Dialectical Materialism

What does this philosophy claim?

As the name says, it has two parts. The 'materialism' holds that the world consists of matter rather than of anyone's ideas or spirit, and that consciousness is the product and reflection of matter in its most highly organized form, the brain. The world is therefore knowable in principle; there are no unknowable things, only things not yet known. The 'dialectics' is a method for viewing that material world. Against the habit of treating things one by one as fixed items (the attitude Marxist literature calls 'metaphysics'), it sees everything in interconnection, in motion of arising and passing away. Small quantitative changes accumulate until they turn into a qualitative leap (as water boils at 100 degrees), and the force driving the motion is not external but the struggle of opposed tendencies inside things themselves.

What was taken from Hegel and Feuerbach?

Hegel pictured the world as a process unfolding through contradiction, but made the subject of that process a spirit, the 'absolute idea'. Marx wrote that this dialectic held a "rational kernel within the mystical shell" and had to be turned right side up. Feuerbach inverted Hegel's idealism and restored materialism, but his materialism was contemplative, viewing man from outside history and practice. Marx and Engels took the method from one and the worldview from the other while cutting away the limits of both; Engels systematized the result in Anti-Duehring and Dialectics of Nature, Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909). The compound term 'dialectical materialism' itself was coined and established by Plekhanov after Marx's death.

How did it become the state philosophy of the USSR?

In the 1920s Soviet philosophy was torn between the 'mechanists', who wanted to reduce dialectics to the language of natural science, and the Deborin school, which led with Hegel scholarship. In 1931 the party centre intervened and condemned both (mechanism as a right deviation, the Deborinites as 'Menshevizing idealism'), turning philosophical debate into a question of the party line. With the publication of the Short Course of the History of the CPSU(B) in 1938, whose chapter four, section two was Stalin's essay, 'diamat' became the standard text of party education and university instruction, an institutionalized subject and state worldview. Every Soviet university student took the course regardless of specialty.

What marks Stalin's codification?

Stalin's essay arranged the dialectical method into four principal features (universal interconnection, motion and development, the passing of quantitative into qualitative change, internal contradiction) and philosophical materialism into three (the materiality of the world, the primacy of matter over consciousness, the knowability of the world), in numbered lists. The gain in clarity was a loss of open questions. The most discussed omission is the 'negation of the negation', which Engels had counted among the laws of dialectics; why the law that the new grows inside the old and is negated in turn disappeared from the list has drawn many interpretations. The same document is criticized as having frozen philosophy into a catechism and credited with giving tens of millions of people with no philosophical schooling a systematic introduction to a worldview.

What happened afterwards?

After Stalin's death Soviet philosophy began to move again within the frame. There were currents that pushed dialectical materialism creatively, such as Evald Ilyenkov's study of the logic of Capital and the rehabilitation of Vygotsky's psychology, and there was a history of misuse, as in the Lysenko affair, where philosophical language was mobilized to settle scientific disputes administratively. Marxists in Western Europe mostly kept their distance from the Soviet 'diamat' system and read Marx's method differently; that branch became the separate tradition known as 'Western Marxism'.