Dialectical Materialism

DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

A concept in Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Dialectical materialism was the underlying approach to the interpretation of history and society in Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology. According to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in the history of philosophy, the clash of contradictory ideas has generated constant movement toward higher levels. Karl Marx poured new content into the dialectic with his materialist interpretation of history, which asserted that the development of the forces of production was the source of the conflicts or contradictions that would demolish each stage of society and lead to its replacement with a higher stage. Marx's collaborator, Friedrich Engels, systematized the three laws of the dialectic that were to figure prominently in the official Soviet ideology: (a) the transformation of quantity into quality; (b) the unity of opposites; and (c) the negation of the negation. According to the first of those laws, within any stage of development of society, changes accumulate gradually, until further change cannot be accommodated within the framework of that stage and must proceed by a leap of revolutionary transformation, like that from feudal society to capitalism. The second law signifies that within any stage, mutually antagonistic forces are built into to the character of the system; for instance, the capitalists and the proletariat are locked in a relationship of struggle, but as long as capitalism survives, the existence of each of those classes presumes the existence of the other. The third law of the dialectic supposedly reflects the reality that any new stage of society (i.e., capitalism) has replaced or negated a previous stage, but will itself eventually be replaced by still another stage of development (i.e., communism).

In Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology under successive political leaders, though the insistence on the universal validity of the laws of the dialectic became highly dogmatic, the application of those laws was continually adapted, depending on the political objectives and calculations of the top leaders. Most crucial is the example of Josef Stalin, who insisted that the dialectic took the form of destructive struggle within capitalist societies, but tried to exempt Soviet socialism from the harshness of such internal conflict by arguing that in socialism, the conscious planning and control of change eliminated fundamental inconsistency between the material base and the political-administrative superstructure. Thus in socialism the interplay of nonantagonistic contradictions could open the way to gradual leaps of relatively painless qualitative transformation. Mikhail Gorbachev later repudiated that reasoning as having been the philosophical rationale for evading necessary reforms in political and administrative structures in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1980s.

See also: hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich; lenin, vladimir ilich; marxism

bibliography

Avineri, Shlomo. (1971). Karl Marx: Social and Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Carver, Terrell. (1983). Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Evans, Alfred B., Jr. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Alfred B. Evans Jr.