The term dialectical materialism was coined in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen, a socialist who corresponded with Marx, during and after the failed 1848 German Revolution.
[8][9] Casual mention of the term "dialectical materialism" is also found in the biography Frederick Engels, by philosopher Karl Kautsky,[10] written in 1899.
[11] Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, first used the term "dialectical materialism" in 1891 in his writings on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Marx.
Marx and Engels both concluded that Hegelian philosophy, at least as interpreted by their former colleagues, was too abstract and was being misapplied in attempts to explain the social injustice in recently industrializing countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, which was a growing concern in the early 1840s, as exemplified by Dickensian inequity.
This was a very important transformation because it allowed him to move dialectics out of the contextual subject of philosophy and into the study of social relations based on the material world.
He explicitly rejects the idea of Hegel's followers that history can be understood as "a person apart, a metaphysical subject of which real human individuals are but the bearers".
[25] Marx's rejection of this sort of teleology was one reason for his enthusiastic (though not entirely uncritical) reception of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.
[26] For Marx, dialectics is not a formula for generating predetermined outcomes but is a method for the empirical study of social processes in terms of interrelations, development, and transformation.
"[27] Marx's own writings are almost exclusively concerned with understanding human history in terms of systemic processes, based on modes of production (broadly speaking, the ways in which societies are organized to employ their technological powers to interact with their material surroundings).
More narrowly, within the framework of this general theory of history, most of Marx's writing is devoted to an analysis of the specific structure and development of the capitalist economy.
[34] Engels elucidated these laws as the materialist dialectic in his work Dialectics of Nature: The first law, which originates with the ancient Ionian philosopher Heraclitus,[35] can be clarified through the following examples: For example, in biological evolution the formation of new forms of life occurs precisely through the unity and struggle of opposites in heredity and variability.
In physical processes the nature of light was explained precisely by means of the unity and struggle of opposites appearing, for example, as corpuscular and wave properties; this, moreover, cleared the path for a “drama of ideas” in physical science, whereby the opposition and synthesis of corpuscular and wave theories characterized scientific progress.
A. Jordan notes, "Engels made constant use of the metaphysical insight that the higher level of existence emerges from and has its roots in the lower; that the higher level constitutes a new order of being with its irreducible laws; and that this process of evolutionary advance is governed by laws of development which reflect basic properties of 'matter in motion as a whole'.
The philosophic solution that Lenin (and Engels) proposed was "dialectical materialism", wherein matter is defined as objective reality, theoretically consistent with (new) developments occurring in the sciences.
True, there are certain idealist books—not of a clerical character, but philosophical ones—wherein you can read that time and space are categories of our minds, that they result from the requirements of our thinking, and that nothing actually corresponds to them in reality.
[43]In his book In Defence of Marxism, Leon Trotsky defended the dialectical method of scientific socialism during the factional schisms within the American Trotskyist movement in the period 1939–40.
Specifically, he described scientific socialism as "the conscious expression of the unconscious historical process; namely, the instinctive and elemental drive of the proletariat to reconstruct society on communist beginnings".
It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded, and deepened, only along the lines laid down by its founders.
So did Louis Althusser, who later defined Marxism and psychoanalysis as "conflictual sciences",[45] stating that political factions and revisionism are inherent to Marxist theory and political praxis, because dialectical materialism is the philosophic product of class struggle: For this reason, the task of orthodox Marxism, its victory over Revisionism and utopianism can never mean the defeat, once and for all, of false tendencies.
Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process.
At the 5th Congress of the Communist International (July 1924), Grigory Zinoviev formally denounced Lukács's heterodox definition of Orthodox Marxism as exclusively derived from fidelity to the "Marxist method", and not to Communist party dogmas; and denounced the philosophical developments of the German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch.
It was codified in Stalin's work, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), and popularized in textbooks used for compulsory education within the Soviet Union and throughout the Eastern Bloc.
In his 1947 article New Life, Ho Chi Minh described the dialectical relationship between the old and the new in building society, stating:[46] Not everything old must be abandoned.
He has concluded that, despite the Lysenko period in genetics and constraints on free inquiry imposed by political authorities, dialectical materialism had a positive influence on the work of many Soviet scientists.
Lewontin's perspective offers the following idea: Dialectical materialism is not, and never has been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems.
He wrote that: ...dialectical thinking should be taken more seriously by Western scholars, not discarded because some nations of the second world have constructed a cardboard version as an official political doctrine.
They wrote that "history, as Hegel said, moves upward in a spiral of negations", and that "punctuated equilibria is a model for discontinuous tempos of change (in) the process of speciation and the deployment of species in geological time.
Nevertheless, they found a readiness for critics to "seize upon" key statements[54] and portray punctuated equilibrium, and exercises associated with it, such as public exhibitions, as a "Marxist plot".
[57] Philosopher Allen Wood argued that, in its form as an official Soviet philosophy, dialectical materialism was doomed to be superficial because "creativity or critical thinking" was impossible in an authoritarian environment.
[16][58] Economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises wrote a critique of Marxist materialism which he published as a part of his 1957 work Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution.