/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>Critics, attacking Marxism, accuse it of maintaining that development is performed according to Hegelian triads. According to them, development takesplace in the following way. At the beginning of the development of any process, it appears as a thesis, as something positive. This thing generates its own particular opposite – its antithesis. Further development unifies, in a way, the thesis and antithesis, that is, comes out as a synthesis. Thus development of any object takes places in three stages which form a “triad”: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. By these positions Hegel wanted to confirm the law of development through the struggle of opposites, transition of one phenomenon into another, its opposite, and transition of the former into such opposite, in which is included both preceding stages of development. Hegel’s positions contain profound thinking, which was grasped and developed by Marx and Engels. Engels wrote that the negation of the negation – “a very simple procedure, performed everywhere every day, which every child can understand as soon as the mysterious junk in which the old idealistic philosophy wrapped itself is stripped off […].”2

>But it is just metaphysical philosophy which also does not see anything in the law of the negation of the negation other than mystical [188] junk. The law of the negation of the negation is depicted by metaphysics as a schematic “triad,” which Marxists fit to the development concrete reality by force. True, it is necessary to say that Hegel himself gave grounds, particularly in his Philosophy of Right, to interpret “triplicity” as a law of development itself, and not merely as an aspect of the law of the negation of the negation. Thus he considered crime as the negation of law, and punishment as the negation of crime, that is, as the negation of the negation. Here the triad actively entered as an external schema, which drives the phenomena of reality. It would also be possible to say that the
struggle for existence in organic nature takes place according to a triad: insects are eaten by birds (thesis and antithesis), but birds are eaten by predators (synthesis). A kind of unification of the world of insects and the world of birds arises in the stomach of the predator arises.

>Certainly, such schematic behavior of phenomena according to a triad could not explain development….

>[193] In the development of a plant, the seed, a manifestation of its growth, appears as the negation of it, i.e., the negation of the negation. But seeds are>generated by the development of the plant, they constitute a moment of the plant, a moment which signifies the goal of the development of the plant. The plant rots, the seed remains. The cycle of development is finished.

>Kautsky is puzzled: what is this negation of the negation where simultaneously there are both a plant (negation of a seed) and a seed (the negation of the negation, that is, of the plant). As a mechanist he would want to tear apart these two stages, and afterwards would be surprised when he found no development.

>Meanwhile the essence of both negation and the negation of the negation consists in this, that they appear as moments in the contradictory development of a process.

https://www.marxistphilosophy.org/Aizenberg.pdf

Makes sense to me.