What is dialectical materialism?
Dialectical materialism is a broad concept usually used to describe the economic and social theories of Karl Marx. It is generally interpreted to mean the history of struggle and conflict for control over material things (“the means of production” in some of Marx’s work) among humans. This struggle results in the concentration of economic and social control in the hands of the few (the “bourgeoisie”) at the expense of the many (the “proletariat”). Marx drew on the work G.W.F. Hegel, a German philosopher who developed a “dialectical” understanding of history as the confrontation or struggle of opposite ideas and forces out of which “truth” arose. Marx combined this with Feuerbach’s work on materialism to arrive at his own perspective on social order. You can find Marx’s analysis and synthesis of Hegel and Feuerbach in his “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” available in English translation in Economic and Phiolosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Prometheus, 1988). Y
