Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term “dialectical materialism” first appeared in Joseph Dietzgen's 1887 essay “Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of Epistemology,” but only became a central concept within Marxism following George Plekhanov's 1891 essay commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of Hegel's death and his ensuing efforts to establish a monist view of history. Dialectical materialism became the dominant philosophy of Marxism during the Second International (1889–1917) and the official, formulaic philosophy of communist parties controlled by the USSR during Joseph Stalin's dictatorship (1929–53). As the official philosophy of Soviet communism, dialectical materialism brought together a simplistic notion of Hegel's dialectical method – one that presented change as the result of the internal struggle of opposites in which a thesis gives way to its antithesis and is then followed by a higher synthesis of the original opposites – with Marx and Engels's materialism to constitute a single, allegedly coherent science that applied to all material, biological, historical, social, and political phenomena. Its supporters claimed that it represented the extension and culmination of “historical materialism” – a term Engels used to designate a formalized philosophy of history based on Marx's 1859 sketch of his “materialist conception of history.” All change, according to dialectical materialists, resulted ... log in or subscribe to read full text