Dialectical materialism

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Dialectical materialism is the philosophical expression of Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. The name refers to the notion that Marxism is a materialist worldview with a dialectical method. It was developed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the mid-late eighteenth century and further elaborated by later Marxist theorists.

Dialectical materialism holds that the world, including human beings, is "matter in motion" and that progress occurs through struggle. It follows the Hegelian principle of the philosophy of history, namely the development of the thesis into its antithesis, which is in turn superseded by a synthesis that conserves aspects of the thesis and the antithesis while at the same time abolishing them. While retaining Hegel's dialectical method, however, 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, in which economics is the determining factor. Moreover, while quantitative change may be gradual, qualitative change involves an abrupt, violent leap to a higher stage. In society, this means that only violent revolution can bring about the shift from private ownership to socialism and communism which Marx and Engels envisioned.

Dialectical materialism was debated and criticized by various Marxist philosophers, which led to a number of political and philosophical struggles in the Marxist movement in general and in the Comintern in particular. After the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the proper interpretation of dialectical materialism became a subject of state policy. The official Soviet version of dialectical materialism, as codified by Josef Stalin was known as diamat. It became the official philosophy of the Soviet state and had a major influence on Soviet intellectual tradition, which was required to adhere to its teachings as official dogma.

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:

1. The universe is not a disconnected mix of things isolated from each other, but an integral whole, with the result that things are interdependent.
2. The natural world, from its smallest to its largest component, is in a state of constant motion
3. All things contain within themselves internal contradictions, which are the primary cause of motion, change, and development in the world.
4. 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 and Lenin 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
• 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 Engels, and also addressed the writings of more recent philosophers, often in biting and satirical form. He took on the task of distancing Marxist materialism from several other forms of materialist philosophy: "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). He also took on several Marxist thinkers whom he deemed to have improperly understood the implications of dialectical and historical materialism, usually resulting in their adopting an insufficiently revolutionary outlook based on gradual change and "bourgeois-democratic" socialism. Like Marx and Engels, Lenin insisted that gradualism could never achieve qualitative change in the economic base of society.

Following the 1917 October Revolution, Soviet philosophy divided itself between "dialecticians" (Deborin) and "mechanists" (Bukharin).

Stalin's codification of diamat

Stalin ultimately decided the outcome of the debate between dialecticians and mechanists by publishing a decree which identified dialectical materialism as pertaining solely to Marxism-Leninism rather than classical Marxism. Stalin would also use diamat as a justification for the establishment of the totalitarian state. In June 1930, he told the Soviet party congress:

We stand for the withering away of the state. At the same time we stand for the... strongest state power that has ever existed... Is this “contradictory”? Yes, it is contradictory. But this contradiction... fully reflects Marx’s dialectics.

Stalin then established the official Soviet version of dialectical materialism in his work Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938). Here, he enumerated the "laws of dialectics," which are to serve as the grounds of particular scientific disciplines and especially sociology and the "science" of history, thus guaranteeing their conformity what he called the "proletarian conception of the world." Thus, the official Soviet philosophy of diamat was imposed on most Communist parties affiliated to the Third International. Under the Stalinist regime and its successors, academic discussion in Soviet intellectual institutions would be constrained to stay within the line of Stalinist philosophical orthodoxy.

Marxist criticisms of dialectical materialism

Nevertheless, the doctrine of dialectical materialism, especially the official Soviet version of diamat. Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, for example, proposed a "philosophy of praxis" in its stead. Other thinkers in Marxist philosophy have pointed to the original texts of Marx and Engels and have created other Marxist philosophical projects which present alternatives to traditional 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 Louis Althusser's work on 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 Stalinist "teleological" reading of Marx as a return to Hegel's idealismm in which ideology supersedes reality. Another school of thought, led by Italian philosopher Ludovico Geymonat, constructed a "historical epistemology" from dialectical materialism.

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

• Friedrich Engels
• Karl Marx
• Marxism

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