Negation of the negation

• • Negation of the negation** is one of the basic laws or principles of dialectics (see). Every object or condition, being made up of internal contradictions, contains within itself its own negation. There is a struggle within it between that which is growing and that which is dying—between the old and the new. The negation of the old does not signify, however, a useless, empty negation, a simple casting aside of all that is old, as metaphysical thinking tends to conceive it. “Negation in dialectics does not mean simply saying ‘no,’ or declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes.” (Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 155.) Dialectics “demands a recognition of the unity, that is, the connection of negative with positive, the finding of the positive in the negative.” (Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, p. 217, Russian ed.)

It is this that is meant when people speak of turning a defeat into a victory, or again, the destruction of fascism which is a return to the conditions that preceded fascism, is not a dialectical destruction, for fascism will then arise again. Fascism is only destroyed, when the negation is negated, when new conditions are created that make the return of fascism impossible.

Marx wrote in a famous passage: “The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era, i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.” (Capital, I, p. 837.) Many of the basic ideas of Marxism represent the employment of this dialectical law. One simple example is found in the concept of the proletariat. While the proletariat is produced by capitalism for the purpose of exploitation, it becomes the grave-digger of capitalism. And what Marx is pointing to in the above passage is that elements of socialism are already contained within the framework of capitalist society, but they are the negation of this structure or order of society. When they are freed from these bonds, and the expropriators are expropriated, there is a negation of the former negation, which, far from being a mere nothing, is a higher form of society—socialism.

Not to see this resolution of the contradictions in terms of the negation of the negation, with its genuinely positive aspects, may mean to think of resolving the contradictions by going backwards to an earlier form of society before these contradictions arose. The negation of negation points always towards the resolution of any and every contradiction in nature and society through a forward movement which brings into being new forces and conditions. Thus it is that Engels calls it “an extremely general—and for this reason extremely comprehensive and important—law of development of Nature, history and thought; a law which holds good in the animal and plant kingdom, in geology, in mathematics, in history, and in philosophy.” (Anti-Dühring, p. 154.)