Thumbnail is Marx’s manuscript for The German Ideology. Summary below is a compilation of my notes I wrote when reading Materialism and the Dialectical Method by Maurice Cornforth, along with general knowledge from reading various Marxist authors.

Often times, Marxists use the term “material conditions,” and “dialectics.” What does this mean? Why do Marxists care so much about material conditions? The answer is that Marxists seek materialist explanations for observed processes as opposed to idealist, and do so dialectically, as opposed to metaphysically. In other words, Marxists apply dialectical analysis to find materialist explanations for phenomena. Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the proletariat as a class, and serves as the most vital ideological tool for overthrowing capitalism.

In order to understand dialectical materialism, we need to understand its component parts, materialism and dialectics, and their historical predecessors, idealism and metaphysics.

Idealism

Idealism is, in short, to put ideas prior to matter. Idealism has been used by feudal lords to justify their position above the serfs, forming the ideological basis for feudalism. The 3 major assertions of idealism are as follows:

  1. Idealism asserts that the material world is dependent on the spiritual

  2. Idealism asserts that spirit, or mind, or idea, can and does exist in separation from matter. (The most extreme form of this assertion is subjective idealism, which asserts that matter does not exist at all but is pure illusion.)

  3. Idealism asserts that there exists a realm of the mysterious and unknowable, “above,” or “beyond,” or “behind” what can be ascertained and known by perception, experience, and science.

Early Materialism

Common idealist arguments are appealing to a supernatural “human nature,” or “good vs. evil” explanations for processes. Materialism arose over time, as people grew to understand the world more deeply, and especially as a tool to overthrow the feudal aristocracy that justified its existence via the church. In other words, materialism rose to help the bourgeoisie. The 3 basic teachings of materialism as counterposed to idealism are:

  1. Materialism teaches that the world is by its very nature material, that everything which exists comes into being on the basis of material causes, arises and develops in accordance with the laws of motion of matter.

  2. Materialism teaches that matter is objective reality existing outside and independent of the mind; and that far from the mental existing in separation from the material, everything mental or spiritual is a product of material processes.

  3. Materialism teaches that the world and its laws are fully knowable, and that while much may not be known there is nothing which is by nature unknowable.

Shortcomings of Metaphysical Materialism

The type of materialism that overthrew the feudal lords was still underdeveloped, and metaphysical. The bourgeoisie needed an explanation for why the feudal lords were illegitimate, but still needed to support their own static, permanent rule. This was called mechanistic materialism, for the bourgeois scientists saw the world as a grand machine repeating simple motions forever. Mechanistic materialism, therefore, makes certain dogmatic assumptions:

  1. That the world consists of permanent and stable things or particles, with definite, fixed properties;

  2. That the particles of matter are by nature inert and no change ever happens except by the action of some external cause;

  3. That all motion, all change can be reduced to the mechanical interaction of the separate particles of matter;

  4. That each particle has its own fixed nature independent of everything else, and that the relationships between separate things are merely external relationships.

Moving from Metaphysics to Dialectics

This, of course, has proven false. History did not end with the dissolution of the USSR, despite what modern mechanistic materialists claim. Mechanistic materialism relies on metaphysics, seeing everything as a static abstraction, devoid of its context. It has no explanation for how new qualities emerge, and ultimately fell to idealism to explain the “first mover,” ie “God.” Dialectical materialism holds instead:

  1. The world is not a complex of things but of processes;

  2. That matter is inseperable from motion;

  3. That the motion of matter comprehends an infinite diversity of forms which arise one from another and pass into one another;

  4. That things exist not as separate individual units but in essential relation and interconnection.

Dialectical Materialism

This became remarkable for the proletariat, as it sees nothing as static, and therefore marks the eventual downfall of the bourgeoisie. Putting it all together, we get the following:

  1. Dialectical materialism understands the world, not as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which all things go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.

In other words, when analyzing events and contextualizing them, we must always viee them as a struggle between the rising and the falling, the old and the new, for example the concentration of capital in markets and the rise in socialize labor.

  1. Dialectical materialism considers that matter is always in motion, that motion is the mode of existence of matter, so that there can no more be matter without motion than motion without matter. Motion does not have to be impressed upon matter by some outside force, but above all it is necessary to look for the inner impulses of development, the self-motion, inherent in all processes.

In other words, all movement is a result of contradiction. Your foot presses on the Earth, and the Earth presses back on you.

  1. Dialectical materialism understands the motion of matter as comprehending all changes and processes in the universe, from mere changes of place right to thinking. It recognizes, therefore, the infinite diversity of the forms of motion of matter from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher.

In other words, dialectical materialism recognizes that development exists as a change of quantity into quality. Addition or subtraction gives way to qualitative change. A balloon is filled with air, until at a given point it pops due to pressure buildup. Water goes from liquid to gas at its boiling point, and back into liquid when cooling down to said point.

  1. Dialectical materialism considers that, in the manifold processes taking place in the universe, things come into being, change and pass out of being, not as separate individual units, but in essential relation and interconnection, so that they cannot be understood each separately and by itself but only in their relation and interconnection.

In other words, everything is connected, and must be analyzed in context to truly understand it. A worker isn’t just an individual, but instead part of a social class of many workers. Wages are not something invented brand new every time, but instead are set by societal standards, controlled by the ruling capitalist class.

Conclusion

Karl Marx created dialectical materialism by turning Hegel’s idealist dialectic into a materialist one. Then, he applied it to the progression of society, creating historical materialism. By analyzing social structures and progress as a dialectical process based in materialism, we can learn from history and analyze where it’s going. This is scientific socialism in progress. Human thought is shaped by our social experience, forming class consciousness and ideology. How we produce and distribute determines our ways of thinking.

Socialism and communism also have their own contradictions as well, and just because we progress on to socialism does not mean we cannot fall back to capitalism. The dialectical materialist world outlook understands that nothing is static, and there is always new contradiction and new movement from that.

If you keep these in mind, you can do your own dialectical materialist analysis. Always seek explanations based on the material, not the ideal, and always do so by contextualizing the processes, analyzing their contradictions, the unity and struggle of opposing tendencies. Quantitative changes lead to qualitative development, and progresses as a result of the conflict or struggle of opposite tendencies. There’s much more to dialectical materialism, but this should help serve as a simple overview!

  • pleiades@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    I’m having trouble seeing what the issue is with mechanistic materialism, particularly on the third point:

    That all motion, all change can be reduced to the mechanical interaction of the separate particles of matter;

    How is this not the most scientific/least metaphysical way to view the world? This sentence is the basis of all physics! I also saw a post a while ago saying that dialectical materialists “understand that consciousness is real” while “a mechanical materialist treats humans like passive objects, reduces consciousness to brain chemistry”. In this case, is the second statement really incorrect? To say otherwise would be reintroducing metaphysics, denying that neuroscience/psychology can describe the brain because of some supernatural force.

    • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      The excerpt of Cornforth given by @Cowbee@hexbear.net is good, though maybe a bit advanced or “in the weeds” given you recently said you are new to Marxist theory. Furthermore Cornforth commits to some stances that I think are not necessary to answer this question.

      This can be answered from a careful reading of a brief early Marx writing, Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Marx, having recently completed his PhD, was an expert on the materialism of antiquity: his thesis compared the systems of Democritus, the father of atomism, and of Epicurus, the father of western materialism. The latter directly and explicitly inspired the enlightenment thinkers including Newton.[1] In the Theses, Marx summarizes the weaknesses of “contemplative materialism” in order to motivate his own, new materialist attitude, which will manifest in his life’s work.

      It was Epicurus who laid the groundwork for a nondeterministic or “non-mechanical” materialism. Being an atomist himself, he believed that reality consists of atomic matter, and that physical phenomena are caused by the continual reconfiguration of matter; this differed from the Aristotelian view that matter consisted of distinct essences. But Epicurus’ key contribution in this context is the concept of the swerve. He posited an explanation of free will through the possibility that, although matter generally follows mechanistic laws, it contains a potential to “swerve” caused by an inner change.

      Returning to Marx’s Theses, there are a couple to highlight. Note well, in Thesis IX, that Marx does not use the term mechanical materialism but contemplative materialism as mentioned previously. This difference, combined with the final Thesis XI which advocated for practical philosophy over interpretive philosophy, lays out the problem Marx had with Feuerbach, the representative of what might be called mechanical materialism. For Marx, the point of philosophy is not to prove materialism through contemplation. Indeed Marx takes materialism as an apparent fact, the starting point of his thought, when he advocates in Thesis II for an empirical mode of knowledge acquisition. The point of philosophy is to improve our understanding of the world, to make it intelligible, so that we can change it. Therefore Marx’s materialism is inherently practical. Materialism for Marx is not a question of ontology, and it does not hinge on whether actually atoms swerve on some plane of reality. Marx’s materialism has a metaphysics (as all science does), but it is settled as an a priori given; the substance of Marx’s philosophy itself is not at all metaphysical.

      To illustrate the point: it may be true that Donald Trump is made of atoms and that those atoms approximately follow the known laws of physics. This is not practical information for us to understand his behavior nor modify our own in response. The point of dialectical materialism, as explained in Thesis I, is to grasp human activity as an objective force in nature; in other words, that humans have free will, and that this modifies and produces our objective reality. This is in stark contrast to a materialism which conceives of humans as passive observers or subjects existing within reality but not part of it.

      1. 1. See Marx’s Ecology by John Bellamy Foster, intro and chapter 1, for an excellent overview of Marx, Epicurus, and the history of western materialism. ↩︎

    • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      In a word, mechanistic materialism is incomplete. When we declare mechanistic materialism to be metaphysical, we are pointing out that it sees everything as independent, rather than dependent, with respect to everything else. They saw the world as fixed and static, rather than as constantly in motion, changing, coming into being and leaving being. Thus, nothing new could ever come into being if we take mechanistic materialism to its logical conclusion. As an example, evolution as a process goes directly against the mechanical interpretation of the world.

      Here’s Cornforth on the limitations of mechanistic materialism, in comparison to dialectical materialism:

      (1) It could not sustain the materialist standpoint consistently and all the way. For if the world is like a machine, who made it, who started it up? There was necessary, in any system of mechanistic materialism, a “Supreme Being,” outside the material world—even if he no longer continuously interfered in the world and kept things moving, but did no more than start things up and then watch what happened. Such a “Supreme Being” was postulated by nearly all the mechanistic materialists; for example, by Voltaire and Tom Paine. But this opens the door to idealism.

      (2) Mechanistic materialism sees change everywhere. Yet because it always tries to reduce all phenomena to the same system of mechanical interactions, it sees this change as nothing but the eternal repetition of the same kinds of mechanical processes, an eternal cycle of the same changes.

      This limitation is inseparable from the view of the world as a machine. For just as a machine has to be started up, so it can never do anything except what it was made to do. It cannot change itself or produce anything radically new. Mechanistic theory, therefore, always breaks down when it is a question of accounting for the emergence of new quality. It sees change everywhere—but nothing new, no development.

      The various processes of nature—chemical processes and the processes of living matter, for example—cannot in fact be all reduced to one and the same kind of mechanical interaction of material particles.

      Chemical interactions differ from mechanical interactions inasmuch as the changes which take place as a result of chemical Interaction involve a change of quality. For example, if we consider the mechanical interaction of two particles which collide, then their qualitative characteristics are irrelevant and the result is expressed as a change in the quantity and direction of motion of each. But if two chemical substances come together and combine chemically, then there results a new substance qualitatively different from either. Similarly, from the point of view of mechanics heat is nothing but an increase in the quantity of motion of the particles of matter. But in chemistry, the application of heat leads to qualitative changes.

      Nor do the processes of nature consist in the repetition of the same cycle of mechanical interactions, but in nature there is continual development and evolution, producing ever new forms of the existence or, what is the same thing, motion of matter. Hence the more widely and consistently the mechanistic categories are applied in the interpretation of nature, the more is their essential limitation exposed.

      (3) Still less can mechanistic materialism explain social development. Mechanistic materialism expresses the radical bourgeois conception of society as consisting of social atoms, interacting together. The real economic and social causes of the development of society cannot be discovered from this point of view. And so great social changes seem to spring from quite accidental causes. Human activity itself appears to be either the mechanical result of external causes, or else it is treated—and here mechanistic materialism collapses into idealism—as purely spontaneous and uncaused. In a word, mechanistic materialism cannot give an account of men’s social activity. … In order to find how the limitations of the mechanist approach can be overcome we may consider first of all certain extremely dogmatic assumptions which are made by mechanistic materialism. These mechanistic assumptions are none of them justified. And by bringing them to the light of day and pointing out what is wrong with them, we can see how to advance beyond mechanistic materialism.

      (1) Mechanism sees all change as having at its basis permanent and stable things with definite, fixed properties. Thus for the mechanists the world consists of indivisible, indestructible material particles, which in their interaction manifest such properties as position, mass, velocity. According to mechanism, if you could state the position, mass and velocity of every particle at a given instant of time, then you would have said everything that could be said about the world at that time, and could, by applying the laws of mechanics, predict everything that was going to happen afterwards. This is the first dogmatic assumption of mechanism. But we need to reject it. For the world does not consist of things but of processes, in which things come into being and pass away.

      “The world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things,” wrote Engels, “but as a complex of processes, in which things apparently stable, no less than their mind-images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.”[1]

      This, indeed, is what science in its latest developments teaches us. Thus the atom, once thought to be eternal and indivisible, has been dissolved into electrons, protons and neutrons; and these themselves are not “fundamental particles” in any absolute sense, i.e. they are not eternal and indestructible, any more than the atom; but science more and more shows that they, too, come into being, pass away and go through many transformations. What is fundamental is not the “thing,” the “particle,” but the unending processes of nature, in which things go through “an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.” And nature’s process is, moreover, infinite: there will always be fresh aspects to be revealed, and it cannot be reduced to any ultimate constituents. “The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom, nature is infinite,” wrote Lenin.[2]

      Just so in considering society, we cannot understand a given society simply in terms of some set of institutions in and through which individual men and women are organized, but we must study the social processes which are going on, in the course of which both institutions and people are transformed.

      [Cont.]

      • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        The second dogmatic assumption of mechanism is the assumption that no change can ever happen except by the action of some external cause.

        Just as no part of a machine moves unless another part acts on it and makes it move, so mechanism sees matter as being inert— without motion, or rather without self-motion. For mechanism, nothing ever moves unless something else pushes or pulls it, it never changes unless something else interferes with it.

        No wonder that, regarding matter in this way, the mechanists had to believe in a Supreme Being to give the “initial impulse.” But we need to reject this lifeless, dead theory about matter. This theory separates matter and motion: it thinks of matter as just a dead mass, so that motion always has to be impressed on matter from outside. But, on the contrary, you cannot separate matter and motion. Motion, said Engels, is the mode of existence of matter.

        “Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be. Motion in cosmic space, mechanical motion of smaller masses on the various celestial bodies, the motion of molecules as heat or as electrical or magnetic currents, chemical combination or disintegration, organic life—at each given moment each individual atom of matter in the world is in one or other of these forms of motion, or in several forms of them at once. All rest, all equilibrium is only relative, and only has meaning in relation to one or other definite form of motion. A body, for example, may be on the ground in mechanical equilibrium, may be mechanically at rest; but this in no way prevents it from participating in the motion of the earth and in that of the whole solar system, just as little as it prevents its most minute parts from carrying out the oscillations determined by its temperature, or its atoms from passing through a chemical process. Matter without motion is Just as unthinkable as motion without matter.”[3]

        Far from being dead, lifeless, inert, it is the very nature of matter to be in process of continual change, of motion. Once we realize this, then there is an end of appeal to the “initial impulse.” Motion, like matter, never had a beginning.

        The conception of the inseparability of matter and motion, the understanding that “motion is the mode of existence of matter,” provides the way to answering a number of perplexing questions which usually haunt people’s minds when they think about materialism and which lead them to desert materialism and to run to the priests for an explanation of the “ultimate” truth about the universe.

        Was the world created by a Supreme Being? What was the origin of matter? What was the origin of motion? What was the very beginning of everything? What was the first cause? These are the sort of questions which puzzle people.

        It is possible to answer these questions. No, the world was not created by a Supreme Being. Any particular organization of matter, any particular process of matter in motion, has an origin and a beginning—it originated out of some previous organization of matter, out of some previous process of matter in motion. But matter in motion had no origin, no beginning. Science teaches us the inseparability of matter and motion. However static some things may seem to be, there is in them continual motion. The atom, for instance, maintains itself as the same only by means of a continual movement of its parts.

        So in studying the causes of change, we should not merely seek for external causes of change, but should above all seek for the source of the change within the process itself, in its own self-movement, in the inner impulses to development contained within things themselves.

        Thus in seeking the causes of social development and its laws, we should not see social changes as being brought about by the actions of great men, who impressed their superior ideas and will on the inert mass of society—nor as being brought about by accidents and external factors—but as being brought about by the development of the internal forces of society itself; and that means, by the development of the social forces of production. Thus unlike the utopians, we see socialism as the result, not of the dreams of reformers, but of the development of capitalist society itself—which contains within itself causes which must inevitably bring it to an end and lead to the socialist revolution.

        The third dogmatic assumption of mechanism is the assumption that the mechanical motion of particles, i.e. the simple change of place of particles as the result of the action on them of external forces, is the ultimate, basic form of motion of matter; and that all changes, all happenings whatsoever can be reduced to and explained by such mechanical motion of particles.

        Thus all the motion of matter is reduced to simple mechanical motion. All the changing qualities which we recognize in matter are nothing but the appearances of the basic mechanical motion of matter. However varied the appearances may be, whatever new and higher forms of development may appear to arise, they are all to be reduced to one and the same thing—the eternal repetition of the mechanical interaction of the separate parts of matter.

        It is difficult to find any justification for such an assumption. In the material world there are many different types of process, which all constitute different forms of the motion of matter. But they can by no means be all reduced to one and the same form of (mechanical) motion.

        “Motion in the most general sense,” wrote Engels, “conceived as the mode of existence, the inherent attribute, of matter, comprehends all changes and processes occurring in the universe, from mere change of place right to thinking. The investigation of the nature of motion had as a matter of course to start from the lowest, simplest forms of this motion and to learn to grasp these before it could achieve anything in the way of explanation of the higher and more complicated forms.”

        The simplest form of motion is the simple change of place of bodies, the laws of which are studied by mechanics. But that does not mean that all motion can be reduced to this simplest form of motion. It rather means that we need to study how, from the simplest form of motion, all the higher forms of motion arise and develop—“from mere change of place right to thinking.”

        One form of motion is transformed into another and arises from another. The higher, more complex form of motion cannot exist without the lower and simpler form: but that is not to say that it can be reduced to that simpler form. It is inseparable from the simpler form, but its nature is not exhausted thereby. For example, the thinking which goes on in our heads is inseparable from the chemical, electrical etc. motion which goes on in the gray matter of the brain; but it cannot be reduced to that motion, its nature is not exhausted thereby.

        The materialist standpoint, however, which rejects the mechanistic idea that all forms of motion of matter can be reduced to mechanical motion, must not be confused with the idealist notion that the higher forms of motion cannot be explained as arising from the lower forms. For example, idealists assert that life, as a form of motion of matter, cannot possibly be derived from any processes characteristic of non-living matter. For them, life can only arise through the introduction into a material system of a mysterious something from outside—a “vital force.” But to say that a higher form of motion cannot be reduced to a lower form is not to say that it cannot be derived from the lower form in the course of the latter’s development. Thus materialists will always affirm that life, for example, appears at a certain stage in the development of more complex forms of non-living matter, and arises as a result of that development, not as a result of the introduction into non-living matter of a mysterious “vital force.” The task of science in this sphere remains to demonstrate experimentally how the transition from non-living to living matter takes place.

        Thus the mechanistic program of reducing all the motion of matter to simple, mechanical motion must be rejected. We need rather to study all the infinitely various forms of motion of matter, in their transformations one into another, and as they arise one from another, the complex from the simple, the higher from the lower. In the case of society, no one has yet tried to show how social changes can be explained by the mechanical interactions of the atoms composing the bodies of the various members of society— though to do so would be the logical culmination of the mechanistic program. But the next best thing is attempted by the mechanistic theory known as “economic determinism.” According to this theory, the whole motion of society is to be explained by the economic changes taking place in society, all the determinants of social change have been exhausted when the economic process has been described. This is an example of the mechanistic program of reducing a complex motion to a simple form—the process of social change, including all the political, cultural and ideological developments, to a simple economic process. But the task of explaining social development cannot be fulfilled by trying to reduce the whole development to an economic process. The task is rather to show how, on the basis of the economic process, all the various forms of social activity arise and play their part in the complex movement of society.

        [Cont.]

        • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          The last dogmatic assumption of mechanism to be mentioned is that each of the things or particles, whose interactions are said to make up the totality of events in the universe, has its own fixed nature quite independent of everything else. In other words, each thing can be considered as existing in separation from other things, as an independent unit.

          Proceeding on this assumption it follows that all relations between things are merely external relations. That is to say, things enter into various relationships one with another, but these relationships are accidental and > make no difference to the nature of the things related.

          And regarding each thing as a separate unit entering into external relations with other things, it further follows that mechanism regards the whole as no more than the sum of its separate parts. According to this view, the properties and laws of development of the whole are uniquely determined by the properties of all its parts.

          Not one of these assumptions is correct. Nothing exists or can exist in splendid isolation, separate from its conditions of existence, independent of its relationships with other things. Things come into being, exist and cease to exist, not each independent of all other things, but each in its relationship with other things. The very nature of a thing is modified and transformed by its relationships with other things. When things enter into such relationships that they become parts of a whole, the whole cannot be regarded as nothing more than the sum total of the parts. True, the whole is nothing apart from and independent of its parts. But the mutual relations which the parts enter into in constituting the whole modify their own properties, so that while it may be said that the whole is determined by the parts it may equally be said that the parts are determined by the whole.

          Once again, the development of science itself shows the inadmissibility of the old mechanistic assumptions. These assumptions have force only in the very limited sphere of the study of the mechanical interactions of discrete particles. In physics they were already shattered with the development of the study of the electromagnetic field. Still less are they admissible in biology, in the study of living matter, and still less in the study of men and society.

          To return, mechanistic materialism removes change and development, and sees the world as fixed and static. Dialectics proceeds beyond this, which is affirmed by science.

          As for consciousness, I’m not sure I understand the point being made by that person regarding dialectical materialism and consciousness. Dialectical materialism understands that the world changes us, but that we then change the world, which then re-changes us and therefore we re-change the world, in an endless spiral. Perhaps the point being made is that mechanical materialism sees this entire process as passive on the side of humanity, rather than the fact that we take an active role in shaping the world and re-shaping it. Humans make history, but not through conditions of our own choosing, so to speak.

    • Red_Shift [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      Because it isn’t the best explanation of why things change given the available evidence. Putting aside all the other points entailed in mechanical materialism which badly fail given new discoveries in physics and cosmology, this third point rejects that what something is, what makes a thing a thing is to carry within it a contradiction that moves it to become something else. That change can be internal and necessary to its own characteristics rather than external. An atom is only an atom at a specific time, place, state, etc. There was a time when no atoms existed, and there will be a time when all atoms decay or combine into something else.

      Motion does not have to be impressed upon matter by some outside force, but above all it is necessary to look for the inner impulses of development, the self-motion, inherent in all processes.

      Mechanical materialists have to reject this, and it’s simply a worse model that ignores internal change.

      On consciousness, from my understanding the majority view is functionalism which basically states that the specific material and arrangement of the brain doesn’t matter so long as it’s able to produce the software required to generate subjective experience. So in a sense most philosophers would probably say that consciousness can’t be directly reduced to neurons. It’s sort of like, you cant see a video game by looking at the physical chips, its all been abstracted at so many levels that a direct connection to physical brain neurons only leads to loose associations with broad concepts, like memory or mood. Marxists would throw in that social factors play a huge role in what we consider consciousness and identity, so not even fully reducible to one brain and body.