Also known as “law of affirmation and negation”. One of the basic laws of materialist dialectics. It reveals that the dialectical negation of things is not done at once, but goes through a law-governed process of two negations and three stages in which things develop themselves. The three-stage evolution of “affirmation – negation – negation of the negation” is the transformation of each aspect of the contradiction of a thing into its opposite, a comprehensive, all-inclusive process, in which the contradiction unfolds itself. Each stage in the development of things is a negation of the previous stage, which is again negated by the latter stage. Undergoing negation of the negation, the motion of things manifests itself as a cycle, often repeating certain features, properties of the old affirmative stage. Lenin pointed out that a development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (“negation of the negation”), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line. This constitutes the process of development of things moving upward in twists and turns from simple to complex, from the lower to the higher. Such a cyclical spiral-like development is the fundamental characteristic of the law of the negation of the negation…
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