If dialectics provides the theoretical toolkit of Marxists, what are the different ‘tools’ in the kit that we can use – whether consciously or more instinctively – and how do they apply in relation to a study of society, to assist us in both challenging capitalism and building the social forces necessary to overthrow it?

For Marxists active in the struggle to bring about the end of capitalism and the birth of socialism, this is a question of paramount importance. Marxism is not a plaything to amuse armchair academics, but a weapon for serious class fighters who learn to think and apply ideas dialectically in order to bring about the socialist transformation of society.

It is not a question of ‘learning’ the different ‘laws’ of dialectics and then going into the movement and selecting one or more from a crib sheet. Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking, based upon seeing events in their connection. Somebody who yesterday expressed no interest in politics or had illusions in their place in the capitalist system, can tomorrow come searching for a revolutionary party as a result of changes to their outlook based on an experience - such as losing their job, or arising from oppression.

The law of quantity into quality

In everyday life, we all have experience of things altering their ‘quality’ as certain quantitative points are reached. Perhaps the most obvious example is water turning into steam once its boiling point has been reached. Science is full of instances of such ‘qualitative changes’. To give just one example from modern physics, some metals suddenly exhibit zero electrical resistance - and become ‘superconductors’ - once they have been cooled to a given ‘critical temperature’.

Parents look out for the developmental leaps made by their children, such as the transition from crawling to walking. People living on fault lines can never be sure when the incremental build-up of stress in the earth’s crust is going to be released in a sudden earthquake.

But the same kind of processes apply in relation to developments in society too. In any society founded upon antagonistic class forces, where bosses seek to extract the last pound of surplus value (profit) out of the working class, the friction between the classes can, and does, burst into episodic periods of sharpened struggle, leading to political and social crises. These can be local, sectoral or general.

Given the right conditions - not least the necessary revolutionary leadership - the qualitative change can, of course, as in Russia in 1917, be a complete change of social system, when, as Trotsky puts it in his ‘History of the Russian Revolution’, “accumulating quantity turns with an explosion into quality”.

For an entire period, industrial and/or political struggle can sometimes appear to be at a low ebb. Strikes may be at low levels; overt political protest might seem almost invisible. On the surface there can be apparent stability and even quiescence, but under that surface a quantitative build-up of frustration and antagonism among workers towards the bosses can break out suddenly, creating qualitatively new conditions for struggle and catching the capitalists and their political representatives completely by surprise.

Governments can win elections with apparently handsome parliamentary majorities but then, out of an apparently ‘clear blue sky’, new events can burst onto the scene so that suddenly everything that previously appeared stable, now becomes unstable.

Even philosophers educated in capitalist universities, steeped in empiricism (i.e. knowledge limited to immediate experience) and formal logic are forced, usually after an explosive event, to recognise the existence of the law of quantity into quality, reducing it to “the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

As apologists for capitalism, they usually foresee little and learn less, always looking ahead to a brighter future for their system. The most eminent capitalist economists, with only a very few exceptions, did not predict the world recession of 2007-09, believing the hype of the financiers that the good times would just keep on rolling. On the contrary, the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) traced the trajectory of the processes that would lead to the crash. Moreover, we understood after it that all the fundamental features that triggered the 2007 US sub-prime housing crash, that in turn precipitated the most serious world recession since the 1929 Great Depression, were still present and at some stage would mature to crisis point again.

There are times when the unfolding of this law does not denote a progression, but a regression, signifying a defeat for the working class. Prior to the coming to power of the fascists in Germany in 1933, the class struggle went through a series of quantitative political phases, each one leading to partial defeats for the working class and the further erosion of parliamentary democracy through a series of unstable bonapartist governments.

The exasperation of the German capitalists at this class stalemate, in which neither they nor the working class could decisively go forward, led them to hand the keys to Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, to Hitler’s fascist movement, signifying a qualitative defeat for the workers’ movement in Germany and internationally. The ultimate responsibility for this crushing defeat lay with the leaderships of the ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ parties who failed to build the united front forces that could have defeated the Nazis.

There is never an inevitability about how the class struggle will play out. Leadership is decisive, which is why the building of revolutionary parties remains the key to ensuring that revolutionary opportunities will be successfully grasped in the future.

For over fifty years we characterised the Stalinist bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union as a relative fetter upon the growth of the planned economy that was brought in following the 1917 revolution. By this we meant that despite the horrors of the forced-labour camps and the waste and corruption of the parasitic bureaucrats, the existence of even a deformed workers’ state made it still possible for the planned economy to grow, albeit much less efficiently than had the working class been in charge.

By the 1960s, command-style rule from the Kremlin was struggling to cope with the fresh challenges of a more technically advanced form of economy. Trotsky’s maxim that a planned economy needs workers’ control as a body needs oxygen became more relevant than ever. We observed these changes and concluded that the bureaucracy had passed from being an increasingly sclerotic, relative fetter upon further progress, to an absolute one. Quantity had turned into quality. From a study of all the declining economic and social statistics coming out of the USSR and from talking directly with Russian workers, we began to draw more rounded-out theoretical conclusions. The Soviet Union could not stay frozen in stasis.

A point was being rapidly reached where either the working class would have to overthrow the incubus that was the bureaucracy and carry through a political revolution, or there would occur a social counter-revolution leading to the restoration of capitalism, a possibility which had been posed by Trotsky as long ago as the 1930s. The triumph of the latter marked a qualitative defeat for the working class in Russia and everywhere else.