What is dialectical materialism? An introduction

After the deaths of Marx and Engels, socialists began taking up the important task of summarizing their work for popularization. In 1919, for example, Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist, argued that the essence of Marx’s project is not the correctness or incorrectness of his many theses, but rather, his dialectical method. Stressing the significance of Marx’s method Lukács notes that it is a “weapon” of the proletariat and “an instrument of war” (1919/1971, 224). Marx never wrote a text on dialectics or even used the term “dialectical materialism,” and so articulating Marx’s dialectic was left to Engels and those who followed. There are, as a result, a great many debates about what exactly dialectical materialism is. There has also been a tendency to oversimplify dialectical materialism into a mechanical and deterministic dogma. This article outlines Marx’s method, dialectical materialism, a theory and manner of understanding change. It is a theory that grasps how many of the competing social forces driving the movement of society are often hidden or mystified, and that gives us a way of uncovering them. It is a method that understands that unveiling social forces must be done in such a way as to foster class-for-self-consciousness within the working class as a revolutionary force. Toward these ends this article introduces the major components of dialectical materialism, including the negation of the negation, sublation, the unity of opposites, and the transformation of quantity into quality. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/what-is-dialectical-materialism-an-introduction/