A possible reconstruction of dialectical materialism
The following discussion build some of the previous discussions, on this site, on such matters as positivism versus antipositivism, the socialist calculations debates and the relevance of Ronald Coase, and the nature of materialism itself. This post is substantively similar to the post One possible reconstruction of dialectical materialism but it’s written a little differently and also includes discussion of some other thinkers like Stephen Jay Gould, B. F. Skinner and Jerome Ulman
Dialectical materialism arguably failed in the twentieth century not because it was too historical or too social, but because it hardened into a metaphysical dogma instead of remaining a flexible bridge between science and society. Philipp Frank, physicist, logical empiricist, and one of the most politically self-aware members of the Vienna Circle (outside of Otto Neurath), offers one possible way out. Against both Soviet scholasticism and Western “value-free” scientism, Frank argued that science is underdetermined by data alone and therefore requires a humanistic middle link: a socially articulated framework that connects formal theories to collective purposes (Frank, Modern Science and Its Philosophy). Read this way, dialectical materialism is not a set of cosmic “laws,” but rather is a functional worldview-language, a way of coordinating scientific practice with emancipatory social goals rather than letting it drift toward technocratic or capitalist ends.
This immediately demystifies dialectics. The so-called “laws” of dialectical materialism: quantity into quality, unity of opposites, negation of the negation, are neither pseudo-scientific superlaws nor mystical Hegelian residues. They are heuristics: pattern-recognition tools that sensitize inquiry to nonlinear change, systemic contradiction, and historical transformation. Stephen Jay Gould explicitly defended dialectics in exactly this sense, treating it as a heuristic for understanding punctuated equilibrium, contingency, and emergence in evolutionary biology rather than as a predictive calculus (The Panda’s Thumb; Eight Little Piggies). Frank would almost certainly have approved: dialectics becomes scientifically legitimate when it guides attention without dictating results. Jerome Ulman’s attempt to synthesize Marxism with B. F. Skinner’s radical behaviorism follows the same logic, stripping away metaphysical claims while preserving a materialist, anti-mentalist commitment to explanation grounded in observable practices and environmental structures.
Once dialectical materialism is reconstructed as a middle link rather than a metaphysics, its relevance to political economy becomes clearer, especially in the work of Oskar Lange and Ronald Coase. Lange showed that the mathematical tools of neoclassical economics were not inherently capitalist but could be redeployed within socialist planning as instruments of rational calculation (On the Economic Theory of Socialism). Coase, from the opposite ideological direction, demonstrated why planning already exists inside capitalism: firms are internal planned economies that arise whenever transaction costs make markets inefficient (“The Nature of the Firm”). Together, Lange and Coase reveal that the real question is not market versus planning, but which institutional form minimizes social friction under given conditions. Frank’s philosophy takes things a step further by explaining why this choice is never purely technical: transaction costs, property rights, and planning mechanisms only function within a prior social interpretation of value and purpose.
This synthesis reaches its sharpest contemporary relevance in the age of platform capitalism and algorithmic governance. Amazon, Alibaba, and Google are de facto planned economies, coordinating labor, logistics, and pricing internally through massive computational systems because it is more efficient than market exchange. This is a Coasean fact realized at Langean scale. What is missing is precisely what Frank insisted upon: the humanistic middle link. To what social ends are these private planning systems directed? Without an explicit dialectical-materialist framework — understood in Frank’s operational, non-dogmatic sense — science and technology default to serving capital accumulation rather than collective flourishing. A reconstructed dialectical materialism would not command scientists what to believe, but would openly declare why certain scientifically permissible paths are chosen over others.
In this form, dialectical materialism can survive both positivist dismissal and Cold War discrediting. It becomes neither a “super-science” nor a party catechism, but a philosophy of science for public purpose: empirically disciplined, historically informed, and unapologetically normative. Frank, Neurath, Gould, Ulman, Lange, and even Coase converge on a single lesson — science always operates within a social grammar. The only real choice is whether that grammar remains implicit and ideological, or explicit and democratically contestable.
Related posts:
The young Ronald Coase as socialist
Discussion of the young Ronald Coase as socialist, on Marxmail
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Is Dialectical Materialism very important for Marxist thought?
References
Philipp Frank
- Philipp Frank, Modern Science and Its Philosophy (1949)
Full text via Internet Archive (borrowable, free account):
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.54416/page/n5/mode/2up - Philipp Frank, Philosophy of Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy. Prentice-Hall (1957). https://archive.org/details/philosophyofscie00fran_0/page/n3/mode/2up
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Philipp Frank”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frank-philipp/
Otto Neurath
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Otto Neurath”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neurath/ - Otto Neurath, “Unified Science and Its Encyclopedic Integration”
Open PDF hosted by the University of Vienna:
https://ia800601.us.archive.org/20/items/B-001-015-449/B-001-015-449.pdf
Stephen Jay Gould
- Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)
Full text available for borrowing via Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/structureofevolu00goul - Stephen Jay Gould, “The Panda’s Thumb” (essay collection)
- Gould on dialectics (primary essay: “Nurturing Nature”)
Reprinted in Ever Since Darwin, available here:
https://archive.org/details/eversincedarwinr00goul
Jerome Ulman
- Jerome Ulman, Toward a Synthesis of Marx and Skinner https://www.academia.edu/32866179/TOWARD_A_SYNTHESIS_OF_MARX_AND_SKINNER
Oskar Lange
- Oskar Lange, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism” (1936)
Full text:
https://ia801408.us.archive.org/33/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.263328/2015.263328.On-The.pdf - Wikipedia overview (surprisingly solid bibliography)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Lange
Ronald Coase
- Ronald Coase, “The Nature of the Firm” (1937)
Free full-text PDF via University of Chicago: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x - Ronald Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960)
- Free full-text PDF via University of Chicago:
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/lawecon/coaseinmemoriam/problemofsocialcost - Nobel Prize autobiography and lecture
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1991/coase/biographical/
