Claim. Against the materialist dialectic’s claim that things develop through struggle between contradictory opposites, UT holds they exist and develop through harmonious give-and-receive between correlatives — distinguishable empirically by common purpose, harmonious interaction, and unequal positions (subject vs object).
Elaboration. Lee offers operational tests to distinguish UT’s view from Marxism-Leninism (B. Subject and Object). Both views agree that every being contains two elements. The disagreement is over their nature. Three diagnostic criteria: (1) Common purpose: if the two elements share a purpose, they are correlatives; if not, opposites. (2) Interaction: if harmonious, give-and-receive; if conflictive, dialectical. (3) Position: if different (subject/object), correlatives; if equal (subject/subject), opposites.
Lee historicizes the dispute. Marx applied dialectic only to social problems and gave no example of natural phenomena developing through struggle. Engels tried to fill the gap in Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring, announcing ‘nature is the proof of dialectics.’ Lee replies that the natural phenomena Engels cited are actually instances of harmonious action centered on common purpose, not struggle (referring to his own The End of Communism for detail). Conclusion: ‘nature is the proof of give and receive action.’ Real struggles exist ‘only among human beings in society’ as a result of the human fall.
Lee returns to this argument in the chapter’s closing critique of the law of the universe. Apparent natural destruction (a star exploding, old cells replaced by new) is misread as struggle; it is in fact replacement within a larger harmonious system, no different from old cells being replaced in a living body. Predator-prey relations between different species (cats and mice, snakes and frogs) are not within-species struggle and cannot justify human-on-human violence — humans uniquely kill conspecifics, which is anomalous in nature and traceable to fall.
The argument carries massive political freight: if nature is harmony, then class struggle has no cosmic warrant; if fallen-nature is the unique source of struggle, then the answer is restoration, not revolution.
See also. ut-give-and-receive-five-types, development-through-harmony-not-contradiction, give-and-receive-is-harmonious-not-struggle