Dialectical Materialism

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

If historical materialism is generally regarded as the science of Marxism, then dialectical materialism is widely considered to be the its philosophical foundation—although this view has been challenged by many who argue that Karl Marx's scientific socialism involves a kind of transcendence of philosophy or that Marxism is a variety of humanism. The term is sufficiently elastic, however, to accommodate a wide variety of perspectives within an ecumenically defined Marxist tradition. Thus, proponents of dialectical materialism (or the materialist dialectic) include humanists who emphasize the role of conscious activity and the subjective factor in shaping human outcomes as well as anti-humanist structuralists who argue that human activities and intentions are mere effects of the autonomous interplay of forces and relations of production within determinate modes of production. (Despite this elasticity of interpretation, however, many Marxists have eschewed dialectical materialism in large part because of its baleful association with the mechanicism of the Second International and, especially, the rigid dogmas of Stalinism.) Dialectical materialism has inspired a tremendous variety of case studies within both the natural and social sciences, and the fact that it has been understood and applied in Marxist thought in so many different ways invites a case study approach to the topic of dialectical materialism itself, as well as the implications of its basic principles for case study methodology.

In his Theses on Feuerbach of 1845, Marx suggested that his “new materialism” incorporates the traditional idealist concern with “the active side” in human affairs while also insisting on the essentially sensuous (material) character of human activity. In his 1873 postface to the second edition of Capital, he wrote the following:

My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of “the Idea,” is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me, the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought. (Marx, 1977, p. 102)

What is common to Hegelian and Marxist dialectics is the conviction that reality must be grasped as a unified totality that is subject to incessant change and that is, in principle, knowable by human consciousness. In the most general sense, then, dialectic is the logic of an ever-changing reality. But the question is posed: Does this logic belong to reality itself, or is it simply a set of principles employed by the human mind to grasp what is happening beyond it? If mind is internally related to everything else that exists, then this question is basically meaningless, for if mind and material reality are not metaphysically separated and absolutely distinct from one another but instead form a [Page 294]contradictory unity of opposites, whether grounded in physical matter or in an incorporeal consciousness, then mind and reality are one in a fundamental ontological sense. A consistently dialectical worldview is therefore also a monistic one—an ontology that refuses the dualistic division of reality into absolutely separate worlds (e.g., the material and the ideal or the natural and the supernatural). Yet this unified reality is subject to considerable differentiation, resulting in the interaction of a great many distinguishable elements. It is the mutual relations and motion of these elements that dialectical logic seeks to grasp.

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