May 02, 2006: On Contradiction #3: Marx and Althusserians
Marx developed his materialist dialectical method through a critical engagement with Hegel's philosophy and its idealist dialectic. As Althusser stressed, Marx's dialectic was not just a simple inversion of Hegel's. While Hegel saw the world as an unfolding of a single "Idea" in contradiction with itself (i.e., as simplicity developing into complexity), Marx posed his materialist dialectic of capitalism as a pre-given complex of interacting relations or processes, each with their own potential efficacy. (See, For Marx)
Marx made use of several concepts of contradiction in his mature works: (1) contradiction as a logical or theoretical inconsistency, (2) as oppositions of social forces of relatively independent origins that tend to cancel each other's actions, and (3) as either temporal or systemic dialectical contradictions--with temporal contradictions being grounded in systemic contradictions.
Althusser drew upon Marx, Lenin, and Mao in developing his conceptions of social contradictions and their dynamics. He posited that social formations are a complex of contradictions some of which, at any given time, could be in a state of fusion (where there is a build up of antagonistic social forces) or displacement (a non-antagonistic situation in which social forces are dissipated) The state of a particular contradiction was dependent upon its relationship to the other contradictions within the social formation and could change as the system developed.
Balibar, who was a coauthor with Althusser of Reading Capital, had a somewhat different take on social contradiction. He was to trying to understand both the reproduction of capitalist social relations, as well as, come up with a theory of transformation from one mode of production to another. For him, the fact that capitalist social relations could reproduce themselves on a continuing basis meant that contradictions do not actually exist in the structure of capitalism, but rather that the dynamics of the structure give rise to contradictory effects.
As an example, Balibar quoted Marx (in Capital Volume 3) who observed that the development of the social productivity of labor causes two seemingly contradictory effects: a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, while the absolute mass of profit rose.
In removing contradiction from the structure, Balibar seems to treat capitalism as if it were an internally regulated physical system as opposed to contradictory social system. Alain Lipietz, of the "regulationist school," thought that Balibar had "inverted" classical Althusserianism with this formulation. To avoid (or correct) this apparent problem the regulationists' have concentrated on showing, among other things, that "capitalist reproduction doesn't run by itself," and that reproduction must generally be pursued in order to avoid crises. (Lipietz in: The Althusserian Legacy, E.A. Kaplan and M. Sprinker, Eds., VERSO, 1993)
