notebooks reveal that Trotsky's materialism is strikingly non-reductive. He emphatically rejects the vulgar materialism that tried to reduce the forms of consciousness to brain states: If consciousness has no independent function, which rises above physiological processes in the brains and nerves, then it is unnecessary, useless; it is harmful because it is a superfluous complication - and what a complication!' (p104) Well before the epoch of computer programmes, Trotsky
speaks of how thought, through its own laws', 'switches on' the relevant life processes. This leads him to defend Freud of the charge of idealism, not by showing him to be some sort of biological reductionist, but precisely through arguing that 'by itself, the method of psychoanalysis, taking as its point of departure "the autonomy" of psychological phenomena. in no way contradicts materialism. (p106)
Here reference to the principle of 'quantity into quality' allows him to conceptualize the possibility of emergent properties: 'the psyche, arising from matter, is "freed" from the determination of matter, so that it can independently — by its own laws - influence matter.' (p106)
In the same way 'politics grows out of economics in order for it in turn to influence the base by switches of a superstructural character. (p106) The editor's scholarly essays contain a wealth of information. Particularly striking is his comparison of Bukharin, Lenin, and Trotsky. As we have seen, the dominant motif in Trotsky's dialectic is that of catastrophe - the emergence of the new. As far as Bukharin is concerned, Pomper argues that his work is structured 'according to the systematic idea of equilibrium' (p59), and he quotes
form Bukharin's Historical
Materialism to prove it. Lenin,
finally, was most impressed with contradiction as the motor principle
of development. (p6l)
It is hoped that libraries will
get this book.
International No 9 March/April 1987
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