taking a brief moment to look at Ingle's writing here, we will actually learn more about dialectics. Engels writes at the end of this text that, quote,

Darwin's mistakes lie precisely in lumping together in natural selection or the survival of the fittest, two absolutely separate things. One, selection by pressure of overpopulation, where perhaps the strongest survive in the first place, but can also be the weakest in many respects. And two, selection by greater capacity of adaptation to altered circumstances, where the survivors are better suited to these circumstances, but where this adaptation as a whole can mean regress just as well as progress. For instance, adaptation to parasitic life is always regress. The main thing that each advance in organic evolution is at the same time a regression, fixing one-sided evolution and excluding the possibility of evolution in other directions. This is, however, a basic law.

quote. And what we can see here is that Ingalls remains critical of Darwin for what he sees as kind of an unjustified malfusianism, which has snuck into Darwin's thinking, and led to a more one-sided understanding of evolution, which failed to fully embrace a dialectical outlook, right? So overpopulation gets smuggled in as one pressure, which is treated, you know, as identical to changing circumstances around the species, and this becomes concerning for Ingalls here. But at the same time, is still a dialectical outlook, right? There is still change and there still is the emergence of species over time. And Ingle's really explains why this matters when he further criticizes Darwin for a lack of precision around the meaning of struggle for life. And he again points to a certain one's

sideleness that overemphasizes struggle while being inadequately attempted to unity within Darwin's work. Quote, the struggle for life, until Darwin, what was stressed by his present adherence was precisely the harmonious cooperative working of organic nature, how the plant kingdom supplies animals with nourishment and oxygen, and animals supply plants with manure, ammonia, and carbonic acid. Hardly was Darwin recognized before these same people saw everywhere nothing but struggle. Both views are justified within narrow limits, but both are equally one-sided and prejudiced.

The interaction of bodies in non-living nature includes both harmony and collision, that of living bodies conscious and unconscious cooperation as well as conscious and unconscious struggle. Hence, even in regards to nature, it is not permissible one-sided to inscribe only struggle to one's banners. But it is absolutely childish to desire to sum up the whole manifold wealth of historical evolution and complexity in the meager and one-sided phrase, struggle for existence. That says less than nothing, end quote. And so again, Ingalls here is actually being somewhat critical of Darwin, noting that Darwin perhaps initiated an overcorrection to a hyper emphasis on struggle that led to a de-emphasis on unity, and that in actuality from the dialectical perspective, natural development occurs both in relation between struggle and unity. There are, in fact, mutually beneficial relationships between species that exist and that can spur their development in addition to the struggle and the competition between species.

And so Ingls tries to take what is dialectical in Darwin and reassert a two-sided view that really pays attention to the relationship of opposites, not always having an antagonistic form. Engels notes the extent to which bourgeois political theory is also kind of smuggled into Darwin's notion of evolution, and he notes that the one-sided notion of struggle becomes, you know, an attempted natural justification for Hobbesianism and Malthusianism. And as such, Darwinian evolution represents a breakthrough from the previous metaphysical approaches to biology, but even in its more dialectical approach, it is limited by its own one-sided metaphysics, which then allows it to be mobilized as an ideological justification for bourgeois domination. Ingalls does not reject the dialectical aspect of Darwinian Revolution, but rather works to

unveil the one-sidedness that has been smuggled into it. The issue is that Darwinian evolution over-emphasizes the struggle of opposites and is lacking in its assessment of unity and the interpenetration of opposites, but this does not negate the absolute necessity of Darwin's scientific discoveries, which, as Brett will explain in a moment, not only tell us about the development of the natural world, but also some profound and incredible insights into the development of humanity within that natural world. And on that note, Brett, I'll pass it over to you. Yeah, that's also very good because I often will emphasize those aspects of Darwinian evolution via natural selection that obviously are, you know, synonymous and jive really well

dialectical materialism and very rarely if ever have I explored the nuances of Engels's actual criticism of him which actually explicates dialectical materialism even better by not only understanding what Marx and Engels agreed with in Darwin but what they disagreed with and Darwin himself. I've read the like sort of quintessential biography on Darwin and very fascinating character but he was obviously a politically a product of his class and of Victorian British culture and so Angles is a sharp critic and I think Darwin in his time and in his context would have been considered something like a moderate liberal center left. So the fact that there's this deeper political critique to be had of Darwin as well, I think is interesting and generative. So yeah, we never lose sight of that.

And Engel certainly doesn't. But let's go ahead and move on to this last part now. I have to say that I worked really hard on this part of the script. I found this the most fascinating personally, the most fascinating part of this entire text. And I think many listeners will as well. It does run a little longer than some of the other sections. And I know I'm already a long-winded asshole to begin with. But I hope you'll bear with me. And if you do, I think you'll get a lot out of this section. And I'm really particularly interested in hearing Allison's thoughts as I wrap this up because this section is the end of the scripted part and it naturally leads in to the last part where we have an organic discussion. So I weave that into this as well. So this is labor. And the

evolution of human consciousness. So now that we understand the evolution of all biological life as a dialectical and materialist process, which in and of itself is a truly startling realization and a profound insight in the nature of reality, it's time to turn to the evolution of our species in particular. Homo sapiens stand out in nature as a unique species, and it's worth exploring not only how we got here biologically, but how we made the jump from clever apes in a state of nature to an intelligent techno species capable of building a planetary civilization. Here we run into another essential and largely underappreciated claim of Marxist theory. Labor didn't just build society.

Labor made us human. Labor is not simply the source of wealth, as the economist would have it. It is, or some of them, it is the very foundation of our species. In his chapter titled, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from, ape to man, Angles argues that labor was the decisive force that transformed a species of clever apes into human beings. And to be clear, he means this literally, not metaphorically or symbolically, but biologically, materially, historically, labor created humanity. This transformation began deep in prehistory, hundreds of thousands of years ago when a

particularly intelligent species of anthropoid apes, likely now extinct, began specifically spending more and more time moving upright. This too, like everything in dialectics, was not a single aha evolutionary moment, but a process, a process that unfolded gradually over thousands upon thousands of years and generations. The liberations of the hands from local motion, liberating the hands from being tied to the propelling of our ancestors forward, like most four-legged mammals, was a decisive development. As our ancestors began walking upright, more frequently, the hands were freed up for new tasks, gathering, carrying, grasping, manipulating, etc. So in this first step to civilization, human labor began simply and ungloriously,

with bare hands acting intentionally upon the world. Now take a moment to look at your hands and really grasp their importance. Look at the lines riven through your palms. Close your hand into a fist and open it again. and feel the ancient enormity of this innovation, and feel the primal connection to our deepest ancestors who also looked down at their hands day in and day out as they began to manipulate the world around them with newfound precision. It's also worth noting that some of humanity's oldest and most famous cave painting sites

from the cave of hands in Argentina dating to around 10,000 years ago, to hands painted on the walls of ancient caves, in southeastern France dating back over 30,000 years, featured the human hand. It's an existentially dizzying experience, I'm sure, to be able to place your hand upon the red-oacred outline of our ancestors' hands, connecting millennia of human history in a sublime instant of connection. Today, our children still trace their hands in preschool. In fact, as I wrote this script, my three-year-old's most recent hand-trace art sat next to me, his tiny little handprint, cut out of green construction paper, leaving its ephemeral mark on this world already.

Just one hand in a long line of humans waving hello over millennia. I digress, but I urge you to look up the cave paintings after this and reflect on their historical significance. I'll also leave a short but beautiful video on the topic in the show notes for anyone interested. But here's where the truly dialectical point begins to emerge. The hand was not only the organ of labor, it became the product of labor. Through the process of laboring itself, over immense spans of time, the hand itself changed and evolved. Its bone structure, musculature, flexibility, and fine motor control developed in tandem with the increasingly complex tasks it performed. Nature provided the raw material, the hand, freed up from bipedalism, but it was through the

the historically accumulated practice of using the hand to labor that the hand was actually shaped into what we now consider a human hand, capable of art, of architecture, of science, of writing, and of throwing up a fist to a crowd in a sign of solidarity. This is dialectics. Cause turns into effect and effect into a new cause. There is a reciprocal ongoing relationship between a thing and its context or environment, and influence is a two-way path. But let's take the dialectics even deeper because, of course, the hand did not evolve in isolation. It is only one part of a larger complex organism and changes to one part of the body necessarily influenced the rest. As Engels notes, this is due in part to what Darwin called the, quote,

law of correlation of growth, which basically means when one part of an organism evolves in a new direction, it tends to drag other parts along with it. So as the hand became more dexterous and the body more upright, other systems, skeletal, muscular, neural, had to adapt. This process is not always nice and clean either. Many humans today struggle with back pain, for example, and this too is our ancient inheritance, stemming from the stress put on our back by our shift to bipedalism. A trade-off, I think, is worth it in the end, but tell that to someone who just threw their back out picking up their groceries. cold comfort indeed.

But more importantly, and this is crucial to the development of culture and thus civilization itself, labor led to the need for communication, and communication gave birth to language. Working together on shared tasks meant our ancestors needed to coordinate with increasing sophistication and nuance. First, with gestures, grunts, facial expressions, what you and I might resort to if we found ourselves in a country whose language we didn't speak, trying to communicate. with the natives, and then gradually through more complex sounds. Speech didn't appear fully formed any more than tools did, but necessity and our nature as profoundly

social beings drove its evolution. As the need for communication increased, the vocal apparatus, the larynx, the tongue, the mouth, underwent transformations that paralleled the hand. Speech and labor evolved together reinforcing one another in a dialectical feedback loop that drove forward the development of the brain. And here's where it gets even more profound. The brain didn't evolve first, causing labor and language. Labor and language co-evolved with the brain. Our mental faculties didn't descend from the heavens or erupt spontaneously. They literally emerged from material life, from practical, sensuous, cooperative activity. As tasks grew in complexity, so did the brain's capacity to manage them.

And as consciousness expanded, it didn't just passively reflect reality. It began to actively shape it. One could even say the base of our material life, created the superstructure of our expanding consciousness, which turned back around and helped drive forward the development of our material base. Through labor and language, our early ancestors weren't just surviving or adapting. They were actively transforming reality itself. They developed new tools, hunted new games, game, cooked with fire, domesticated animals, and loved and dreamed and grieved the whole damn time.

These transformations change their diets, their bodies, their relationships to one another, and ultimately their very consciousness. And as Angles emphasizes, this was a slow process, so slow that the entire span of recorded human history is a blink compared to the time it took for apes to become human. But once that threshold was crossed, everything accelerated. And as a quick aside, there seems to be exponential growth in a species after hitting certain thresholds. It took hundreds of thousands of years for us to be able to, say, become predominantly agrarian, which launched us out of primitive communism and into class society.

Slave societies arose, taking thousands of years to develop. The Roman Empire itself lasted some 2,000 plus years, then it morphed into feudalism for roughly a thousand years, then over just a few centuries, shifted into mercantilism, followed by colonialism, then the industrial revolution, and then post-industrial capitalism. Now we are developing technologies at breakneck speed, from AI to quantum computing to particle colliders, and it seems things are speeding up still. This is an interesting aspect to reflect on, and I talk more about it in my episode a few months back titled Introduction to Historical Materialism. But the overall point stands and is actually a source of optimism

when it comes to the transition out of capitalism and toward communism on a time scale we might be able to relate to. Anyway, as our cultural evolution sped up through tools, harnessing fire, domesticating animals, etc., social cooperation became more complex. Different forms of labor emerged. Craftsmanship, agriculture, navigation, the earliest forms of science and art, all of it built on the foundation laid by labor, by the hand, by complicated linguistic speech, by the growing brain, and by the increasingly complex relations between all of them.

These evolutions were again tightly interwoven, each influencing and being influenced by the others in constant dialectical motion. And yet, as humanity advanced, something strange happened. The more we developed intellectually, the more abstract our thinking became, the more we began to forget this dirt and mud origin story. Physical, bodily corporeal labor, the very thing that made us human, began to recede into the background. Mental or cognitive labor, planning, calculating, philosophizing, etc., began to appear separate from or even superior to physical labor. Angles argues that with the rise of class society, those who controlled the planning and organizing of labor no longer needed to pursue.

form it themselves. And this division laid the groundwork for what we know today as idealism. The belief that mind, not matter, was the driving force of history. That the head came before the hand. That thought came before action. Cartesian dualism is one product of this line of thinking. The idea that the body and the mind are fundamentally distinct substances, whose corrective, by the way, can be found in the work of Spinoza, who postulated a single substance of which body and mind are two aspects. people even often feel this dualism to be true viscerally without the need for forays into abstract thought. The idea that the mind exists separate from the body

is found in many religions, philosophies, and even forms of so-called common-sense folk beliefs. The notion that great ideas shape and drive history is a common, if largely unexamined, belief that many hold. The American founding father certainly engaged in this idealism to vary in extent, but in reality, consciousness is not the cause of history, it is its consequence.

This illusion still persists today, even in the most advanced scientific circles. As Angles points out, even Darwinian scientists, committed materialists in the biological sense, often fail to see labor as the driving force in human evolution. They remain trapped in the ideological shadows of idealism, unable to fully grasp how species transform not only through natural selection, but also through praxis, through the active transformation of the environment by conscious beings. In the end, the story Engels tells here is not just about biology or anthropology. It's about the dialectical unfolding of human nature itself.

We are not fallen angels or accidental apes. We are laboring animals, forged by our own activity, shaped by the work of our hands, the words of our mouths and the tools we've made along the way to solve problems and survive. Engels shows us that labor is not just what we do, labor is what made us who we are, it is the basis of our species and our civilization, and we forget that at our own peril. But there's one final connection I want to make before we move on to the open discussion portion of this episode and discuss the political implications of this text. I want to quickly highlight how Engels takes a concept Marx advanced in his earlier and younger work on alienation and expands it scientifically. Marx wrote about this concept specifically in his book, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which of course Allison and I have an episode on, which we'll link in the show notes.

But in that text, Marx discussed the concept of species being, which was basically the first Marxist articulation of human nature, a fact that almost always goes ignored when anti-Marxists begin to opine dumbly on their shitty ideas about what human nature actually is. For Marx, species being refers to the, essential nature of humanity as social, creative, and conscious beings who freely transform the world through purposeful labor. What Engels does in this chapter I discovered and in the book more broadly is he traces out the long arc of how that capacity emerged, arguing that labor

did not simply shape society, but shape the human being itself, our anatomy, our consciousness, our speech, our sociality. The hand, the brain, and the collective labor process co-evolved in a dialectical unity, transforming ape into human and nature into history. He took Marx's concept, backed it up and fleshed it out with the cutting-edge science of his day, and expanded it through the prism of dialectical materialism. Both thinkers emphasized that labor is the essence of humanity, and that the full realization of our species being requires a society in which labor is no longer coerced or exploited, but becomes a free and cooperative expression of our creative and socializing.

social nature. Angles's evolutionary analysis thus expands Marx's vision. It not only explains how we became human through labor, but why a revolutionary reorganization of labor is needed to remain human in any meaningful sense. And that's the perfect bridge to this next part of this conversation, where we're just going to open it up and discuss the implications of this text. So, Alison, any thoughts? Yeah, many thoughts, but you tried to start them off. I mean, one, I want to make a observation that maybe is like aesthetic in nature. But a thing that you often hear leveraged that Marxism from anti-communists is sort of that there's this claim that there's like an ugliness to it, right? To reduce everything to materialism, to reduce everything to materiality,

to map out development in ways that you can trace its laws and all of these things, that the mystery of the world and all of these things are gone. And I don't know how you can listen to what you just express there, Brett, and not see a beauty, right? And not actually see a deep and profound aesthetic quality to the Marxist understanding of history. To really be able to look at the depth of the development of humanity and to see it as part of these broader structures of nature, to me, is just dumbfoundingly, breathtakingly beautiful, right, in a way that I find somewhat undeniable.

And so I hope that that aesthetic impression is there for people listening. But to get to, you know, kind of what you were passing it off on is that, yeah, this is relevant, right? This is meaningful for us as people who want to intervene in the world and want to see revolutionary change that can build this kind of society where the species being that you are discussing matters, right, and is able to flourish. Now, I will say I recently taught a little, like, political education class with some tenant organizers where we dove into dialectics.

And we traced a lot of what we looked at here. And at the end of it, a really wonderful organization. said, okay, so if nothing is static, if everything is changing, if there's a constant process, if everything is moving, how do we fucking understand anything? Right. Which I think is a fair point in the face of this. This on a certain level can sound like something that is so overwhelming that the world is so full of complexities and interrelations that how could I pick something out,

understand the thing that I've picked out, and intervene in the world to be able to change the world. You know, that question stood out to me because I think oftentimes when I read about this part of dialectics, I get excited because I'm like, oh my God, this is a thing that allows me to intervene, right? But I guess, you know, what I realized in that conversation is that it's not immediately obvious that this does allow for that intervention for everyone who encounters dialectics. So one of the things that I hope we can talk about is why this matters for political struggle, why this allows us to make interventions into society, to try to change the world. And so broadly, I'll just throw out a brief kind of opening salvo on that and pass it to you, Brett.

I think the corollary to this understanding of dialectical materialism that's important within Marxism is the development of scientific socialism, right? And this is really the foundation of scientific socialism. We're going to shout out so many of our old episodes, I guess, but we have an episode on Ingalls' text, socialism, utopian, and scientific. that I think does a good job of unpacking this. But what Ingalls really gets at in his development of scientific socialism, drawing from this is that if we can understand these processes of dialectics, we can understand that socialism isn't a thing that we're just going to invent out of thin air. It's not something that we decide we want to build and then we go build it.

The roots of socialism exist within the presently existing system of our time. And we can actually look at the contradictions within our existing system. We can look at the interplay of opposites within it. And by looking at that, we can then see how we can make interventions in order to create a socialism whose seeds already exist and just need to be watered and nourished and brought into fruition. And so that shift to the scientific approach to socialism, where we look at the existing reality,

we understand the dialectical interplays, and we understand how socialism already exists in germinal form within what happens now, and how its emergence will be. that which has come before is really the basis on which we can make calculated political actions. It's the basis on which we as Marxists are not just coming up with ideas and trying to impose them onto the world, but are saying, no, the thing that we are fighting for already is here and is just struggling and waiting to be born and we are joining the fight to help its birth.

So, you know, I want to open with that idea that really this is the basis of which Marxism is able to make interventions into history in the first place at all. Yeah, that's so good. And that resonates deeply with how I would approach that problem and that concern, which is real. It's like overwhelming. Everything's a constant cascade of change. It feels like there's no place to get a firm grip to make any movements. But you remember that you're not passively subject to that change. You are an intimate, embedded part of it, which actually means that this is not determined. I actually reject the determinism, the hyperdeterminism that some Marxist or people, you know, people in general can fall into philosophically because I think what emerges out of this is that we're embedded in this process through our understanding of the process. We can become active agents that shape the direction of the relentless change. I often think like, you know, if you're a feudal peasant in medieval Europe or something, you know, you have really no conception of how things came before you, how slave societies emerged into feudalism, what's coming next, you could never

fathom, especially if you're in the middle of a thousand years of feudalism, it just seems like for every generation backwards that you can remember, everything's been the same. Same if you're a slave in ancient Roman society or whatever. There's this real lack of any movement. Your life is very much like your great-grandparents' life, which is very much like your great-grandchildren's life. But then through the development, which also accelerates, this understanding emerges, which human beings now, as workers under capitalism, we can see the process that got us to where we are and we can see the means by which we can build out of where we are, out of the present and into the future. So this gives us like a sort of cognitive understanding of the dynamics

and laws of the change that allows us to intervene meaningfully in it. And I think that is deeply empowering. And also it increases my optimism. People often always ask me in like interviews and stuff like how do you stay optimistic or what makes you optimistic and my wrote answer is dialectics. Because what the implication is is that change is always, it would be much more depressing if we're just going to remain like this forever. If there's no hope of breaking out of it. The fact that change is always happening means that change is always putting pressure on the very things we oppose. And we can see those things coming under more and more pressure. And then we can add our efforts to increasing the quantity of opposition that those already

decaying structures, you know, they're already sandcastles in the tide of history, how they're already dissolving, we can add to that. And so I know that things are going to change. Now, the change isn't always perfect. It's not teleological or deterministic in the sense that the change necessarily means that this is what happens next and that's what happens next. Because if that were the case, then we really would just be passive things, that we really would just be caught in the swirl and we couldn't act on the world and change anything because it's already determined. It's already leading to a very specific end. So I actually reject teleology and determinism precisely because I open up the active embeddedness of ourselves in nature and in politics. And that leads to this third point,

which is that if we're nature becoming conscious and self-aware of itself, what socialism and communism is demanding of us is that we apply that self-consciousness and that rational ability to take over the economic system itself. right now under capitalism, we are subject to the whims of impersonal economic laws. That, you know, our employment, our ability to feed our families depends on this insanely chaotic, crisis-ridden, anarchistic, you know, anarchy of the market sense system that controls us way more than we control it. What socialism represents is saying, hey, humans have the capacity to creatively and rationally

take control of the economic system and shift it toward the meeting human needs. That's something that capitalism must deny you can't do that. To do that is tyranny. If you even try to do that, you're doing a dangerous experiment that will inevitably lead in dictatorship and tyranny. We're saying no. Humans are mature enough and we're ever maturing. We can and we should and our futures depend on no longer being subject to the whims of the

economic system, no longer being the slaves to the mass, of the economy, but switching that, dialectically inverting that relationship. The economy is put to work for people, to meet needs for the many, not to, you know, chaotically make profits for the few. And that, I think, also emerges out of this text directly. Like, you know, that's what Angles is in one way or another implicitly or explicitly telling us needs to happen. And I think the nature of the crises that capitalism produces, ecological, social, etc., is creating the context where that has to happen. Where to actually solve these problems, we're going to have to do that.

And of course, the people who are okay with the current system, who profit from it or who can't think outside of it are going to drag their feet the whole goddamn time. But that's why development and movement forward is often first cultivated amongst a relative minority of forward-thinking, progressive-minded people. And materially rooted in their societies, wanting better societies and fighting for it. So all those things and more not only give me optimism, but, you know, and also we have to take seriously the fact that this is a scary chaotic shift. I mean, change is scary. But also I think it pulls out the revolutionary message of a text like this, which is like that's our task.

Yeah, I think all of that is beautifully said. And I think, yes, this idea of, you know, we are nature becoming conscious of it. itself in some way, really imposes this profound responsibility, right? That is quite overwhelming potentially. But again, this is why the scientific approach matters, because we can study the world in such a way now that we can achieve this. And I'm actually very interested to get into, like, some of the cosmological questions that we have, right? Because one of the things is, you know, I think I'm also not teleological or deterministic about this. I think that there's a world where humanity dies out and we have not achieved socialism.

Absolutely. Right. But I'm also quite confident that that's not the end of the universe, right? And that the universe itself will go on in some way and that development will continue. And I'm actually quite confident that life will continue in some form or another and complexity will reemerge. And so there is a scope that you get towards reality when you start to look at this kind of dialectical understanding, not just a biology, but getting into geology, the history of the earth,

the history of the universe. that really is quite profound, and at least for me during my moments of hopelessness, actually gives me a weird sense of comfort, kind of, to be like, even if we were to fail and our species were to go, say, because of climate, you know, becoming unlivable for us, that's not the end of the universe in a sense, and it certainly isn't the end of development, and we will probably not be the last time that the universe achieves a level of complexity, such that subjective awareness could exist, you know? So that's a weird thing that I kind of take away from this. But, Yeah, I mean, I think, again, I think there is practicality here.

And one of the things that I'll get to, again, would just like, how do we do something with this? Is that when this feels overwhelming, when it feels like everything is in flux and change, that since a scale that I just alluded to can also help you think about, like, okay, yes, humanity is in a constant state of change, but within my lifetime, it's not changing that much on a biological level, right? These processes are processes that play out over millennia often rather than over the course of our lifetimes. And so we are able to intervene within the currently existing formulations that exist. And we are able to study the world as it is now. It's just important that that study not trade off with recognizing that there's a history to what we see and there's a future to it as well.

I don't know if that's useful, but that's kind of one of the ways that I kind of push back against that sense of overwhelmingness that can come from this emphasis on change in flux and process. Yeah, the difference between biological and cultural evolution is important here, too, because once an intelligent species develops culture, that is precisely, I think, what allows for that exponential growth in its development, because it's no longer subject to the glacial geological time spans that biological evolution requires to have any meaningful change. So cultural change is then exponentialized or exceptionalized.

accelerated through technological development, which really quickly builds on itself. And then you might eventually come back to a point where through technology, then you can, and we're right on the precipice of this, directly intervene in the biological process itself. Like we're already there in some ways. It's only going to get more and more gene editing, you know, understanding the human genome, which was cracked in the last few decades for the first time in human history. We understand it. Now we can act upon it, the sophistication of our medical scientific tools.

so that intervention now can happen. So then there's this biological evolution to get to intelligence. It takes a really long time. Culture allows for the construction of civilization, which then eventually creates technology, which can then turn back around and intervene in the biological process. So then you zoom way out and you think of just the staggering fucking amount of galaxies and planets. And you know that there's this, there is. this evolution of subjectivity happening all around the cosmos.

It's almost fucking certain that, you know, I mean, it's insane to believe that we're the only intelligent creatures and also very depressing, but also not true. So this evolution of subjectivity is occurring kind of like the biological evolution of organisms in that there's probably all throughout the cosmos and development in different ways through different pathways of intelligent species who, as they evolve biologically and then culturally, begin to create the conditions through technology often where they could undermine their own existence, right? Like the invention of the nuclear bomb, you know, fossil fuels burning for energy, which is crucial to the blossoming of civilization, but also at the same time

undermines its future livability to say nothing of other things like AI or et cetera. But the cultural evolution creates technological advances, which then create global problems. So like climate change is forcing humanity who started as warring tribes and now warring nation states, which is a dialectical improvement in some sense because it encompasses more people, is asking us now, okay, you really want to grow up, you really want to get through the technological bottleneck that intelligent species go through. You need to see yourself not only as a planetary species, no longer various tribes, of various sorts, see yourself as a planetary species and see yourself as intimately and inseparably connected to Earth itself. If you're unable to do that and integrate your social,

political, and economic systems into that new way of seeing things, which is interestingly dialectical and materialist, then you will fail. And that, and there might be more bottlenecks after this. There's certainly bottlenecks that we've already come through as a species. But that's one, that's the techno bottleneck, perhaps, that we find. ourselves facing. And so the possibility of extinction is very clear. And in fact, most species on Earth's history have gone extinct. It's from extrapolating from that, you could say that probably most intelligent species at one point or another go extinct. Just by the peer force of entropy and time and the on a long enough time scale, civilizations can fuck up pretty badly. Maybe the way

you get out of that is to advance to the stage where you spread your species over multiple planets. so then you're no longer subject to fucking it up and on one with nuclear or AI or whatever it may be. Dune is an interesting idea because in the Dune series, right, they create AI and then it does the terrible dystopian AI thing. And they have to do the butlerian jihad to do it. And then they cut themselves off from all thinking machines going forward. But interestingly, historically, materialistically, they devolve into feudalism. And so in lieu of technology. technological advancement, capitalism can't sustain itself. It doesn't seem like in their past they got to socialism, much less communism. And so now they've rejected a certain sort of technology, which condemns them in some sense to a form of intergalactic feudalism. So yeah, those are a bundle of different thoughts. But yeah, do you have any, you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, no, I mean, I think you getting at this challenge for the technological bottleneck and poses gets us back to the political in a really useful way, right? Because you're right. It will take humanity understanding itself as a planetary species beyond these divisions of competing in war in nation states and beyond things like the profit motive in order for us to escape this. Like AI is one of the interesting ones where I've talked about how I don't think AGI is going to necessarily ever emerge. But I do think AI poses. is an incredible environmental risk, right? It is unbelievably destructive to the environment. And I do think we will, if we want to survive as a species, have to choose to constrain that. That doesn't mean that something like AI won't exist or be developed, but limits have to be placed around it, right, in order to make sure that it doesn't come at the cost of the planet. And our ability to do that doesn't exist presently in the social arrangements that we have. In the current social arrangement, if anything, because of the buzzer,

around it, the current structures of profit, incentive, and investment are only causing us to increase the development of AI and do massive amounts of damage to the economy and to the planet. And more importantly, AI is now becoming the new arms race that nations are engaging with each other, right? The U.S. and China are competing explicitly in terms of AI development, which means that you also have these national structures, which are imposing these own incentive structures that don't put the species or the planet or reality itself first. And so this again is why we need socialism. Socialism is internationalist. Socialism is the overcoming of those national boundaries of national chauvinism and the overcoming of the competing nation states that will always choose a competitive

edge over what's good for the species. And so all of this comes back to why we need to have a political engagement that is the result of all this philosophical investigation. That's kind of just what I would throw back to kind of round that back towards the question of revolutionary socialism. Absolutely. Yeah, I really truly believe in this broader worldview that we've been articulating that socialism and communism would represent humanity doing the thing I just said they needed to do, which is integrate their social, economic, and political systems into these new ways of

relating to one another and to the natural world. and probably in that process to our very selves, which were alienated in so many ways from ourselves, as we understand through Marxist theory and Buddhist theory, to be honest. So, yeah, so literally, like, and this is what anti-Marxists, anti-socials, anti-communists will scoff at, laugh at, but if you have this full apparatus of ideas, this full architecture of ideas,

it seems very clear to me that that is not only what we should do, but what we need to do if we're going to survive as a species, which is really profound. And then our individual responsibility comes in the form of doing everything we can in our 80 to 100 years, if we're lucky, to push forward and advance in that direction. And I think there is a natural blossoming that also kind of occurs. Like as we're met with these problems, as information is integrated globally, as the species gets more acclimated with each other and with the natural world, there's a natural consciousness that starts to look in that direction. direction. And for those of us who think in these terms, that's our educational responsibility to reach that and to continue to cultivate that. But I would also argue out of this text,

the political implication is that eco-socialism directly and explicitly comes out of this text. Because Engels is basically saying that unlike animals which alter their nature unintentionally, humans deliberately transform their environment to meet our needs. But Engels is saying that this separation we feel with nature, that we have to dominate it, that we have to extract from it, that we have to exploit it, these victories that we see over nature, which you can see also come out of our primitive past, where we're at the whims of nature. We're beaten by nature.

Disease fucking ruins us, big predators tear us apart. Storms come in and blow our shit away. So there's obviously out of that a deep human need to want to control nature and the natural forces, but by attempting to do so, dialectically, you alienate yourself from nature. now we have to return to nature at a higher level learning the lessons that we've learned in the in the meantime. And so directly out of this text in the fucking 1800s, angles is arguing for eco-socialism. Humans are not separate from nature. We have to live in harmony with it.

We have to learn its laws so that we can consciously act in harmony with it. And I think that's also a necessary outcome of understanding dialectical materialism as a worldview. you get eco-socialism broadly. When you don't just apply it in a narrow political or social way, but when you allow dialectical materialism to be a broad, natural worldview, eco-socialism, I think, is quickly ushered on board as a part of that, and Engels makes that explicit. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I think really, you know, part of what humanity right now is reckoning with with the realization of climate change and how much it matters is precisely the exact thing that we've been pointing to here,

which is that human development and social development and economic development are not a separate sphere from nature, right? The whole thing that we're being forced to confront is that we are nature, we are embedded in nature in such a way that our actions do not exist independently from other natural actions. And climate change is allowing us to see the reality of those interrelations and the way that states of equilibrium can be disrupted horrifically,

and that can change not just human society, but also can change natural processes more broadly, right? So that embeddedness, I think, is really important there. I will transition us slightly, because I'm very interested in this question, to the question of, like, spiritual implications here, if that's okay, and some of what's going on there. I mean, you've referenced Buddhism a couple of times here, and I think I mentioned this to you,

But when I was doing a political education event on dialectics recently, one of the organizers was there was like, this really sounds like Alan Watts to me, right? And that organizer, and I think I felt this myself, have noticed this kind of way that dialectics fits into a sort of non-dualism that one really does find in Buddhism, that one certainly finds in Spinozism, that one finds in things that are often thought of as spiritual. So, you know, obviously I'm not saying we have to have all the answers. here, but it is interesting to me how, like, the more that I've dived into thinking about non-dualism as a contemplative reality that can be explored through contemplative practices, and the more that I've looked into the history of people engaging in that, the more that I find just profound resonance between that and dialectics, and it actually really does feel to me like a lot of contemplative practice might, in a sense, be the application of dialectics to consciousness, right, in a really interesting way, and a form of dialectical experimentation with consciousness. A lot of ideas there, but I'll kind of throw that to you because I'm certain you have even more thoughts about that.

Yeah, I mean, I could not agree more. And this is what I'm trying to turn into an argument for a book because unity of opposites, the subjective and the objective, the inward and the outward, we're already obliterating those barriers. Once you obliterate those barriers, you take subjectivity seriously. Marxism is fundamentally concerned with the outward transformation of politics and society and economics. And it doesn't in and of itself, nor should we ask it to address the inward transformation

that I think is also part and parcel of that external transformation. If we are going to build socialism, if we are going to exist as a communist planet, it is no doubt that we also have to mature inwardly, that we can't carry the same old way of thinking and of being and behaving and conceptualizing ourselves and others. We cannot carry that forward and build a truly, world from those same old rotten and decrepit internal systems, just like capitalism and imperialism and these arbitrary hierarchies are these decaying external systems. And also what's beautiful about this dialectical aspect, of course we can argue on the materialist

aspect, but Marx and angles are, they're interested in science. So they're talking in materialist terms about what we can know in that third person, empirical, scientific perspective, which of course is crucial to their project. but the dialectic aspect was beautiful about it it's it's necessary for us to evolve i think i've established that or at least you know planted those seeds and it comes from every culture deep in the bowels of every culture and every people's history there is something akin to this deep in the in the in the caves of every religion there eventually is some form of non-dualism or mysticism that is asking you to not believe certain things

the ego is in the realm of belief, right? To conceptually, and Alan Watts talks about this, right? We break up, we confuse the menu for the food. We filter reality through our concepts, and then we mistake our concepts for reality. And that creates a lot of confusion. We create a concept of our self, which is permanent and fixed, a fixed concept. But our self is always moving and changing and evolving. And so there's always this tension.

We never feel at home in ourselves. we feel alienated from ourselves at odds with ourselves. There's the observer and the thing being observed at the same time. There's the part of you that wants to be disciplined, and there's the part of you that breaks into the fridge at 4 in the morning to smash on shredded cheese. Like, you know, and those parts of you exist at the same time. Our whole lives, we're trying to like subtly resolve this inward tension. But it's precisely in the overcoming of the ego, which is transcending and including,

just like you transcended and included your childhood. You look back on your childhood and you say, okay, my consciousness has expanded dramatically beyond my childhood understanding of the world. But my present being is deeply rooted in that child. Its experiences, its first relationships continue to influence who I am. So in some sense, that child is still included in me. It's still in there somewhere. But I've transcended it.

I would not believe the same silly things I believed as a seven-year-old or an eight-year-old. Right. I can see how I'm not just. harshly judging my child self. I'm loving my child's self and realizing I grew out of that, but I don't agree with it. I can see it for what it was. The shift from ego to post ego is the exact same shift. An expansion of awareness wherein you see how you used to think not judgmentally and not a clean break, not that the ego dies or goes away, you know, because the child technically goes away through change, but is always there in you influencing your behaviors, your patterns of thought,

etc. Your inaugural traumas, whatever it may be. The ego persists, but your conscious awareness has expanded beyond it such that it's not in rigid identification with it. It's useful but it is not the slave master dialectic. You

you've gone from being the slave of your ego to the master of it. It's in its proper place. And so that expansion is dialectical in the sense of the upward spiral of the transcendence and inclusion of continuity and of rupture. It is the nest Transformation that I think would that would allow a full human species to actually interact with one another in a communist way. I think we can build socialism with awakening egos. But I think to have a stable communist world, I think that's going to require outward and inward transformation that are actually inseparable, right? Those two attempts to transform, transform each other at the same time. That's real dialectics. And again, this heritage is deep in human history.

in every culture and every major religion. It doesn't belong to any one culture or any one people. It's our birthright. And it is also the very thing that's going to lead us forward. So I think, yeah, the hallmarks of this new orientation is the transcendence of ego identification, the reintegration of ourselves with one another in the natural world, and the political, economic, and social systems that reflect that, which is first socialism and then ultimately communism.

Yeah, very well said. I think, you know, a couple things that I'll touch on there. You know, what's interesting to you when you get into the ego and you get into consciousness and contemplation is, I actually, and you've gestured towards this earlier, think you can kind of like see dialectical principles at play when you are doing contemplative practice in a really interesting way. The ego, you know, as it's conceptualized, kind of crassly and intuitively, as the core kind of driving thing of consciousness, as us as this thing that is in control. In so many ways in the realm of consciousness plays the role that God plays in the material sciences kind of crass materialism phase, right?

Where you have this kind of like first mover that becomes necessary, and intentionality to set everything in motion becomes necessary. And one of the interesting things with contemplative practice is that that is kind of blown apart, right? Like the moment that you start to become aware of how consciousness functions, you really become profoundly aware of this sense that you are not in the driver's seat, right? And this is very easy to test. Like, you right now could go, pause this, and just spend one minute trying not to think any thoughts, and I guarantee you you can't do it, right? And that is because,

you know, even in consciousness, we see that emotion is the natural state of things, that things arise and they appear and they pass away on their own, absent some governing kind of will or principle. And so I do think it's interesting, even when you get into like the details of those contemplative practices, you start to see some of these dialectical concepts play out, which is interesting. But one thing that I will say to complicate some of what we're saying here, because I do think I want to be fair to the critics of the way that some of this contemplative and Buddhist ideals get taken up in the West is that absent being paired with socialism, all of this can be quite amenable to a certain form of capitalism if we're not careful, right? I think if you look at Western

Buddhism as it gets taken up in like Silicon Valley, for example, it can be constructed in such a way that there's a political quietism that comes out of it and sort of a disengagement from the political world and responsibility to engage in change. And I'm not saying that that is representative of Buddhism or contemplative traditions on the whole. Like I think if you look at like the Plum Village School. You'll see the exact opposite, right? A Buddhism that is necessarily engaged. But I think it's important to recognize that if the contemplative is taken away from the broader dialectical understanding of the universe and the need for political transformation, it can kind of fall into a crass ideology of its own. And I want to acknowledge that because I'm

sure there's a subset of our listeners who are thinking that. And I think there's a certain level of fairness there. But I don't think that that means that there's not something to the contemplative that should be engaged and that could be understood dialectically. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but yeah, one of my subchapter's is about personal quietism, the problem of retreating into spirituality without this other outward transformational revolutionary out, you know, aspect to it, which, which does just devolve into an individualist. Yeah, quietism is the perfect word. That's the name of that subchapter. Because anything brought into the superstructure will be shaped by it unless you struggle on the terrain of the superstructure.

You can think of anything, fucking like sports, Christianity, anything brought into the capitalist superstructure will punk rock, right? Even subversive things that the culture produces can very easily and always is attacked and attempted to be co-opted by the superstructure. And so if you don't have that revolutionary orientation that is willing to struggle in the base and in the superstructure and has that understanding of how these things actually operate, then yeah, it will immediately, be defanged. It will be abstracted away from its culture and its history and it will be put to the

service of capitalism. And these practices existed in feudalism. They existed in slave societies. In and of themselves, it is quite clear that they are not capable of, you know, revolutionary change. But on the other hand of that, we've all been in left-wing Marxist, organizing socialist circles. We've all seen people with huge fucking egos. We've seen people with deep insecurities, people that can't be honest and vulnerable with their own emotions and so who, who, um, set up interpersonal conflicts as their principled ideological struggles. We've all seen people who just can't relate to themselves and they can't relate to others. And these tear organizations apart, they, they are, are ripe for hypocrisy and forms of abuse to flower, um, you know, so, so if we don't take on

that subjective internal maturation process alongside our political maturation process, each one of those without the other is severely weakened. And that's the argument I kind of want to make in this book and the book. And the argument I think I implicitly or explicitly, and you do as well, Allison, make in all of these shows. You know, some shows will be just on mysticism or the ego and then Marxists will be like, what the fuck is this shit? Well, we're talking about that side of the dialectic.

Let us talk about that side of the dialectic. We'll get back to this other side. But hold them both in your mind at the same time because they're both essential, you know? Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. think it's funny. We both just like, I, you know, we haven't said it as explicitly as in this episode. I think we both breed Marxism and dialectic through Spinoza so much, right? That it doesn't feel controversial to us to make these connections. Because I think Spinoza can operate as a really nice bridge from a lot of what Ingalls is saying here to, um, thinking about what is traditionally called spiritual, which is a term that I don't necessarily love. But, you know, there's interesting stuff going on there. I don't know that I have too much more there. But I do think like, yeah, I, I think, I, I think, I think, you know, this view of dialectics fits with broader philosophical trends in what often gets called, like, Eastern philosophy in ways that are really interesting, and that shouldn't surprise

us, right? Like, Ingalls' point is that even when science lost dialectics, philosophy kept it alive, and that wasn't just true of, like, philosophy in Western Europe, right? Like, that would actually be a particularly chauvinist assumption, I think. So there are interesting connections to draw here, but I hope at least some of our audience finds useful, because I kind of can't help but going back to them in these cases. Yeah, and I always like to also point out that we're interested in the ruthless pursuit of truth, the ruthless criticism of all that exists. That's not only aimed outward. We can also aim that relentless pursuit of truth inwardly, and that is meditative practice. That is looking, sitting down, shutting the fuck up, looking inward, watching moment by moment how your mind

actually operates. Cause and effect chain of what this thought leads to this emotion leads to this thought. Oh, I'm starting to look inward so much that I can see how my ego is reacting to this person saying this thing. Now that I'm aware that I'm getting pulled in this direction of whatever anger or jealousy by the actions of this other person, I'm no longer so tightly identified with it that I just spill out the anger and the jealousy. But I actually am at a higher place of awareness such that I can see the jealousy and the rage emerging, and I can immediately cut it off by a veto because I'm aware of it. I'm not identified with it.

It's something that's happening in me that I can stand back from, observe, and decide whether this is skillful or unskilful to carry through with. So, yeah, ruthless criticism, relentless pursuit of truth, aim it inwardly and you get something like these sorts of spiritual practices that we're talking about. This is not woo-woo. This is not metaphysical speculation. It's not actually asking you to believe anything.

It is asking you to. run the experiment to ruthlessly look inward, time and time again, sit down and look at what your mind is actually doing and see for yourself over time what discoveries you make. And we talk about reality as relentless cascade of change. Buddhism is this practice precisely of applying that to your mind is constantly in this chaotic state. And now it's hyper-accelerated from all these distractions we have in our phone and our screens and our minds are just, running a hundred miles a minute redlining all day long. What would it be like to give your mind a rest?

You know, what would it be like to first sit down and watch the constant cascade of change happening inside of you, become very intimate with how that works, and then to be able over time to slow that down or to just drop out of conceptual, compulsive thinking when you see that it's no longer serving you? That's a superpower in today's world. And that is precisely the stillness, the dignity, the inward togetherness that would make for the best sort of organizer to go out and change the world. One that is not reactive, but one that can stand back from their own reactivity and assess it skillfully. Holy shit, we need more of that on the left, right?

Right. And you might just come to understand dialectics better, too. That's kind of my additional pitch, is you might get like some experiential realities in relation to dialectics. can be kind of illuminating and help you understand. So what we're talking about here that is stupidly abstract and philosophical, right? Having the experiential layer added on, um, you really can help like an incredible amount. Absolutely. It's not just about belief, which is to say it's not just about theory. It's about experience. Spiritually, it's not about believing a certain metaphysical claim. It's about looking into the nature of experience itself.

And politically, it's not about understanding Marxist theory. It's about applying it and learning through experience itself. Same exact. thing. Very quickly, let's touch on atheism because I see this new form of spirituality that you and I are trying to articulate as the dialectical advancement beyond atheism. Atheism has this necessary part of the upward spiral to dismantle all the previous belief, ego-oriented forms of religion, but that atheism itself kind of like irony is inherently destructive. It tears things down, sometimes very much needed. but it actually doesn't build much up.

So the modern person who can no longer believe often in the old ways of being and thinking about the world, they often default to an atheism. Some even turn that into an egoic source of pride. But atheism itself ultimately kind of gives rise to a sort of nihilism because atheism doesn't offer anything. And then once you start telling an atheist this, they'll start opining on the beauty of the cosmos.

Okay, now we're to the next stage. Now we're starting to break through to like, Hey, there's something more here. So Marx and Engels were atheists. Materialist atheists. That is not spiritually or existentially satisfying. And the modern person finds themselves disoriented and despairing in the face of it because it doesn't really provide anything.

So we have to go beyond it. Marks and Engels in their time did not. Maybe they didn't want to. They weren't aware that it was possible to go beyond it. Who knows? But what do you make of the limits of atheism as you and I have both called our and have been atheists in the past. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think maybe I still am an atheist and I'm not an atheist at the same time. In the Spinoza sense, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's a very difficult proposition. Okay, so I think two things, right? So atheism, you're right, is a necessary corrective. And precisely in this text, right?

Like, it is atheism that allows us to break beyond the metaphysics of mechanical materialism because you no longer can defer to a first mover argument that pinned the universe in a given state. Right. And so atheism is like unbelievably philosophically necessary in that sense. And, you know, in that sense, I would say dialectical materialism is atheist, right? It is making this atheistic critique of a certain metaphysical assumption that underpinned early science. So yes, I think atheism is a necessity. At the same time, I think that, yeah, it's interesting, right? Atheism is not a positive proposition about reality. I think. It's quite the opposite. It's a negative proposition that argues that another thing which has been proposed by religion or by these other social phenomena does not have an actual epistemological basis on which we should believe in it, and it tries to argue against that. And I think it's good that it does that. But I think you're right. It becomes difficult then to feel like the universe

is a place where we can exist comfortably, perhaps, in the way that God allowed. You know, it's interesting. I'm very just sympathetic to Nietzsche about the death of God being traumatic, right? Like, it is necessary and good that God has died, but it is also horrifying, you know, the madman in Nietzsche's work states perfectly, like, how could we become responsible of this deed that we've done? I'm very sympathetic to that read. So atheism also poses a problem to us existentially. Now, I don't want to say, though, that that means we should return to theism, because I actually do see, like, some Marxists doing this, like, unproblematically promoting theism in response to this. And I think that would be a mistake, too, right?

Just going back to traditional theism would be an issue, because it reimposes all the metaphysics that we as Marxists are trying to escape. And so I'm not very willing to entertain that. But I will say that as I've engaged with the contemplative side of things, and as I've philosophically wrestled with the meaning of atheism. I have found that my atheism looks perhaps quite a lot like a pantheism and like those two things might be identical to each other. And when you say, you know, atheists will then start to get going about, oh, well, the beauty of the universe, I think they're onto something. I actually think then looking at the aesthetic qualities and the meaning and the grounding that can exist within that reality can allow us to understand the universe as something

more than just like base materiality that we might feel depressed by. I don't want to tease it out too far, but like I do think like I would probably if I had to put a term on myself, call myself like a post atheist, right? And atheism was necessary. I think there's no getting around that. I think if I personally had it experienced atheism, I would not be able to be a Marxist. But I also think a basic unquestioning crude, purely oppositional atheism is insufficient. Yes. And the way I would have to be a Marxist. I would. articulate it quickly as we wrap up here. The modern form of atheism that we all have gone through and that we're trying to transcend and include is this alienated, separate, egoic understanding of

yourself in relation to the cosmos. You look at out the world, you say, yeah, it's beautiful, it's gorgeous, I can't believe I get to see this for my 80 years. But behind all of that is lurking the fundamental belief that you're separate from it. And so what's lurking is a demoralization that you're going to be ripped out of this thing. That that, that, That you get to see it and it's beauty for a little snapshot of time and then you go away. You separate from it eternally. And that is the alienation and the separation. That is the illusion of the ego.

And so I think when you see the beauty of the universe and you practice these experiential-based spiritual practices, you are it. There is no separation from it. Alan Watts made those claims explicitly. You look up at the night sky and you don't just intellectually think, I'm not really separate from and I'm actually the same thing. You feel it in your fucking bones. That's enlightenment. That's non-dualism. And you said you're still an atheist. I say the same thing we said it about Spinoza earlier. He's both the most theistic and the most atheistic. I'm the most atheistic and non-athistic person you'll ever meet in the world. And here's the crucial punchline of this whole thing. When you can hold

both sides of a dualism in complete harmony with no contradiction, you are on the right spiritual and dialectical path. That's the hallmark. Yeah. When you can say without a hint of irony that I am both of those things at the same exact fucking time and feel it in your bones to be true, that is the next stage that we need to evolve towards. Yeah. I'll end on one last thing. I think I have the time to get out one more thing. You know, that idea of getting beyond the ego and being able to understand ourselves as part of nature as being part of this post-Atheism is really on my mind right now. My grandma died very recently, and my whole family are, like, strong evangelical Christians.

So all I've heard is she's not really dead, right? We're going to see her again, this very theistic belief in an afterlife. And me, as someone who's not, you know, part of that, I've been wrestling with this. And I ended up, you know, deciding to write a letter that I left in her coffin. And in that letter, I basically just kind of wrestled with, well, I don't believe I'm going to see you again, grandma. And I don't believe that there's a God that plan. all this. I don't believe in any of those things. I'm going to approach this as an atheist. But what I do believe is that my ego is an emergent thing that is operating on its own and that I am not my ego.

And I believe that you weren't your ego either. And I believe that you and I are not things that are separate from the universe, but that we are the universe. And how you exist in the universe has changed. Your body is going into the ground in which it will become different forms of matter, but you're still going to be in the universe, Grandma, and someday I'm going to be in the ground too, and the same thing is going to happen. And there's no horror in that, necessarily. There's no reason for despair.

There's no reason for existential loss just because there's not some God that made Providence happen here, but that we are not separate ego-dominating things. We just are the universe, and our position within it will change just like everything changes. This is, in my mind, kind of the inside of dialectics. And so, yeah, when I talk about like, I guess, opposed to atheism, I mean something along those lines. I don't know. Hopefully that makes sense. But that's a way that I've been thinking about it concretely in my life.

It's beautiful and it's moving. And I send, as I've done privately, I'll do it publicly, send all my love to you and your family. And I think what you're hinting at is the next stage of human understanding and our spiritual development, this non-separation. Because it is the, it's the ego that thinks it's going to be wholesale taken up into heaven. and I'll meet my same exact grandma, or I'll meet my dog in heaven. And it's also the ego that is horrified at the prospect of its own annihilation. If you can get to a point in your mind

where you're viscerally experiencing your being beyond that, the terror goes away. And that's what's fascinating. It's not easy. I'm not saying I'm there, right? That would be enlightening. It's back and forth. It's opening and closing all the time. But that is the cutting edge, I think, of human moral and spiritual and existential development.

And we've got to push in that direction. So I think we'll wrap it up there. You know, I'm not going to pat me and Allison on the back too hard, but you're not getting this conversation anywhere else. Folks, come on. This is the only place you're hearing all this stuff in one place. So, yeah, hopefully that was edifying and interesting and educational to people out there, spread it around, listen to it, and start thinking in this way.

And I think you'll find it incredibly rewarding and deepening and profound in existential ways. So, again, couldn't ask for a better co-host. I can't have these conversations with almost. to anybody else. So huge shout out to Allison. We worked really hard on this episode. We hope people like it. Love and solidarity. Stay safe out there.