Materialism, Dialectical

Materialism, Dialectical

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dialectical materialism was the name given by the doctrinaires and political stalwarts of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to official Soviet philosophy. Others regarded it more as an ideology, but either way dialectical materialism was a constituent part of the major political innovation of the twentieth-century, official Soviet Marxism. Whether or not dialectical materialism was well formed enough to give adequate or appropriate support to the Soviet experiment is, of course, another question, and a much-debated one. Because CPSU officials and stalwarts were powerful enough to impose their definitions on a captive audience, dialectical material-ism—which was commonly given the acronymic form DiaMat—enjoyed a remarkable shelf life during the mid-twentieth century. But, as a concept, its sell-by date is by now long past.

Dialectical was often confused with historical materialism. (In Dialectical and Historical Materialism, a book supposedly written by Joseph Stalin during the 1930s, it is unclear whether the author wishes to separate the two or run them together.) Their conflation was and is mistaken: Historical materialism’s register is historiographical—it is a mode of historical and sociopolitical analysis—whereas dialectical materialism, whose register is philosophical and scientific, throws nature and its laws, along with the supposed “laws” of thought, into the mix. One might say that whereas dialectical encompasses historical materialism, the latter can and did flourish among thinkers to whom dialectical materialism was an embarrassment—Western Marxists and critical theorists prominent among them. The addition of nature and thought, which was first and foremost the contribution of Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), did nothing to make DiaMat philosophically coherent. DiaMat was, rather, a hodgepodge of philosophy and science that confused the pursuit or advance of (mainly scientific) knowledge in the world with the attainment of truth about the world.

At a basic level, DiaMat regarded historical or social evolution as an aspect or facet of natural evolution, and as being subject to the same “laws” as those that govern natural evolution—laws that are said but not shown to be “dialectical” in character. (Engels was as uncomfortable as many other Victorian gentlemen with the aleatory, non-teleological character of Darwin’s principle of natural selection.) When we ask who was the first to run together natural laws, historical laws, and the “laws” of thought, it is Engels, not Marx, who instantly snaps into focus. (Marx, for the record, never even used the term historical materialism, though he did not protest when Engels in a review designated Marx’s method as an instance of “the materialist interpretation of history.”)

While it was Georgi Plekhanov, “the father of Russian Marxism,” who coined the term dialectical materialism, the concept was first authoritatively enacted by V. I. Lenin (1870–1924), who regarded Engels’s and Plekhanov’s legacy as giving intellectual ballast to the copy-theory of perception he advanced in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908). In fact, Lenin’s theory of perception

involved a divergence from Engels’s account, since materialism to Engels was not the same as epistemological realism. … [Engels’s] medley of metaphysical materialism and Hegelian dialectics … was conserved by Lenin, but [Lenin’s] own theory of cognition—which was all that really mattered to him—was not strictly speaking dependent on it. Matter as an absolute substance, or constitutive element of the universe, is not required for a doctrine which merely postulates that the mind is able to arrive at universally true conclusions about the external world given to the senses (Lichtheim 1974, pp. 70–71).

(As an aside, the contemporary philosopher Donald Davidson argues that the question whether an accurate representation of reality in thought is possible, let alone desirable—Lenin thought it was both—is undecidable and should be discarded from philosophy altogether.) The compatibility of Lenin with Engels (or Marx, for that matter) was in the event eclipsed by Russian Marxist notables’ need to establish “orthodoxy,” to produce a canon, a continuous, unbroken line of succession stretching from Hegel through Marx through Engels through Plekhanov through Lenin through Stalin (and whoever else was à la page at the time).

Engels of course could have had no foreknowledge of what Soviet stalwarts would do with his doctrine. His sights had been set, not on a nonexistent CPSU, but on German social democracy and, by extension, the Second International (1885–1914). Engels cannot be held directly responsible for the transformation of his speculations into a state dogma imposed on a captive audience. Even so, at a less direct level Engels has much to answer for. He did much to make the sorry Soviet sequence of DiaMat luminaries possible. These swiftly awarded Engels canonical status, and presented him as enjoying a status he had never claimed, as someone coeval and on an equal footing with Marx.

There can be no doubt that Engels’s presentation of his intellectual partnership with Marx, “second fiddle” or no second fiddle, aided and abetted the spurious continuity between Marx and Stalin that DiaMat required. (This continuity was celebrated by cold warriors in the West as well as the East, for it provided the former with an easy— arguably, too easy—target). Such continuity depended throughout on an idea Engels encouraged after Marx’s death in 1883: that in writing about (and conflating) the laws of nature, history, and thought, Engels was faithfully fulfilling his part in an agreed-upon division of labor, according to which Engels produced texts that were interchangeable with Marx’s texts on some subjects and supplementary to, but always compatible with, and true to Marx’s works on others. Without this supposition DiaMat would not and could not have taken the seamless form it took; but there is no evidence that the supposition itself could withstand serious, critical examination.

The disservice done to Marx by the later Engels was a disservice to philosophy at large: It turned Marxism at the official level into the kind of universal weltanschauung or worldview that Marx never intended to provide. Marxism-Leninism constructed around Marx’s writings, to the extent that these were made available (and they were not rushed into print as Engels’s were), a key to unlock every door, a grand theory concerned with the ultimate laws and constituents of the universe. Marx himself had maintained discretion on such cosmic questions. Naturalism and cosmology were domains distant from the critique of political economy that was Marx’s lifework. Worse still, it was in a sense precisely because Marx had remained reticent on these issues that his self-styled Soviet epigones—to whom such silence seemed unnerving—felt the need to fill in nonexistent gaps and construct a coherent, comprehensive system of materialist metaphysics. Marx’s considered reticence, it could be (and was) argued, constituted not a failure of scholarly nerve but a well-judged reluctance to extend his arguments into areas where they could have no meaningful application.

Even though Engels’s interpretation of Marxism is in significant respects at variance with what Marx had bequeathed him (and us), Engels took care to advance it in Marx’s name. This immeasurably helped DiaMat set the tone for more than a generation of “official” Soviet Marxists. While DiaMat did not pass unquestioned in the West, particularly among Western Marxists and critical theorists, it ruled the roost and attained canonical status in the USSR, its satellites, and China. There was throughout its elaboration an inbuilt, fatal flaw: If nature is conceived materialistically, it does not lend itself to dialectical method, and if, conversely, the dialectic (a category that Hegel had confined within logic, and that was to be of no real use to Marx) is read back into nature, there is no real place or need for materialism. The misapplication of the dialectic into natural processes then either endows the structure of reality with a purposive, teleological striving (which would fly in the face of Darwin, if not of Darwinism), or it stretches the concept of dialectical change to the point of tautology: Anything that happens is said to be a “development” involving qualitative as well as quantitative change (see Lichtheim 1965, p. 254; cf. 247–248).

Paid positions for philosophers who accepted the precepts of DiaMat (or who said they did) came into existence as the fledgling Soviet régime consolidated itself. But, unsurprisingly, “between 1930–1955, philosophical discussions among (Soviet) Marxists were stifled, the publication of books and articles became virtually nonexistent, and the teaching of philosophy in the USSR was greatly reduced” (Loone 1993, p. 158). Engels’s third law of dialectics (the negation of the negation) was unceremoniously jettisoned by Stalin, and Engels’s first law (the transformation of quantity into quality) was relegated by Chairman Mao to the status of a special instance of Engels’s second law (the interpenetration of opposites). These doctrinal modifications could be regarded as refinements, or as signs that DiaMat was beginning to collapse beneath its own weight—even before the political system it was said to uphold imploded at the institutional level. Lichtheim has called DiaMat an “intellectual disaster,” and it is not hard to see why. It was also, after all, a kind of politically charged quodlibet for the philosophically tone-deaf.

SEE ALSO Marxism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhaskar, Roy. 1993. Dialectic. In The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought, ed. William Outhwaite and Tom Bottomore, 154–157. Oxford: Blackwell.

Graham, Loren R. 1972. Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union. New York: Knopf.

Jordan, Z. A. 1967. The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism: A Philosophical and Sociological Analysis. London and New York: Macmillan.

Kuusinen, O. W., et al. 1960. Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism. Trans. and ed. Clemens Dutt. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House.

Lichtheim, George. 1965. Dialectical Materialism. In his Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, 244–248. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Praeger.

Lichtheim, George. 1974 (1971). On the Interpretation of Marx’s Thought. In his From Marx to Hegel, 63–79. New York: Seabury.

Loone, Eero. 1993. “Dialectical Materialism.” In The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought, ed. William Outhwaite and Tom Bottomore, 157–158. Oxford: Blackwell.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1958. Soviet Marxism. London and New York: Columbia University Press.

Thomas, Paul. 1999. Engels and ‘Scientific Socialism’. In Engels after Marx, ed. Manfred B. Steger and Terrell Carver, 215–231. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Wetter, Gustav A. 1958. Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union. Trans. Peter Heath. Rev. ed. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Paul Thomas