Dialectical materialism

Dialectical materialism

Dialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel’s dialectics and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach’s materialism. According to certain followers of Karl Marx, it is the philosophical basis of Marxism, although this remains a controversial assertion due to the disputed status of science and naturalism in Marx’s thought. The basic idea of dialectical materialism is that every economic order grows to a state of maximum efficiency, while at the same time developing internal contradictions or weaknesses that contribute to its decay.

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. Dietzgen had himself constructed dialectical materialism independently of Marx and Friedrich Engels. Casual mention of the term is also found in Kautsky’s Frederick Engels, written in the same year. Marx himself had talked about the “materialist conception of history”, which was later referred to 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. Joseph Stalin further codified it as Diamat and imposed it as the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism.
The term was not used by Marx in any of his works, and the actual presence of “dialectical materialism” within his thought remains the subject of significant controversy, particularly regarding the relationship between dialectics, ontology and nature. For scholars working on these issues from a variety of perspectives see the works of Bertell Ollman, Chris Arthurs, Roger Albritton, and Roy Bhaskar.

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”. Marx’s materialism developed through his engagement with Feuerbach. Marx sought to base human social organization within the context of the material reproduction of their daily lives, which he calls sensous practice in his early works (Marx 1844, 1845). From this material context men develop certain ideas about their world, thereby leading to the core materialist conception that social being determines social consciousness. The dialectical aspect retains the Hegelian method within this materialist framework, and emphasizes the process of historical change arising from contradiction and class struggle based in a particular social context.

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. The Aufhebung conserves the thesis and the antithesis and transcends them both (Aufheben – this contradiction explains the difficulties of Hegel’s thought). 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.