March 13, 2006: On Contradiction #1: Initial Thoughts
"Contradiction" is a complicated subject. When thinking about contradiction, one of the first questions that comes to my mind is: How can contradiction be defined in a way that is logically consistent as well as practically useful for political theory.
Anthony Giddens provided a definition in Central Problems of Social Theory (1979). First, he differentiated between two notions: conflict and contradiction. For him conflict is the struggle between actors or collectivities expressed as definite social practices. On the other hand, contradiction is the disjunction of structural principles of system organization.
Giddens' definition poses another question: What constitutes a "system" in society?
Using a dialectical approach, I would say that a "system" consists of mutually interacting elements or processes that are dependent upon each other for their existence or behavior. For example, in capitalism owners depend upon (the exploitation of) workers in order to continue making profits, to continue being owners. Workers are, in turn, dependent upon capitalists for their daily wages and survival. This is not a "natural" dependency but one that is socially constructed: workers, who have no storehouse of wealth, must obey the laws of private property (under threat of violence) and subject themselves to economic exploitation. Since social systems involve these and other types of social practices, they should not be metaphorically assimilated to purely physical systems, like a machine or a biological organism.
In order to use the concept of contradiction in political analysis, it might also be useful to differentiate between contradiction (as Giddens' defined it) and the opposition of social forces. Further, one might also distinguish between primary contradictions and displaced contradictions (see also Ted's blog on this subject where he proposes three forms of displacement). This would be my tentative typology of contradictions (including Ted's three forms):
Primary contradictions: In a capitalist society, these would be the primary economic contradictions that Marx identified in Capital.Displaced contradictions: Giddens called these secondary contradictions but I like the term "displacement" because it seems a bit more descriptive. David Harvey frequently makes use of the idea of displaced contradictions; here is a quote from Urbanization of Capital (1985) where he refers to the closely related notion of displaced class struggle as, "class struggle that has its origin in the work process but that ramifies and reverberates throughout all aspects of the system of relations which capitalism establishes."
Opposition of social forces: A society can have various social elements, processes, forces, etc. that are not internally related (e.g., by mutual dependence, etc.), but are nonetheless in opposition and this opposition can give rise to social conflict.
We'll see how my proposition "pans out" as this discussion on contradiction unfolds.
Comments
Why do we use the term "contradiction" at all? Why not "conflict" or "antagonism"? To my ear "contradiction" sounds so idealist: it's a problem with the logic colliding with itself.
Does anybody know where the term originates? I don't think the Greeks used it. Kant uses "antinomy". Does it trace to Hegel? If yes, why did Hegel choose this term, rather than something else?
Why do we tend to reduce contradictions to pairs of binary oppositions? What's so privileged about the number two? Real world social formations have more contradictions than just the highly-abstracted one between capital and labor. There are the surviving pre-capitalist modes of production, the impact of imperialism, etc. etc. You can't understand the Nicaraguan revolution, for example, as an unfolding of a simple contradiction between capital and labor.
Lenin insisted that Marxists needed to undertake "concrete analysis of concrete situations". Althusser showed that Lenin's "concreteness" consisted specifically of the multiplicity -- overdetermination -- of the contradictions, which are no longer single, binary and abstract, but multiple and complex.
The language of "contradiction" doesn't reflect concrete multiplicity very well. Is there a better term?
Posted by: Mark Phillips | April 7, 2006 11:48 AM
Good points. I think that Marx frequently used the word "antagonism" to describe various relations of capitalism. My impression is that people started using "contradiction" to underscore internal relations aspect of the situation, as distinct from a simple opposition of unrelated social forces.
Contradiction does seem to take on idealist tones if we're talking about the dialectics of nature. If you restrict yourself to human relations, maybe its a bit less so. For example, exploitative human relations usually involve some form of domination, which means that one person "gives orders" to the other which "contradict" what the that other person would have wanted to do.
To continue your inquiry on the notion of contradiction being always two elements in opposition, I wonder if one could think of larger groups of interacting (social) forces all at once. Or would it be better to analyze a situation in terms of various couples of two that then interact with each other. Did Althusser address this at all? It almost sounds like a physics problem! (i.e., the two-body vs. the multi-body problem in celestial mechanics)
All very complicated stuff!
Posted by: Emmett | April 7, 2006 01:24 PM
Althusser did believe that "real" contradictions aren't found in binary pairs. For Althusser this abstract binary "dialectics" is a survival of "bad" Hegelianism within Marxist thought, and should be struggled against.
My larger question is really, is Althusser right that reducing "dialectics" to binary pairs is characteristic of Hegelianism? Does it go back farther?
Posted by: Mark Phillips | April 7, 2006 03:28 PM
P.S., Althusser throws in another term for good measure: "idealist" versus "materialist" contradiction.
For L.A., Hegelian binary contradictions are "abstract", "idealist", and bad, while Marxist overdetermined contradictions are "concrete", "materialist", and good.
I understand and accept the labels abstract/concrete, and also the distinction that for Marx and followers contradictions are indeed overdetermined. I'm not clear what the tags "idealist" versus "materialist" mean in this context. Hegel obviously was an idealist philosopher while Marx was a materialist activist. But I don't understand how those two labels relate to their respective understandings of "contradiction." Maybe Ted or Wayne can clear this up.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | April 7, 2006 05:50 PM