Dialectical Materialism a Philosophical Framework, a Theoretical ‘Weapon’ and a Framing Research Tool

CHAPTER 11 Dialectical Materialism A Philosophical Framework, a Theoretical ‘Weapon’ and a Framing Research Tool

Polina-Theopoula Chrysochou

[The materialist dialectic method is] a scandal and abomination to bour- geoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its com- prehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary. marx, Afterword to Second German Edition of Capital, Vol. I, 1867/1965, p. 29 ∵

Major Propositions and Aspects of Dialectical Materialism

Although the validity of the term ‘dialectical materialism’ has been contested on grounds that Marx himself did not use it and it was used by Stalin in a very dogmatic and mechanical fashion, Marx’s philosophy was materialist and it was dialectical. In fact, Marx may not have been the first materialist, but he definitely was the first dialectical materialist (Molyneux, 2012). To put it differently, it was when Marx and Engels linked materialism and dialectics into a philosophic the- ory that materialism stopped being mechanistic and metaphysical and dialectics ‘dispatched’ from its Hegelian idealist and mystified form (Krapivin, 1985, p. 90). For Marx the driving forces of history were material forces and interests, not ideas, a thinking that Trotsky explicitly emphasizes when he writes In Defence of Marxism—A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party

Thanks to the powerful impulse given to thought by the French Revolu- tion, Hegel anticipated the general movement of science. But because

it was only an anticipation, although by a genius, it received from Hegel an idealistic character. Hegel operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the movement of material bodies. (Trotsky, 1942, p. 51, original emphasis)

Along these lines, it can be argued that the starting point of dialectical materialism is that human needs are essential; the foundation of history. However, these needs are not natural, but social. Let me turn to an example to illustrate this line of reasoning. For instance, humans must eat to survive, but the grow- ing or hunting of food to meet this biological need is a social process. The latter point is exactly what places dialectics as antithetical to ideologies of absolute individualism and autonomy. For dialectics, humans are not self-contained entities who act according to dictates of free will. On the contrary, “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx, 1852/1995). Nevertheless, it should be stressed that the aforementioned statement does not in any way clash with the active role of human beings in making their own history. Despite the permanent critics against Marx and Engels about ‘ignoring’ the individual and failing to take account of human nature, there is nothing ‘Marxist’ in views that follow, either a mechanistic and vulgar materialism, similar to that prevailing in the 18th century, or a deterministic perception of history. Marx’s critique of that kind of materialism is well-known. In his Third Thesis on Feuerbach, he writes

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that men themselves change circumstances and that the educator himself must be educated. (Marx, 1845/1976, p. 62)

In fact, the dialectical relationship between objective circumstances and human intervention in the making of history, permeates the whole of Marx’s and Engel’s work (Krapivin, 1985). In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels insist that

History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”, it “wages no battles”. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims. (Marx & Engels, 1844/1956, original emphasis)