Dialectical materialism

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dialectical_materialism

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 andFrederick 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is in turn superseded by a synthesis that conserves aspects of the thesis and the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 theComintern 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. Hundreds of millions of people were indoctrinated in the
principles of dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union and China during the twentieth
century.

Marxist materialism
Like other materialists of their day, Marx and Engels asserted the primacy of the
material world: in short, matter precedes thought. Thus, there is no God who conceived
Dialectical materialism
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dialectical_materialism
the world, but rather humans, 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
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 truly 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).

Friedrich Engels

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' 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 Marxin France and Germany, was engaging in precisely that transformational
revolution.

Historical materialismthe application of dialectical materialism to the analysis of

historythus affords primacy to class struggle over philosophy per se. Philosophy, in
fact, is not an objective science but a partisan political act. In this sense, classical
Dialectical materialism
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dialectical_materialism
materialismwhich tended to justify the social status quowas no better than the
outrightIdealism of Kant or Hegel's philosophies. "True" philosophy must take the correct
position in the class struggle, and the function of Marxist philosophy is to do exact that.

The materialism of Marx and Engels later opened up the way for the 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
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 these laws was also seen by both Hegel and Lenin as the central feature of a
dialectical understanding of things. It has been traced to the ancient Greek
philosopher Heraclitus. The second is taken by Hegel from Aristotle, and may be traced
to the ancient Ionian philosophers (particularly Anaximenes), from whom Aristotle
inherited the concept. The third, the negation of the negation, is Hegel's distinct
expression. It refers to the idea a thesis generating its antithesis or negation, which is in
turn negated by a synthesis.

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.
Dialectical materialism
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dialectical_materialism
4. Development is a process whereby insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes
lead to fundamental, qualitative changes. Qualitative changes, however, do not change
gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, in the form of a leap from one state to another.

Historical materialism
Being concerned primarily with history and society rather than philosophy per se, Marx
and Engels were particularly concerned with the application of their philosophy to
historical and political reality. The result came to be known as historical materialism.

According to this theory, the primitive communism of tribal societies represented the
original "thesis" of human development. This generated the antithesis of private
ownership and class society. The synthesisemerging after various stages of historical
development such as slavery, feudalism, mercantilism, and capitalismwill be
advanced communism, in which the workers own the means of production in an
advanced 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 qualitative 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 advanced communism.

According to the Marxist principle of the "partisanship of philosophy," the avowed

purpose of this intellectual exercise for Marx and Engels was to create an 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).
Dialectical materialism
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dialectical_materialism

Soviet dialectical materialism

Lenin's contributions

Lenin in 1920

Lenin first formally addressed dialectical materialism in Materialism and

Empiriocriticism (1908) around three axes:

The "materialist inversion" of Hegelian dialectics

Ethical principles ordered to class struggle
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)
Nineteenth century "mechanical materialism" (matter was like little molecular billiard
balls interacting according to simple laws of mechanics)
Dialectical materialism
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dialectical_materialism
He also took on several Marxist thinkers whom he deemed to have improperly
understood the implications of dialectical and historical materialism, resulting in their
adopting an insufficient revolutionary outlook based on gradual change and "bourgeois-
democratic"socialism. Lenin insisted that gradualism could never achieve qualitative
change in the economic base of society.

Stalin's codification of diamat

Stalin

Following the 1917 October Revolution, the Soviet philosophy divided itself between
"dialecticians" (Deborin) and "mechanists" (Bukharin).Stalin ultimately decided the
outcome of the debate by publishing a decree which identified dialectical materialism as
pertaining solely to Marxism-Leninism rather than any other form of materialism. 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 Marxs dialectics.

Stalin then established the official Soviet version of dialectical materialism in his
work, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938).[1] Here, he enumerated the "laws of
dialectics," which are to serve as the grounds of particular scientific disciplines,
Dialectical materialism
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dialectical_materialism
especially sociology and the "science" of history, thus guaranteeing their conformity with
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 and journals 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, has been criticized by numerous Marxist thinkers. 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,
pointing out that traditional dialectical materialism was much more a product of Engels
than of Marx. This has resulted in various "Marxist" philosophical projects which present
alternatives to traditional dialectical materialism.

As early as 1937, Mao Zedong proposed yet another interpretation, in his essay On
Contradiction, in which he rejected Engels' "laws of dialectics" as oversimplified 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 idealism in which
philosophy supersedes reality. Another school of thought, led by Italian philosopher
Ludovico Geymonat, constructed a "historical epistemology" from dialectical
materialism.

Legacy
For more than 70 years in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, dialectical
materialism was the official guiding philosophy of state. It attempted to deal with all
questions of existence, from atoms to history and economics. It became them most
Dialectical materialism
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dialectical_materialism
important atheistic ideology of the twentieth century, absolutely denying even the
possibility of God's existence and affirming the need for violent revolution that would do
away with religion, which it insisted was merely the "opiate" of the masses.

More than a billion young people in the former Soviet Union, China, and many other
countries were indoctrinated into the worldview of dialectical materialism in schools from
kindergarten through college. In the context of the totalitarian societies which it
spawned, dialectical materialism stifled the creative spirit of two entire generations who
grew up under Soviet-style rule. The former Communist world even today is still
struggling to recover from dialectical materialism's tragic legacy, a philosophy designed
to liberate the workers of the world but which itself ended up in the dust bin of history.

See also
Friedrich Engels
Karl Marx
Marxism

Notes
1. Josef Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Retrieved November 5, 2008.

References
Ollman, Bertell, and Tony Smith. Dialectics for the New Century. Basingstoke::
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ISBN 9780230535312.
Rigby, S. H. Engels and the Formation of Marxism: History, Dialectics and Revolution.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007. ISBN 9780719077746.
Yi, Sang-hn. Communism; a Critique & Counterproposal. Washington: Freedom
Leadership Foundation, 1973. OCLC 741232.

External links
All links retrieved August 16, 2013.
Dialectical materialism
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dialectical_materialism
Friedrich Engels. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
Friedrich Engels. Anti-Dhring
Friedrich Engels. Dialectics of Nature
V.I. Lenin. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,
V.I. Lenin. On the Question of Dialectics
Joseph Stalin. Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Mao Tse-tung. On Contradiction
Louis Althusser. On the Materialist Dialectic
Georg Lukacs. History and Class Consciousness