Dialectical materialism

Dialectical materialism is a materialist theory based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to philosophy of science. As a materialist philosophy, Marxist dialectics emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of functional contradictions within and among social relations, which derive from, but are not limited to, the contradictions that occur in social class, labour economics, and socioeconomic interactions. Within Marxism, a contradiction is a relationship in which two forces oppose each other, leading to mutual development.

In contrast with the idealist perspective of Hegelian dialectics, the materialist perspective of Marxist dialectics emphasizes that contradictions in material phenomena could be resolved with dialectical analysis, from which is synthesized the solution that resolves the contradiction, whilst retaining the essence of the phenomena. Marx proposed that the most effective solution to the problems caused by contradiction was to address the contradiction and then rearrange the systems of social organization that are the root of the problem.

Dialectical materialism recognises the evolution of the natural world, and thus the emergence of new qualities of being human and of human existence. Engels used the metaphysical insight that the higher level of human existence emerges from and is rooted in the lower level of human existence. He believed that the higher level of being is a new order with irreducible laws, and that evolution is governed by laws of development, which reflect the basic properties of ''matter in motion''.Jordan, p. 167.

In the 20th century, the revolutionary Marxist Vladimir Lenin proposed his own interpretation of Marxist dialectics, which took an essential place among the views and doctrines of Leninism and was later propagated by his followers such as Leon Trotsky. Since the 1930s, a Marxist-Leninist reading of dialectical materialism introduced by such leaders of communist states as Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union) and Mao Zedong ( Maoist China) set forth the official formulations on dialectical materialism and historical materialism, which were taught in state systems of education. In the West, different approaches towards Marxist dialectics were proposed by such authors of Western Marxism as György Lukács and Slavoj Žižek.

The term

The term ''dialectical materialism'' was coined in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen, a socialist who corresponded with Marx, during and after the failed 1848 German Revolution. Casual mention of the term "dialectical materialism" is also found in the biography ''Frederick Engels'', by philosopher Karl Kautsky, written in 1899. Marx himself had talked about the "materialist conception of history", which was later referred to as "historical materialism" by Engels. Engels "substantially developed materialist dialectics" in his incomplete 1883 work '' Dialectics of Nature''. Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, first used the term "dialectical materialism" in 1891 in his writings on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Marx. Stalin further delineated and defined dialectical and historical materialism as the world outlook of Marxism–Leninism, and as a method to study society and its history.

Historical background

Marx and Engels each began their adulthood as Young Hegelians, one of several groups of intellectuals inspired by the philosopher Hegel. Marx's doctoral thesis, '' The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature'', was concerned with the atomism of Epicurus and Democritus, which is considered the foundation of materialist philosophy. Marx was also familiar with Lucretius's theory of '' clinamen''.

Marx and Engels both concluded that Hegelian philosophy, at least as interpreted by their former colleagues, was too abstract and was being misapplied in attempts to explain the social injustice in recently industrializing countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, which was a growing concern in the early 1840s, as exemplified by Dickensian inequity.

In contrast to the conventional Hegelian dialectic of the day, which emphasized the idealist observation that human experience is dependent on the mind's perceptions, Marx developed Marxist dialectics, which emphasized the materialist view that the world of the concrete shapes socioeconomic interactions and that those in turn determine sociopolitical reality.

Whereas some Hegelians blamed religious alienation (estrangement from the traditional comforts of religion) for societal ills, Marx and Engels concluded that alienation from economic and political autonomy, coupled with exploitation and poverty, was the real culprit.

In keeping with dialectical ideas, Marx and Engels thus created an alternative theory, not only of why the world is the way it is but also of which actions people should take to make it the way it ought to be. In '' Theses on Feuerbach'' (1845), Marx wrote a famous quote, "The philosophers have only ''interpreted'' the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to ''change'' it." Dialectical materialism is thus closely related to Marx's and Engels's historical materialism (and has sometimes been viewed as synonymous with it). Marx rejected Fichte's language of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis".

Dialectical materialism is an aspect of the broader subject of materialism, which asserts the primacy of the material world: in short, matter precedes thought. Materialism is a realist philosophy of science, which holds that the world is material; that all phenomena in the universe consist of "matter in motion," wherein all things are interdependent and interconnected and develop according to natural law; that the world exists outside consciousness and independently of people's perception of it; that thought is a reflection of the material world in the brain, and that the world is ''in principle'' knowable.

Marx criticized classical materialism as another idealist philosophy—idealist because of its transhistorical understanding of material contexts. The Young Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach had rejected Hegel's idealistic philosophy and advocated materialism."Feuerbach, Ludwig"
at marxists.org. Accessed 18 April 2016. Despite being strongly influenced by Feuerbach, Marx rejected Feuerbach's version of materialism ( anthropological materialism) as inconsistent.Nicholas Churchich, ''Marxism and Alienation'', Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990, p. 57: "Although Marx has rejected Feuerbach's abstract materialism," Lenin says that Feuerbach's views "are consistently materialist," implying that Feuerbach's conception of causality is entirely in line with dialectical materialism." The writings of Engels, especially '' Anti-Dühring'' (1878) and '' Dialectics of Nature'' (1875–82), were the source of the main doctrines of dialectical materialism.

Classical Marxism

Marx's dialectics

The concept of dialectical materialism emerges from statements by Marx in the second edition postface to his ''magnum opus'', ''Das Kapital''. There Marx says he intends to use Hegelian dialectics but in revised form. He defends Hegel against those who view him as a "dead dog" and then says, "I openly avowed myself as the pupil of that mighty thinker Hegel". Marx credits Hegel with "being the first to present ialectic'sform of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner". But he then criticizes Hegel for turning dialectics upside down: "With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.".Marx, p. 25.

Marx's criticism of Hegel asserts that Hegel's dialectics go astray by dealing with ideas, with the human mind. Hegel's dialectic, Marx says, inappropriately concerns "the process of the human brain"; it focuses on ideas. Hegel's thought is in fact sometimes called dialectical idealism, and Hegel himself is counted among a number of other philosophers known as the German idealists. Marx, on the contrary, believed that dialectics should deal not with the mental world of ideas but with "the material world", the world of production and other economic activity. For Marx, a contradiction can be solved by a desperate struggle to change the social world. This was a very important transformation because it allowed him to move dialectics out of the contextual subject of philosophy and into the study of social relations based on the material world.

For Marx, human history cannot be fitted into any neat ''a priori'' schema. He explicitly rejects the idea of Hegel's followers that history can be understood as "a person apart, a metaphysical subject of which real human individuals are but the bearers". To interpret history as though previous social formations have somehow been aiming themselves toward the present state of affairs is "to misunderstand the historical movement by which the successive generations transformed the results acquired by the generations that preceded them". Marx's rejection of this sort of teleology was one reason for his enthusiastic (though not entirely uncritical) reception of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.

For Marx, dialectics is not a formula for generating predetermined outcomes but is a method for the empirical study of social processes in terms of interrelations, development, and transformation. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Marx's ''Capital'', Ernest Mandel writes, "When the dialectical method is applied to the study of economic problems, economic phenomena are not viewed separately from each other, by bits and pieces, but in their inner connection as an integrated totality, structured around, and by, a basic predominant mode of production."

Marx's own writings are almost exclusively concerned with understanding human history in terms of systemic processes, based on modes of production (broadly speaking, the ways in which societies are organized to employ their technological powers to interact with their material surroundings). This is called ''historical materialism''. More narrowly, within the framework of this general theory of history, most of Marx's writing is devoted to an analysis of the specific structure and development of the capitalist economy.

For his part, Engels applies a "dialectical" approach to the natural world in general, arguing that contemporary science is increasingly recognizing the necessity of viewing natural processes in terms of interconnectedness, development, and transformation. Some scholars have doubted that Engels' "dialectics of nature" is a legitimate extension of Marx's approach to social processes. Other scholars have argued that despite Marx's insistence that humans are natural beings in an evolving, mutual relationship with the rest of nature, Marx's own writings pay inadequate attention to the ways in which human agency is constrained by such factors as biology, geography, and ecology.

Engels's dialectics

Engels postulated three laws of dialectics from his reading of Hegel's '' Science of Logic''. Engels elucidated these laws as the materialist dialectic in his work ''Dialectics of Nature'':

# The law of the unity and conflict of opposites
# The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes
# The law of the negation of the negation

The first law, which originates with the ancient Ionian philosopher Heraclitus, can be clarified through the following examples:

The first law was seen by both Hegel and Vladimir Lenin as the central feature of a dialectical understanding:

The second law Hegel took from Ancient Greek philosophers, notably the paradox of the heap, and explanation by Aristotle, and it is equated with what scientists call phase transitions. It may be traced to the ancient Ionian philosophers, particularly Anaximenes from whom Aristotle, Hegel, and Engels inherited the concept. For all these authors, one of the main illustrations is the phase transitions of water. There has also been an effort to apply this mechanism to social phenomena, whereby population increases result in changes in social structure. The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes can also be applied to the process of social change and class conflict.

The third law, "negation of the negation", originated with Hegel. Although Hegel coined the term "negation of the negation", it gained its fame from Marx's using it in ''Capital''. There Marx wrote this: "The eathknell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property ... But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It his new negationis the negation of negation."

Z. A. Jordan notes, "Engels made constant use of the metaphysical insight that the higher level of existence emerges from and has its roots in the lower; that the higher level constitutes a new order of being with its irreducible laws; and that this process of evolutionary advance is governed by laws of development which reflect basic properties of 'matter in motion as a whole'."

Vladimir Lenin's contributions

After reading Hegel's ''Science of Logic'' in 1914, Lenin made some brief notes outlining three "elements" of logic. They are:

# The determination of the concept out of itself he thing itself must be considered in its relations and in its development
# The contradictory nature of the thing itself (the other of itself), the contradictory forces and tendencies in each phenomenon;
# The union of analysis and synthesis.

Lenin develops these in a further series of notes, and appears to argue that "the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa" is an example of the unity and opposition of opposites expressed tentatively as "not only the unity of opposites but the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other nto its opposite?"

In his essay "On the Question of Dialectics", Lenin stated, "Development is the 'struggle' of opposites."
He stated, "The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute."

In '' Materialism and Empiriocriticism'' (1908), Lenin explained ''dialectical materialism'' as three axes: (i) the materialist inversion of Hegelian dialectics, (ii) the historicity of ethical principles ordered to class struggle, and (iii) the convergence of " laws of evolution" in physics ( Helmholtz), biology ( Darwin), and in political economy (Marx). Hence, Lenin was philosophically positioned between historicist Marxism ( Labriola) and determinist Marxism—a political position close to "social Darwinism" (Kautsky) . Moreover, late-century discoveries in physics (x-rays, electrons), and the beginning of quantum mechanics, philosophically challenged previous conceptions of matter and materialism, thus matter seemed to be disappearing. Lenin disagreed:

'Matter disappears' means that the limit within which we have hitherto known matter disappears, and that our knowledge is penetrating deeper; properties of matter are disappearing that formerly seemed absolute, immutable, and primary, and which are now revealed to be relative and characteristic only of certain states of matter. For the ''sole'' 'property' of matter, with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up, is the property of ''being an objective reality'', of existing outside of the mind.

Lenin was developing the work of Engels, who said that "with each epoch-making discovery, even in the sphere of natural science, materialism has to change its form". One of Lenin's challenges was distancing materialism, as a viable philosophical outlook, from the "vulgar materialism" expressed in the statement "the brain secretes thought in the same way as the liver secretes bile" (attributed to 18th-century physician Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis); "metaphysical materialism" (matter composed of immutable particles); and 19th-century "mechanical materialism" (matter as random molecules interacting per the laws of mechanics). The philosophic solution that Lenin (and Engels) proposed was "dialectical materialism", wherein matter is defined as ''objective reality'', theoretically consistent with (new) developments occurring in the sciences.

Lenin reassessed Feuerbach's philosophy and concluded that it was in line with dialectical materialism.

Trotskyism

In 1926, Trotsky said in a speech:

In his book ''In Defence of Marxism'', Leon Trotsky defended the dialectical method of scientific socialism during the factional schisms within the American Trotskyist movement in the period 1939–40. Trotsky viewed dialectics as an essential method of analysis to discern class nature of the Soviet Union. Specifically, he described scientific socialism as "the conscious expression of the unconscious historical process; namely, the instinctive and elemental drive of the proletariat to reconstruct society on communist beginnings".

Western Marxism

György Lukács's contributions

György Lukács, Minister of Culture in the brief Béla Kun government of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919), published '' History and Class Consciousness'' (1923), in which he defined ''dialectical materialism'' as the knowledge of society as a whole, knowledge which, in itself, was the class consciousness of the proletariat. In the first chapter "What is Orthodox Marxism?", Lukács defined ''orthodoxy'' as fidelity to the "Marxist method", not fidelity to "dogmas":

Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the "belief" in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a "sacred" book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded, and deepened, only along the lines laid down by its founders. (§1)

In his later works and actions, Lukács became a leader of Democratic Marxism. He modified many of his formulations of his 1923 works and went on to develop a Marxist ontology and played an active role in democratic movements in Hungary in 1956 and the 1960s. He and his associates became sharply critical of the formulation of dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union that was exported to those countries under its control. In the 1960s, his associates became known as the Budapest School.

Lukács, in his philosophical criticism of Marxist revisionism, proposed an intellectual return to the Marxist method. So did Louis Althusser, who later defined Marxism and psychoanalysis as "conflictual sciences", stating that political factions and revisionism are inherent to Marxist theory and political praxis, because dialectical materialism is the philosophic product of class struggle:

For this reason, the task of orthodox Marxism, its victory over Revisionism and utopianism can never mean the defeat, once and for all, of false tendencies. It is an ever-renewed struggle against the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat. Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process. (§5)


...the premise of dialectical materialism is, we recall: 'It is not men's consciousness that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness'.... Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity. (§5)

Philosophically aligned with Marx is the criticism of the individualist, bourgeois philosophy of the subject, which is founded upon the voluntary and conscious subject. Against said ideology is the primacy of social relations. Existence—and thus the world—is the product of human activity, but this can be seen only by accepting the primacy of social process on individual consciousness. This type of consciousness is an effect of ideological mystification.

At the 5th Congress of the Communist International (July 1924), Grigory Zinoviev formally denounced Lukács's heterodox definition of Orthodox Marxism as exclusively derived from fidelity to the "Marxist method", and not to Communist party dogmas; and denounced the philosophical developments of the German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch.

Slavoj Žižek's contributions

Slavoj Žižek proposed a new approach towards dialectical materialism as a "radical attempt to ground subjectivity qua subjectivity into objectivity — not merely find the hidden 'objective reality' of thought." In his approach, he refused "to rule out the reference to Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938) as a provocation," and his views have ambiguous relations to the writings of Engels and Stalin. "On the one hand, the birth of the Symbolic from the Real without the intermediary of a socially shared space bears a strong resemblance to the emergence of universal human history from matter in motion, histomat from diamat." On the other hand, Žižek believes that what makes his approach essentially materialist is the denial of totality as opposite to Stalinist dialectics which rely on considering history and society as totalities, unified wholes.

For Zižek, 'the Other' (whether the Symbolic Order, or a political regime) never 'exists' as the fully consistent whole that subjects imagine, as they shape their identities in relation to it. This means that society, history and culture ultimately always depend for their illusory 'existence' as apparent wholes on the (unconscious) beliefs of subjects in them. This truth is registered in a series of 'material' inconsistencies: the way ideologies have to posit enemies 'supposed to enjoy' our difficulties, and to rest at their heart on sublime Ideas like 'the Nation', which no one can directly say what their content is. Thus, Žižek's 'dialectical materialism' is ultimately the doctrine that 'the Other does not exist'.

Marxism-Leninism

Joseph Stalin

In the 1930s, Stalin and his associates formulated a version of dialectical and historical materialism that became the "official" Soviet interpretation of Marxism. It was codified in Stalin's work, '' Dialectical and Historical Materialism'' (1938), and popularized in textbooks used for compulsory education within the Soviet Union and throughout the Eastern Bloc.

Mao Zedong

In '' On Contradiction'' (1937), Mao Zedong outlined a version of dialectical materialism that subsumed two of Engels's three principal laws of dialectics, "the transformation of quantity into quality" and "the negation of the negation" as sub-laws (and not principal laws of their own) of the first law, "the unity and interpenetration of opposites".

Ho Chi Minh

In his 1947 article ''New Life'', Ho Chi Minh described the dialectical relationship between the old and the new in building society, stating:

As a heuristic in science and elsewhere

Historian of science Loren Graham has detailed at length the role played by dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union in disciplines throughout the natural and social sciences. He has concluded that, despite the Lysenko period in genetics and constraints on free inquiry imposed by political authorities, dialectical materialism had a positive influence on the work of many Soviet scientists.

Some evolutionary biologists, such as Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, have tried to employ dialectical materialism in their approach. They view dialectics as playing a precautionary heuristic role in their work. Lewontin's perspective offers the following idea:

Dialectical materialism is not, and never has been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, a dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, "Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in time and space and not lose them in utterly idealized abstractions. Remember that the qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated". And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent."

Gould shared similar views regarding a heuristic role for dialectical materialism. He wrote that:

...dialectical thinking should be taken more seriously by Western scholars, not discarded because some nations of the second world have constructed a cardboard version as an official political doctrine.

...when presented as guidelines for a philosophy of change, not as dogmatic precepts true by fiat, the three classical laws of dialectics embody a holistic vision that views change as interaction among components of complete systems and sees the components themselves not as a priori entities, but as both products and inputs to the system. Thus, the law of "interpenetrating opposites" records the inextricable interdependence of components: the "transformation of quantity to quality" defends a systems-based view of change that translates incremental inputs into alterations of state, and the "negation of negation" describes the direction given to history because complex systems cannot revert exactly to previous states.Gould, S. J. (1990), p. 154.

This heuristic was also applied to the theory of punctuated equilibrium proposed by Gould and Niles Eldredge. They wrote that "history, as Hegel said, moves upward in a spiral of negations", and that "punctuated equilibria is a model for discontinuous tempos of change (in) the process of speciation and the deployment of species in geological time." They noted that "the law of transformation of quantity into quality... holds that a new quality emerges in a leap as the slow accumulation of quantitative changes, long resisted by a stable system, finally forces it rapidly from one state into another", a phenomenon described in some disciplines as a paradigm shift. Apart from the commonly cited example of water turning to steam with increased temperature, Gould and Eldredge noted another analogy in information theory, "with its jargon of equilibrium, steady state, and homeostasis maintained by negative feedback", and "extremely rapid transitions that occur with positive feedback".

Lewontin, Gould, and Eldredge were thus more interested in dialectical materialism as a heuristic than a dogmatic form of 'truth' or a statement of their politics. Nevertheless, they found a readiness for critics to "seize upon" key statements and portray punctuated equilibrium, and exercises associated with it, such as public exhibitions, as a "Marxist plot". In his account of one ad hominem absurdity, Gould states on p. 984 "I swear that I do not exaggerate" regarding the accusations of a Marxist plot.

The Communist Party's official interpretation of Marxism, dialectical materialism, fit Alexander Oparin's studies on the origins of life as 'a flow, an exchange, a dialectical unity'. This notion was re-enforced by Oparin's association with Lysenko.

In 1972, China's Cultural Revolution slowed down and scientific research restarted. Astrophysicist and cosmologist Fang Lizhi found an opportunity to read some recent astrophysics papers in western journals, and soon wrote his first paper on cosmology, "A Cosmological Solution in Scalar-tensor Theory with Mass and Blackbody Radiation", which was published on the journal ''Wu Li'' (Physics), Vol. 1, 163 (1972). This was the first modern cosmological research paper in mainland China. Fang assembled a group of young faculty members of USTC around him to conduct astrophysics research.

Philosophical evaluations

Philosopher Allen Wood argued that, in its form as an official Soviet philosophy, dialectical materialism was doomed to be superficial because "creativity or critical thinking" was impossible in an authoritarian environment. Nevertheless, he considered the basic aims and principles of dialectical materialism to be in harmony with rational scientific thought.

Economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises wrote a critique of Marxist materialism which he published as a part of his 1957 work ''Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution''. H. B. Acton described Marxism as "a philosophical farrago". Max Eastman argued that dialectical materialism lacks a psychological basis.

Leszek Kołakowski criticized the laws of dialectics in '' Main Currents of Marxism'', arguing that they consist partly of truisms with no specific Marxist content, partly of philosophical dogmas, partly of nonsense, and partly of statements that could be any of these things depending on how they are interpreted.

Of the term

Joseph Needham, an influential historian of science and a Christian who nonetheless was an adherent of dialectical materialism, suggested that a more appropriate term might be "dialectical organicism".

Marxist rejection

Though a minority position, some Marxists have called into question the adequacy of dialectical materialism as a label for Marxist philosophy. For instance, Z.A. Jordan argued that "Engels is the founder of dialectical materialism," denying that he and Marx shared a common philosophy. Though less categorical in his separation of Engels from Marx, John Holloway writes that "Engels’ understanding of the dialectic method is an extremely diluted one." According to this argument, while Marx's writings afforded human subjectivity a role in the revolutionary process, Engels's aspirations to scientific validity led to an "exclusion of subjectivity: ‘scientific’ is identified with ‘objective’." Anti-communist, formerly Marxist humanist, Leszek Kołakowski argued that dialectical materialism was not truly Marxist.

See also

;Books
* '' Fundamentals of Marxism–Leninism''
* '' Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism''

;Concepts
* Classical Marxism
* Critique of political economy
* Dialectical monism
* Marxist philosophy of nature
* Methodological naturalism
* Orthodox Marxism
* Parametric determinism
* Philosophical realism
* Philosophy in the Soviet Union

;People
* Alexander Spirkin
* Fidel Castro
* Ludovico Geymonat
* Maurice Cornforth
* Shulamith Firestone
* Teodor Oizerman

References

Further reading

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* First published in 1971, as "Главные философские направления" – The author traces the struggle between materialism and idealism on the basis of the dialectical-materialist conception of the history of philosophy. The book was in 1979 awarded the Plekhanov prize under the decision of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

{{Authority control

Dialectic

Ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Marxist theory
Materialism