CHAPTER 1

The Meaning of "Dialectical Materialism"

The whole history of philosophy is the history of the struggle and the development of two
mutually opposed schools of philosophyidealism and materialism. All philosophical currents
are manifestations of these two fundamental schools.
Mao Zedong, Dialectical Materialism

Materialism and Idealism

Since the goal of this book is to explain dialectical materialism, let us begin by first examining

this concept as a whole rather than delving into the meaning of dialectical logic. As will be clear

in later chapters, dialectical logic does not have to be materialist; it is best to first understand the

specific meaning of dialectical thought for Marxism, and thus the direction of this book, rather

than simply examining dialectics in general.

Dialectical materialism is a type of materialism: the word dialectical is meant to explain

the logic by which this materialism is articulated. Just as dialectical logic does not have to be

materialist, materialism does not have to be dialectical. Hence the term dialectical materialism

is the historical short-hand for a particular variant of materialismthe specific way in which

Marx, Engels, and the revolutionary tradition they initiated is materialist.

 Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 13

According to Marxists, the history of philosophy can be reduced to the history of two

oppositional tendencies: idealism and materialism. Whereas idealism is the tendency to make

ideas and concepts primarythe belief that ideas precede mattermaterialism is the tendency to

make the material world primary and thus assert that matter precedes ideas. The paradigmatic

difference between idealism and materialism can be found in the difference between Plato and

Aristotle, the two big names of Hellenistic philosophy; in order to understand this differential

properly, it is worth examining the divergent philosophies of these two thinkers in some detail.

According to Plato, who was trying to unify a problem inherited from earlier

philosophers who also represented either idealist or materialist apprehensions of reality

(Parmenides on a idealist side, Leucippus and Democritus on the materialist side) but in a vaguer

sense, the realm of ideas was more real than the realm of matter. After all, in the world that is

presented to our senses there are multiple articulations of a single conceptual idea: there are

innumerable variations of a chair, for example, and yet we have an idea of chairness that unifies

all of these variations in our mind as particular chairs so that when we see a variation of this

chairness we know that it is a chair.

Plato thus asserted that singular concepts behind multiple material variations belonged to

a realm of ideas in which the material world participated; we could only understand the world of

material things by reflecting on the unalterable concepts that gave them sense. The realm of

ideas (which was not limited to banal concepts but that included, most importantly, ideas such as

Beauty, Justice, and the Good) was considered, by Plato, to be more real than the realm of matter

(which was structured by its participation in the realm of ideas) because he believed that what

was changeless and permanent was more real than what was determined by entropy and

impermanence.
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Here, Plato took his cue from Parmenides who had argued, against Heraclitus, that

change was an illusion because movement required the concept of voidin order for there to be

movement there needed, in the last instance, to be an empty space through which things moved

and such a concept was irrational: to assert that nothing exists is a logical contradiction. Thus,

change was treated as irrational and, due to this irrationality, less real (illusory even) than

concepts and ideas that did not, at least in Platos view of reality, change. For Plato, the material

world was a distorted reflection of the unchangeable world of ideal forms and the only way to

understand this material world was by reflecting on the realthat is, the realm of ideasrather

than being deceived by ones senses. His well known parable of the cave is meant to explain this

point.

Aristotle, however, reversed the relationship between ideas and matter. The material

world, according to Aristotle, was primary, and all unifying concepts were not independent and

metaphysically prior to material existence but the product of human reasoning. The human

being, the rational animal, engaged with matter and gave it meaning by theorizing ideas and

concepts that possessed the dimension of universality. Thus, one did not understand the meaning

of justice, for example, by attempting to discover some a priori concept of justice but by

conceptualizing justice based on observing what was commonly understood to be, in a social and

historical context, particular instances of just action.

Whereas Plato emphasized a type of contemplation where all knowledge was the memory

of eternal ideas, Aristotles contemplative life was one in which the philosopher actively made

sense of the messiness of reality by conceptualizing logical categories that allowed for such

sense to exist in the first place. To return to my vulgar example of chairs, Aristotle would argue

that there could be no such thing as a chairness that existed prior to the production, in the crude
 Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 15

and material world, of the first chair: someone decided to categorize their creation as a chair and

thus produced the idea of chairness; all other instances of the chair were not articulations of an

immaterial concept but, rather, imitations of the first human-made chair understood conceptually

as chairs only because someone made a chair to begin with.

Here we have a simple distinction between idealism and materialism: idealism argues that

ideas precede material and thus determine human, sensual life; materialism argues that the crude

material world precedes ideas and that these ideas are ultimately the product of humans thinking

in material conditions. Although it might be argued that Marxists have simplified the history of

philosophy by arguing that it can be reduced to a division between these two warring tendencies,

it is worth noting that even non-Marxist philosophers have treated the distinction between Plato

and Aristotle as foundational to the history of philosophy: it has now become something of a

cliche to riff off of Whiteheads famous quip about all of philosophy being a footnote to Plato by

adding Aristotle to the equationall of philosophy is footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. While it

may be true that such a claim smacks of eurocentrism, and there is definitely a eurocentric

manner in the way Hellenistic philosophy is articulated and mobilized by academia, we should

also be wary of any attempt to impose the categories of Europe and european on Plato, Aristotle

and the pre-Socratic Hellenistic philosopherswhich is, in fact, a eurocentric conceit, as

Martin Bernal has demonstrated in Black Athena.1 Moreover, we should recognize that Plato and

Aristotle are also ciphers of a similar contradiction that was manifesting in contexts outside of

Ancient Greece; they are useful as a paradigm for the most clear distinction between idealism

and materialism.

1
Bernals argument in Black Athena (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987) is that the
classical civilization of Ancient Greece was actually an Afroasiatic phenomenon and was only
fabricated as European, in a process that started in 1789, by eurocentric scholars who were
searching for a historical European destiny.
 Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 16

Finally, it is also worth noting that, while Aristotle was an early representative of

materialism, Plato was an early representative of dialectical logic. Indeed, the latter was a

superior dialectician whereas the former rejected dialectical thought in his conceptualization of

logical categories. If we were to trace the development of dialectical materialism back to

Hellenistic philosophy, which is only necessary in order to explain it according to what has

become the philosophical canon, we can argue that this philosophy finds a foundational

worldview in Aristotle and a logic in Plato.

Early Modern Materialism

In order to understand materialism in a modern sense, however, we need to examine the period

of early modernity when philosophers were breaking from a supernatural way of understanding

the world and asserting the doctrine of science: natural phenomena can be explained according to

natural causes. The idealist tendency that had haunted thought was incapable of making a

distinction between the natural and the supernatural because it subordinated human existence to

the primacy of supernatural categories. So while it is correct to assert that there were

philosophers and bodies of knowledge that demonstrated some level of scientific thinking in

earlier periods, these great attempts to break from superstition were still affected by mystified

categories of thoughtand these categories of thought formed the primary and common sense

way of understanding the world.

Take, for example, Thomas Aquinas great chain of being, an ideal category of existence

that is meant to justify the structure of feudalism.2 According to this eternal idea, humans were

born into a structure that was ordained before their existence and that determined whether they

2
The fact that Thomistic philosophy was partially based upon Aristotelian categories did not
make it materialiston the contrary, it was haunted by idealism and the ghost of Plato.
 Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 17

were meant to be kings, aristocrats, priests, or peasants. To the idea of the great chain of being

we can add the Confucian idea of the law of heaven and the Hindu concept of the Vedic cycle

non-European doctrines that justified a certain state of affairs.

The fact that these were ideas made up by thinkers who were taught to think that the

values of the tributary ruling classes were superior is only something that can be understood by a

materialist analysis, specifically a historical materialist analysisby the assumption that such

ideas are produced by real humans embedded in material circumstances and designed to make

sense of and justify these circumstances. Before the early modern break with this kind of

mystified thinking, then, reality was justified according to these eternal ideas that, derived from

particular material circumstances, were treated as a priori and the basis for material reality. How

does one live well according to the Thomistic or Confucian idealist view of the universe? By

reflecting on the eternal idea of the great chain of being or the law of heaven and, after

performing this reflection, participating in this form by accepting ones social station.

Hence, the materialists of the early scientific epoch were tied to a bourgeois view of

reality since the primary reason for tearing asunder the bond between the material and

ideological instanceto the point of where everything sacred was profanedwas to prove that

class was made and not found and that the feudal order possessed no logical justification. The

world could be explained according to material causes and without recourse to supernatural

explanation: physics could be explained according to physical causes, biology according to

biological causes, history and society according to historical and social causes.

This early modern variant of materialism, though overdetermined by the need to explain

the world according to the categories of a rising bourgeois order, not only produced the basis for

scientific investigation but also the materialism of Marx and Engels that would prove to be even
 Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 18

more critical. Generally speaking, however, this materialism was largely an empiricist

materialism that privileged empirical investigation, and recourse to the senses, while ignoring the

emergent class relations that this sensuous investigation reified.

Let us refer to this early modern type of materialism, though it might be overly

simplistic, as positivismwhich is still a popular contemporary materialism. Such a materialism

privileges statistical research as the basis of understanding; its logical apprehension of reality is

only formal; it lacks the ability to understand whatever lies beyond the boundaries with which it

is presented. Reality is precisely what can be found in reality, through the senses; contradictions

are illogical. John Lockes empiricism, which was raised against Renee Descartes rationalism,

is the paradigmatic example of this type of materialism.

Moreover, although the idealists were wrong in assuming that the material world was an

illusion, some of them were correct in arguing that the senses were unreliable and incapable of

providing an adequate picture of realitys totality. For if ones way of seeing the world is trained

according to their class sensibilities, as Marx and Engels would argue, then a simplistic empirical

investigation, constrained within these categories, would be incapable of producing anything but

a reiteration, and thus reification, of a reality based on these sensibilities. A cruder example: a

biologist without a microscope trying to make sense of mud, regardless of their empirical

research, will produce a rather limited understanding of this mud.

In contradistinction to positivism, then, the materialism of Marx and Engels, which took

history and society as its theoretical terrain, was something entirely different. While indebted to

the materialism of Locke and the empiricists, it approached reality in a dialectical manner and, in

doing so, attempted to provide a more complete picture of the world in which real people live,

interact, and produce societies and histories.

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Dialectical or Metaphysical Materialism

In Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou explains the entire idealism-materialism contradiction

according to four general categories: metaphysical idealism, dialectical idealism, metaphysical

materialism (which I have chosen to define as positivism to avoid the unnecessary confusion

that might result from the word metaphysical), and dialectical materialism.3 Moreover, Badiou

characterizes the distinction between the paired concepts in the following manner:

Materialist is whoever recognizes the primacy of being over thinking (being does not
need my thinking in order to be). Idealist, whoever posits the opposite. [] A
dialectician is someone who turns contradiction into the law of being; a metaphysician,
whoever does the same with the principle of identity.4

Badious above categorization and characterization should serve as an appropriate conclusion to

this chapter as well as an introduction to the following chapter; his summary definition should

allow us to delineate dialectical materialism from other forms of idealism and materialism.

First of all, the phrase the primacy of being over thinking is a traditionally

philosophical way to explain the definition of materialism put forward in this chapter (the

primacy of the material realm over the realm of ideas, and the belief that ideas come from a

material context rather than vice versa), and uses the term being instead of material so as to

ontologically clarify the meaning of materialism. Being means, simply, to bethat is to exist

and for Badiou, in this context, the world as it is and exists, as it is presented to us and as it is

presented and explained by the sciences. The materialist axiom is that the world exists prior to

thought and all thoughtall ideasare contingent upon being in the world, and derived from the

thinkers being in (that is, living and growing within) this world that precedes all thought.

3
Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 116-117.
 Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 20

Secondly, the two possible qualifications of materialism (which also qualify idealism)

provided by Badiou (metaphysical and dialectical) serve as a law of the being described above:

one can understand what it means to be based primarily on the the principle of identity (each

thing is the same with itself and different from another thing5), which denies contradiction; one

can understand what it means to be, to exist and live, based primarily on the principle of

contradiction. The latter approach serves to describe the kind of materialism with which we are

concerned: dialectical materialism, and in the following chapter we shall examine this law of

beingthat is, the logical basis of the kind of materialism initiated by Marx and Engelsand

hopefully explain the basic meaning of dialectical logic, where contradiction [is] the law of

being, in thorough and clear manner.

Historical Materialism

Before proceeding to the next chapter to examine the basics of dialectical logic, however, it

might be worth mentioning a terminological lacuna that remains from this chapters examination

of materialism: that is, the term historical materialism that is also ascribed to Marx and Engels.

Since this is a book on dialectical materialism I do not plan to discuss the related term historical

4
Ibid., 117.
5
For more information on what this principle means in the history of philosophy, specifically for
anti-dialectical materialists, see Aristotles discussion of the law of identity in Metaphysics
(Book IV, Part 4) and John Lockes discussion of the same principle in Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (Of Maxims). Here it is worth noting that Aristotle never actually
formulated this principle, though it appears unnamed in his work, but that it was named by
medieval Aristotelians in an attempt to schematize logic. By the time of John Lockes Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, however, it was accepted by the early modern materialists as
a law of being. In some ways, due to the historical controversy of this terms emergence, it
may be better to think of the positivist law of being as being the principle of non-contradiction,
which the above passage in Aristotles Metaphysics is meant to explain negatively.
 Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 21

materialism in very much detail, though the concept will haunt the following pages, but I will

say a few words about it here.

One of the reasons I want to avoid a thorough discussion on historical materialism is

because this term has become so entangled with dialectical materialism that attempts to tease

them apart have often resulted in a formulaic tradition where dialectical materialism and

historical materialism are rent asunder.6 On the other hand, there is a tendency to conflate

dialectical and historical materialism so that they become synonyms of the same concept when,

at least in my opinion, while they overlap they are not necessarily identical.

Perhaps the best way to draw a distinction between historical and dialectical materialism

is to take our cue from the classical tradition of Marxist theory where historical materialism was

treated as the name of the science initiated by Marx and Engels, and dialectical materialism was

the name of the philosophy connected to this science. Whereas the former is the short-hand for a

science of historythat is, a materialist examination of historical motionthe latter is the

ontology upon which this examination restsbeing philosophical it is meant to explain how and

why this science of history should proceed. Thus, Marx and Engels initiated a science of history

but the way in which they performed this science of history, its specific meaning, was dialectical.

Hence, their focus on the motion of history (the contradiction of class struggle) which is derived

from dialectical logic; hence the scaffolding behind Marxs scientific analysis of Capitalism

that was evident in The Grundrisse but was pushed into the background by the time Capital was

written; hence Marxs plan to write a book on his philosophical method, similar to Capital, that

was to be entitled Dialectics.7

6
Such as the famous formulation of Stalin, foundational to Soviet theory, in Dialectical and
Historical Materialism (1938) which is not altogether wrong but is rather simplistic.
7
It is also worth considering, as an aside, whether or not the removal of the scaffolding of
philosophical language was more than just (as is explicitly stated by Marx in a letter to Engels) a
 Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 22

Generally, we can understand historical materialism, being the science of history, as a

theoretical terrain that is best navigated according to the logic of dialectical materialism.

Historical materialisms scientific principle is that class struggle is the motion of history;

dialectical materialisms logical principle is the law of contradiction which is, as we shall

examine in the next chapter, the logic of motion. In this way they are bound together, but in this

way they are also separate.

Although historical and dialectical materialism are entangled and interrelated concepts,

isolating them in the above manner prevents conceptual slippage, just as long as we do not pull

them completely apart. While it is true that this classical separation between historical and

dialectical materialism has often led to the kind of bifurcation we observe in Stalins treatise, the

fact that dialectical materialism and historical materialism are often conflated, rather than treated

as different angles from which to view Marxism, has led to some terrible Marxist theories

whereby dialectical materialism is treated as if it is the queen of the sciences and all scientific

developments that appear to violate dialectical logic are thus treated as anti-materialist and

non-scientific.8 At this point in the investigation, though, we should simply treat dialectical

publishing strategy to make the work cognizable to people who would be unfamiliar with
Hegelian jargon. The disappearance of this language is also, in many ways, the attempt to move
beyond philosophy, that which interprets the world, and into science, that which changes the
world. Most importantly, it makes Capital palatable to its target audience, the proletariat, rather
than relegating to academic specialization. I cannot help but recall one of my graduate school
teachers telling us that university students had a harder time understanding Capital than workers
in a reading group she had led in India. Maybe this obsession to understand dialectics
academicallythat is, the meaning of its logicis not always helpful when it comes to struggle
considering that, if this anecdote is correct, Capital without the Hegelian jargon was better
understood by its target audience whereas a university audience, looking precisely for
philosophical insights and often lacking the concrete experience it describes, find it more
difficult.
8
According to some hack Marxists, who imagine that their understanding of dialectics places
them in a position of authority over all scientific pursuits, have concluded that modern physics
are idealist because they violate materialist dialectics. We will examine this problem in a later
chapter.
 Tension & Torsion/Moufawad-Paul 23

materialism as interrelated with and overlapping historical materialism, the former being our

object of examination and the latter being the implicit terrain in which this examination takes

place.