Dialectical materialism :: The W2N.net

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 Engels¹, 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 literature². 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 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, commonly referred as that he "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.

Marxism is based in the scientific conviction that everything can be explained by Matter alone. This qualifies Marxism as a fundamentally 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, a term not employed by Hegel in describing his dialectics.³) — which conserves the thesis and the antithesis while at the same time transcending them both (Aufheben — this contradiction explains the difficulties of Hegel's thought). ⁴ Hegel's dialectics aims at explaining the growth and development of human history. He considered that truth was the product of history and passed through various moments, including the moment of error, as error, or also negativity, is part of the development of truth. Marx's dialectical materialism considers, against Hegel's idealism, that history is not the product of the Spirit (Geist or also Zeitgeist — the "Spirit of the Time") but the effect of material class struggle in society. Theory thus 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:

Marx and Engels answer all of these questions by utilizing the three laws of motion, i.e. dialectics, first discovered by the Greek philosophers and codified by Hegel. These three laws are discovered within nature instead of being superimposed upon it.

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 are ultimately contradictory forces. Even humans through introspection find that they are a unity of opposite qualities. Masculinity and femininity, selfishness and altruism, humbleness and pride, and so forth. The Marxist conclusion being that everything "contains two mutually incompatible and exclusive but nevertheless equally essential and indispensable parts or aspects." The basic concept being that this unity of opposites in nature is the thing that makes each entity auto-dynamic and provides this 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."

This dichotomy is often found in nature. A star is held together by gravity trying to push all the molecules to the center, and heat trying to send them as far from the center as possible. If either force is completely successful the star ceases to be, if heat is victorious it explodes into a supernova, if gravity is victorious it implodes into a neutron star or a black hole. Furthermore, living things strive to balance internal and external forces to maintain homeostasis, which is nothing more than a balance of opposing forces such as acidity and alkalinity.

Some opposites are antagonistic, [1] as in the competition between capitalists and laborers. Factory owners offer the lowest wages possible, while workers seek to maximize 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 numerical quantity 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 produces conflict in each element and gives them 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; and 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 allows for the reverse with quality affecting 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.

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. A revolution which is caused by years of tensions between opposing factions in society acts as a social illustration. The law occurs in reverse. An example would be, that by introducing better (changing quality) tools to farm, the tools will aid the increase in the amount (change the quantity) of what is produced.

Materialism in dialectical materialism

Marx's thesis concerned Epicurus and Democritus' atomism, considered as the founder, along with stoicism, of materialist philosophy. He was thus familiar with Lucretius' theory of clinamen, etc. Materialism asserts the primacy of the material world: in short, matter precedes thought. Additionally, 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 in accordance with 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.

Marx thus endorsed a materialist philosophy against Hegel's idealism; he "turned Hegel's dialectics upside down". However, Marx's materialist position is not to be confused with simple materialism: in fact, he criticized classic 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, which the rising workers' movement, observed by Engels in England (Chartist movement) and by Marx in France and Germany, was precisely doing. Historical materialism is therefore the primacy accorded to class struggle. The ultimate sense of Marx's materialism philosophy is that philosophy itself must take position in the class struggle, if it is not to be reduced to spiritualist Idealism (such as Kant or Hegel's philosophies) which are, in fact, only ideologies, that is the material product of social existence. Marx's materialism 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.

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:

Engels' laws of dialectics

As mentioned above, Engels determined three laws of dialectics from his reading of Hegel's Science of Logic⁵. They are:

The first of Engels' laws or expressions was seen by both Hegel and Lenin as the central feature of a dialectical understanding of things⁶ ⁷ and originates with the ancient Ionian philosopher Heraclitus. ⁸

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 (amongst other things) Hegel's dialectic became fashionable during his life-time.

Engels presupposes, in drawing up these laws, 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

Lenin made some brief notes outlining three "elements" of logic after reading Hegel's Science of Logic in 1914.¹⁰ 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:

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

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:

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.

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 doctrine of diamat

Following the 1917 October Revolution, Soviet philosophy divided itself between "dialecticians" (Deborin) and "mechanists" (Bukharin). 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 Dialectical and Historical Materialism (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. Diamat became the official philosophy of the Soviet Union and remained as such until its fall.

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

Endnotes

^ http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1887/xx/engels.htm
^ For instance, Plekhanov, The development of the monist view of history, (1895)
^ Walter Kaufmann (1966). "§ 37". Hegel: A Reinterpretation. Anchor Books. ISBN 0268010684. OCLC 3168016. "Whoever looks for the stereotype of the allegedly Hegelian dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology will not find it. What one does find on looking at the table of contents is a very decided preference for triadic arrangements. ... But these many triads are not presented or deduced by Hegel as so many theses, antitheses, and syntheses. It is not by means of any dialectic of that sort that his thought moves up the ladder to absolute knowledge."
^ In particular, see Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, chapter II, first observation, where he uses this formulation. We should note here that Hegelians tend to attribute this formula to Marx's teacher - "a certain Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus" - a Kantian who misrepresented Hegel, conflating Hegel's dialectic with the Fichtean triad thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It is suggested that subsequent to Marx's use of the phrase, Hegel has always been associated with the triad, which he rejected (cf Jon Stewart, ed{{#ifeq|.|.||.}} (1996). "Introduction". The Hegel Myths and Legends. North-Western University Press. ). However, one might cite Marx's explanation of the development of the dialectic in the cited passage of The Poverty of Philosophy: "This new [synthesis] unfolds itself again into two contradictory thoughts" which appears to be reaching beyond the limits of this misleading external triad to an inner inherent unfolding, more along the Hegelian lines.
^ Engels, Dialectics of nature
^ "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.
^ cf, for instance. 'The Doctrine of Flux and the Unity of Opposites' in the 'Heraclitus' entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
^ The discovery that heat was actually the movement of atoms or molecules was the very latest science of the period in which Engels was writing in his late period, in which what today we would express in terms of "energy" was just beginning to be grasped.
^ Lenin's Summary of Hegel's Dialectics
^ Lenin's Collected Works Vol. 38 pp 221 - 222, written while reading Book III, Section 3, Chapter 3 of The Science of Logic — “The Absolute Idea”
^ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch02.htm Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
^ Louis Althusser, "Marx and Freud", in Writings on Psychoanalysis, Stock/IMEC, 1993 (French edition)

Contents

The term