dialectical materialism

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Dialectical materialism is the philosophy of Karl Marx, which he formulated by taking the dialectic of Hegel and joining it to the Materialism of Feuerbach. According to many followers of Karl Marx's thinking, it is the philosophical basis of Marxism.

The term

Dialectical materialism was coined in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen, a socialist tanner who corresponded with Marx both during and after the failed 1848 German Revolution. Casual mention of the term is also found in Kautsky's Frederick Engels^[1], written in the same year. Marx himself had talked about the "materialist conception of history", which was later referred as "historical materialism" by Engels. Engels further exposed the "materialist dialectic" — not "dialectical materialism" — in his Dialectics of Nature in 1883. Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, later introduced the term dialectical materialism to Marxist literature^[2]. Stalin further codified it as Diamat and imposed it as the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. The term wasn't coupled by Marx himself, and it refers to the combination of dialectics and materialism in Marx's thinking as material forces causing social and economic changes. It is sometimes seen as complementary to historical materialism which is the name given to Marx's methodology in the study of society, economics and history.

Dialectical Materialism is the philosophy of Karl Marx which he formulated by taking the dialectic of Hegel and joining it to the Materialism of Feuerbach, extracting from it a concept of progress in terms of the contradictory, interacting forces called the thesis and antithesis, culminating at a critical nodal point where one overthrows the other, giving rise to the synthesis, and applying it to the history of social development and deriving therefrom an essentially revolutionary concept of social change.

Aspects

Dialectical materialism originates from two major aspects of Marx's philosophy. One is his transformation of Hegel's idealistic understanding of dialectics into a materialist one, an act commonly said to have "put Hegel's dialectics back on its feet". The other is his core idea that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" as stated in The Communist Manifesto in 1848.

Materialism is based in the conviction that all phenomena can be explained through natural means. Some aspects of Marxism are informed by materialist philosophy. According to materialism, matter is the total explanation for space, nature, man, psychic consciousness, human intelligence, society, history and every other aspect of existence. Marxism assigns the task of knowing all truth to science. If science can get to know everything about matter, then it can get to know about everything. Conclusively, matter is accepted as the beginning and ending of all reality. Matter's sovereignty in determining the course of nature is a vital part of Marxist thought and what separates dialectical materialism from the Hegelian method of dialectical idealism.

Hegel

Dialectical materialism is essentially characterized by the thesis that history is the product of class struggles and follows the general Hegelian principle of philosophy of history, that is the development of the thesis into its antithesis which is sublated by the Aufhebung ("synthesis"). The term Aufhebung was not used by Hegel to describe his dialectics.^[3] The Aufhebung conserves the thesis and the antithesis and transcends them both (Aufheben — this contradiction explains the difficulties of Hegel's thought).^[4] Hegel's dialectics aims to explain the development of human history. He considered that truth was the product of history and that it passed through various moments, including the moment of error; error and negativity are part of the development of truth. Hegel's idealism considered history a product of the Spirit (Geist or also Zeitgeist — the "Spirit of the Time"). By contrast, Marx's dialectical materialism considers history as a product of material class struggle in society. Thus, theory has its roots in the materiality of social existence.

Three laws of dialectical materialism

Marxism sets out to answer questions related to both nature and humanity, including questions on:

• the origin of energy or motion in nature;
• why galaxies, solar system, planets, animals and all kingdoms of nature constantly increase in number;
• the origin of life, the origin of species and the origin of consciousness and mind;
• the origin of societal order and its direction

Marx and Engels answer these questions by using the three laws of motion, i.e. dialectics, first discovered by the Greek philosophers and codified by Hegel.

Law of Opposites

Marx and Engels started with the observation that everything in existence is a unity of opposites. For example, electricity is characterized by a positive and negative charge, and atoms consist of protons and electrons which are unified but ultimately contradictory forces. A star is held together by gravity pulling the molecules towards the center, and heat pushing them away from the center. If either force completely succeeds, the star ceases to be; if heat wins it explodes into a supernova, and if gravity wins it implodes into a neutron star or a black hole. Living things strive to balance internal and external forces to maintain homeostasis, which is simply a balance of opposing forces such as acidity and alkalinity.

Marx concludes that everything "contains mutually incompatible and exclusive but nevertheless equally essential and indispensable parts or aspects." This unity of opposites is what makes each entity auto-dynamic and provides a constant motivation for movement and change. This idea was borrowed from Georg Wilhelm Hegel who said: "Contradiction in nature is the root of all motion and of all life."

Some opposites are antagonistic,[1] as in the competition between capitalists and laborers. Factory owners offer the lowest wages possible, while workers seek the highest wages. Sometimes, this antagonism sparks strikes or lockouts.

Law of Negation

The law of negation was created to account for the tendency in nature to constantly increase the number of all things. Marx and Engels demonstrated that entities tend to negate themselves in order to advance or reproduce a higher quantity. This means that the nature of opposition, which causes conflict in each element and gives it motion, also tends to negate the thing itself. This dynamic process of birth and destruction is what causes entities to advance. This law is commonly simplified as the cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

In nature, Engels often cited the case of the barley seed which, in its natural state, germinates and out of its own death or negation produces a plant; the plant in turn grows to maturity, and is itself negated after bearing many barley seeds. Thus, all nature is constantly expanding through cycles.

In society, we have the case of class. For example, the aristocracy was negated by the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie then created the proletariat that will one day negate them. This illustrates that the cycle of negation is eternal, as each class creates its "grave-digger", its successor, as soon as it finishes burying its creator.

Law of Transformation

This law states that continuous quantitative development results in qualitative "leaps" in nature whereby a completely new form or entity is produced. This is how "quantitative development becomes qualitative change". Transformation also allows the reverse process, where quality affects quantity.

This theory draws many parallels to the Theory of Evolution. Marxist philosophers concluded that entities, through quantitative accumulations, are also inherently capable of "leaps" to new forms and levels of reality. The law illustrates that during a long period of time, through a process of small, almost irrelevant accumulations, nature develops noticeable changes in direction.

In nature, this can be illustrated by the eruption of a volcano which is caused by years of pressure building up. The volcano may no longer be a mountain but when its lava cools, it will become fertile land where previously there was none. In society, it can be illustrated by a revolution which is caused by years of tensions between opposing factions.

The law also occurs in reverse. An example is that by introducing better (changing quality) tools to farm, the tools will help to increase the production.

Materialism in dialectical materialism

Marx's doctoral thesis concerned the atomism of Epicurus and Democritus, which (along with stoicism) is considered the foundation of materialist philosophy. Marx was also familiar with Lucretius's theory of clinamen.

Materialism asserts the primacy of the material world: in short, matter precedes thought. Materialism holds that the world is material; that all phenomena in the universe consist of "matter in motion," wherein all things are interdependent and interconnected and develop according to natural law; that the world exists outside us and independently of our perception of it; that thought is a reflection of the material world in the brain, and that the world is in principle knowable.

"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 endorsed this materialist philosophy against Hegel's idealism; he "turned Hegel's dialectics upside down." However, Marx also criticized classical materialism as another idealist philosophy. According to the famous Theses on Feuerbach (1845), philosophy had to stop "interpreting" the world in endless metaphysical debates, in order to start "changing" the world, as was being done by the rising workers' movement observed by Engels in England (Chartist movement) and by Marx in France and Germany. Thus, dialectical materialists tend to accord primacy to class struggle. The ultimate sense of Marx's materialist philosophy is that philosophy itself must take a position in the class struggle based on objective analysis of physical and social relations. Otherwise, it will be reduced to spiritualist idealism, such as the philosophies of Kant or Hegel, which are only ideologies, that is the material product of social existence.

Thus Marx's materialism 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.

Dialectics in dialectical materialism

Dialectics is the science of the general and abstract laws of the development of nature, society, and thought. Its principal features are:

1. The universe is an integral whole in which things are interdependent, rather than a mixture of things isolated from each other.
2. The natural world or cosmos is in a state of constant motion:

"All nature, from the smallest thing to the biggest, from a grain of sand to the sun, from the protista to man, is in a constant state of coming into being and going out of being, in a constant flux, in a ceaseless state of movement and change." --Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature.

1. Development is a process whereby insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes lead to fundamental, qualitative changes. Qualitative changes occur not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, as leaps from one state to another. A simple example from the physical world is the heating of water: a one degree increase in temperature is a quantitative change, but between 99 and 100 degrees there is a qualitative change - water to steam.

"Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes." --Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1.

1. All things contain within themselves internal dialectical contradictions, which are the primary cause of motion, change, and development in the world. It is important to note that 'dialectical contradiction' is not about simple 'opposites' or 'negation'. For formal approaches, the core message of 'dialectical opposition / contradiction' must be understood as 'some sense' opposition between the objects involved in a directly associated context.

For the application of the dialectic to history see Historical materialism.

Engels' laws of dialectics

As mentioned above, Engels determined three laws of dialectics from his reading of Hegel's Science of Logic^[5]. They are:

1. The law of the unity and conflict of opposites;
2. The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes;
3. The law of the negation of the negation

The first law was seen by both Hegel and Lenin as the central feature of a dialectical understanding of things^[6][7] and originates with the ancient Ionian philosopher Heraclitus. ^[8]

The second law Hegel took from Aristotle, and it is equated with what scientists call "phase transitions". It may be traced to the ancient Ionian philosophers (particularly Anaximenes), from whom Aristotle, Hegel and Engels inherited the concept. For all these authors, one of the main illustrations is the phase transitions of water.

The third law is Hegel's own. It was the expression through which (amongst other things) Hegel's dialectic became fashionable during his life-time.

In drawing up these laws, Engels presupposes a holistic approach outlined above and in Lenin's three elements of dialectic below, and emphasizes elsewhere that all things are in motion. ^[9]

Lenin's elements of dialectics

After reading Hegel's Science of Logic in 1914, Lenin made some brief notes outlining three "elements" of logic.^[10] They are:

Lenin develops these in a further series of notes, and appears to argue that "the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa" is an example of the unity and opposition of opposites expressed tentatively as "not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other [into its opposite?]."

History of dialectical materialism

Lenin's contributions

Dialectical materialism was first elaborated by Lenin in Materialism and Empiriocriticism in 1908 around three axes: the "materialist inversion" of Hegelian dialectics, the historicity of ethical principles ordered to class struggle and the convergence of "laws of evolution" in physics (Helmholtz), biology (Darwin) and in political economics (Marx). Lenin hence took position between a historicist Marxism (Labriola) and a determinist Marxism, close to "social Darwinism" (Kautsky). New discoveries in physics, including x-rays, electrons, and the beginnings of quantum mechanics challenged previous conceptions of matter and materialism. Matter seemed to be disappearing. Lenin disagreed:

'Matter disappears' means that the limit within which we have hitherto known matter disappears and that our knowledge is penetrating deeper; properties of matter are disappearing that formerly seemed absolute, immutable and primary, and which are now revealed to be relative and characteristic only of certain states of matter. For the sole 'property' of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside of the mind.

Lenin was following on from the work 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."^[12] 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 18th century physician Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, 1757-1808); "metaphysical materialism" (matter is composed of immutable, unchanging particles); and 19th-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.

Lukács' additions

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. This book 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 later define Marxism and psychoanalysis as "conflictual sciences",^[13] 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 is accepted. He classified this consciousness as an effect of ideological mystification. His thesis 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.

However, this heterodox definition, 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 5th Comintern Congress, by Grigory Zinoviev.

Marxist criticisms of dialectical materialism

Dialectical materialism has been criticized by many Marxist theorists, including Marxist philosophers Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, who proposed a Marxist "philosophy of praxis" instead. 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 alleged 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." In an attempt to approach the problem in a new way, Italian philosopher Ludovico Geymonat constructed a historical epistemology from dialectical materialism. Althusser soon backed the epistemological method centred on the rejection of the dichotomy between subject and object, which makes Marx's work incompatible with its antecedents.

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

Selected readings on dialectical materialism

• Dialectical Materialism, Alexander Spirkin
• 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 Zedong
• 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
• Dialectical Materialism: Its Laws, Categories, and Practice, Ira Gollobin, Petras Press, NY, 1986.
• Dialectics for the New Century, ed. Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith, Palgrave Macmillan, England, 2008.

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External links

• @nti-dialectics – website presenting contemporary criticism of dialectical materialism