Marx 101: Introduction to Dialectical Materialism
If you read Marxist theory, you’ve certainly come across the word dialectics. You’ve probably heard that the dialectic is important to Marx’s method, that it’s what gives Marxists their power, and that it’s key to understanding Marxist theory. But what is it exactly? Let’s take a look.
The word dialectics comes from the ancient Greeks, for whom it refers to a method of dialogue between two or more characters with opposed points-of-view, typically aiming to arrive at truth – as in Plato’s philosophical fan fiction of Socrates destroying his opponents with some facts but mostly logic. A version of dialectics as a method of arriving at truth through argumentation, often through identifying and removing contradictions, was taken up by medieval thinkers, and went on to be transformed in the classical German philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and especially Hegel. Hegel’s dialectic makes sense of things in terms of their development through the resolution of contradictions and was applied just to dialogues, real or imagined, but to the natural world and human history as well.
If we zoom out, we can see that thinking in terms of processes, interactions, relations, transformation, and the importance of examining things from different perspectives is remarkably common in human history, permeating, among others, Aztec philosophy; international anarchists from Bakunin to He-Yin Zhen; and famously Chinese thought, going all the way back to the founding texts of Confucianism and Daoism and indeed to the Book of Changes itself.
Marx never wrote a dedicated text on dialectics and later Marxists developed a variety of theories and interpretations of their own[1][2]. Even when they agree on ideas – which they often don’t – they often use the same words in different ways and focus on different things. So if you’re confused, that’s probably because this really is confusing.
We’re here to help, starting with how Marx thinks in terms of processes and relations and uses these ideas in thinking about human beings, capitalism, history, and communism. We want to be transparent that we find the details of this really tricky, and we’re not sure we fully understand everything, so in order to show you what we’re working from we have a bunch of textual evidence and comments in notes, the numbers of which will appear on screen. On your first watch, though, we recommend that you ignore them and just focus on enjoying the video.
Marx views things in the world in terms of active, interactive, and constantly developing and changing processes, with things being shaped and becoming what they are through their patterns of interaction or their relations[3][4]. Accordingly, Marx defines communism not as a static point to reach, but as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” (Marx & Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, 2010, p. 49).
It’s the sort of view that Octavia Butler expressed in Parable of the Sower, where she writes that:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
Atoms interact with each other to form molecules; cells interact with each other to form plants and animals; and human beings interact with each other to form societies.
The interactions between components generate totalities with new powers, where “power” refers to something like potential or capacity, capacity to affect and be affected by things in the world. Hydrogen and oxygen atoms interacting the right way form a water molecule with polarity, which is why water is such a good solvent. Individual cells can’t fiercely stalk prey or seek out cuddles, but the cute kitty they make up can. Your individual cells can’t understand this language, fall in love, or make friends, but the you they make up can. In this way, things interact to generate totalities with new powers that emerge out of this interaction, thus generating wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.
These totalities in turn affect or determine, enable and constrain, the components that are part of them. So in order to understand the nature of a thing’s components, we need to understand how those components are shaped by the totality they are part of. Two hydrogen atoms in a hydrogen molecule will share their electrons equally and the electron bond between them will be non-polar, but if instead they join an oxygen atom to form a water molecule, the negatively charged electrons in the bond will shift more towards the oxygen, forming a polar bond. The cute cat’s paw is able to pet and bat and naughtily scratch only so long as it’s part of a broader kitty totality. And we ourselves – whether we learn to hunt bison on the prairies or discount games on the internet, whether we listen to Beethoven or Opeth, or whether we learn to live together as free comrades or ruler and ruled – are, as we know, shaped by and through our continuous interaction with our natural, social, and historical context[5].
Does this mean that things are nothing but the totalities they’re part of, that, say, human beings are simply some blank slate upon which society, or social structure, inscribes its commands? Of course not.
Firstly, totalities don’t, on their own, determine everything about their components. For example, Marx and Engels explicitly point out that being, say, the member of a class, doesn’t mean that people “cease to be persons”, only that “their personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite class relations” (Marx & Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, 2010, p. 78)[6][7]. People can take part in a wide variety of different particular relations and institutions – capitalist corporations, states, workplaces, families, households, unions, political parties, community organisations, and so on – and each of these affect them and are affected by them in turn. Naturally, these different components of our societies differ in their degrees of influence or power, which we’ll discuss in later episodes.
Secondly, things also have certain natures, or aspects of their natures, that persist across different totalities they can be part of. Marx distinguishes between “human nature in general” and “human nature as historically modified in each epoch” (Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1990, pp. 759, footnote 51)[8] – and something can’t be historically modified if it doesn’t exist. Unlike a lot of liberal thinkers, Marx distinguishes things not according to any fixed, static, or unchanging essences that we can take as given; but according to their powers, thus distinguishing human beings by our powers of consciousness[9]. This explains why humans can, but racoons can’t, teach university courses in physics or competently oppress the working class if we vote them into office – unless, that is, we change their natures. Naturally, human powers of consciousness will always develop in interaction with – shaping and being shaped by – our human and non-human environment, and as a result vary across different historical natural, social, and historical contexts. It thus makes sense to speak of human beings across different totalities that we can become part of, but not in isolation from or outside of the various totalities that we’re one interconnected part of[10].
The powers that distinguish different things emerge through the interactions of their processual and relational parts, their moments. All such natures are thus a kind of interactive process and exist only for as long as these processes persist[11]. On this view, an individual person isn’t simply the sum of cells that are constantly being born and dying, but the evolving relation, structure, or assemblage that they reproduce through time. Relatedly, capital is understood not as a static thing, but as “a social relation of production.” (Marx & Engels, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works in Three Volumes, Volume 1, 1976, p. 160)[12] that’s reproduced through time. The historical task of communism is thus changing the ways we interact, changing the social relations within and through which we interact with each other and with nature in the production and reproduction of human life (Saito 2017) (Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, 1995) (Mészáros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, Volume 2: The Dialectic of Structure and History, 2011).
How we understand ourselves and our societies shapes our orientation, tactics, and actions. We’re taught to think in deeply undialectical ways that hold back our ability to make sense of and change the world. Often accusations that something is “undialectical” just means that they dislike what’s said, but can’t think of a real argument. But when it does means something, it usually means that someone is failing to account for the processual and interactive nature of what they’re talking about. One example would be thinking that class, colonialism, gender, imperialism, race, and so on can be understood in isolation from each other and maybe added together at the end, without understanding how they’ve interacted through history and continue to do so, each shaping the others and being shaped by them in turn. This is why class reductionism is deeply antithetical to Marx’s thought[13]. Another example would be theories of history that abstractly treats the factors of historical explanation as entirely separate and independent entities, with changes in one thing mechanically causing changes in the other. As we’ll see in later videos in this series, Marx roundly rejects theories of history that replace concrete accounts of real human beings’ acting and interacting with some abstract, mechanical set of steps for the world to walk[14].
When Marx and later Marxists write about human society and history, they often use a variety of technical concepts like Interpenetration of Opposites, Contradiction, and Negation of the Negation, that can be hard to properly pin down. This episode has looked at the relational process ontology that underlies these concepts. Our next episode will explain what they mean and how Marx uses them to understand what capitalism is and how to overcome it.
We’re Red Plateaus. We now also exist as a podcast, are on twitter, and have a discord – for info see the description. We’d like to thank our friends who helped with the script and our patrons – we love you all comrades! If you like our work and think it’s important, please send us some money on Patreon. If you have any questions about the video, things you’d like us to talk about in future, or anything else, please let us know in the comments. Long live the revolution.
[Thanks for helping with script: Anarchopac, Rad Shiba, Rosa Zampella, and Mouthyinfidel, and Paul Giladi]
Marx, K. (1990). Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1991). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1992). Karl Marx: Early Writings. London: Penguin.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1976). Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works in Three Volumes, Volume 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010). Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 4. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010). Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Mészáros, I. (1995). Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition. London: Merlin Press.
Mészáros, I. (2011). Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, Volume 2: The Dialectic of Structure and History. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Ollman, B. (1976). Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ollman, B. (2003). Dance of the Dialectics: Steps in Marx's Method. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Pannekoek, A. (1975). Pannekoek, A., 1975. Lenin as Philosopher: A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of Leninism. London: Merlin Press.
Saito, K. (2017). Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Eonomy. New York: Monthly Review Press.
[1] Before you read the first “proper” endnote, we think we should let you know that dealing with this aspect of Marx’s thought well without ending up with a video that’s several hours long is very difficult – at least if one wants, as we do, to show you some of the quotes and evidence that support our various claims. That’s why the endnotes to this are longer than the main text of the script. The way we tried to make this work was by having a main text that focuses on explaining what the ideas at work are, leaving much of the textual evidence and asides in these notes, in the hopes that people who are new to or just generally find these ideas difficult can watch the video and get the basics explained, while those who want more detail, or think they disagree with our interpretations, can find more to work with by turning to these notes. Anyway, we’ll see how this works.
[2] In fact, Marx doesn’t use the term “dialectical materialism”, but both people he agreed with and later Marxist thinkers do. For example, the tanner and philosopher Joseph Dietzgen, of whom Marx once said “Here is our philosopher” (Ollman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, 1976, p. 36) (Marx also mentions him approvingly in Capital, see (Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1990, p. 98)), uses the term, and both this and his ideas’ connection to Marx’s thought has rightly been emphasised both by Engels (Marx & Engels, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 26, 2010, p. 384) and by later thinkers, like the astronomer and theorist Anton Pannekoek (Pannekoek, 1975). In general, we would like to point out that, though our presentation differs in certain mostly minor respects, this video owes a great debt to Bertell Ollman’s excellent book on dialectics (Ollman, Dance of the Dialectics: Steps in Marx's Method, 2003), which we cannot recommend enough on this subject.
[3] The word Marx typically uses here is Wesen, which is remarkably rich in German, and can alternately be translated as “being”, “essence”, “nature”, with all the variation and complexity of each of those terms in English. In order to cover this richness, we generally speak of “nature” here, since it comes closer to Marx’s German original, and because the term “essence” in English can often be understood in a static and ahistorical sense that we think is foreign to many of Marx’s uses of the term Wesen, as when he speaks of what it is that distinguishes human beings from other animals.
[4] In accordance with this view, for the remainder of this video and the rest of this series, we use the word ‘thing’ in the broadest possible sense, which includes processes and relations of all kinds. This should not be confused with a narrower meaning sometimes attached to the word ‘thing’, where it instead refers to a discrete physical object, as when Marx insists that what capital is is not a ‘thing’ in this latter sense, but rather a social relation. When we use the word ‘thing’ here, we use it broadly to include such social relations.
[5] As Marx put it, “A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature” (Marx, Karl Marx: Early Writings, 1992, p. 390).
[6] The more complete quote is as follows: “We do not mean it to be understood from this that, for example, the rentier, the capitalist, etc., cease to be persons; but their personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite class relations, and the cleavage appears only in their opposition to another class and, for themselves, only when they go bankrupt.” (Marx & Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, 2010, p. 78). A similar point is made elsewhere in the same work, where they write that: “In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being which, under the existing relations, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which is ousted from society and forced into the sharpest contradiction to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class” (Marx & Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, 2010, p. 52). Note that communist consciousness here is said to emanate from the proletarian class, but can still arise among the members of other classes, not by virtue of any special or particular economic factors they are in as opposed to other members of their class, but through “contemplation” of the proletariat’s situation.
[7] One way of expressing this point is to say that Marx’s totalities are not necessarily totalising: the parts mutually interact with each other to generate totalities that act back upon them, but these totalities don’t determine everything about their parts. On this view, totalities are never completely totalising, but they can be more or less totalising insofar as they exercise greater or lesser control over their components. It’s in this sense, as matter of degree, that capitalism is often described as relatively “totalising” insofar as e.g. its tendencies towards centralisation and concentration tend to drive it to expand into more and more fields of human life in continuous search for profits. For more on this, see (Mészáros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, Volume 2: The Dialectic of Structure and History, 2011).
[8] It’s worth noting that he makes this point in one of his more deliciously scathing footnotes, this one on Jeremy Bentham, who proposed evaluating all actions etc. according to utility, to the extent to which they maximise happiness, without regard for how what in fact has utility for real existing humans varies across different contexts. The full quote is as follows: “The principle of utility was no discovery made by Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with wit and ingenuity in the eighteenth century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must investigate the nature of dogs. This nature is not itself deducible from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would judge all human acts, movements, relations, etc. according to the principle of utility would first have to deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as historically modified in each epoch. Bentham does not trouble himself with this. With the dryest naïveté he assumes that the modern petty bourgeois, especially the English petty bourgeois, is the normal man. Whatever is useful to this peculiar kind of normal man, and to his world, is useful in and for itself. He applies this yardstick to the past, the present and the future. The Christian religion, for example, is 'useful', 'because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law'. Art criticism is 'harmful' because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin Tupper, etc.” (Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1990, pp. 758-9, footnote 51). See also Marx’s point in The Poverty of Philosophy, where he writes that “All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature” (Marx & Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 6, 2010, p. 192). Note that Marx is very clearly not denying that there is something which might be called human nature, in the sense of something that human beings have in common and distinguishes them from other animals, because this would imply that there’s nothing that really can be modified in, or differ across, different historical epochs. See also the next note.
[9] We see this e.g. in Capital, Volume I, where Marx writes that: “We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in the wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purposes in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it. This subordination is no mere momentary act. Apart from the exertion of the working organs, a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of the work. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be.” (Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1990, p. 284). Later on in the same work, he writes that labour in this sense is “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live” (Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1990, p. 290). While you’re here, we should point out that this expresses the same idea as Marx does in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where he writes that: “Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. (…) Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species-being. Or rather, he is a conscious being, i.e. his own life is an object for him, only because he is a species-being. Only because of that is his activity free activity” (Marx, Karl Marx: Early Writings, 1992, p. 328). In Marx, this is famously tied to an explanation of human beings’ greater plasticity and historical variation compared to other species, and to his ideas of freedom. On this see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbEd_s67F6U&list=PLfqdvDnX3lbCtADtZDCg0HQB3Nime4rVS&index=2
[10] See note iv. We also see this emphasised in Marx’s talk of the metabolism between humanity and nature, which see (Saito, 2017).
[11] This view allows us to avoid the Platonist mistake of thinking that every time you have totalities that determine their components, you need some kind of independent higher-level principle to explain it. When faced with complex interactions that generate totalities with new powers – wholes which are greater than the sums of their parts – some people are tempted to posit some mystical higher principle – things like immaterial forms to explain natural regularities, spirits to explain activity, souls to explain thought and consciousness, world spirits to explain historical trends and patterns, and so on. In Western philosophy, this seems to have gained much traction with Plato (who in turn drew on Parmenides) and to partly be driven by thinking of the material world in static and passive ways and thus needing something to explain where movement and change comes from, and assuming that the only way of bringing order and organisation to something – whether everchanging matter or human beings – is by having something else standing outside of, above, and in some sense governing it. It’s easy to see how this view tends towards mysticism and conservatism.
[12] Similar points are repeated through various works, including different volumes of Capital. For example, in the Poverty of Philosophy he writes that “Money is not a thing, it is a social relation”Invalid source specified. and in the Results of the Immediate Process of Production that “Capital is not a thing, any more than money is a thing. In capital, as in money, certain specific social relations of production between people appear as relations of things to people, or else certain social relations appear as the natural properties of things in society. Without a class dependent on wages, the moment individuals confront each other as free persons, there can be no production of surplus value; without the production of surplus-value there can be no capitalist production, and hence no capital and no capitalist! Capital and wage-labour (it is thus we designate the labour of the worker who sells his own labour-power) only express two aspects of the self-same relationship.” (Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1990, pp. 1005-6). Correspondingly, he writes that “The concept of a productive worker therefore implies not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect, between the worker and the product of his work, but also a specifically social relation of production, a relation with a historical origin which stamps the worker as capital's direct means of valorization.” (Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1990, p. 644). In Wage Labor and Capital he writes that “A cotton-spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar the price of sugar... Capital, also, is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois production relation, a production relation of bourgeois society” (Marx & Engels, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works in Three Volumes, Volume 1, 1976, pp. 159-60), much like he in Volume III of Capital writes that “capital is not a thing, it is a definite social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing and gives this thing a specific social character” (Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, 1991, p. 953).
[13] Here’s just one example of how Marx gets misread as an economic determinist. In Volume III of Capital, he writes that “It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers – a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power – in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of state in each case.” (Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, 1991, p. 927). It’s understandable why one might read this in a reductionist way, i.e. as implying (even if it doesn’t actually say this) that every specific aspect of the state reflects and is merely the result of some factor or change in the material economic base. This isn’t of course what Marx is saying here. All he’s saying is that productive relations form the material base for state structures, that they shape state structures and are necessary for them to operate. However, this does not at all mean that every aspect or component of the state is mechanically caused by some component or change in the economic base. Marx himself points this out in the very next sentence, writing that “This does not prevent the same economic basis – the same in its major conditions – from displaying endless variations and gradations in its appearance, as the result of innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural conditions, racial relations, historical influences acting from outside, etc., and these can only be understood by analysing these empirically given conditions” (Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3 1991, 927-8)
[14] This why Marx and Engels in The Holy Family, complain that for Hegel (and Bauer) history “history, like truth, becomes a person apart, a metaphysical subject of which the real human individuals are merely the bearers” (Marx & Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 4, 2010, p. 79). I suspect you were expecting us to bring up Hegel here. Don’t worry, we’ll get to Hegel – in our third dialectics video on dialectical laws and logic.