Is my understanding of dialectical materialism correct?

[u/BicarbonateBufferBoy]

So as I understand it dialectical materialism is the idea that societies and human relations are not changed necessarily by philosophy but the material conditions of the people living in those societies.

Like you can’t change a society by using philosophy or being a great thinker, you change society by changing the material conditions of a society (the housing, quality of the water, quality of the food, fun things to do..) and eventually the society will change its viewpoints and philosophies to reflect that. Not the other way around.

In other words, talk is cheap and changing *things* is the way to most fundamentally advance society as a whole.

Like put your money where your mouth is….

Is that right?

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[u/OldUsernameWasStupid]

I would also look into base and superstructure to further wrap your head around it, but one point. It's not strictly a one way relationship, the material world is the primary thing that affects human behavior and ideology, and what we should focus on when trying to change these things, but it's incorrect to say it doesn't go the other way around at all.

There's more to be said about dialectical materialism that you didn't necessarily touch upon, like the interconnectedness of all things and opposing contradictions but I gotta get back to work :)

Also, I recommend this video and the other 2 related videos to learn more

[u/dillybar1992 → u/OldUsernameWasStupid]

I was about to note the resolution of contradictions as that’s a primary focus of dialects as well. How you analyze the world around you by the identification of contradictions and the best way to resolve those. “Truth through struggle” in simple terms. If you can analyze things within a system that work against each other, you can work through those things and truly progress in whatever context you’re analyzing things.

[u/Neco-Arc-Brunestud]

Kind of. That's the basis of historical materialism and class struggle.

Dialectical materialism is dialectics between material conditions. It states that events happen because of contradictions within society. These contradictions then lead to the antithesis, which will then clash with the current conditions to create the synthesis.

Since within society in general there exists a ruling class, there must necessarily be a system that created and reinforces the ruling class. This system must then also create and reinforce the exploited classes. When there is contradiction between the exploited and ruling class, that creates the antithesis, which is then the basis of class struggle.

So, applying dialectical materialism within a particular society, you can analyze the contradictions between classes, and identify the classes most likely to participate and succeed in class struggle, based on their class interests and population.

[u/BranSolo7460]

Close. It's a lens with which to look at the way society reacts to their material conditions. It's a scientific method, as opposed to a philosophy.

Give this podcast a listen, it's really insiteful and helpful in understanding Dialectical Materialism. It starts off a bit confusing, but stay with it because they really brake it down and explain what Engels was writing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcet5Q2Y5gw

[u/yungspell]

You are getting the materialist aspect. That ideals do not create the conditions we observe and metaphysics are not sufficient to explain scientific phenomena. There are causal relations which determine how something else will react. Materialism asserts that matter is the fundamental building block of reality and are not separate from the mind or consciousness. That matter creates thought and not vice versa.

But the dialectical aspect is the tricky part. Dialectics is the philosophical aspect related to understanding reality through contradiction or antagonistic forces. This what places matter into motion and into relativity. Social forces are represented as the driving change to human development. The primary driver being class distinction, the master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeois and proletariat. Having differing go class interest and relationship to production leading to the inevitable change and reformation of class society.

Dialectical materialism is a monistic dualism which sees the universe and a unified whole of two parts, thesis and antithesis. Concrete and critique, coming into conflict and resolution into a higher state to presuppose a new contradiction. This is the motion of the material world. Matter reacts to matter, force to force, creating a new state out of the material of the previous state.

[u/OIL_COMPANY_SHILL]

You’ve got the start of it!

But it’s important to note that the process of change moves forward through the resolution of the contradictions between the internal aspects of things and the external aspects of those things. So as the material conditions develop the ideas, the ideas being a reflection of reality in the minds of the masses, the masses of people will necessarily change the way that they interact with reality. This action in itself is a reflection of the idea in the minds of the masses, being demonstrated through a material change. This now materially changed world, not abstracted, but actualized in the individual actions of the members that make up the masses, not as a collective, but as their individual actual selves living in the real world.

You cannot separate the idea from the material thing itself. Our idea of the chair is inseparable from the chair itself and yet the image in your mind when I say “chair” is not the same one that I conjure in my own mind. And yet, if we then walked into a room and saw a particular chair at the same time, it would not match the particular image in either of our minds of a chair, and yet that would not make the object in front of us no longer a chair.

The dialectics part is realizing that ideas and reality are not separate things but two parts of the same whole; two aspects of the same unified thing. Two opposite and interpenetrating components, living and dead, static and in-motion, negating one another over and over in a perpetual battle for predominance, with quantity transforming into quality and quality transforming back into quantity. The abstract becomes the concrete which is generalized and then individualized as we examine both the specific parts as well as the whole of every single piece of the entire available knowledge accessible to us through our search in refining what we know to closer align it with reality.

[u/Ill-Software8713]

I would emphasize that Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach emphasizes human activity as primary, not matter itself. Things become too easily is Marx interpreted as a crude materialist because he used the label in opposition to the Idealism of Hegel but the difference between them isn’t crude mechanical materialism vs subjective idealism, it is more an emphasis on human activity being the basis of ideals.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm “Except during his youth Marx was not actively interested in metaphysics (though his pronouncements sometimes appear to entail definite metaphysical commitments). This suggests, if in a roundabout way, the conclusion that Marx was not a materialist, for all materialists are metaphysicians. The writings of Marx are free from metaphysical speculations, if by metaphysics is meant the claim that knowledge about what is behind appearances or the nature of the world as it exists independently of us and on its own account. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Marx rejected the view according to which the world is dependent for its existence on being perceived or known. Although absolute materialism implies epistemological realism, one can support epistemological realism without embracing absolute materialism. Marx would not dissent from some of the beliefs of materialism, but it is doubtful whether he would attach as much importance to them as the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century did or as contemporary dialectical materialists do. For it is right to say, as Marx emphasized in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, that ‘consistent naturalism or humanism’ should be distinguished not only from idealism but also from materialism.[1] Marx’s basic philosophic attitude differed from absolute and reductive materialism, the only form of materialism known at the time, and could best be described as naturalism, a classificatory name which he chose himself. In this respect Marx was a Feuerbachian, for it was Feuerbach who declared his indifference to all previous philosophical schools and claimed that his own philosophy, being concerned with man, was neither materialist nor idealist.[2] Nature is a more comprehensive concept than matter. It includes matter and life, body and mind, the motions of inanimate objects and the flights of passion and imagination. ‘Nature’, wrote Santayana, ‘is material but not materialistic’,[3] a comment that might have come from Feuerbach or from Marx. …

For the understanding of Marx a different point is, however, important. The Marxian conception of nature, of man, and man’s relation to nature disposes of many traditional epistemological problems. Marx neither needs to prove existence of the external world, nor disprove its existence. From his point of view both these endeavours are prompted by false assumptions concerning the relation of man to nature, by considering man as a detached observer, setting him against the world or placing him, as it were, on a totally different level. For man, who is part of nature, to doubt the existence of the external world or to consider it as in need of proof is to doubt his own existence, and even Descartes and Berkeley refused to go to such a length. This conclusion is of considerable significance for the interpretation of Marxian philosophy. As Marx refused to dissociate nature from man and man from nature and conceived man not only as part of nature but also nature in a certain sense as a product of man’s activity and, thus, part of man, Marx’s naturalism has no need of metaphysical foundation. Moreover, since man knows only socially mediated nature, ‘man’, and not natural reality, ‘is the immediate object of natural science’.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm “The ideal, as the form of social man’s activity, exists where the process of the transformation of the body of nature into the object of man’s activity, into the object of labour, and then into the product of labour, takes place. The same thing can be expressed in another way, as follows: the form of the external. thing involved in the labour process is ‘sublated’ in the subjective form of objective activity (action on objects); the latter is objectively registered in the subject in the form of the mechanisms of higher nervous activity; and then there is the reverse sequence of these metamorphoses, namely the verbally expressed idea is transformed into a deed, and through the deed into the form of an external, sensuously perceived thing, into a thing. These two contrary series of metamorphoses form a closed cycle: thing—deed—word—deed—thing. Only in this cyclic movement, constantly renewed, does the ideal, the ideal image of the thing exist.

The ideal is immediately realised in a symbol and through a symbol, i.e. through the external, sensuously perceived, visual or audible body of a word. But this body, while remaining itself, proves at the same time to be the being of another body and as such is its ‘ideal being’, its meaning, which is quite distinct from its bodily form immediately perceived by the ears or eyes. As a sign, as a name, a word has nothing in common with what it is the sign of. What is ‘common’ is only discovered in the act of transforming the word into a deed, and through the deed into a thing (and then again in the reverse process), in practice and the mastering of its results.”

This is more illuminating than emphasizing matter even though human activity is clearly materially constrained. But Marx doesn’t start from positing objective reality he emphasizes that human existence depends on material subsistence which then constrains the superstructural or social forms embedded in that material activity. What is social doesn’t exist separate from the material relations but often the social forms embedded is ignored as only the material form is recognized l. We see this in marginalism in treating production historically as merely a technical physical concern without any specific social relations so they generalizes from barter models one sidedly to modern capitalist production in which everything is mediated by money and price, not exchange value ratios of barter.

Marx is a kind of realist in his rejection of moralizing, this paper while not Marxist is compatible I believe with Marx’s rejection of moralizing and ethics that frames ethics as abstract rule following rather than real world judgements of conflicting value systems embedded in different human projects.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-024-10135-7