The 'formalising' of dialectics.

'It is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that
the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the
most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as
well as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main
to three:

The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
The law of the negation of the negation.

All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fa****on as mere laws
of thought: the first, in the first part of his Logic, in the Doctrine
of Being; the second fills the whole of the second and by far the most
im****tant part of his Logic, the Doctrine of Essence; finally the
third figures as the fundamental law for the construction of the whole
system. The mistake lies in the fact that these laws are foisted on
nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them. This
is the source of the whole forced and often outrageous treatment; the
universe, willy-nilly, is made out to be arranged in accordance with a
system of thought which itself is only the product of a definite stage
of evolution of human thought. If we turn the thing round, then
everything becomes simple, and the dialectical laws that look so
extremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at once become simple and
clear as noonday.'

Engels' Dialectics of Nature

When Frederick Engels wrote the above paragraph in 1883 he explicitly
said that he was not 'concerned here with writing a handbook of
dialectics but only with showing that the dialectical laws are real
laws of development of nature, and therefore are valid also for
theoretical natural science.'

II. Dialectics

(The general nature of dialectics to be developed as the science of
interconnections, in contrast to metaphysics.)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch02.htm

Since Engels wrote the above and Lenin wrote his philosophical
notebooks many soviet philosophers after the revolution tried to write
'handbooks of dialectics'.  They attempted to do what Marx, Engels,
and Lenin had not done which was to 'systematise' dialectical
materialism.  Now the question is what was their degree of success and
indeed why do we have to go back to Lenin, Engels, Marx, and even
Hegel if they were successful and wrote a comprehensive 'handbook of
dialectics'.

Apart from a few outstanding soviet philosophers such as E V Ilyenkov
most of the attempts of the soviet philosophers to write 'handbooks of
dialectics' resulted in the formalising of the subject and dialectics
itself being presented in the most undialectical way.  This legacy has
found its way into the Marxist movement and is present still today.
It is always tempting to convert theory into a 'formula' because it
then can be easily remembered and applied at will.  However,
dialectics does not allow for this treatment without ending up as its
opposite in terms of theory, that is as a fixed and conservative 'set
of rules'.

It is only by taking a critical attitude to this 'formalising of
dialectics' that we can develop dialectical materialism today but this
work doesn't easily fit into the everyday consciousness because in the
struggle to grasp even works by Hegel the mind tends to 'formalise'
the content in order to understand the logic espoused.  It is
necessary to suspend 'judgement' for a time and just follow the
'argument' in the order that this 'content' may stimulate new thought
through contradiction.  Whilst the work of some of those soviet
philosophers may be useful in presenting the 'bare bones' of
dialectical categories and their interconnections it is necessary to
understand the 'active' side of dialectics and the fact that it
develops through struggle.

Roger