The Method of Marxism – Dialectical Materialism
Marxism like all ideas is a product of historical development. But no idea comes into existence in a vacuum but develops out of and even expresses itself in the language of ideas it is preparing to replace. On the development of Marxism, Engels explained that:
Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880
When Marx and Engels were writing, the “intellectual stock-in-trade” of Western and Ancient Greek philosophy was more widely known, at least among educated audiences. However, 150 years later the “intellectual stock-in-trade” of Marx’s time is not only unfamiliar but sounds like a foreign language. Even many words have changed their everyday meanings. Revolutionaries must struggle to understand these ideas nevertheless. But in this introduction we will leave a basic sketch of the history of philosophy until Part Four and instead introduce dialectical materialism by further developing the more familiar ideas of modern science with which we have begun.
How do we know anything?
To build up our understanding of dialectical materialism we need to ask the most basic question of them all: how do we know anything about the world around us? How do we know where to look for ‘objective explanations’? Throughout most of human history people had no idea what even counted as an ‘objective explanation’ in nature or society. They wouldn’t have recognised one if you had showed it to them!
Human understanding of the world throughout history can be described as being like a pair of scissors. One handle represents the world as it actually is; the other our understanding of it. The closer the two handles are together the more accurate our understanding.
People have always tried to fill the gap. But these attempts have never been random. The different ‘points of view’ of how to fill the gap have been the products of different social conditions just as surely as the different ‘points of view’ about wages and profits are today.
For example, primitive societies with no science and very little understanding of nature developed supernatural ideas to explain the world, such as the idea that spirits controlled the weather (see Part Four for more detail on primitive religion). With no understanding of what counted as an ‘objective explanation’ there was no way to determine the correctness of ideas, for example by testing their ability to make accurate predictions. Ideas were made ‘independent’ by being separated from the social conditions that created them and elevated to the status of objective explanations in their own right. This gave ideas an unchallengeable status as self-evident truths existing outside of history. But this put the relationship between ideas and the world upside down. People wrongly believed that the world should conform to their ideas; not their ideas conform to the world by accurately describing it.
In philosophical language we call this approach idealism. But when we talk about “idealism” in philosophy we should not confuse it with the modern everyday use of the word where we call someone an “idealist” if we think they have ‘good’ or ‘honest’ motives for their actions. This is not what we mean when we talk about idealism in philosophy. Idealism means to elevate ideas to the status of objective explanations and in the process make them ideal (hence the name) or perfect – in other words abstract (explained further in Part Three). This is the same as having a pair of scissors with two right handles – “our understanding of the world” trying to explain “our understanding of the world”.
The dead-end of idealism most often takes the form of religion. But even today, with science’s search for objective explanations falling short of the door of society, idealism still exists. For example, it doesn’t take long to find a lazy journalist who will try and explain the end of South African capitalism’s racist apartheid segregation system by saying something like, “the eventual recognition that democratic rights could and should be extended to all races led the apartheid leaders to the negotiating table by the late 1980s”.
When you think about it, statements like this explain nothing. Why did the apartheid leaders make this recognition? Why did they change their views in the late 1980s and not for example the late 1960s? These are the questions that need to be answered to explain why rather than just state it as a fact. This ‘explanation’ leaves us with the idea that the apartheid leaders went to bed one night as racists and woke-up the next morning as champions of freedom and democracy.
The unsatisfying explanation of this fictional, but typical, journalist is the result of idealism – of seeing no need to explain changes in ideas because ideas are thought to exist independently of social conditions. But a real explanation for the end of apartheid must start by examining these. In other words we must look at what had changed in society by the late 1980s. The change in attitude of the apartheid leaders was a product of the economic crisis of South Africa, the mass movement of the black working class and the collapse of the USSR leading to the end of the Cold War. These changing social conditions explain why the apartheid leaders made their “eventual recognition” and made a compromise with the ANC, ending apartheid whilst keeping its capitalist economic foundations in place.
From subjective idealism to objective science
Human understanding of the world has grown massively, especially in the past few hundred years allowing the invention of remarkable technology, medicines, industrial techniques etc. that even a generation ago would have seemed impossible. How did society break-out of the idealist dead-end and begin to understand where to look for objective explanations?
The breakthrough came first in our understanding of nature. But how did our understanding of nature change? For example, for most of human history, people woke-up in the morning and saw the sun rise just as you could see the sun rise tomorrow morning. The sun would appear to our eyes and the eyes of our ancestors as almost identical. But our ancestors did not understand what they were looking at. It looked to them as though a ball of fire was circling above their heads. They probably gave the sun a name and said it was a god.
But today, we understand that the sun is a star just like billions of others in our galaxy, it is kept burning by a process of nuclear fusion, it is more than 100 times larger than the Earth, it is over 149 million kilometres away and it is the Earth which is in orbit around the sun not the other way around.
But the sunrise still looks the same. We can’t see any of these new facts about the sun with our eyes. It is even a leap to understand that the stars we see at night are the same as the ‘ball of fire’ we see during the day. How were we able to so radically change the way we think about the sun?
This was possible with the invention of the telescope and its focus on the night sky in the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution. Careful observation of the night sky by early scientists allowed them to see things invisible to the naked eye. From observing the orbits of the planets around the sun the scientists were able to explain the ‘rising’ of the sun as the result of the Earth’s rotation. An objective explanation was developed from observation.
That this new explanation for the sunrise was more accurate could be proved by its power to make predictions. For example, based on the new theories of gravity and elliptical orbits worked-out from careful observations, Edmond Halley was able to predict the year that a particular comet would make its next appearance in the night sky. Halley’s prediction was correct and it has reappeared every 75-76 years since.
Materialism – the first foundation of Marxism
What was new about science was that it recognised that nature has an objective existence independent of any ‘points of view’ about it. Science said that only objective observations of the world could provide us with facts. This was a huge breakthrough for human understanding. Modern science established how we should understand the relationship between the world, or at least nature, and our ideas. As Karl Marx said in his second thesis on Feurbach, “the question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question”. In other words, the correctness of our ideas about the world must be tested by investigating the things we are trying to understand.
Like science, the understanding that everything in the world has an objective explanation is the first foundation of Marxism. In the philosophical language of the nineteenth century we call this idea materialism. But when talking about “materialism” in philosophy, we should not confuse the word with its modern everyday meaning, where someone is described as “materialistic” if they only worry about buying nice clothes and the latest cell phone. In philosophy, materialism is the idea that the world has an existence independent of ‘points of view’ about it.
It follows from this that all those things that at first appear to be subjective, such as thoughts and emotions, religious beliefs, morals and values, and all other ideas, in fact have an objective explanation. For example, thoughts and emotions are the products of brains. If there are no brains, there are no thoughts or emotions. The emotions experienced by humans all have evolutionary roots in the primitive mental states experienced by less complex animals. Different beliefs and ideas, such as religious beliefs or political ideas have an objective explanation in the social conditions of the society that created them. As Marx said, “conditions determine consciousness”.
Dialectical thought – the second foundation of Marxism
But there is one particular feature of the world that is so fundamental that it must be incorporated into how we think if we are to describe the world as accurately as possible. Nothing in the world is static, unmoving or fixed. Through many different processes everything is undergoing constant change. The second foundation of Marxism is dialectics, or dialectical thought, which describes the constant change in the world.
When the foundations of materialism and dialectical thought are combined we have Marxism’s method of dialectical materialism. By recognising processes of change dialectical materialism closely describes the ways in which the world develops allowing us to shrink the ‘knowledge gap’ enormously.
Dialectical materialism helps us to understand that everything that exists, from the galaxies to the thoughts of our brains are part of a spectrum of continuous development. As Trotsky pointed out, “consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of nebulae.” All of modern science demonstrates this process of continuous development in nature; Marxism shows that this process does not stop at the door of society but continues right up to the ideas that we are discussing here.