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 eternal categories valid for all social formations. This could be seen 
 at its crassest in the vulgar bourgeois economists, but the vulgar 
 Marxists soon followed in their footsteps. The dialectical method was 
 overthrown and with it the methodological supremacy of the totality over 
 the individual aspects; the parts were prevented from finding their 
 definition within the whole and, instead, the whole was dismissed as 
 unscientific or else it degenerated into the mere €idea€ or €sum€ of the 
 parts. With the totality out of the way, the fetishistic relations of 
 the isolated parts appeared as a timeless law valid for every human 
 society. 
  
 Marx€s dictum: €The relations of production of every society form a 
 whole€ [13] is the methodological point of departure and the key to the 
 historical understanding of social relations. All the isolated partial 
 categories can be thought of and treated € in isolation € as something 
 that is always present in every society. (If it cannot be found in a 
 given society this is put down to €chance€ as the exception that proves 
 the rule.) But the changes to which these individual aspects are subject 
 give no clear and unambiguous picture of the real differences in the 
 various stages of the evolution of society. These can really only be 
 discerned in the context of the total historical process of their 
 relation to society as a whole. 
  
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 3 
  
 This dialectical conception of totality seems to have put a great 
 distance between itself and reality, it appears to construct reality 
 very €unscientifically€. But it is the only method capable of 
 understanding and reproducing reality. Concrete totality is, therefore, 
 the category that governs reality. [14] The rightness of this view only 
 emerges with complete clarity when we direct our attention to the real, 
 material substratum of our method, viz. capitalist society with its 
 internal antagonism between the forces and the relations of production. 
 The methodology of the natural sciences which forms the methodological 
 ideal of every fetishistic science and every kind of Revisionism rejects 
 the idea of contradiction and antagonism in its subject matter. If, 
 despite this, contradictions do spring up between particular theories, 
 this only proves that our knowledge is as yet imperfect. Contradictions 
 between theories show that these theories have reached their natural 
 limits; they must therefore be transformed and subsumed under even wider 
 theories in which the contradictions finally disappear. 
  
 But we maintain that in the case of social reality these contradictions 
 are not a sign of the imperfect understanding of society; on the 
 contrary, they belong to the nature of reality itself and to the nature 
 of capitalism. When the totality is known they will not be transcended 
 and cease to be contradictions. Quite the reverse. they will be seen to 
 be necessary contradictions arising out of the antagonisms of this 
 system of production. When theory (as the knowledge of the whole) opens 
 up the way to resolving these contradictions it does so by revealing the 
 real tendencies of social evolution. For these are destined to effect a 
 real resolution of the contradictions that have emerged in the course of 
 history. 
  
  From this angle we see that the conflict between the dialectical method 
 and that of €criticism€ (or vulgar materialism, Machism, etc.) is a 
 social problem. When the ideal of scientific knowledge is applied to 
 nature it simply furthers the progress of science. But when it is 
 applied to society it turns out to be an ideological weapon of the 
 bourgeoisie. For the latter it is a matter of life and death to 
 understand its own system of production in terms of eternally valid 
 categories: it must think of capitalism as being predestined to eternal 
 survival by the eternal laws of nature and reason. Conversely, 
 contradictions that cannot be ignored must be shown to be purely surface 
 phenomena, unrelated to this mode of production. 
  
 The method of classical economics was a product of this ideological 
 need. But also its limitations as a science are a consequence of the 
 structure of capitalist reality and the antagonistic character of 
 capitalist production. When, for example, a thinker of Ricardo€s stature 
 can deny the €necessity of expanding the market along with the expansion 
 of production and the growth of capital€, he does so (unconsciously of 
 course), to avoid the necessity of admitting that crises are inevitable. 
 For crises are the most striking illustration of the antagonisms in 
 capitalist production and it is evident that €the bourgeois mode of 
 production implies a limitation to the free development of the forces of 
 production.€ [15] What was good faith in Ricardo became a consciously 
 misleading apologia of bourgeois society in the writings of the vulgar 
 economists. The vulgar Marxists arrived at the same results by seeking 
 either the thorough-going elimination of dialectics from proletarian 
 science, or at best its €critical€ refinement. 
  
 To give a grotesque illustration, Max Adler wished to make a critical 
 distinction between dialectics as method, as the movement of thought on 
 the one hand and the dialectics of being, as metaphysics on the other. 
 His €criticism€ culminates in the sharp separation of dialectics from 
 both and he describes it as a €piece of positive science€ which €is. 
 what is chiefly meant by talk of real dialectics in Marxism.€ This 
 dialectic might more aptly be called €antagonism€, for it simply 
 €asserts that an opposition exists between the self-interest of an 
 individual and the social forms in which he is confined.€ [16] By this 
 stroke the objective economic antagonism as expressed in the class 
 struggle evaporates, leaving only a conflict between the individual and 
 society. This means that neither the emergence of internal problems, nor 
 the collapse of capitalist society, can be seen to be necessary. The 
 end-product, whether he likes it or not, is a Kantian philosophy of 
 history€ Moreover, the structure of bourgeois society is established as 
 the universal form of society in general. For the central problem Max 
 Adler tackles, of the real €dialectics or, better, antagonism€ is nothing 
 but one of the typical ideological forms of the capitalist social order. 
 But whether capitalism is rendered immortal on economic or on ideological 
 grounds, whether with naive nonchalance, or with critical refinement is 
 of little importance. 
  
 Thus with the rejection or blurring of the dialectical method history 
 becomes unknowable. This does not imply that a more or less exact 
 account of particular people or epochs cannot be given without the aid 
 of dialectics. But it does put paid to attempts to understand history 
 as a unified process. (This can be seen in the sociologically abstract, 
 historical constructs of the type of Spencer and Comte whose inner 
 contradictions have been convincingly exposed by modern bourgeois 
 historians, most incisively by Rickert. But it also shows itself in the 
 demand for a €philosophy of history€ which then turns out to have a 
 quite inscrutable relationship to historical reality.) The opposition 
 between the description of an aspect of history and the description of 
 history as a unified process is not just a problem of scope, as in the 
 distinction between particular and universal history. It is rather a 
 conflict of method, of approach. Whatever the epoch or special topic of 
  
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  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)