That damn dialectic just keeps grinding on. Relentless would be a fitting adjective. From the humble atom with its feuding sub-atomic particles right through to the whole crazy mixed-up universe itself, forever expanding and contracting as it will, till the end of time and beyond. There’s just no way of escaping the ubiquitousness of the thing. Contradictory forces bound together in mutual rivalry, interpenetrating each others domain, pushing and shoving in a never-ending battle for supremacy; harmony and equilibrium only momentary, fleeting states. It seems it is only change that is permanent.

Nothing is eternal but eternally changing Gigantic, unseen centrifugal and centripetal forces tearing at the universe day and night from every conceivable direction: positive and negative impulses locked in eternal struggle; the old forever being usurped by the new until low and behold, the new soon becomes the new old. Quantity eventually, always and everywhere, giving rise to qualitative change. Every thesis inevitably producing its own antithesis with the ensuing struggle certain to produce a synthesis a new thesis in its own right. The negation of the negation, as Frederick Engels would have it. A universe consisting of nothing but contradictions everywhere you care to look. What a carry on!

It’s the same damn routine right here down on Earth. The omnipresent dialectic just won’t leave us alone. As if we don’t have enough to be getting on with, what with all those bills to pay, those illnesses to avoid, and the grim reaper hovering over our shoulders. There’s no escaping it. The dialectic turns every human experience into a dogged struggle of opposites so in the end you don’t know whether you’re coming or going. The individual versus the collective; private versus public; invention versus tradition; science versus superstition. The dialectic is endless. And to add insult to injury, there is no right way or wrong, you’re just left to get on with it the best you can. No wonder we humans are forever inventing omniscient gods, prophets and holy books just to get us through the day. And what of happiness? The minute you think you’ve got things on an even keel, along comes another dilemma, another crisis to rock your boat. Jump one hurdle and up pops another one. Even a little bit of everyday contentment seems mercurial. Happiness don’t make me laugh!

What’s all this nonsense about the dialectic I here you mumble. It’s all about the economy stupid. And you’d be right. Yes, it is all about the economy but the curse of the dialectic has got its grubby little hands on that too. From day one the dialectic has cast its ubiquitous shadow on all us pitiful homo-sapiens. A never-ending struggle between scarcity and abundance that is what we long suffering creatures are bestowed with. Move one step forward and lo and behold, the goal posts move. Think you’re getting ahead of the game and hey presto a double or triple whammy knocks you right back to square one. Recessions, repossessions, debt and outright bankruptcy. And on the health front it’s no better. Cancers, strokes, heart attacks, depression or, if you make it that far, a slow, lingering, humiliating, life sapping dementia. All that struggle and strife just to end up rotting, unwanted, in the local care home. One step forward, two steps back until you run out of steam, keel over and die. Abundance, don’t make me laugh!

That’s the dialectic for you. Uncaring, unmoving, unknowing but relentless. This is our inheritance from 3.5 billion years of evolution on this god-forsaken rock. A merciless struggle to ward off the ravages of want and hunger. And to be perfectly honest, scarcity has by far had the better of the battle. Even today, with all our fancy high powered technological gadgets, with seven billion of us now hustling for a crust, most of us don’t have two buttons to rub together. A billion of us have no fresh water to drink and a further three billion have little or no access to a real all-rounded education. 14 million children stave or waste away every damn year. In fact, only the top 5% could be said to have overcome scarcity in any meaningful sense of the word. And even then the shadow of economic ruin is never that far away. In the battle between scarcity and abundance it seems scarcity is holding all the trump cards.

But, in our 5 million year journey from ape to man, are things about to tip in the other direction? Have we reached the level of technological development where we could, if we had the collective will, the right sort of socio-political structures, and the right sort of clear headed vision, get the jump on scarcity and walk, heads held high, into the realm of material abundance? Just a pleasant sounding fairytale maybe, but don’t be too hasty to dismiss. Just look at some of the facts.

We have definitively reached the point where humans can tap the energy of our sun. Solar power, just a lefty fantasy a few decades ago, now a growing industrial reality. If you don’t believe me just check up on what the Germans are up to in the deserts of North Africa. Wind power is on everyone’s agenda these days too, when not so long ago it was just a hippy dream. A world fuelled by clean solar power and other renewables was just a sci-fi construct a few decades back but now.

And then there is the internet, a fearsome democratising tool if ever there was one. No hiding place for tyrants, CEO’s and corporate megalomaniacs. If the Murdochs can be hounded into the dock then all things are possible. Sure, the internet can be censored and even shut down but the ramifications would be enormous. It would almost certainly spell the end of any sense of popular legitimacy a government might have. The age of blogging and tweeting has done to the media moguls and their empires what the printing press did to the Catholic Church. The smart phone in particular has enables countless millions to join the world community where before they were imprisoned in the isolation of their own impoverishment. Now, billions of citizens can trade, learn and communicate via their held hand computer. An advance unimaginable just a few years back.

Linking all the advances in technology and science is the globalised economy. And this is where the dialectic it at its most pronounced. Every country is dependent on every other in a way that has not been experienced in human history. If one trading block falls they all fall. Even relatively small indebted nations like Greece or Ireland can trigger global ructions. No one is immune, no one can insulate themselves. We are a global community like we have never been before. But the contradiction at the heart of it all is blindingly obvious. Humanity has amassed unbelievable wealth but that wealth is concentrated in just a few private hands. Capitalism has done a sterling job for sure, but all that wealth amassed in just a handful of corporations!

So what needs to be done to tip the dialectic in favour of abundance? Let the invisible hand of the market run its course with all the likelihood of total economic collapse, dictatorship and war? We’ve been down that road before. Or, if our old friend Marx is to mean anything in the 21st century, is it to collectivise our human wealth? That will be resisted to the last breath by the self appointed masters of the universe, because to socialise our common wealth might show that 21st century scarcity is not in fact a natural phenomenon but rather a man-made ailment that can be cured once and for all.

Socialise the whole damn lot? Not every fruit and veg stall; not every shoe shop and every hairdressers, but the commanding heights of the world economy. Socialise it, regulate it and make the whole thing totally transparent. Bring it under rational, human control and cut adrift the parasites leeching off the collective. Draw up plans that include every citizen across the planet and let the world wide web be the forum for discussion, criticism and amendments. It’s happening anyway under the flag of the left and the right. All governments are increasingly being forced to intervene. Willingly or otherwise, regulation of the planet’s wealth is happening sometimes by stealth, sometimes with great fanfare. The relentless historical struggle between private ownership and collective control, initiated in the nineteenth century, shows no sign of abating. It is the central dialectic of our times. The 99% versus the 1% as the Occupy Wall St would put it. Socialism or barbarism as Karl Marx would say.

In our long, long journey from ape to man, it would seem the simplest of tasks, but stuck in the middle of the battle, it is anything but. The battle ebbs and flows, to use a well worn metaphor, and the smoke of battle obscures the lay of the land. Who would have dreamt that the Murdochs would find themselves in the public dock, but on trial they most definitely are. Who would have believed that the financial and industrial transnationals like Lloyds and General Motors would go bankrupt, saved only by a massive tax payers bailout. Who would have imagined that we again are hovering on the precipice of another global collapse equal or greater than the Great Depression of the 1930’s. These are truly exciting times and truly fearful ones at that. The best of times, the worst of times. The dialectic of human affairs will not, it seems, be silenced.

Moving to the higher stage of human production was described by Engels (The Dialectics of Nature) in the following inspiring terms which I doubt has been bettered since:

Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for mankind in the specifically biological aspect. Historical evolution makes such an organisation daily more indispensable, but also with every day more possible. From it will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself will experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade. P35 Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976 edition)

How wonderful it is to have our learned economists, particularly those of the Milton Freidman school, being described as operating on the same level as the animal kingdom. And if Engels words had resonance in the nineteenth century, they have a thousand times more poignancy in the first decade of the twenty first.

And to move ahead to this higher level of social organisation what are the preconditions? Let the last few words go to the late Christopher Hitchens, who wrestled with the dialectic as much as any man or woman: ‘In the meantime we have the same job we always had, to say, as thinking people and as humans, that there are no final solutions, there is no absolute truth, there is no supreme leader, there is no totalitarian solution that says that if you will just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you will simply abandon your critical faculties, a world of idiotic bliss can be yours. We have to begin by repudiating all such claims grand rabbis, chief ayatollahs, infallible popes, the peddlers of mutant quasi-political worship, the dear leader, great leader, we have no need of any of this. (Acceptance speech on receiving the Atheist Alliance of America’s Richard Dawkins Award, 2010).’