- cross-posted to:
- marxism
- cross-posted to:
- marxism
The following is copied from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia on Dialectical Materialism.
The philosophy of Marxism-Leninism; a scientific world view; a universal method of cognition of the world; the science of the most general laws of the movement and development of nature, society, and consciousness. Dialectical materialism is based on the achievements of modern science and advanced social practice; it is constantly developed and enriched as they progress. It constitutes the general theoretical foundation of Marxist-Leninist teaching. Marxist philosophy is materialistic, since it proceeds from the recognition of matter as the sole basis of the world; it views consciousness as the attribute of a highly organized, social form of matter’s motion, a function of the brain, the reflection of the objective world. It is called dialectical because it recognizes the universal interrelationship between objects and phenomena and stresses the importance of motion and development in the world as the result of the internal contradictions operating in the world itself. Dialectical materialism is the highest form of modern materialism and the sum total of the entire preceding history of the development of philosophical thought.
Origin and Development
Marxism as a whole, and dialectical materialism, a component of it, emerged in the 1840’s, when the proletariat’s struggle for its social liberation imperiously demanded some knowledge of the laws of development of society. This was impossible without materialist dialectics and the materialist explanation of history. The founders of dialectical materialism, K. Marx and F. Engels, subjected social reality to a profound, thoroughgoing analysis, critically reworking and assimilating everything positive that had been achieved previously in the areas of philosophy and history and creating a qualitatively new world view that became the philosophical basis for the theory of scientific communism and for the practical activity of the revolutionary workers’ movement. Marx and Engels were developing dialectical materialism in a sharp ideological struggle against various forms of the bourgeois world view.
The immediate ideological sources of Marxism were the basic philosophical, economic, and political doctrines of the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. Marx and Engels creatively reworked Hegel’s idealist dialectics and earlier philosophical materialism, particularly the doctrine of Feuerbach. They revealed the revolutionary aspects of Hegel’s dialectics—the idea of development and its source and motive power, contradiction. Also important in the development of Marxism were the ideas of the exponents of classical bourgeois political economy (A. Smith and D. Ricardo), the works of the Utopian socialists (C. H. Saint-Simon, F. M. C. Fourier, and R. Owen), and the works of French historians of the Restoration (J. N. A. Thierry, F. P. G. Guizot, and F.-A.-M. Mignet). The achievements of natural science of the late 18th century and the 19th century played an important role in the development of dialectical materialism. (Dialectic was spontaneously forcing its way into the field of natural science.)
The specific sciences
The historical mission of dialectical materialism lies in the creative development of the scientific world view and the general methodological principles of research in the sphere of the natural and social sciences, in a correct theoretical orientation of the practical struggle of progressive social forces. It is based on the firm foundation of all of science and social practice. Dialectical materialism, as Engels noted, is “a world outlook which has to establish its validity and be applied not in science of sciences standing apart, but in the positive sciences” (ibid., p. 142). Every science studies a qualitatively definite system of regularities by which the world operates. However, no specialized science studies the regularities that are general to being and thought. These universal regularities are the subject of philosophical cognition. Dialectical materialism overcame the artificial break between the doctrine of being (ontology), the theory of knowledge (gnoseology), and logic. Dialectical materialism is distinguished from the specialized sciences by the qualitative uniqueness of its subject and its universal, all-embracing nature. There are different levels of generalization within any specialized science. In dialectical materialism, the generalizations of the specialized sciences are themselves generalized. Thus, philosophical generalization rises to the highest “floors” of the integrating work of human reason. Dialectical materialism integrates the results of investigation in the various spheres of science into a unified whole, thus creating a synthesis of the knowledge of the universal laws of being and thought. The subject of scientific cognition determines the nature of the methods applied in approaching it. Dialectical materialism does not use the special methods of the individual sciences. The basic tool of philosophical cognition is theoretical thought, based on the aggregate experience of humanity and on the achievements of all the sciences and of culture as a whole.
Possessing a definite specificity, dialectical materialism is at the same time a general science, playing the role of a world view and a methodology for specific areas of knowledge. In various areas of scientific knowledge the internal need, constantly and as time goes on, increasingly arises for scrutinizing the logical apparatus, cognitive activity, the character of theory and the means of building it, the analysis of the empirical and theoretical levels of cognition, the assumptions of the science, and the methods of comprehending truth. All this is the direct duty of philosophical investigation. The solution of these problems presupposes the unification of the efforts of exponents of the specialized sciences and of philosophy. The methodological significance of the principles, laws, and categories of dialectical materialism must not be understood in an oversimplified way, in the sense that it would be impossible to resolve even a single problem without them. With regard to the place and role of dialectical materialism in the system of scientific cognition, the question is not one of individual experiments or calculations, but rather of the development of science as a whole: the advancement and substantiation of hypotheses; the struggle of opinions; the creation of theories; the resolution of internal contradictions within a given theory; the exposure of the essence of the basic concepts of a science; the understanding of new facts and evaluating the conclusions drawn from them; and the methods of scientific investigation. In the contemporary world, the revolution in science has become a scientific-technical revolution. Under these conditions, Engels’ words recalled by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism are particularly timely: that “with each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science, materialism has to change its form” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 18, p. 265). The transformations in contemporary science are so profound that they affect even its theoretical-cognitive foundations. The needs of developing science elicited substantial changes in the treatment of most of the categories of dialectical materialism—matter, space and time, consciousness, causality, the part and the whole, and so forth. The increasing complexity of the subject of scientific cognition sharply complicated the methods, and the procedure itself, of cognitive activity. The developments of modern science had not merely put forward a multitude of new facts and methods of cognition, posing more complex tasks for human cognitive activity, but also advanced a multitude of new concepts, and in addition often demanded a radical rethinking of previous positions and ideas. The progress of science does not merely pose new questions for dialectical materialism but also focuses the attention of philosophical thought on new aspects of old problems. One of the symptomatic phenomena of contemporary scientific cognition is the tendency to turn a number of specialized concepts into general scientific and philosophical categories. These include probability, structure, system, information, algorithm, constructive object, feedback, control, model, simulation, and isomorphism. Actual contacts are being established between Marxist philosophers and exponents of various other spheres of knowledge. These contacts contribute to advances, in both the formulation of questions and the solution of a number of important methodological problems of science. Examples include the explanation of the peculiarities of statistical regularities in the microscopic world and substantiation of their objectivity; the demonstration of the unsoundness of indeterminism in modern physics; the demonstration of the applicability of physics, chemistry, and cybernetics in biological research; the clarification of the man-machine system; the working out of the problem of the correlation between the physiological and the psychic; and the clarification of the cooperation of separate sciences in the study of the brain. One of the tendencies of modern science is the increasing abstraction of knowledge, the “flight” from the perceptible and demonstrable. Dialectical materialism shows that all sciences develop along the path of gradual withdrawal from descriptive methods of investigation to ever greater use of precise methods, including mathematical methods, not only in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences. In the cognitive process, artificial formalized languages and mathematical symbolism play an increasingly greater role. Theoretical generalization becomes increasingly indirect and multilevel, revealing ever more profound objective ties. The principles, laws, and categories of dialectical materialism play an active part in the synthesis of new scientific notions, in the closest connection, of course, with the empirical and theoretical notions of the corresponding science. In recent years, the heuristic role of dialectical materialism in the synthesis of the contemporary scientific picture of the world has been thoroughly manifested.
Party spirit
Dialectical materialism has a class and a party character. The partiinost’ (party spirit) of any philosophy is above all its affiliation with one of the two main philosophical camps—materialism and idealism. In the final analysis, the struggle between them reflects the contradictions between the progressive and conservative tendencies in social development. The partiinost’ of dialectical materialism is manifested in the fact that it consistently adheres to the principle of materialism, which is in complete accordance with the interests of science and revolutionary social practice.
Dialectical materialism arose as the theoretical basis of the world view of the revolutionary class, the proletariat, and it constitutes the general ideological and methodological basis of the program, strategy, tactics, and politics of communist and workers’ parties. The political line of Marxism is at all times and in all issues “inseparably bound up with its philosophical principles” (Lenin, ibid., vol. 17, p. 418). The ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the revisionists exalt the non-partiinost’, setting forth the idea of a “third line” in philosophy. The idea of non-partiinost’ in a world view is a mistaken one. Lenin emphasized that there can be no non-party “social science in a society based on class struggle” (ibid., vol. 23, p. 40). The revisionists assert that partiinost’ is incompatible with the scientific approach. Actually, partiinost’ is incompatible with the reactionary world view, but it is fully compatible with the scientific approach where the progressive world view is concerned. Communist partiinost’ means also a genuinely scientific approach to the phenomena of reality, since the working class and the Communist Party, whose goal is the revolutionary transformation of the world, are vitally interested in the correct cognition of the world. The principle of partiinost’ demands consistent, uncompromising struggle against bourgeois theories and views, as well as against the ideas of right and “left” revisionism. The partiinost’ of dialectical materialism is based on the fact that it is precisely this world view that consciously and purposefully serves the interests of the great cause of the construction of socialism and communism.
Dialectical materialism develops in the struggle against various currents in contemporary bourgeois philosophy. Bourgeois ideologists, seeing in dialectical materialism a fundamental obstacle to the spread of their views, present criticisms of dialectical materialism with increasing frequency, distorting its essence in the process. Certain bourgeois ideologists strive to deprive materialist dialectics of its revolutionary content and in this form adapt it to their own needs. The majority of present-day bourgeois critics of dialectical materialism attempt to interpret it as a variant of religious faith, to deny its scientific nature, and to find features common to dialectical materialism and Catholic philosophy, in neo-Thomism. These and other “arguments” are used also by various representatives of modern revisionism in their attempts to revise and “correct” specific propositions of dialectical materialism.
Revisionists of the right and the “left” in fact deny the objective nature of social laws and the necessity for a revolutionary party to act in accordance with these laws. This relates also to the laws of dialectics. Reformists and right-wing revisionist ideologists recognize not the struggle but rather the conciliation of opposites; they deny qualitative changes, defending only “flat” evolutionism, and do not recognize the law of negation of the negation. In turn, left-wing revisionist theoreticians consider only antagonistic contradictions and their chaotic “struggle” to be real; they deny quantitative changes, fighting for continuous “leaps” and endorsing the complete negation of the old without preserving what was positive in it. For the reformists and right-wing revisionists, this serves as a methodological basis to justify opportunism, while for the “left” revisionists, their methodology is the basis for extreme voluntarism and subjectivism in politics.
In its struggle against bourgeois philosophy, as against contemporary revisionism and dogmatism, Marxism consistently adheres to the principle of the partiinost’ of philosophy, viewing the philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism as a scientific weapon in the hands of the working class and toiling masses who are struggling for their liberation from capitalism and for the victory of communism.
REFERENCES
Marx, K., and P. Engels. “Nemetskaia ideologiia.” Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 3.
Marx, K. Tezisy o Feierbakhe. Ibid.
Engels, F. Anti-Dühring. Ibid., vol. 20.
Engels, F. Dialektika prirody. Ibid.
Lenin, V. I. Materializm i empiriokrititsizm. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 18.
Lenin, V. I. Tri istochnika i tri sostavnykh chasti marksizma. Ibid., vol. 23.
Lenin, V. I. Filosofskie tetradi. Ibid., vol. 29.
Morochnik, S. B. Dialekticheskii materializm. Dushanbe, 1963.
Rutkevich, M. N. Dialekticheskii materializm.
Moscow, 1961. Marksistsko-leninskaia filosofiia: Dialekticheskii materializm.
Moscow, 1970. Osnovy marksistsko-leninskoifilosofii.
Moscow, 1971.A. G. SPIRKIN