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 [dialectic's] form 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'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, 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 [death] knell 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 [this new negation] is 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'." featured in the film
Half Nelson, in which Ryan Gosling was nominated for an academy award, playing a classroom teacher expounding Engels’ dialectics. --'
Anti-Duhring
,' pg 148 International Publishers, 1966 == Vladimir Lenin's contributions ==