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Video Dialectics science and nature

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The central thesis is that dialectical materialism — far from being an outdated dogma imposed on science from outside — is the implicit philosophical framework of the most revolutionary advances in scientific thought. Ben Curry argues that the great scientific breakthroughs, from Darwinian evolution to quantum mechanics, have repeatedly undermined static, mechanistic, and idealist worldviews, and have done so in ways that correspond to the core categories of dialectics: contradiction, transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation. The claim is not that scientists consciously apply dialectics, but that the logic of scientific discovery itself, when it breaks through existing paradigms, moves in a dialectical direction. The article therefore presents dialectical materialism not as a rival to science but as the most adequate philosophical generalisation of science's own best practice.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws directly on Engels's unfinished Dialectics of Nature and on the broader tradition of Marxist philosophy that insists on the universality of dialectical laws — their applicability to nature, not only to human society and history. This places the article within the classical Marxist tradition, as distinct from Western Marxism's tendency to restrict dialectics to the social realm (Lukács, the Frankfurt School). It also draws on Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and his philosophical notebooks, particularly his engagement with Hegel and his insistence that dialectics is the logic of motion in both thought and the material world.

The article situates itself against two opposing positions: the positivist view that philosophy is irrelevant to science, and the idealist view that science is merely a social construct. It argues that both positions fail to account for the actual history of scientific discovery, which repeatedly demonstrates the objective existence of contradiction, development, and qualitative transformation in nature itself.

Conjunctural Relevance

Written in 2019, the article addresses a conjuncture in which the prestige of science is simultaneously high and contested. On one hand, climate science, epidemiology, and evolutionary biology face sustained attacks from right-wing populism, religious fundamentalism, and corporate-funded denialism. On the other hand, a vulgar scientism — often reductionist, mechanistic, and dismissive of philosophy — remains dominant in many academic and policy circles. The article intervenes by arguing that Marxism offers a philosophical framework capable of defending science against both irrationalism and sterile positivism.

The article also speaks to a moment when the left, particularly in the Anglophone world, has become increasingly sceptical of science, sometimes conflating it with technocratic control or Western epistemic imperialism. Curry's argument is that this scepticism is a political error: dialectical materialism provides the tools to critique the social uses of science without abandoning the materialist core of scientific method. The conjuncture thus demands a defence of science that is simultaneously a critique of its capitalist distortion.

Where the Argument Continues

The article is a compressed presentation of themes developed at greater length elsewhere in the Marxist.com corpus. Readers should consult:

  • Alan Woods, Reason in Revolt: Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science (co-authored with Ted Grant) — the definitive text in this tradition, covering the same ground in far greater detail, including extensive treatments of relativity, quantum mechanics, and evolutionary biology.
  • Alan Woods, "Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science" — a series of articles on Marxist.com that expand on the relationship between Marxism and specific scientific fields.
  • Against the Stream episodes on science and philosophy — several episodes of the RCI's podcast series have addressed the philosophy of science, the history of materialism, and the political implications of scientific discovery.
  • Engels, Dialectics of Nature — the foundational text, which the article explicitly draws on and recommends.

The article leaves underdeveloped the specific relationship between dialectics and contemporary physics (quantum mechanics, relativity, cosmology) and the question of how dialectics applies to emergent fields like complexity theory and systems biology. These are addressed in the broader corpus.

Connections

  • Engels, Dialectics of Nature — the canonical source for the application of dialectics to natural science.
  • Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism — for the defence of materialist epistemology against idealist and positivist currents.
  • Alan Woods, Reason in Revolt — the most comprehensive contemporary treatment of the same themes.
  • Stephen Jay Gould — the evolutionary biologist whose work on punctuated equilibrium and contingency is often cited by Marxists as implicitly dialectical.
  • Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, The Dialectical Biologist — a more academic treatment of dialectics in biology, compatible with the article's approach.
  • J.B.S. Haldane, The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences — an earlier attempt by a leading scientist to synthesise Marxism and scientific practice.

Key Quotes

  1. "The latest developments and discoveries in modern science are a tremendous vindication of the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism."

  2. "Dialectical materialism is not a dogma that we impose on science from the outside. It is the philosophical expression of the actual movement of the natural world, as revealed by science itself."

  3. "The great scientific revolutions — from Copernicus to Darwin to Einstein — have each in their own way shattered the static, mechanical worldview that dominated previous thought. They have revealed a universe in constant motion, full of contradictions, where things are not what they seem."

  4. "The transformation of quantity into quality is not some abstract philosophical principle. It is observable everywhere in nature, from the boiling of water to the evolution of species."

  5. "What the idealists and the positivists have in common is a refusal to accept that the world is knowable, that there are objective laws of motion that exist independently of our consciousness. Marxism insists on the opposite: the world is knowable, and science is the most powerful tool we have for knowing it."

  6. "The crisis of modern science is not a crisis of science itself, but of the social conditions under which science is practised. Capitalism distorts and limits the development of science, but the dialectical method — the method of Marxism — points the way to a future in which science can be used for the benefit of humanity as a whole."