Difference between revisions of "Dialectical materialism" - New World Encyclopedia
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The materialism of Marx and Engels thus later opened up the way for [[Frankfurt School]]'s [[Critical theory (Frankfurt School)|critical theory]], which combined philosophy with the [[social science]]s in an attempt to diagnose the ailments of society. In the later Marxist movement centering on the Soviet Union, however, dialectical materialism would be reduced to the orthodox Marxist theory known as ''diamat''. | The materialism of Marx and Engels thus later opened up the way for [[Frankfurt School]]'s [[Critical theory (Frankfurt School)|critical theory]], which combined philosophy with the [[social science]]s in an attempt to diagnose the ailments of society. In the later Marxist movement centering on the Soviet Union, however, dialectical materialism would be reduced to the orthodox Marxist theory known as ''diamat''. | ||
| − | == | + | ==Marxist dialectics== |
| + | The principal features of Marxist dialectics are: | ||
| − | + | #The universe is not a disconnected mix of things isolated from each other, but an integral whole, with the result that things are interdependent. | |
| + | #The natural world, from its smallest to its largest component, is in a state of constant motion | ||
| + | #All things contain within themselves internal contradictions, which are the primary cause of motion, change, and development in the world. | ||
| + | #Development is a process whereby insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes lead to fundamental, qualitative changes. Qualitative changes, however, do not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, in the form of a leap from one state to another. | ||
| − | + | Engels observed three laws of dialectics. They are: | |
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* The law of the unity and conflict of opposites; | * The law of the unity and conflict of opposites; | ||
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* The law of the negation of the negation | * The law of the negation of the negation | ||
| − | The first of Engel's laws or expressions was seen by both Hegel | + | The first of Engel's laws or expressions was seen by both Hegel<ref> "It is in this dialectic as it is here understood, that is, in the grasping of oppositions in their unity, or of the positive in the negative, that speculative thought consists. It is the most important aspect of dialectic." Hegel, ''Science of Logic'', § 69, (p 56 in the Miller edition)</ref> and Lenin<ref>"The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence (one of the "essentials," one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristics or features) of dialectics. That is precisely how Hegel, too, puts the matter." Lenin's Collected Works VOLUME 38, p359: On the question of dialectics.</ref> as the central feature of a dialectical understanding of things and originates with the ancient Ionian philosopher Heraclitus. The second is taken by Hegel from Aristotle, and is equated with what scientists call "phase transitions." It may be traced to the ancient Ionian philosophers (particularly Anaximenes), from whom Aristotle inherited the concept, as well as by Hegel and Engels, and in each case the phase transitions of water is one of the main expositions of quantity into quality and vice versa. The third, the negation of the negation, is Hegel's distinct expression. It was the expression through which (among other things) Hegel's dialectic became fashionable during his life-time. |
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| − | The second is taken by Hegel from Aristotle, and is equated with what scientists call "phase transitions." It may be traced to the ancient Ionian philosophers (particularly Anaximenes), from whom Aristotle inherited the concept, as well as by Hegel and Engels, and in each case the phase transitions of water is one of the main expositions of quantity into quality and vice versa. | ||
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| − | The third, the negation of the negation, is Hegel's distinct expression. It was the expression through which ( | ||
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| − | + | ==Historical materialism== | |
| + | Being concerned primary with history, Marx and Engels were particularly concerned with the application of their philosophy to historical and political reality. The result if known as [[historical materialism]]. | ||
| − | + | In this theory, the [[primitive communism]] of tribal society represented the origin "thesis" of human development. This generating the ''antithesis'' of private ownership and class society. The ''synthesis''—emerging after various stages of historical development such as slavery, feudalism, and capitalism—will be advanced communism, in which the workers own the means of production in an industrialized society. However, just as a chick must break out of the shell which both protects and encases it, the working class must break free from the institutions of repression which capitalist society has created in order to perpetuate itself. Because such qualitiative changes are always sudden and violent, this necessitates a violent revolution and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat as a first step to achieving first socialism, and then the gradual withering away of the state into advance communism. | |
| − | + | The avowed purpose of this intellectual exercise for Marx and Engels was to create a ideology as a catalyst toward developing revolutionary class consciousness. Indeed, Marx and Engels saw themselves not so much as philosophers but as the voices of a historical inevitability: | |
| + | <blockquote> | ||
| + | It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness —Karl Marx, ''Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy''</blockquote> | ||
== Soviet dialectical materialism== | == Soviet dialectical materialism== | ||
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Dialectical materialism is the philosophical basis of Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. The name refers to the notion that Marxism represents a synthesis of (primarily Hegelian) dialectics and materialism.
Dialectical materialism is characterized by the belief that history is the product of class struggle and obeys the Hegelian principle of philosophy of history, that is the development of the thesis into its antithesis which is in turn superseded by the synthesis which conserves aspects thesis and the antithesis while at the same time abolishing it. While retaining Hegel's dialectical method, Marx and Engels reacted against Hegel's idealism. Thus, history is not the result of the progressive unfolding of the Spirit, but of class struggle in society.
Also called, Diamat dialectical materialism was debated and criticized by many Marxist philosophers, which led to various political and philosophical struggles in the Marxist movement in general and in the Comintern in particular.
Marxist materialism
Like other materialists of his day, Marx asserted the primacy of the material world: in short, matter precedes thought. Thus, there is no God who conceived the world, but rather human, who are essentially material beings, conceived God. In addition, there is no spiritual world, heaven, or hell, beyond the material world. All phenomena in the universe consist of "matter in motion." All things are interdependent and interconnected and develop in accordance with natural law. The physical world is an objective reality and exists independently of our perception of it. Perception is thus a reflection of the material world in the brain, and the world is in principle knowable, when objectively perceived.
"The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought."—Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. 1.
Marx thus endorsed a materialist philosophy against Hegel's idealism. However, he also criticized classical materialism as type idealist philosophy. According to his and Engels' famous Theses on Feuerbach (1845), philosophy had to stop "interpreting" the world in endless metaphysical debates, in order to start "transforming" the world.
The rising workers' movement, observed by Engels in England and by Marx in France and Germany, was engaging in precisely that transformational revolution.
Historical materialism—the application of dialectical materialism to the analysis of history—thus affords primacy to class struggle over philosophy as an end in itself. Philosophy, in fact, is not an objective science but a partisan political act. Philosophy itself must therefore take position in the class struggle. In this sense, classical materialism—which tended to justify the social status quo—was not better than the outright spiritual Idealism of Kant or Hegel's philosophies.
The materialism of Marx and Engels thus later opened up the way for Frankfurt School's critical theory, which combined philosophy with the social sciences in an attempt to diagnose the ailments of society. In the later Marxist movement centering on the Soviet Union, however, dialectical materialism would be reduced to the orthodox Marxist theory known as diamat.
Marxist dialectics
The principal features of Marxist dialectics are:
- The universe is not a disconnected mix of things isolated from each other, but an integral whole, with the result that things are interdependent.
- The natural world, from its smallest to its largest component, is in a state of constant motion
- All things contain within themselves internal contradictions, which are the primary cause of motion, change, and development in the world.
- Development is a process whereby insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes lead to fundamental, qualitative changes. Qualitative changes, however, do not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, in the form of a leap from one state to another.
Engels observed three laws of dialectics. They are:
- The law of the unity and conflict of opposites;
- The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes;
- The law of the negation of the negation
The first of Engel's laws or expressions was seen by both Hegel[1] and Lenin[2] as the central feature of a dialectical understanding of things and originates with the ancient Ionian philosopher Heraclitus. The second is taken by Hegel from Aristotle, and is equated with what scientists call "phase transitions." It may be traced to the ancient Ionian philosophers (particularly Anaximenes), from whom Aristotle inherited the concept, as well as by Hegel and Engels, and in each case the phase transitions of water is one of the main expositions of quantity into quality and vice versa. The third, the negation of the negation, is Hegel's distinct expression. It was the expression through which (among other things) Hegel's dialectic became fashionable during his life-time.
Historical materialism
Being concerned primary with history, Marx and Engels were particularly concerned with the application of their philosophy to historical and political reality. The result if known as historical materialism.
In this theory, the primitive communism of tribal society represented the origin "thesis" of human development. This generating the antithesis of private ownership and class society. The synthesis—emerging after various stages of historical development such as slavery, feudalism, and capitalism—will be advanced communism, in which the workers own the means of production in an industrialized society. However, just as a chick must break out of the shell which both protects and encases it, the working class must break free from the institutions of repression which capitalist society has created in order to perpetuate itself. Because such qualitiative changes are always sudden and violent, this necessitates a violent revolution and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat as a first step to achieving first socialism, and then the gradual withering away of the state into advance communism.
The avowed purpose of this intellectual exercise for Marx and Engels was to create a ideology as a catalyst toward developing revolutionary class consciousness. Indeed, Marx and Engels saw themselves not so much as philosophers but as the voices of a historical inevitability:
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness —Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Soviet dialectical materialism
Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1908)
Lenin first formally address dialectical materialism in Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1908) around three axes:
- the "materialist inversion" of Hegelian dialectics
- ethical principles ordered to class struggle (the ends justifying the means)
- and the convergence of the "laws of evolution" in physics (Helmholtz), biology (Darwin), and in political economics (Marx).
Lenin based his work on that of Friedrich Engels, who had noted that "with each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science, materialism has to change its form." (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.) One of Lenin's challenges was distancing materialism as a viable philosophical outlook from what he referred to as the "vulgar materialism" expressed in statements like "the brain secretes thought in the same way as the liver secretes bile" (attributed to eighteenth century physician Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, 1757-1808); "metaphysical materialism" (matter is composed of immutable, unchanging particles); and nineteenth-century "mechanical materialism" (matter was like little molecular billiard balls interacting according to simple laws of mechanics). Lenin's (and Engels') solution to this challenge was "dialectical materialism," where matter was understood in the broader sense of "objective reality" and consistent with new developments in science.
Following the 1917 October Revolution, Soviet philosophy divided itself between "dialecticians" (Deborin) and "mechanists" (Bukharin).
Georg Lukács' History and Class Consciousness (1921-23)
Georg Lukács, who had been minister of Culture in Béla Kun's short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919), published History and Class Consciousness in 1923, in which he defined dialectical materialism as the knowledge of society as a whole, knowledge which in itself was immediately the class consciousness of the proletariat. In the first chapter, "What is Orthodox Marxism?," Lukács defined orthodoxy as the fidelity to the "Marxist method," and not to the "dogmas":
"Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders." (§1)
Lukács criticized revisionist attempts by calling for the return to this Marxist method. In much the same way that Althusser would latter define Marxism and psychoanalysis as "conflictual sciences",[3] Lukács conceives "revisionism" and political splits as inherent to Marxist theory and praxis, insofar as dialectical materialism is, according to him, the product of class struggle:
"For this reason the task of orthodox Marxism, its victory over Revisionism and utopianism can never mean the defeat, once and for all, of false tendencies. It is an ever-renewed struggle against the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat. Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process." (end of §5)
Furthermore, he stated that "The premise of dialectical materialism is, we recall: 'It is not men’s consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.'... Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity." (§5) In line with Marx's thought, he thus criticized the individualist bourgeois philosophy of the subject, which founds itself on the voluntary and conscious subject. Against this ideology, he asserts the primacy of social relations. Existence — and thus the world — is the product of human activity; but this can be seen only if the primacy of social process on individual consciousness, which is but the effect of ideological mystification, is accepted. This doesn't entail that Lukács restrains human liberty on behalf of some kind of sociological determinism: to the contrary, this production of existence is the possibility of praxis.
This heterodox definition, however, which he maintained by asserting that "orthodox Marxism" is fidelity to the Marxist "method," and not to "dogmas," was condemned, along with Karl Korsch's work, in July 1924, during the Vth Comintern Congress, by Grigory Zinoviev.
Stalin's codification of diamat
In 1931, Stalin decided the issue of the debate between dialecticians and mechanists by publishing a decree which identified dialectical materialism as pertaining solely to Marxism-Leninism. He then codified it in [1] (1938) by enumerating the "laws of dialectics," which are the grounds of particular disciplines and in particular of the science of history, and which guarantees their conformity to the "proletarian conception of the world." Thus, diamat was imposed on most Communist parties affiliated to the Third International.
Marxist criticisms of dialectical materialism
However, the doctrine of dialectical materialism has been criticized by many Marxist theorists, including Marxist philosophers such as Antonio Gramsci, who proposed a Marxist "philosophy of praxis" in its stead, or Louis Althusser. Other thinkers in Marxist philosophy have had recourse to the original texts of Marx and Engels and have created other Marxist philosophical projects and concepts which present alternatives to dialectical materialism. As early as 1937, Mao Zedong proposed another interpretation, in his essay On Contradiction, in which he rejected the "laws of dialectics" and insisted on the complexity of the contradiction. Mao's text inspired Althusser's work on the contradiction, which was a driving theme in his well-known essay For Marx (1965). Althusser attempted to nuance the Marxist concept of "contradiction" by borrowing the concept of "overdetermination" from psychoanalysis. He criticized the teleological reading of Marx as a return to Hegel's idealism. Althusser developed the concept of "random materialism" (matérialisme aléatoire) in contrast to dialectical materialism, a move which grew out of Althusser's project of 'anti-humanism,' or the "philosophy of the subject." Another school of thought, led by Italian philosopher Ludovico Geymonat, constructed a historical epistemology from dialectical materialism.
Quotations
- "The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice."—Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
Endnotes
- ↑ "It is in this dialectic as it is here understood, that is, in the grasping of oppositions in their unity, or of the positive in the negative, that speculative thought consists. It is the most important aspect of dialectic." Hegel, Science of Logic, § 69, (p 56 in the Miller edition)
- ↑ "The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence (one of the "essentials," one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristics or features) of dialectics. That is precisely how Hegel, too, puts the matter." Lenin's Collected Works VOLUME 38, p359: On the question of dialectics.
- ↑ Louis Althusser, "Marx and Freud," in Writings on Psychoanalysis, Stock/IMEC, 1993 (French edition)
Selected readings on dialectical materialism
- Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Friedrich Engels
- Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels
- Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels
- Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, V.I. Lenin
- On the Question of Dialectics, V.I. Lenin
- Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Joseph Stalin
- On Contradiction, Mao Tse-tung
- On the Materialist Dialectic, Louis Althusser
- Dialectical Materialism, V.G. Afanasyev
- Materialism And Historical Materialism, Anton Pannekoek
- Reason in Revolt, Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science, Ted Grant and Alan Woods
- History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs
- Ioan, Petru "Logic and Dialectics" A.I. Cuza University Press, Iaşi 1998.
- "Dialectical Materialism", Theory and History, Ludwig von Mises
- The Origins of Dialectical Materialism, Z.A. Jordan
- Dialectics For Kids
See also
People
- Joseph Dietzgen
- Friedrich Engels
- Ludovico Geymonat
- Karl Marx
Concepts
- Parametric determinism
- dialectical monism
- historical materialism
- Marxism
- Marxist philosophy of nature
- Methodological naturalism
- Classical Marxism
- Orthodox Marxism
- Philosophy in the Soviet Union
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