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The whole history of philosophy is the history of the struggle and the development of two
mutually opposed schools of philosophyidealism and materialism. All philosophical currents
are manifestations of these two fundamental schools.
Mao Zedong, Dialectical Materialism
Since the goal of this book is to explain dialectical materialism, let us begin by first examining
this concept as a whole rather than delving into the meaning of dialectical logic. As will be clear
in later chapters, dialectical logic does not have to be materialist; it is best to first understand the
specific meaning of dialectical thought for Marxism, and thus the direction of this book, rather
the logic by which this materialism is articulated. Just as dialectical logic does not have to be
materialist, materialism does not have to be dialectical. Hence the term dialectical materialism
is the historical short-hand for a particular variant of materialismthe specific way in which
According to Marxists, the history of philosophy can be reduced to the history of two
oppositional tendencies: idealism and materialism. Whereas idealism is the tendency to make
ideas and concepts primarythe belief that ideas precede mattermaterialism is the tendency to
make the material world primary and thus assert that matter precedes ideas. The paradigmatic
difference between idealism and materialism can be found in the difference between Plato and
Aristotle, the two big names of Hellenistic philosophy; in order to understand this differential
properly, it is worth examining the divergent philosophies of these two thinkers in some detail.
According to Plato, who was trying to unify a problem inherited from earlier
(Parmenides on a idealist side, Leucippus and Democritus on the materialist side) but in a vaguer
sense, the realm of ideas was more real than the realm of matter. After all, in the world that is
presented to our senses there are multiple articulations of a single conceptual idea: there are
innumerable variations of a chair, for example, and yet we have an idea of chairness that unifies
all of these variations in our mind as particular chairs so that when we see a variation of this
Plato thus asserted that singular concepts behind multiple material variations belonged to
a realm of ideas in which the material world participated; we could only understand the world of
material things by reflecting on the unalterable concepts that gave them sense. The realm of
ideas (which was not limited to banal concepts but that included, most importantly, ideas such as
Beauty, Justice, and the Good) was considered, by Plato, to be more real than the realm of matter
(which was structured by its participation in the realm of ideas) because he believed that what
was changeless and permanent was more real than what was determined by entropy and
impermanence.
Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 14
Here, Plato took his cue from Parmenides who had argued, against Heraclitus, that
change was an illusion because movement required the concept of voidin order for there to be
movement there needed, in the last instance, to be an empty space through which things moved
and such a concept was irrational: to assert that nothing exists is a logical contradiction. Thus,
change was treated as irrational and, due to this irrationality, less real (illusory even) than
concepts and ideas that did not, at least in Platos view of reality, change. For Plato, the material
world was a distorted reflection of the unchangeable world of ideal forms and the only way to
understand this material world was by reflecting on the realthat is, the realm of ideasrather
than being deceived by ones senses. His well known parable of the cave is meant to explain this
point.
Aristotle, however, reversed the relationship between ideas and matter. The material
world, according to Aristotle, was primary, and all unifying concepts were not independent and
metaphysically prior to material existence but the product of human reasoning. The human
being, the rational animal, engaged with matter and gave it meaning by theorizing ideas and
concepts that possessed the dimension of universality. Thus, one did not understand the meaning
of justice, for example, by attempting to discover some a priori concept of justice but by
conceptualizing justice based on observing what was commonly understood to be, in a social and
Whereas Plato emphasized a type of contemplation where all knowledge was the memory
of eternal ideas, Aristotles contemplative life was one in which the philosopher actively made
sense of the messiness of reality by conceptualizing logical categories that allowed for such
sense to exist in the first place. To return to my vulgar example of chairs, Aristotle would argue
that there could be no such thing as a chairness that existed prior to the production, in the crude
Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 15
and material world, of the first chair: someone decided to categorize their creation as a chair and
thus produced the idea of chairness; all other instances of the chair were not articulations of an
immaterial concept but, rather, imitations of the first human-made chair understood conceptually
Here we have a simple distinction between idealism and materialism: idealism argues that
ideas precede material and thus determine human, sensual life; materialism argues that the crude
material world precedes ideas and that these ideas are ultimately the product of humans thinking
in material conditions. Although it might be argued that Marxists have simplified the history of
philosophy by arguing that it can be reduced to a division between these two warring tendencies,
it is worth noting that even non-Marxist philosophers have treated the distinction between Plato
and Aristotle as foundational to the history of philosophy: it has now become something of a
cliche to riff off of Whiteheads famous quip about all of philosophy being a footnote to Plato by
adding Aristotle to the equationall of philosophy is footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. While it
may be true that such a claim smacks of eurocentrism, and there is definitely a eurocentric
manner in the way Hellenistic philosophy is articulated and mobilized by academia, we should
also be wary of any attempt to impose the categories of Europe and european on Plato, Aristotle
Martin Bernal has demonstrated in Black Athena.1 Moreover, we should recognize that Plato and
Aristotle are also ciphers of a similar contradiction that was manifesting in contexts outside of
Ancient Greece; they are useful as a paradigm for the most clear distinction between idealism
and materialism.
1
Bernals argument in Black Athena (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987) is that the
classical civilization of Ancient Greece was actually an Afroasiatic phenomenon and was only
fabricated as European, in a process that started in 1789, by eurocentric scholars who were
searching for a historical European destiny.
Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 16
Finally, it is also worth noting that, while Aristotle was an early representative of
materialism, Plato was an early representative of dialectical logic. Indeed, the latter was a
superior dialectician whereas the former rejected dialectical thought in his conceptualization of
Hellenistic philosophy, which is only necessary in order to explain it according to what has
become the philosophical canon, we can argue that this philosophy finds a foundational
In order to understand materialism in a modern sense, however, we need to examine the period
of early modernity when philosophers were breaking from a supernatural way of understanding
the world and asserting the doctrine of science: natural phenomena can be explained according to
natural causes. The idealist tendency that had haunted thought was incapable of making a
distinction between the natural and the supernatural because it subordinated human existence to
the primacy of supernatural categories. So while it is correct to assert that there were
philosophers and bodies of knowledge that demonstrated some level of scientific thinking in
earlier periods, these great attempts to break from superstition were still affected by mystified
categories of thoughtand these categories of thought formed the primary and common sense
Take, for example, Thomas Aquinas great chain of being, an ideal category of existence
that is meant to justify the structure of feudalism.2 According to this eternal idea, humans were
born into a structure that was ordained before their existence and that determined whether they
2
The fact that Thomistic philosophy was partially based upon Aristotelian categories did not
make it materialiston the contrary, it was haunted by idealism and the ghost of Plato.
Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 17
were meant to be kings, aristocrats, priests, or peasants. To the idea of the great chain of being
we can add the Confucian idea of the law of heaven and the Hindu concept of the Vedic cycle
The fact that these were ideas made up by thinkers who were taught to think that the
values of the tributary ruling classes were superior is only something that can be understood by a
materialist analysis, specifically a historical materialist analysisby the assumption that such
ideas are produced by real humans embedded in material circumstances and designed to make
sense of and justify these circumstances. Before the early modern break with this kind of
mystified thinking, then, reality was justified according to these eternal ideas that, derived from
particular material circumstances, were treated as a priori and the basis for material reality. How
does one live well according to the Thomistic or Confucian idealist view of the universe? By
reflecting on the eternal idea of the great chain of being or the law of heaven and, after
performing this reflection, participating in this form by accepting ones social station.
Hence, the materialists of the early scientific epoch were tied to a bourgeois view of
reality since the primary reason for tearing asunder the bond between the material and
ideological instanceto the point of where everything sacred was profanedwas to prove that
class was made and not found and that the feudal order possessed no logical justification. The
world could be explained according to material causes and without recourse to supernatural
biological causes, history and society according to historical and social causes.
This early modern variant of materialism, though overdetermined by the need to explain
the world according to the categories of a rising bourgeois order, not only produced the basis for
scientific investigation but also the materialism of Marx and Engels that would prove to be even
Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 18
more critical. Generally speaking, however, this materialism was largely an empiricist
materialism that privileged empirical investigation, and recourse to the senses, while ignoring the
Let us refer to this early modern type of materialism, though it might be overly
privileges statistical research as the basis of understanding; its logical apprehension of reality is
only formal; it lacks the ability to understand whatever lies beyond the boundaries with which it
is presented. Reality is precisely what can be found in reality, through the senses; contradictions
are illogical. John Lockes empiricism, which was raised against Renee Descartes rationalism,
Moreover, although the idealists were wrong in assuming that the material world was an
illusion, some of them were correct in arguing that the senses were unreliable and incapable of
providing an adequate picture of realitys totality. For if ones way of seeing the world is trained
according to their class sensibilities, as Marx and Engels would argue, then a simplistic empirical
investigation, constrained within these categories, would be incapable of producing anything but
a reiteration, and thus reification, of a reality based on these sensibilities. A cruder example: a
biologist without a microscope trying to make sense of mud, regardless of their empirical
In contradistinction to positivism, then, the materialism of Marx and Engels, which took
history and society as its theoretical terrain, was something entirely different. While indebted to
the materialism of Locke and the empiricists, it approached reality in a dialectical manner and, in
doing so, attempted to provide a more complete picture of the world in which real people live,
In Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou explains the entire idealism-materialism contradiction
materialism (which I have chosen to define as positivism to avoid the unnecessary confusion
that might result from the word metaphysical), and dialectical materialism.3 Moreover, Badiou
characterizes the distinction between the paired concepts in the following manner:
Materialist is whoever recognizes the primacy of being over thinking (being does not
need my thinking in order to be). Idealist, whoever posits the opposite. [] A
dialectician is someone who turns contradiction into the law of being; a metaphysician,
whoever does the same with the principle of identity.4
this chapter as well as an introduction to the following chapter; his summary definition should
allow us to delineate dialectical materialism from other forms of idealism and materialism.
First of all, the phrase the primacy of being over thinking is a traditionally
philosophical way to explain the definition of materialism put forward in this chapter (the
primacy of the material realm over the realm of ideas, and the belief that ideas come from a
material context rather than vice versa), and uses the term being instead of material so as to
ontologically clarify the meaning of materialism. Being means, simply, to bethat is to exist
and for Badiou, in this context, the world as it is and exists, as it is presented to us and as it is
presented and explained by the sciences. The materialist axiom is that the world exists prior to
thought and all thoughtall ideasare contingent upon being in the world, and derived from the
thinkers being in (that is, living and growing within) this world that precedes all thought.
3
Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 116-117.
Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 20
Secondly, the two possible qualifications of materialism (which also qualify idealism)
provided by Badiou (metaphysical and dialectical) serve as a law of the being described above:
one can understand what it means to be based primarily on the the principle of identity (each
thing is the same with itself and different from another thing5), which denies contradiction; one
can understand what it means to be, to exist and live, based primarily on the principle of
contradiction. The latter approach serves to describe the kind of materialism with which we are
concerned: dialectical materialism, and in the following chapter we shall examine this law of
beingthat is, the logical basis of the kind of materialism initiated by Marx and Engelsand
hopefully explain the basic meaning of dialectical logic, where contradiction [is] the law of
Historical Materialism
Before proceeding to the next chapter to examine the basics of dialectical logic, however, it
might be worth mentioning a terminological lacuna that remains from this chapters examination
of materialism: that is, the term historical materialism that is also ascribed to Marx and Engels.
Since this is a book on dialectical materialism I do not plan to discuss the related term historical
4
Ibid., 117.
5
For more information on what this principle means in the history of philosophy, specifically for
anti-dialectical materialists, see Aristotles discussion of the law of identity in Metaphysics
(Book IV, Part 4) and John Lockes discussion of the same principle in Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (Of Maxims). Here it is worth noting that Aristotle never actually
formulated this principle, though it appears unnamed in his work, but that it was named by
medieval Aristotelians in an attempt to schematize logic. By the time of John Lockes Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, however, it was accepted by the early modern materialists as
a law of being. In some ways, due to the historical controversy of this terms emergence, it
may be better to think of the positivist law of being as being the principle of non-contradiction,
which the above passage in Aristotles Metaphysics is meant to explain negatively.
Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 21
materialism in very much detail, though the concept will haunt the following pages, but I will
because this term has become so entangled with dialectical materialism that attempts to tease
them apart have often resulted in a formulaic tradition where dialectical materialism and
historical materialism are rent asunder.6 On the other hand, there is a tendency to conflate
dialectical and historical materialism so that they become synonyms of the same concept when,
at least in my opinion, while they overlap they are not necessarily identical.
Perhaps the best way to draw a distinction between historical and dialectical materialism
is to take our cue from the classical tradition of Marxist theory where historical materialism was
treated as the name of the science initiated by Marx and Engels, and dialectical materialism was
the name of the philosophy connected to this science. Whereas the former is the short-hand for a
ontology upon which this examination restsbeing philosophical it is meant to explain how and
why this science of history should proceed. Thus, Marx and Engels initiated a science of history
but the way in which they performed this science of history, its specific meaning, was dialectical.
Hence, their focus on the motion of history (the contradiction of class struggle) which is derived
from dialectical logic; hence the scaffolding behind Marxs scientific analysis of Capitalism
that was evident in The Grundrisse but was pushed into the background by the time Capital was
written; hence Marxs plan to write a book on his philosophical method, similar to Capital, that
6
Such as the famous formulation of Stalin, foundational to Soviet theory, in Dialectical and
Historical Materialism (1938) which is not altogether wrong but is rather simplistic.
7
It is also worth considering, as an aside, whether or not the removal of the scaffolding of
philosophical language was more than just (as is explicitly stated by Marx in a letter to Engels) a
Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 22
theoretical terrain that is best navigated according to the logic of dialectical materialism.
Historical materialisms scientific principle is that class struggle is the motion of history;
dialectical materialisms logical principle is the law of contradiction which is, as we shall
examine in the next chapter, the logic of motion. In this way they are bound together, but in this
Although historical and dialectical materialism are entangled and interrelated concepts,
isolating them in the above manner prevents conceptual slippage, just as long as we do not pull
them completely apart. While it is true that this classical separation between historical and
dialectical materialism has often led to the kind of bifurcation we observe in Stalins treatise, the
fact that dialectical materialism and historical materialism are often conflated, rather than treated
as different angles from which to view Marxism, has led to some terrible Marxist theories
whereby dialectical materialism is treated as if it is the queen of the sciences and all scientific
developments that appear to violate dialectical logic are thus treated as anti-materialist and
non-scientific.8 At this point in the investigation, though, we should simply treat dialectical
publishing strategy to make the work cognizable to people who would be unfamiliar with
Hegelian jargon. The disappearance of this language is also, in many ways, the attempt to move
beyond philosophy, that which interprets the world, and into science, that which changes the
world. Most importantly, it makes Capital palatable to its target audience, the proletariat, rather
than relegating to academic specialization. I cannot help but recall one of my graduate school
teachers telling us that university students had a harder time understanding Capital than workers
in a reading group she had led in India. Maybe this obsession to understand dialectics
academicallythat is, the meaning of its logicis not always helpful when it comes to struggle
considering that, if this anecdote is correct, Capital without the Hegelian jargon was better
understood by its target audience whereas a university audience, looking precisely for
philosophical insights and often lacking the concrete experience it describes, find it more
difficult.
8
According to some hack Marxists, who imagine that their understanding of dialectics places
them in a position of authority over all scientific pursuits, have concluded that modern physics
are idealist because they violate materialist dialectics. We will examine this problem in a later
chapter.
Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 23
materialism as interrelated with and overlapping historical materialism, the former being our
object of examination and the latter being the implicit terrain in which this examination takes
place.