DIALECTICAL MATERIALIST

What Was 'Dialectical' and what was 'Materialist' about Karl Marx's View of History?

What Was 'Dialectical' and what was 'Materialist' about Karl Marx's View of History?

Marxist theory has been called, after his time, 'dialectical materialism'. This term reflects the dual claims made by Marx in his early, philosophical works: to be drawing on and extending the Hegelian dialectic, but turning it on its head. Yet can Marx accurately be viewed as both dialectical, and materialist? This essay will argue that Marx is dialectical in three specific ways: as an expressivist, a teleologist and a conflict theorist.

Dialectical materialism is the philosophical basis of Marxism as defined by later Communists and the fellow mates, which some of the times called an orthodox Marxism. As this term indicates that it is an outcome of both Ludwig Feuerbach's and Hegel's dialectics and Karl Marx's materialism in philiophical context, and is most directly traced to Marx's fellow thinker, Friedrich Engels. It applies the notion of thesis, synthesis and antithesis to give explanation of growth and maturity of human history.

The dialectic borrowed from the philosopher Hegel is opposed to the classical one, which means that the course of history is not linear: it is through crises, although crises are fertile. The negative moment of death is essential to the dialectical progression. This concept is taken up by the dialectical materialism.

But for the idealist Hegel, the term of the dialectic is the Spirit. It is the spirit which influences matter is to say, the real world. Therefore, the problem of classical dialectic is that it tends to press a logical system of reality at the risk of returning it by force in the shape of spirit.

Therefore it is the real world that influences the life and spirit that are only inalienable parts of the real world (both nature and society). This logic is dialectical materialism. The term of this dialectic is the activity of nature and humanity itself in the real world, in nature and society. The action or the movement of things is no longer in this case a mental construct. It is the study of the real world that the logic of the world is discovered.

Marx flips the Hegelianism, although it has been more explicit in the writings of Engels, and although some believe that Marx was not very interested in the work of systematization of his philosophical doctrine made by his friend. Marx dialectic method is not only fundamentally different from the Hegelian, but it is completely opposite. For Hegel, the process of thinking makes it even under the name of the idea of an independent subject. It is the demiurge (the creator of) the real, which is only its outward manifestation. For Marx, on the contrary, the ideal concept is nothing but the material by the human mind and translated it as. This is a classic situation that fully exposed the idealistic character of Hegel's dialectic, which examined the process of thinking as a supernatural and divine ...