What Is Dialectical Materialism?¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: What Is Dialectical Materialism?
This chapter establishes dialectical materialism as the indispensable philosophical foundation of Marxism, arguing that every person unconsciously holds a philosophy, and that in class society the ruling class’s ideas dominate. The worker, unless armed with a conscious socialist philosophy, remains captive to capitalist ideology. Philosophy is divided into two irreconcilable camps: idealism, which treats ideas or spirit as primary and the material world as mere reflection—religion belongs here—and materialism, which holds the material world as real and primary, with thought a product of the brain. Marx insisted that the ideal is the material world reflected in thought, and that social existence determines consciousness; even abstract thought like mathematics derives from material reality.
Modern materialism arose in seventeenth-century England with Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, driven by the bourgeoisie’s need for science against feudalism, but this was mechanical materialism. Hegel later revived dialectical reasoning, subjecting formal logic to detailed criticism and presenting the world as a constant process of motion, change, and development. He elaborated three key dialectical laws: the transformation of quantity into quality, where quantitative change at nodal points produces a qualitative leap; the interpenetration of opposites, where polar opposites are inseparable; and the negation of the negation, where development proceeds through contradictions that negate previous forms while preserving them on a higher level. Yet Hegel was an idealist, placing dialectics on its head. Marx and Engels fused Hegelian dialectics with materialism, turning it right side up: ideological shadows reflect material bodies.
Dialectics is the science of the general laws of motion in nature, society, and thought. It sees the world as a complex of processes, not ready-made things, revealing the transitory character of everything. This contrasts with the metaphysical approach, which treats things as isolated, fixed, and without contradiction. Trotsky compared dialectics to a motion picture and metaphysics to a still photograph; formal logic’s axiom ‘A equals A’ holds only within limits, as things constantly change. Dialectical logic establishes a ‘tolerance’ for concepts based on continuous change, identifying the critical limit where ‘A’ ceases to be ‘A’. In production, tolerance norms define when objects are considered equal; exceeding tolerance turns quantity into quality.
Dialectics must begin with the simplest proposition—‘John is a man’—which already contains the dialectical relation of the individual and the universal. Each proposition contains the germs of necessity, objective connection, contingency, essence, and appearance. Dialectics is therefore a property of all human knowledge. Knowledge proceeds in circles or a spiral. Philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated development of one facet of knowledge into an absolute, divorced from matter—a sterile flower on the living tree of human knowledge. The epistemological roots of idealism are rectilinearity, one-sidedness, and subjectivism. Marxism is determinist but not fatalist: contradictions in society can only be resolved through conscious human struggle. Dialectics is the doctrine of the unity of opposites.