a The Motive-Force of Material Change: Dialectics or Selectionism Maria da Luz Alexandrino University of Southern California Joseph B. Morrow California State University, Sacramento This paper does not question the notion of materialism. All is matter. Words about non-matter do not represent or name nature. They merely reify or name other words. This paper does not suggest that matter is necessarily mechanical or unchanging. On the contrary, nature is in constant change and new things develop from old things. What this paper would like to discuss is the mechanism by which nature changes. We would argue that an understanding of this mechanism is crucial to those who would themselves attempt to change the world that nature and society has put in front of us. We wholeheartedly endorse Engels’ dictum that freedom is not the escape from necessity but the understanding of natural laws and making those laws work toward definite ends. We believe that Engels and Marx were wrong in their conclusion that the Hegelian theory of dialectics represents the motive force for change. Instead, we believe that a closer examination of nature argues for a process called selectioniam as the motive force for change and development. We would argue that changes that occur arenot the outcome of opposing tendencies or contradictions. It is instead a process whereby a natural event occurs and produces or is followed by consequences, and it is these consequences that determine change and new development We believe this is a crucial difference. Probably in all scientific fields and certainly in ours, behavioral psychology and public administration, the laws of dialectics: the unity and contradiction of opposites, the negation of the negation, and qualitative changes as a result of an undetermined number of quantitative changes, do not resemble the processes we observe unfolding. They contradict the empirical data. To engineer change from the dialectical standpoint an attempt must be made to provide an opposite or contradiction for that part of nature one would change. The contradiction or opposite, and even the concept of quality, are often obscure in any objective sense. Perhaps it is easy in retrospect to label things as opposites or as a quality change in a post hoc analysis, but we would suggest that the terms "opposite" and "quality" do not lend themselves very well to empirical studies or prescriptive action. On the other hand nature has provided us with abundant examples of how consequences select development. A contemporary of Marx was Charles Darwin (1809-1882). He too was interested in the mechanism of change. Darwin's goal was nothing short of understanding the origin of species. Rejecting the mechanism of God, Darwin sought in an inductive endeavor to observe what nature said to him about the question.3 In 1859 he published what he believed was the answer to the origin of species. Species developed via the mechanism he called “natural selection": organisms have descendants that vary somewhat from themselves. Those that are best suited to live in the environment into which they are born are more likely to survive and have descendants who resemble them. This is called ‘survival of the fittest". That is, those who best "fit" the requirements of their specific environment are more likely to survive. For example, insects that more closely resemble their background “fit” better, i.e., they are less likely to be seen and eaten by predators and hence survive and have descendants who resemble them. Those descendants will vary in physical characteristics and some will likely resemble their backgrounds even more than their predecessors. Thus the consequences of more closely resembling their background was a greater likelihood of survival and hence, such structures are “selected naturally". Selection by consequences serves as the causal mode or motive force for the development of species and biological structures. Darwin reasoned that this natural "selectionism" was the mechanism for the development of all physical characteristics of species. A dialectical explanation of the development of species leaves much to be desired when compared with a selectionist one. To discuss next the role of selectionism in the development of individual behavior, it is necessary to assert the notion of continuity of species. This is not the place to argue this point4 but suffice it to say that what follows is predicated upon the idea that humans too, were selected by the same basic processes that selected other species. We must also assert the assumption that human behavior is lawful, that is, it is a product of the genetic and environmental history of people and not the product of some pre-scientific concept like "free will". In biological history as organisms began to move or behave, certain propensities evolved or were selected. Simple tropisms such as movement toward or away from light must have been among some of earlier ones. We only have to look at bees or ants to see that eventually quite complex but still innate forms of behavior developed by this process. (We humans are not totally free from innate processes, Touching a hungry infant on the cheek invariably results in the infant turning in the direction of the touch and commencing sucking). In time, another propensity developed. Not only did offspring exhibit the behavior repertory of their progenitors, but part of their own life's experience began to play a role in the development their behavior. Scientists have delineated two basic processes that ensued. One is of a reflexive stimulus-response nature and was studied extensively by I.P. Pavlov. He discovered that if you take an innate species reflex such as food-salivation and subsequently pair with the food some stimulus unique in the history of the organism such as a bell, the organism will eventually come to salivate to the bell. { 73 vhus, the innate tendency to respond in a particular way to = a particular stimulus can be supplemented. Non-innate environmental stimuli closely associated in time with the innate environmental stimulus also come to elicit the behavior. This process has been called “respondent conditioning" and is clearly demonstrable in practically every species including humans. We would urge the following characterization of this fact: respondent conditioning evolved or was selected because the consequence of manifesting this phenomenon was a greater likelihood of survival of the individual. A large portion of the non-innate behavior of organisms is not of a stimulus-response nature. (This is most especially true in humans). This kind of behavior occurs and is followed by a consequence. It would appear that the nature of this consequence selects the kind of behavior that preceded it in a manner analogous to the selection of structure delineated by Darwin. For example, a hungry rat may press a lever in a box. If the consequence of lever pressing is food delivery, lever pressing begins to occur more often, If the result of lever pressing is electric shock presentation, lever pressing becomes extremely unlikely. This phenomenon, distinct from the respondent conditioning of Pavlov, has been called " perant conditioning" and has been extensively studied by B. F. Skinner. Skinner demonstrated how extensive behavior repertories in animals are developed by the various kinds of consequences in their environment. These basic laws of behavior discovered with animals have been6 extremely useful in developing new behavior repertories in humans. Despite the many ethical concerns such a science raises, the understanding of these natural laws has permitted them to be used to work toward definite ends. For example, we now know how to teach verbal behavior to autistic children. As a matter of fact when the techniques derived fron these laws are used extensively for long periods of time with young autistic children, about half can develop and maintain a totally normal status. Again, it must be emphasized that the motive force or causal mode for this development derived from the notion of selectionism. It was the direct consequences of behavior that were manipulated to effect these normalizations. A dialectical explanation of individual behavior simply does not fit the data. Moving another step up in the level of analysis, to organizational behavior theory or the study of group behavior in organizations, these basic laws of individual behavior have been utilized as the cornerstone of organizational change and management. Lumped under the name of “reinforcement theory", these basic laws have been successfully translated in applied organizational development interventions centered on structure of incentives, as well as in management through manipulation of incentive systems. All these applications give support to the notion that group behavior in organizations follows, within specific constraints such as group size, the same laws as individual behavior. Group behaviores in organizations can be changed if we manipulate the reinforcers and keep clear-cut relationships - contingencies - between the desired behavior and the reinforcers. We do not know of any direct application of materialist dialectical thinking to the important subject. matter of organizational behavior. But one contribution coming from the area of marxism-leninism, as @ corollary of the theory of alienation, deserves mention because of the impact it has had on organizations. This contribution, designed at a societal level, is firstly the use of moral incentives, as opposed to and instead of material incentives, and secondly, the abolition of the market. Moral incentives were construed as having the capability of obtaining different personal, working, and social relationships - the substitution of competition and private rewards for emulation and solidarity - and the creation a new kind of moral citizen, the communist man. The controversial use of "moral incentives" was a necessary consequence of the abolition of the market as a mechanism for allocation of resources, including human resources. But the abolition of the market also entailed the creation of another mechanism ~ the administrative allocation of resources. These two aspects - the use of “moral incentives" and the administrative allocation of resources - had the following consequences: moral incentives, in the way the policies for implementation were designed, did not accomplish the task of creating a new kind of citizen “across the board"; and the | | | {administrative allocation of resources entailed, in turn, the development of a heavy and enlarged public administration that soon acquired most of the characteristics of the rational-legal type of organization, defined and named early in this century by Max Weber as bureaucracy. It is our opinion that these two consequences occurred mainly because of the following: Moral incentives failed to achieve their desired results because they were designed and implemented in the absence of knowledge of why and how consequences shape and maintain behavior. And, the crucial role of contingencies between the incentives and the desired social behaviors was not given adequate attention, if any. Also, a heavy and enlarged public administrati m developed because the dialectical perspective can not foresee that these bureaucratic structures do not disappear because of a change in the social classes presumably in power. Bureaucratic characteristics of organizations, including their size, come from selection of these characteristics by certain social environments, such as central planning, centralization of power, and egalitarian mass redistributive policies. In actuality, in all socialist countries it became larger and larger. We would argue that a selectionist paradigm would have been more helpful in anticipating these outcomes. In concluding, let us be absolutely clear and say that our quarrel with dialectics as a model of change is not aimed atdiscrediting socialism, or the endeavor of building a better and more just society, (or even less, those persons who have devoted their lives to this cause). On the contrary, we are looking for ways to provide better tools for their design. Let us also be clear that we are not supporting anything in the nature of the discredited Social Darwinism. we consider that a perversion of selectionism that comes from very short range observations where the goal is the justification of some status quo such as capitalist exploitation. Finally, it must be said that marxism-leninism has provided us with the best critique of capitaliem ever written, a rich poli cal theory for the conquest of state power, and social and economic concepts that today greatly enrich our culture at large. But marxism-leninism did not have, and probably has not presently, the answers for all problems. Being s theory of macro-phenomena, it did not deal with crucial aspects of the design of societies - individual behavior, organizational behavior, and a theory of the administrative state. We would assert, it could not deal with then appropriately because the model of change for these social phenomena is selectionism and not dialectics.Bibliography Bernardo, Robert M. 1971. The Theory of Moral Incentives in Cuba. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Carens, Joseph H. 1961. Equality, Moral Incentives, and the Market. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. Dwivedi, O.P., Graf, William, and Neff, J. 1985. Marxist Contributions to the Theory of the Administrative State. The Indian Journal of Political Science 46, no.1 (Jan./Mar.): 1-17. Fitzgerald, Frank 7. 1989. The Reform of the Cuban Economy: 1976-86: Organisation, Incentives and Patterns of Behaviour. Journal of Latin American Studies 21, part 2 (May): 283-310. Lovass, O. Ivar 1987. Behavioral Treatment and Normal Educational and Intellectual Functioning in Young Autistic Children. Journal of Consulting Clinical Psychology 55, no. 1: 3-9. Mesa-Lago, C. 1971. Le Debat Socialiste a Cuba. 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