I’m reading through The Curriculum of Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism at the moment so I’ve been trying to get my head around this lately. It would be super helpful if someone could, say, talk about some historical political development or some contemporary issue and tell me examples of what an idealist, nondialectical materialist, and dialectical materialist analysis of that issue might look like? Thank you 🙏
I’ve always just treated is as thinking about everything as the output of a system. Idealist think that the end result happens due to some morality, materialists think only in terms of immediate causes, and dialectical materialists see the system as it exists due to historical conditions, present conditions, and uses that knowledge to see the deeper systemic forces that cause the conditions that create the effect.
You are separating dialectical and materialism as if they are separate methods, and while there is a difference between what each word means, they are not mutually exclusive the way you seem to be describing them, and it is simply an incorrect view of what “materialist” means. Remember, Marxist philosophy is Dialectical Materialism. Dialectical thinking is almost entirely about recognizing the contradictions within a thing that drive its change. Materialism on the other hand, is not “thinking only in terms of immediate causes.” Materialism is merely analyzing any thing or issue or system by putting material reality forward as the primary causal force rather than driven by human ideas or by spirits or by some magical secondary universe (like in Cartesian Dualism). Where you said “see a system as it exists due to historical conditions and present conditions” - that is materialism, while the dialectical part is again, identifying the contradictions within a thing as what is driving that thing towards change.
To more directly answer the OP question, an easy way to approach a dialectical kind of thinking is to consider the old school platonic meaning of “a dialectic,” where, when trying to understand an issue, you approach it with a given perspective but then consider what someone with an opposing perspective would say as an argument against your initial perspective. That is a very simplified way of beginning the process of thinking dialectically.
I was only framing it that way because OP did. Materialism as an actual idea is pretty closely related to dialectic thinking. There is a modern version of it that is bastardized though. Liberal “I fucking love science” types, and PMCs that think reading stock tickers is being materialist.
I didn’t mean to imply they’re mutually exclusive things, but can’t people put forward a material analysis of something without thinking in terms of dialectics? Isn’t that what people mean when they say vulgar materialism?
A stupid analogy that explains my interpretation would be a car accident.
An idealist would lay the blame on the moral failing of the drivers involved, a “vulgar” materialist would bring up the road signaling or mechanical issues with the vehicles, and a dialectical materialist would see the situation as a symptom of overdevelopment of vehicular infrastructure.
Now just replace a car crash with a market crash or a crisis of overproduction.
All 3 of them can be correct about something, but one one of those actually does anything to prevent the situation entirely instead of just reacting to it as it happens.
Non-dialectic materialism is what is called Mechanical Materialism and it basically reduces everything down to a biological mechanism as its reason for existing. One example I can think of is how liberals will sometimes say the reason our political system is the way it is, is because of “tribalism”. They believe that human behavior or human nature is derived by some biomechanical mechanism, something we have no real control over. Or that the only reason we do anything is because of our reward center of the brain.
It reduces everything down to some agancy robbing chemical exchange in the brain or whatever.
Dialectical Materialism takes idealism and inverts it. Idealism basically asserts that everything you see and experience, that your entire reality, are from the mind that the base reality you experience exists in the mind as pure thought. That everything can be known. Since everything is just a product of the mind.
The inversion here is that dialectical materialism states that the primary reality that we all experience is the material world, the material reality. This inversion means that ideas do not simply come about through pure thought, but instead through interactions with the primary reality, which is the material world.
There is always an internal and external component when thinking dialectically. For example, if you think of the mind, the mind has your own internal thoughts and emotions, but your mind also contains a series of experiences which can only be gathered through external sensory perception.
So, internally, your behavior is driven by your thoughts and emotions, but those same thoughts and emotions are also derived by the way your behavior interacts with the world around you. In many ways, this is describing the scientific method, but scientific method can sometimes fall into mechanical materialism.
For example, we can use dialectical materialist thinking to think about any number of subjects. Take the car wash, for example. The internal components of a car wash have changed dramatically since its inception. Something someone can assume, since nowadays, many carwashes are A. Touchless. And B. Almost fully automatic. Or in some cases, completely automated to the point where there isn’t even a human attendant present at the building.
Internally, a carwash is a set of components necessary for the act of washing a person’s car as a service. Externally, a car wash is a service provided to people who have cars, but do not have the necessary means to clean their own car or seek the convenience of the carwash. It is influenced externally by the available technology of the period in which it exists, which is why, in many cases now, as I stated, it is nearly fully automatic or completely unattended and automated.
But the car wash didn’t come into being simply because someone thought it would be a good idea. It came into being under very specific conditions. Those conditions were created by the prevalence of the car. In fact, the carwash couldn’t exist without the car and could not have been an idea that someone had without there being a car in the first place. However, the idea of offering a service to clean one’s car is something that really couldn’t exist until enough cars existed and cars were such a component of everyday life that it made good financial sense to offer car cleaning as a service.
This likely required, although I have not looked this up myself, a critical mass of cars. This constitutes what is called a shift from quantity into quality. At a certain point, the quantity of cars became large enough that a quality shift occurred in our culture, and our culture shifted around the car itself, driving some of the market forces that existed and developing ideas of services centered around car life and car ownership.
As years progressed, the desire of the capitalist to minimize costs in car washing meant that the car wash went from a service provided by people to a service provided by machines or a place that offered mechanical equipment that allowed the car owner themselves to perform the act of cleaning their own car.
So thinking dialectically is taking something that we can observe and trying to understand it both internally and externally. What forces have shaped it, what forces maintain it, and what components are necessary for it to exist both internally and externally.
The correct way forward is to join a book club and read Hegel, then get a nervous breakdown about the fact that now nobody outside your bookclub understands what the fuck is going on anymore. At least that’s what happened to a friend of mine who probably has the deepest understanding of dialectics out of anybody i know.
coming for the theoryreaders, to pull them into the inky abyss of knowledge.
It boils down to analyzing the world in terms of interconnection and contradiction, as processes moving in time rather than static. The vulgar materialist sees history as a series of snapshots without context, which leads them to believe Russia randomly decided to enter the Ukrainian Civil War or that the genocide in Palestine started on October 7th. To think dialectically is to understand that the motive force of change is the self-movement of contradictions, diametric coexistent opposed forces, which for example centers class struggle (bourgeois and proletarian), national liberation movements (neocolonized vs. neocolonizer), settler-colonialism (settlers vs. indigenous), and imperialism (monopoly finance capital and the super-exploited).
To me, dialectical materialism is a more complete elaboration of the scientific method beyond the one-sided view of science which became prevalent among bourgeois intellectuals during the Enlightenment.
The materialism of the Enlightenment was immature due to its simple empiricism where the essence of material things could be determined simply by its surface appearance. The more you study the physical form of an object, the more you know it. How do you then understand something as simple as commodity exchange? Is there something inherent to the chemistry of gloves which makes them exchangeable? (No.)
Consider instead that when material things are placed in relation with each other, new properties emerge by the fact of their relation. Basically “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The world is not a collection of non-interacting units, but instead it is a system of things in relationship with all other parts. One example is the ecosystem - species don’t exist in isolation, but are intimately connected to all other parts of nature.
So what? This means that when we scientifically study something, we must not only study the physical attributes of the objects in question, but we must also study the relationships of things as they exist in a system. Even further, these systems are historically contingent and therefore their historical “genetic” lineage can be the subject of its own analysis.
Materialist dialectics basically looks like the familiar process of the scientific method - gathering of empirical data, testing of hypotheses, falsifiability, etc. - with the crucial difference that these facts are integrated into a concept of an interrelated whole. The dialectical relationships of the whole can be analyzed in itself to uncover new facts which can be tested through practice. Essentially, materialist dialectics use both inductive and deductive reasoning to discover new truths, while the bourgeois conception of science overweighted inductive reasoning.
For example, in Capital, Marx starts from the commodity form and deductively analyzes the dialectical commodity form as far as he can, discovering the value form in the process. He then switches modes to empirical evidence gathering and inductive reasoning in order to integrate these facts into the conception of the whole he has obtained to this point. He’s not only using facts to bolster his argument, but importantly also to test his conception and modify his original model and move the analysis forward. This is the essence of materialist dialectics.
In conclusion: materialist dialectics holds that something cannot simply be understood by looking at it - one must also understand how it relates in the systems in which it is part. Materialist dialectics builds up more and more detailed concepts of things using a combination of empirical evidence gathering and deductive dialectical analysis of the concept (as represented in the head of the theorist) to arrive at more complete understandings.
I’m making it through Evald Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital (1960) and highly recommend it, if this interests you further.
These two text helped me:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm
Here’s a Vietnamese translating her books from school:
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Idealism vs Materialism
Idealism is the principle that ideas are real / primary, and that material objects are imperfect instances (examples) of them. So, to an idealist, the ‘idea’ of a dog is what really exists, and all the dogs in the world are just examples of it. This idea came from Plato or Aristotle if I remember correctly, and nowadays nobody thinks this way (although if you are a programmer you might see some similarities to classes and objects).
Materialism is the other extreme - materialists see the physical world as real / primary. So it is the physical dogs that really exist, and our idea of ‘dog’ is a generalisation or abstraction. Nowadays most people (or at least most philosophers and scientists - the people who write about this sort of stuff) think this way.
There’s also (Cartesian) dualism, which says there is a world of ideas and a material world. This was a step up from the old idealist worldview, but has logical problems like causal closure.
Metaphysics vs Dialectics
Metaphysics tries to understand the world by breaking it down to its pieces, studying them, and putting the information about each component back together. Of course, this means that it assumes that patterns discovered in one place are true across space and time. This is a mostly valid assumption in the physical sciences - a proton weighs the same under almost all conditions, and two plus two is generally four.
Dialectics sees the world as evolving constantly, due to the interactions between its components. This view is more common in the life and social sciences, since animals and societies very clearly change over time and show differences from place to place. A dialectical approach also highlights the importance of contradiction - what seems true now may become false later, because it was only true under specific conditions. Most animals alive today need oxygen to live. But oxygen was toxic to the very first animals, who lived in a time when the earth’s atmosphere was nitrogen and carbon dioxide. This ‘contradiction’ can be resolved by learning that at some point in earth’s history, algae produced so much oxygen that most of the old animals died out, and the survivors evolved to exploit oxygen.
