Dialectical materialism
Socialist Press1978 1978-12-20Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 1 →
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The Marxist theory of knowledge and world-view, which understands the universe as composed of matter in motion.
Material reality is the product of continuing movement and change brought about through the conflict and interaction-the dialectic-of opposite forces.
People's ideas too, produced by the material processes of their material brains, are only one of the infinite forms of the expression of changing matter, reflecting the social, historical and economic reality of the day.
Once the world is grasped as a process of opposed material forces in conflict and in movement, dialectical materialism offers to revolutionary Marxists Marx the tools for probing beneath the surface appearance of the class struggle and analysing the forces and laws drive it forward.
Trotsky points out:
"The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion...
"Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph, but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion." (In Defence Marxism, See also Engels Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.