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Dialectical materialism

Overview

Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of nature and philosophy of science, developed in the late 19th century based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. By synthesising Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectic with philosophical materialism, dialectical materialism proposes that the world is material, that all phenomena are the result of matter in motion, and that the world's evolution is the product of a dialectical process driven by internal contradiction. It posits a set of general laws—most notably the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation—that are claimed to govern nature, society, and thought. The philosophy became the official state philosophy of the Soviet Union and other Marxist–Leninist states.

The intellectual origins of dialectical materialism can be traced to 19th-century German idealism, particularly Hegel's theory of the dialectic as a logical process of development. Marx and Engels inverted Hegel's idealist system, proposing that the dialectic was not a process of the "Concept" or "Idea" but of the real, material world. While Marx never used the term "dialectical materialism", he applied some of its principles in his critique of political economy and his theory of history, historical materialism. After Marx's death, Engels extended the dialectical method to the natural sciences in works such as Anti-Dühring (1878) and Dialectics of Nature, formulating what he saw as its general laws. The Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov later formalized the system and coined the term "dialectical materialism" in the 1890s.

In the 20th century, dialectical materialism was further developed by Vladimir Lenin, who adapted it for his revolutionary political project. In Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909), Lenin redefined matter in purely epistemological terms as "objective reality" and introduced the principle of "partisanship", which asserted that all philosophy is inherently political and tied to class struggle. The doctrine was codified by Joseph Stalin in his 1938 essay Dialectical and Historical Materialism, which became the mandatory ideological framework for all scientific and philosophical inquiry in the Soviet Union. In this form, often referred to as "diamat", it was taught as the official Soviet worldview and used to justify state policy. After Stalin's death, a period of "de-Stalinization" led to critiques of its dogmatism and a "thaw" in Soviet philosophy.

The doctrine of dialectical materialism has been subject to extensive criticism. A central debate concerns the work of Engels, whom critics in the Western Marxist tradition like Georg Lukács accused of distorting Marx's thought with a positivist and metaphysical "dialectics of nature". Other commentators have argued that the doctrine evolved from a philosophical project into a rigid, quasi-religious "political cosmology" under Soviet rule, serving primarily as an instrument of ideological control.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Dialectic, it may be added, is no novelty in philosophy. Among the ancients Plato is termed the inventor of Dialectic; and his right to the name rests on the fact, that the Platonic philosophy first gave the free scientific, and thus at the same time the objective, form to Dialectic. Socrates, as we should expect from the general character of his philosophising, has the dialectical element in a predominantly…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
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As a matter of fact, we prefer Hegel's "Encyclopedia," with all its fever phantoms, to the "final truths of the last instance" of Herr Duehring. In the first place, according to Herr Duehring we have the general scheme of the universe which by Hegel is called "logic." Then according to both of them we have the application of this scheme to nature by means of the logical categories, the philosophy of nature, and…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
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The materialistic conception of history, as it is called, is due to Marx, and underlies the whole Communist philosophy. I do not mean, of course, that a man could not be a Communist without accepting it, but that in fact it is accepted by the Communist Party, and that it profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics. The name does not convey at all accurately what is meant by the theory. It means that…
Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
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Dialectical materialism

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