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An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism
Marxism is dialectical, Novack explains. It considers all phenomena in their development, in their transition from one state to another. And it is materialist, explaining the world as matter in motion that exists prior to and independently of human consciousness.
136 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1969
13 people are currently reading
221 people want to read
About the author
George Novack
47 books22 followersLeftist political activist and Marxist theoretician.
He attended Harvard University, earning a B.A. in 1926, and an M.A. in 1927. He was on a successful track in the publishing business, when the beginning of the Great Depression radicalized him. He joined the Trotskyist Communist League of America in 1933 and was a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from 1940 to 1973.
In 1937-40 Novack served as the secretary of the American Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky. This body initiated the celebrated 1937 Dewey Commission that inquired into the charges made against Trotsky in the Moscow show trials, and found the Moscow trials to have been a complete frame-up.
George Novack was not one of the 18 SWP leaders imprisoned in World War II under the Smith Act, but he played a major role in the defense campaign.
Novack produced a number of books on various aspects of Marxism: An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism, America's Revolutionary Heritage, Democracy and Revolution, Empiricism and Its Evolution, Humanism and Socialism, The Origins of Materialism, Polemics in Marxist Philosophy, Revolutionary Dynamics of Women's Liberation, and Understanding History, Marxist Essays.
He attended Harvard University, earning a B.A. in 1926, and an M.A. in 1927. He was on a successful track in the publishing business, when the beginning of the Great Depression radicalized him. He joined the Trotskyist Communist League of America in 1933 and was a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from 1940 to 1973.
In 1937-40 Novack served as the secretary of the American Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky. This body initiated the celebrated 1937 Dewey Commission that inquired into the charges made against Trotsky in the Moscow show trials, and found the Moscow trials to have been a complete frame-up.
George Novack was not one of the 18 SWP leaders imprisoned in World War II under the Smith Act, but he played a major role in the defense campaign.
Novack produced a number of books on various aspects of Marxism: An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism, America's Revolutionary Heritage, Democracy and Revolution, Empiricism and Its Evolution, Humanism and Socialism, The Origins of Materialism, Polemics in Marxist Philosophy, Revolutionary Dynamics of Women's Liberation, and Understanding History, Marxist Essays.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
February 1, 2022
The eighth #book I finished in 2022: the U.S. Trotskyist leader George Novack gave a series of lectures on dialectical logic in 1942. They are gathered in this short book, expanding on Trotsky's contributions to the debates that led to the split of the Socialist Workers Party in 1939-40. A minority of the SWP could not comprehend how the workers' state that emerged from the October Revolution had so thoroughly degenerated under Stalin. They declared that the Soviet Union must be some completely new thing. Trotsky explained how the nature of the Soviet Union could only be understood as an expression of contradictions: between the ruling bureaucratic caste and the masses, between imperialism and the proletariat, etc. In other words, dialectical and not formal logic was necessary. In these lectures, Novack expanded on the points Trotsky was making.
Many leftists today claim "dialectics" is nothing more than a buzzword, or even a thought-stopping cliché. Novack offers a simple presentation of how dialectics emerged out of German bourgeois philosophy, and in turned formed the basis for revolutionary socialism. Novack lacks Trotsky's literary skills, but he is able to go into some detail about the history of philosophy in a way that is accessible for workers.
The only thing that concerns me a bit is how Novack, in a few sentences, presents different tactical debates in the SWP as "a struggle between formalists and dialecticians." Dialectics offers a method for solving political problems, not ready-made answers. The term "dialectics" can be invoked as a lazy answer to end debate. "Why do you think we should support the bourgeois government of Mexico, comrade?" "You have to see things dialectically!" I imagine this argumentative technique had not yet emerged in Novack's time, or else he would have included a warning against it. After all: Declaring that one's own positions are always "dialectical," whatever they may be, is a great example of formal logic. #bookstagram
Many leftists today claim "dialectics" is nothing more than a buzzword, or even a thought-stopping cliché. Novack offers a simple presentation of how dialectics emerged out of German bourgeois philosophy, and in turned formed the basis for revolutionary socialism. Novack lacks Trotsky's literary skills, but he is able to go into some detail about the history of philosophy in a way that is accessible for workers.
The only thing that concerns me a bit is how Novack, in a few sentences, presents different tactical debates in the SWP as "a struggle between formalists and dialecticians." Dialectics offers a method for solving political problems, not ready-made answers. The term "dialectics" can be invoked as a lazy answer to end debate. "Why do you think we should support the bourgeois government of Mexico, comrade?" "You have to see things dialectically!" I imagine this argumentative technique had not yet emerged in Novack's time, or else he would have included a warning against it. After all: Declaring that one's own positions are always "dialectical," whatever they may be, is a great example of formal logic. #bookstagram
January 2, 2011
I never write reviews. I shall, briefly, for this book.
This is the first book - among the many I've tried - that actually made Hegel, the Dialectic, and Historical Materialism, ascertainable - even to the total layman - and intriguing. For once in my life I found myself actually wanting to read about these subjects, over and above all other activities I could be engaged in. Instead of begrudgingly slugging through Hegelian flapdoodle, coming out the other end of the book having learned nothing, and wasted hours.
George Novack is a laudable author for his capability in making such abstruse philosophical subjects comprehensible. I know of no other authors that meet him in this capability. Furthermore, the book is said to be a series of lectures he gave to workers, and I'd imagine they left the lectures as enlightened as I.
One caveat though, the book was written several decades ago, and is filled with radical jargon that may turn the reader off at first. The first few pages read like straight Marxist propaganda, if one can swallow this, even chuckle a bit at it, the rest of the book will be quite rewarding.
Now, on to more Novack!
This is the first book - among the many I've tried - that actually made Hegel, the Dialectic, and Historical Materialism, ascertainable - even to the total layman - and intriguing. For once in my life I found myself actually wanting to read about these subjects, over and above all other activities I could be engaged in. Instead of begrudgingly slugging through Hegelian flapdoodle, coming out the other end of the book having learned nothing, and wasted hours.
George Novack is a laudable author for his capability in making such abstruse philosophical subjects comprehensible. I know of no other authors that meet him in this capability. Furthermore, the book is said to be a series of lectures he gave to workers, and I'd imagine they left the lectures as enlightened as I.
One caveat though, the book was written several decades ago, and is filled with radical jargon that may turn the reader off at first. The first few pages read like straight Marxist propaganda, if one can swallow this, even chuckle a bit at it, the rest of the book will be quite rewarding.
Now, on to more Novack!
February 4, 2026
Mission 2026: Binge reviewing (and rereading on occasion) all previous Reads, I was too slothful to review, back when I read them’
Reading this book today feels like opening a carefully laminated instruction manual for a machine that not only no longer exists, but whose factory has been converted into a start up hub selling mindfulness apps.
Novack writes with absolute certainty, the kind that only flourishes when history has not yet begun to heckle you, and the result is a book so confident in its own inevitability that it barely notices the twentieth century tripping over its predictions on the way out. This is Marxism presented not as a messy, contested, historically battered set of ideas, but as a near mathematical system, a logic so internally coherent that reality itself is expected to fall in line out of courtesy.
The tone is pedagogical, earnest, and faintly missionary, as if the reader’s main obstacle is not doubt or experience but insufficient exposure to dialectical reasoning delivered with enough repetition and bold type.
What makes the book unintentionally comic now is its serene indifference to failure; revolutions collapse, states ossify, bureaucracies metastasise, and human beings stubbornly refuse to behave like historical functions, yet Novack presses on as if these are mere footnotes rather than flashing warning lights. Dialectical materialism is treated here not as a tool to interrogate reality but as a master key that already knows which doors deserve to open, and this is where the logic curdles into dogma.
The book insists that history moves according to discoverable laws, yet history, inconveniently, keeps improvising, taking detours, and mocking predictions with the enthusiasm of a saboteur. Reading it now, after the collapse of the Soviet project, the marketisation of nearly everything, and the persistence of inequality in forms Marx never imagined, the prose acquires a museum like quality, well preserved, carefully labelled, and utterly unconcerned with the fact that the exhibit no longer persuades anyone outside a very committed circle.
Novack’s faith in inevitability is perhaps the most dated element of all; the belief that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its contradictions sounds less like analysis and more like a bedtime story for activists exhausted by the inconvenience of contingency. What the book consistently underestimates is human adaptability, capitalism’s talent for absorbing critique and selling it back as merchandise, and the sheer perversity of power, which rarely behaves according to neat theoretical scripts.
There is also a striking absence of irony, doubt, or self interrogation, qualities that now feel essential to any serious political thinking; everything here is delivered with the confidence of someone who has never had to explain why the promised future keeps missing its trains. To be fair, Novack can be lucid, even persuasive, when explaining the internal mechanics of Marxist reasoning, but clarity in service of a failing model does not redeem the model itself, it merely makes its limitations easier to spot.
The book reads like a sermon preached with flawless logic in an emptying church, the arguments echoing beautifully off the walls while the congregation quietly slips out to deal with a world that refuses to be dialectically resolved. As a historical document, it is fascinating, a snapshot of Cold War certainty, of a moment when belief in grand narratives still felt intellectually respectable rather than faintly embarrassing.
As a guide to understanding the present, however, it is about as useful as a slide rule at a blockchain conference. Marxism may still offer insights, metaphors, and critiques, but Novack’s version embalms it into a system too rigid to survive contact with reality.
In the end, this book does not fail because it is badly argued, but because it is too sure of itself, mistaking internal consistency for truth, and inevitability for wisdom, a reminder that no theory, however elegant, gets to opt out of history’s right to prove it wrong.
Give it a pass.
Reading this book today feels like opening a carefully laminated instruction manual for a machine that not only no longer exists, but whose factory has been converted into a start up hub selling mindfulness apps.
Novack writes with absolute certainty, the kind that only flourishes when history has not yet begun to heckle you, and the result is a book so confident in its own inevitability that it barely notices the twentieth century tripping over its predictions on the way out. This is Marxism presented not as a messy, contested, historically battered set of ideas, but as a near mathematical system, a logic so internally coherent that reality itself is expected to fall in line out of courtesy.
The tone is pedagogical, earnest, and faintly missionary, as if the reader’s main obstacle is not doubt or experience but insufficient exposure to dialectical reasoning delivered with enough repetition and bold type.
What makes the book unintentionally comic now is its serene indifference to failure; revolutions collapse, states ossify, bureaucracies metastasise, and human beings stubbornly refuse to behave like historical functions, yet Novack presses on as if these are mere footnotes rather than flashing warning lights. Dialectical materialism is treated here not as a tool to interrogate reality but as a master key that already knows which doors deserve to open, and this is where the logic curdles into dogma.
The book insists that history moves according to discoverable laws, yet history, inconveniently, keeps improvising, taking detours, and mocking predictions with the enthusiasm of a saboteur. Reading it now, after the collapse of the Soviet project, the marketisation of nearly everything, and the persistence of inequality in forms Marx never imagined, the prose acquires a museum like quality, well preserved, carefully labelled, and utterly unconcerned with the fact that the exhibit no longer persuades anyone outside a very committed circle.
Novack’s faith in inevitability is perhaps the most dated element of all; the belief that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its contradictions sounds less like analysis and more like a bedtime story for activists exhausted by the inconvenience of contingency. What the book consistently underestimates is human adaptability, capitalism’s talent for absorbing critique and selling it back as merchandise, and the sheer perversity of power, which rarely behaves according to neat theoretical scripts.
There is also a striking absence of irony, doubt, or self interrogation, qualities that now feel essential to any serious political thinking; everything here is delivered with the confidence of someone who has never had to explain why the promised future keeps missing its trains. To be fair, Novack can be lucid, even persuasive, when explaining the internal mechanics of Marxist reasoning, but clarity in service of a failing model does not redeem the model itself, it merely makes its limitations easier to spot.
The book reads like a sermon preached with flawless logic in an emptying church, the arguments echoing beautifully off the walls while the congregation quietly slips out to deal with a world that refuses to be dialectically resolved. As a historical document, it is fascinating, a snapshot of Cold War certainty, of a moment when belief in grand narratives still felt intellectually respectable rather than faintly embarrassing.
As a guide to understanding the present, however, it is about as useful as a slide rule at a blockchain conference. Marxism may still offer insights, metaphors, and critiques, but Novack’s version embalms it into a system too rigid to survive contact with reality.
In the end, this book does not fail because it is badly argued, but because it is too sure of itself, mistaking internal consistency for truth, and inevitability for wisdom, a reminder that no theory, however elegant, gets to opt out of history’s right to prove it wrong.
Give it a pass.
February 13, 2022
Lo más sorprendente del libro es que consigue que la dialéctica de Hegel (y el materialismo dialéctico) parezcan fáciles de entender y, sobre todo, útiles como método de análisis de la historia, de la naturaleza, de la sociedad, de la lucha de clases o de nuestra cotidianidad.
El último capítulo, que utiliza el ejemplo concreto de John, un trabajador industrial, para explicar cómo aplicar el método dialéctico en la comprensión de la lucha de clases partiendo de su experiencia laboral individual y colectiva, le pone la guinda del pastel a la explicación que Novack construye a lo largo del libro.
El último capítulo, que utiliza el ejemplo concreto de John, un trabajador industrial, para explicar cómo aplicar el método dialéctico en la comprensión de la lucha de clases partiendo de su experiencia laboral individual y colectiva, le pone la guinda del pastel a la explicación que Novack construye a lo largo del libro.
July 20, 2025
I've read a few of these condensations of a subset of Marxist thought, and ended up liking this one the most. It frames dialectics in opposition to formal logic, although it barely is able to give a positive definition of dialectics without a lot of handy waving. I do wish that the socio-history behind the "innovation" of dialectics was exposed further.
The lectures also begin with bashing groups of "formalists" (adherents, or dogmatic believers of formal logic in the Aristotelian, and perhaps later - the Fregean sense), which of course was never a coherent group of people, but "formalist" here is used as a pejorative category to describe certain movements or orientations of thought. This false categorization strikes me as merely an act of polemicization, rather than a considered move. This form of polemicization is seen in the later (last couple of) chapters in the book.
The lectures also begin with bashing groups of "formalists" (adherents, or dogmatic believers of formal logic in the Aristotelian, and perhaps later - the Fregean sense), which of course was never a coherent group of people, but "formalist" here is used as a pejorative category to describe certain movements or orientations of thought. This false categorization strikes me as merely an act of polemicization, rather than a considered move. This form of polemicization is seen in the later (last couple of) chapters in the book.
September 24, 2019
The story of what this book is really about starts on page 142—about ten pages left in the book—reading the story of John, the worker. His ascension from wage-working know-nothing, to a member of the proletariat, to conscious of his plight as a member of the proletariat, to class-conscious worker, to full-on communist/socialist worker fighting for his rights and the rights of others against the oppressive capitalist system running our world, is what this is all about.
Novack’s ability to breakdown dialectics, Hegel, and Marxism’s relationship to it and fit within it and maturation of it, is tremendous as it is digestible. But when you’ve met and understood John, then you’ve be acquainted, or reacquainted, with the purpose of this all. Read the book, y’all.
Novack’s ability to breakdown dialectics, Hegel, and Marxism’s relationship to it and fit within it and maturation of it, is tremendous as it is digestible. But when you’ve met and understood John, then you’ve be acquainted, or reacquainted, with the purpose of this all. Read the book, y’all.
November 3, 2024
A useful introduction to dialectical materialism. Novack starts with pointing out the limits of formal logic - the logical categories that are still taught in schools and universities - and then explains the revolutionary significance of Hegel's dialectics, and the subsequent revolutionary development of dialectics by Marx and Engels. The book explains the crucial link between dialectical thinking and revolutionary socialist consciousness and action. This is done with a minimum of jargon and in a way that I think is accessible to people new to these topics - in stark contrast to the vast bulk of philosophical writing that comes out of the universities these days.
October 6, 2020
Excelente estudo da lógica e do processo histórico que levou à criação metodológica do pensamento marxista. Não é, no entanto, um livro introdutório: o material tem caráter um pouco mais avançado, tendo em vista certo conhecimento da obra de Hegel e do pensamento marxiano.
June 14, 2021
Pretty sweet (and essential)
November 6, 2023
Simple introduction to dialectics.
Read
January 23, 2024I wish this went into more depth on the categories of dialectical logic, but it's definitely an excellent starting point for a study of dialectics.
October 31, 2024
very good history of logic prior to hegelian and marxist dialectical logic. also very good explaining such a complicated scientific system
December 28, 2024
Great intro to dialectical logic
January 30, 2025
Filosofía para la vida. Práctico y elocuente.
February 15, 2020
A great introduction to the Marxist worldview, written clearly and using everyday examples to illuminate a chaenging subject.
My notes/underlinings:
http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/sea...
My notes/underlinings:
http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/sea...
June 29, 2025
Dialectics: The Logic of Change
As George Novack writes in one of his prefaces, this book is based on lectures “originally given in New York City during 1942 shortly after the opposition headed by James Burnham and Max Shachtman had split from the Socialist Workers Party. During that inner-party controversy, Burnham had denied the validity of dialectical logic while Shachtman questioned its usefulness in solving sociological and political problems.”
“In the last year of his life Trotsky conducted a sharp polemic, recorded in In Defense Of Marxism: Against The Petty Bourgeois Opposition against these anti-dialecticians. He urged the party members, especially the youth, to spurn the skepticism regarding dialectics inculcated by the pragmatists and logical positivists and to undertake serious study of the theoretical method of scientific socialism.”
When I studied Marx in college, something few have the chance to do today, I had a professor who was of the opinion that dialectics was merely a form inherited from Hegel and had nothing to do with the content of Marxism. Other people who called themselves Marxists at the time argued that dialectics applied to history and politics, but not to nature. Novack answered this in an essay “Is Nature Dialectical?” included in his book Polemics in Marxist Philosophy.
I have always thought that nature and modern science’s understanding of it provides the easiest way to understand dialectics. Formal logic starts with the idea that A always equals A. This is useful for many purposes, but what about evolution, where A may be changing into B? What about nuclear physics, where all kinds of changes formerly thought impossible are now known not to be?
Other books by Novack that help explain the Marxist method are Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History, ‘Understanding History,’ ‘The Origins of Materialism,’ ‘Empiricism and Its Evolution.’
As George Novack writes in one of his prefaces, this book is based on lectures “originally given in New York City during 1942 shortly after the opposition headed by James Burnham and Max Shachtman had split from the Socialist Workers Party. During that inner-party controversy, Burnham had denied the validity of dialectical logic while Shachtman questioned its usefulness in solving sociological and political problems.”
“In the last year of his life Trotsky conducted a sharp polemic, recorded in In Defense Of Marxism: Against The Petty Bourgeois Opposition against these anti-dialecticians. He urged the party members, especially the youth, to spurn the skepticism regarding dialectics inculcated by the pragmatists and logical positivists and to undertake serious study of the theoretical method of scientific socialism.”
When I studied Marx in college, something few have the chance to do today, I had a professor who was of the opinion that dialectics was merely a form inherited from Hegel and had nothing to do with the content of Marxism. Other people who called themselves Marxists at the time argued that dialectics applied to history and politics, but not to nature. Novack answered this in an essay “Is Nature Dialectical?” included in his book Polemics in Marxist Philosophy.
I have always thought that nature and modern science’s understanding of it provides the easiest way to understand dialectics. Formal logic starts with the idea that A always equals A. This is useful for many purposes, but what about evolution, where A may be changing into B? What about nuclear physics, where all kinds of changes formerly thought impossible are now known not to be?
Other books by Novack that help explain the Marxist method are Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History, ‘Understanding History,’ ‘The Origins of Materialism,’ ‘Empiricism and Its Evolution.’
July 25, 2007
i can't finish it...i don't know why. other books tempt me, this one is just so dry. i dunno. i'll finish it somedayy
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews