Dialectical Materialism: An Examination

Chongxia You 2011-08-27 Source: Utopia

For a long time, the Sinicization of Marxism has been plagued by a philosophical difficulty. According to relevant textbooks, the philosophy of Marxism is the so-called dialectical materialism. This makes it naturally troubled by mechanical materialism and idealism (dialectics emphasizes the reaction of spirit to matter) in theory. The former is reflected in right-wing economism and productivity theory in practice (see the author\'s Economism in the International Communist Movement).

The word materialism first appeared in the Philosophical Dictionary written by Walch in Germany in 1726: People call the view that denies spiritual entities and only recognizes material entities a kind of materialism. ... In addition, in the field of physics, people often call mechanists materialists and contrast them with spiritualists, although the words mechanism and mechanists are much more common. The term dialectical materialism first came from the German worker philosopher Dietzgen (A Socialist\'s Wanderings in the Field of Philosophy) and Plekhanov of the Russian Menshevik faction. The latter said in the Preface written for the second Russian edition of Engels\' The End: The philosophy of Marx and Engels is not only a materialistic philosophy, but also a dialectical materialism.

The major doubt here is that if Marxist philosophy is really dialectical materialism, then why didn\'t Marx himself say it, but instead it was announced by the second-rate Dietzgen and Plikhanov who opposed Leninism.

In Marx\'s works, materialist philosophy has never appeared. The second point in Marx\'s Theses on Feuerbach says: Whether human thinking has objective truth is not a theoretical question, but a practical question. The last point: Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways, but the problem is to change the world. Marx distinguished between new and old materialism and classified Feuerbach\'s doctrine as old materialism: The main shortcoming of all previous materialism - including Feuerbach\'s materialism - is that things, reality, and sensibility are understood only in an objective or intuitive form, rather than as human sensual activities, as practice, and not from a subjective aspect. The foothold of the old materialism is \'civil\' society; the foothold of the new materialism is human society or socialized human beings. Obviously, Marx emphasized the practicality and subjective aspects of the new materialism.

In addition, Marx and Engels always separated Hegel\'s philosophical system from his dialectical method . The term philosophy refers to the system of speculation, while dialectics refers to the method. For example, Engels wrote in Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy: Those who attach great importance to Hegel\'s system can become quite conservative in both fields; those who regard the dialectical method as the main thing can belong to the most extreme opposition in politics and religion. It is also obvious here that Marx and Engels emphasized the revolutionary nature of dialectics .

For example, Engels\' answer to the question of the relationship between thinking and existence in The End is precisely a negation of philosophy: The most convincing refutation of these and all other philosophical nonsense is practice, that is, experiment and industry. Engels also wrote in Anti-Dühring: Thus, in all previous philosophy, the only thing that still exists independently is the doctrine of thinking and its laws - formal logic and dialectics . Everything else is relegated to the empirical science of nature and history.

In short, Marx did not announce the invention of a new philosophical system, but announced the end of all philosophical systems and the history of philosophy, which is reflected in Hegel\'s philosophical system. As Engels wrote in The End, this dialectical philosophy overturns all ideas about the ultimate absolute truth and the corresponding absolute state of mankind. It can be seen that Marx and Engels emphasized the revolutionary dialectical philosophy more in their philosophical works.

In the process of sinicizing Marxism, Mao Zedong also wisely grasped the core of dialectical philosophy in his philosophical monograph On Contradiction, avoiding the mention of materialism. On Contradiction points out: There have always been two views on the laws of the development of the universe, one is the metaphysical view, the other is the dialectical view, which formed two mutually opposing worldviews. Please note that there are no subjects such as matter, mind, reason, etc., no particles of things themselves (such as atomic theory) or other elements of substance, but only expressions of relational categories such as process, unity, contradiction, objectivity is contradiction, etc.

Unlike Marx and Engels, Mao Zedong did not regard dialectics as a mere methodology, but raised it to the level of ontology, that is, a new worldview, an ontology different from the Western philosophical tradition. And this happens to be very similar to traditional Chinese philosophy, such as Laozi\'s ontology, Dong Zhongshu\'s Yin-Yang theory, and Taoism, Qiology and Neo-Confucianism in the Song Dynasty and later, and there is a very obvious coincidence or similarity in text structure (or discourse narrative structure) between the self-explanation of dialectics and the ancient Chinese philosophical theories of existence and non-existence, Yin-Yang theory, etc. (Li Pengcheng, Mao Zedong and Chinese Culture)

In summary, it is a historical misunderstanding to think that Marxism has materialism as its philosophical foundation. Socialism is not necessarily related to materialism. On the contrary, materialism is precisely the philosophy of capitalist industrial culture. For example, the mainstream philosophy of the West today, positivism, is the handmaiden of fetishism. This point has been made very clearly by Lukacs, the father of Marxism in the West. Lukacs, inspired by the philistinism of the working class, once gave a counter-argument to the already popular materialism that matter precedes concepts, that the economic base determines the superstructure, and that existence determines consciousness, in an attempt to provide a new philosophical foundation for Marxism.

From Utopia!

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