INTRODUCTION TO MARXISM-LENINISM

SECTION I: The Fundamentals of Marxist Philosophy

Lesson 2 - Dialectics

TEXTS FOR DISCUSSION

1. “The great basic thought is that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which apparently stable things (no less than their mind images in our heads) go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away... For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain”. Thus, according to Marx, dialectics is “the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought.”

Frederick Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy

2. “In our times, the idea of development, of evolution, has almost completely penetrated social consciousness … Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegels’ philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in content than is the current idea of evolution. A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (“the negation of the negation”), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; “breaks in continuity”; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws—these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one”

Lenin 1913

Questions:

1. Give an example from your own experience on how political or economic change takes place. Was it a progressive or backward change?
2. What are the main principles of dialectics as outlined in the above texts?
3. Do Marxists accept Darwin’s theory of evolution? Is it scientific? How does the dialectical principle of quantitative to qualitative change occur in nature?

Click here if you would like feedback on your answers from one of our tutors.

Further and Recommended Reading

Dialectics (Marxist Internet Archive: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Terms)

previous | next