Dialectical Materialism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Dialectical materialism is the name given (later, by others) to Karl Marx’s method of analyzing history, which combined Hegelian dialectics with a materialist ontology. In dialectics, historical periods are considered to be driven by tension between opposing forces, sometimes referred to as thesis and antithesis. This tension resolves into a new force (the synthesis), which then defines a new period and arouses its own opposing force. For Georg Hegel, these forces are ideas; for Marx, however, they are material phenomena: opposing social classes, productive forces, and nature.

Marx used this method in The Communist Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire, Critique of the Gotha Program, and other works, but more commonly, it is simply an underlying framework that informs Marx’s analysis of particular situations. Marx never reduces dialectics to a formula and rarely resorts to the technical vocabulary of “thesis.” However, in the hands of Marx’s followers—notably Friedrich Engels, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong—the method developed into a formula, then a dogma, and, ultimately, into a specialized language with which political debates could be conducted and policies could be justified. Engels also claimed that the method applied to the natural sciences as well as to history. This claim has generally been accepted by orthodox Marxists of the Soviet school, though never applied very successfully to actual scientific problems.

The most characteristic use of dialectical materialism was to portray history as a succession of modes of production, each giving rise to the next as its internal contradictions were played out. Primitive communism, in which all shared both work and proceeds, gave rise to ancient society, in which masses of agricultural slaves supported patrician masters. A combination of slave revolts and barbarian invasions produced feudalism; the serfs had more rights than slaves but were exploited in new ways through rents in labor, in kind, and in money. As serfs resisted and fled to towns, the new capitalist era arose, in which free laborers were forced to sell their labor power to capitalists, because they had no other way to survive. Marx believed that the capitalist working class, or proletariat, would in turn overthrow capitalism. This time, however, there would be no one left to exploit, and the result would be a classless society, or socialism. The sense that socialism was the inevitable result of history, as shown by the science of dialectical materialism, made an important contribution to the popularity of socialism in nineteenth-century Europe.

At each stage of this historical progression, the basic relationship was economic—between a class that did the labor and created value and a class that controlled and exploited such individuals. Each mode of production also had its characteristic political organizations and ways of thinking, but these were ultimately determined by the fundamental economic relationships. This attribution of a determining role to economics was what made the dialectics materialist.

By the time Mao published On Contradiction, a pamphlet designed to be used as an introduction to Marxist methods, dialectical materialism had become a formula, according to which the key to successful socialist strategy was to identify the principal contradiction—that is, the two main social forces in conflict—and the principal aspect or dominant force of that contradiction. Dogmatic application of this method had particularly unfortunate results for women and for racial and ethnic minorities both within the socialist bloc and in socialist movements in the capitalist world. The orthodox Marxist position was that gender, race, and ethnicity were secondary contradictions within the working class; in practice, that meant that oppression based on gender and race was ignored in the quest for working-class unity. Similarly, the primacy of the leadership of the Soviet Union within the world socialist movement was justified by the claim that the principal contradiction of the post–World War II (1935–1945) world was between that imperialism and socialism.

As the unity of the Soviet bloc began to unravel following Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956, the Sino-Soviet split, and the Cuban revolution, the orthodoxy of dialectical materialism also began to be challenged, most notably by French communist philosopher Louis Althusser, who argued that economics, politics, and ideology were relatively autonomous from each other. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union by the early 1990s and the restoration of capitalism in most of the formerly socialist countries shortly after greatly reduced the practical relevance of dialectical materialism in world affairs. However, it continues to inspire study, debate, and insight among large portions of the left intellectual world.

Bibliography:

Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital, translated by Ben Brewster. London:Verso, 1979.
Engels, Friedrich. Dialectics of Nature, translated and edited by Clemens Dutt. New York: International, 1940.
“Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” 1848. In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Robert C.Tucker, 683–717. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.
Mao Tse-Tung. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965.
Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. 2nd ed. Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Stalin, Joseph. Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952.