Dialectical Materialism and Science

Wellred

Core Argument

In a chapter examining the relationship between dialectical materialism and the natural sciences, the author begins by considering the October Revolution’s inheritance of the bourgeois cultural legacy. The new socialist state acts as an “inventorial inheritor,” selectively appropriating the positive sciences—those that study nature to increase human mastery—while discarding the ideological justifications of class domination that accompanied them. The natural sciences are deemed more reliable than the social sciences, since practical experience continually corrects their distortions; the social sciences, by contrast, have served only to apologetically justify existing class society, as demonstrated by their utter failure to foresee events such as the World War and the October Revolution itself.

Science is defined through Mendeleev’s formula: to know so that we may foresee and act. This predictive capacity is exemplified by Leverrier’s discovery of Neptune and Mendeleev’s own Periodic Law, which anticipated new elements. Marxism applies the same objective method to society, rejecting supra-historical essences—phlogiston-like concepts such as “national character” or “critical thought”—and instead analysing history as a laboratory record, deducing ideology from the material class structure and productive forces. Marxism’s historical foresight is illustrated by its early predictions in Russia of capitalism’s progressive role and the proletariat’s independent historical agency.

The materialist method unifies the sciences: chemistry reduces to mechanics and physics; physiology reduces to chemistry; psychology, following Pavlov, reduces to physiology; and sociology reduces to the material development of matter. This does not imply the direct reduction of every phenomenon, but rather that each science possesses its own specific methods and laws while remaining ultimately rooted in a single materialist system. The author notes that Mendeleev, Pavlov, and Darwin all mistakenly transplanted methods from their own fields into sociology. Darwin unconsciously applied the dialectical law of quantity into quality to biology, but his followers naively applied biology to society. Society is a social process with its own laws, subject to objective sociological analysis for foresight and mastery.

Mendeleev’s own philosophy combined technico-scientific optimism with conservative social views. Though he insisted on the immutability of elements and denounced dialectics, his Periodic Law unconsciously applied Hegel’s law of quantity into quality, and later discoveries of radioactive transmutation proved dialectics correct. His social utopia—that major powers would eliminate war and revolution through conferences—was refuted by history; Marxists correctly foresaw the consequences. His fear that state socialism would harm science was unfounded. Marxism, not chemistry, provides the objective method for social science. Mendeleev’s great surmises included his anti-Malthusianism, his view of national character as a product of historical conditions and forms of production, and his vision of eliminating contradictions between city and country. However, he argued this contradiction would be resolved by capitalism itself; the author counters that in England, economic development reached a blind alley before this could occur, with unemployment and Malthusian emigration proposed as solutions. For England, overcoming the urban–rural contradiction requires socialism. Mendeleev also predicted a future epoch of “extreme simplification” in obtaining food, clothing, and shelter—words that, despite his rejection of socialist utopia, outline the technical-scientific perspective of communism. The transition from socialism to communism requires no revolution, only technical progress. The chapter concludes that the new generation of scientists must be educated in the harmony of pure research and industrial tasks, recognising that science is socially utilitarian even if individual scientists are driven by a passion for knowledge.