Dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a materialist theory based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with widespread applications. As a materialist philosophy, it emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of dialectical contradictions, including within social class, labour economics, and socioeconomic interactions. Within Marxism, a contradiction is a relationship in which two forces oppose each other, leading to mutual development.
The first law of dialectics is about “the unity and conflict of opposites”. An example of this unity and conflict is the negative and positive particles that make up atoms.
The second law of dialectics is ‘quantity into quality’: that small quantitative changes, such as increasing the heat of water by one degree at a time, at a certain point result in a qualitative change when the water turns into steam.
The third law is the ‘negation of the negation’. In the history of life on Earth, photosynthetic organisms evolved, and their byproduct—molecular oxygen—was toxic to life. At this point oxygen negated life. But when life evolved bacteria that utilized oxygen for its own metabolism, oxygen stopped being a toxin for a whole branch of organisms. This was the 'negation of the negation', and an example of something turning into its opposite.
Karl Marx stated in the postface to Das Kapital, "I openly avowed myself as the pupil of that mighty thinker Hegel," acknowledging his use of Hegel's dialectical method but stating that he stood it "right side up again" by grounding it in material reality rather than Hegel's abstract ideas, so creating dialectical materialism and applying it to economics.
Dialectical materialism recognises the evolution of the natural world, and thus the emergence of new qualities of being human and of human existence. Engels used the metaphysical insight that the higher level of human existence emerges from and is rooted in the lower level of human existence. He believed that the higher level of being is a new order with irreducible laws, and that evolution is governed by laws of development, which reflect the basic properties of matter in motion.
In the 20th century, the revolutionary Marxist Vladimir Lenin proposed his own interpretation of Marxist dialectics, which took an essential place among the views and doctrines of Leninism and was later propagated by his followers such as Leon Trotsky. Since the 1930s, a Marxist-Leninist reading of dialectical materialism introduced by such leaders of nominally communist states as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong set forth the official formulations on dialectical materialism and historical materialism, which were taught in state systems of education. In the West, different approaches towards Marxist dialectics were proposed by such authors of Western Marxism as György Lukács and Slavoj Žižek.
The term
The term dialectical materialism was coined in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen, a socialist who corresponded with Marx, during and after the failed 1848 German Revolution. Casual mention of the term "dialectical materialism" is also found in the biography Frederick Engels, by philosopher Karl Kautsky, written in 1899. Marx himself had talked about the "materialist conception of history", which was later referred to as "historical materialism" by Engels. Engels "substantially developed materialist dialectics" in his incomplete 1883 work Dialectics of Nature. Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, first used the term "dialectical materialism" in 1891 in his writings on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Marx.Historical background
Marx and Engels each began their adulthood as Young Hegelians, one of several groups of intellectuals inspired by the philosopher Hegel. Marx's doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, was concerned with the atomism of Epicurus and Democritus, which is considered the foundation of materialist philosophy. Marx was also familiar with Lucretius's theory of clinamen.Marx and Engels both concluded that Hegelian philosophy, at least as interpreted by their former colleagues, was too abstract and was being misapplied in attempts to explain the social injustice in recently industrializing countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, which was a growing concern in the early 1840s, as exemplified by Dickensian inequity.
In contrast to the conventional Hegelian dialectic of the day, which emphasized the idealist observation that human experience is dependent on the mind's perceptions, Marx developed Marxist dialectics, which emphasized the materialist view that the world of the concrete shapes socioeconomic interactions and that those in turn determine sociopolitical reality.
Whereas some Hegelians blamed religious alienation for societal ills, Marx and Engels concluded that alienation from economic and political autonomy, coupled with exploitation and poverty, was the real culprit.
In keeping with dialectical ideas, Marx and Engels thus created an alternative theory, not only of why the world is the way it is but also of which actions people should take to make it the way it ought to be. In Theses on Feuerbach, Marx wrote a famous quote, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Dialectical materialism is thus closely related to Marx's and Engels's historical materialism. Marx rejected Fichte's language of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis".
Dialectical materialism is an aspect of the broader subject of materialism, which asserts the primacy of the material world: in short, matter precedes thought. Materialism is a realist philosophy of science, which 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 consciousness and independently of people's perception of it; that thought is a reflection of the material world in the brain, and that the world is in principle knowable.
Marx criticized classical materialism as another idealist philosophy—idealist because of its transhistorical understanding of material contexts. The Young Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach had rejected Hegel's idealistic philosophy and advocated materialism. Despite being strongly influenced by Feuerbach, Marx rejected Feuerbach's version of materialism as inconsistent. The writings of Engels, especially Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, were the source of the main doctrines of dialectical materialism.
Classical Marxism
Marx's dialectics
The concept of dialectical materialism emerges from statements by Marx in the second edition postface to his magnum opus, Das Kapital. There Marx says he intends to use Hegelian dialectics but in revised form. He defends Hegel against those who view him as a "dead dog" and then says, "I openly avowed myself as the pupil of that mighty thinker Hegel". Marx credits Hegel with "being the first to present form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner". But he then criticizes Hegel for turning dialectics upside down: "With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.".Marx's criticism of Hegel asserts that Hegel's dialectics go astray by dealing with ideas, with the human mind. Hegel's dialectic, Marx says, inappropriately concerns "the process of the human brain"; it focuses on ideas. Hegel's thought is in fact sometimes called dialectical idealism, and Hegel himself is counted among a number of other philosophers known as the German idealists. Marx, on the contrary, believed that dialectics should deal not with the mental world of ideas but with "the material world", the world of production and other economic activity. For Marx, a contradiction can be solved by a desperate struggle to change the social world. This was a very important transformation because it allowed him to move dialectics out of the contextual subject of philosophy and into the study of social relations based on the material world.
For Marx, human history cannot be fitted into any neat a priori schema. He explicitly rejects the idea of Hegel's followers that history can be understood as "a person apart, a metaphysical subject of which real human individuals are but the bearers". To interpret history as though previous social formations have somehow been aiming themselves toward the present state of affairs is "to misunderstand the historical movement by which the successive generations transformed the results acquired by the generations that preceded them". Marx's rejection of this sort of teleology was one reason for his enthusiastic reception of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.
For Marx, dialectics is not a formula for generating predetermined outcomes but is a method for the empirical study of social processes in terms of interrelations, development, and transformation. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Marx's Capital, Ernest Mandel writes, "When the dialectical method is applied to the study of economic problems, economic phenomena are not viewed separately from each other, by bits and pieces, but in their inner connection as an integrated totality, structured around, and by, a basic predominant mode of production."
Marx's own writings are almost exclusively concerned with understanding human history in terms of systemic processes, based on modes of production. This is called historical materialism. More narrowly, within the framework of this general theory of history, most of Marx's writing is devoted to an analysis of the specific structure and development of the capitalist economy.
For his part, Engels applies a "dialectical" approach to the natural world in general, arguing that contemporary science is increasingly recognizing the necessity of viewing natural processes in terms of interconnectedness, development, and transformation. Some scholars have doubted that Engels' "dialectics of nature" is a legitimate extension of Marx's approach to social processes. Other scholars have argued that despite Marx's insistence that humans are natural beings in an evolving, mutual relationship with the rest of nature, Marx's own writings pay inadequate attention to the ways in which human agency is constrained by such factors as biology, geography, and ecology.