Everything flows and nothing stays.

– Heraclitus

Dialectics is a method of thinking and interpreting the world of both nature and society. It is a way of looking at the universe, which sets out from the axiom that everything is in a constant state of change and flux. But not only that. Dialectics explains that change and motion involve contradiction and can only take place through contradictions. So instead of a smooth, uninterrupted line of progress, we have a line that is interrupted by sudden and explosive periods in which slow, accumulated changes (quantitative change) undergo a rapid acceleration, in which quantity is transformed into quality. Dialectics is the logic of contradiction.

The laws of dialectics were already worked out in detail by Hegel, in whose writings, however, they appear in a mystified, idealist form. It was Marx and Engels who first gave dialectics a scientific, that is to say, materialist basis. As Trotsky explained:

Hegel wrote before Darwin and before Marx. Thanks to the powerful impulse given to thought by the French Revolution, Hegel anticipated the general movement of science. But because it was only an anticipation, although by a genius, it received from Hegel an idealistic character. Hegel operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the movement of material bodies.[18]

In the writings of Hegel there are many striking examples of the law of dialectics drawn from history and nature. But Hegel’s idealism necessarily gave his dialectics a highly abstract, and arbitrary character. In order to make dialectics serve the “Absolute Idea”, Hegel was forced to impose a schema upon nature and society, in flat contradiction to the dialectical method itself, which demands that we derive the laws of a given phenomenon from a scrupulously objective study of the subject matter as Marx did in his Capital. Thus, far from being a mere regurgitation of Hegel’s idealist dialectic arbitrarily foisted on history and society as his critics often assert, Marx’s method was precisely the opposite. As Marx himself explains:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.[19]

When we first contemplate the world around us, we see an immense and amazingly complex series of phenomena, an intricate web of seemingly endless change, cause and effect, action and reaction. The motive force of scientific investigation is the desire to obtain a rational insight into this bewildering labyrinth, to understand it in order to conquer it. We look for laws that can separate the general from the particular, the accidental from the necessary, and enable us to understand the forces that give rise to the phenomena which confront us.

In the words of the English physicist and philosopher David Bohm:

In nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion, and change. However, we discover that nothing simply surges up out of nothing without having antecedents that existed before. Likewise, nothing ever disappears without a trace, in the sense that it gives rise to absolutely nothing existing at later times. This general characteristic of the world can be expressed in terms of a principle which summarises an enormous domain of different kinds of experience and which has never yet been contradicted in any observation or experiment, scientific or otherwise; namely, everything comes from other things and gives rise to other things.[20]

The fundamental proposition of dialectics is that everything is in a constant process of change, motion and development. Even when it appears to us that nothing is happening, in reality, matter is always changing. Molecules, atoms and subatomic particles are constantly changing place, always on the move. Dialectics is thus an essentially dynamic interpretation of the phenomena and processes that occur at all levels of both organic and inorganic matter.

The American physicist Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) notes:

To our eyes, our crude eyes, nothing is changing, but if we could see it a billion times magnified, we would see that from its own point of view it is always changing: molecules are leaving the surface, molecules are coming back.[21]

So fundamental is this idea to dialectics that Marx and Engels considered motion to be the most basic characteristic of matter. As in so many cases, this dialectical notion was already anticipated by Aristotle, who wrote: “Therefore… the primary and proper meaning of ‘nature’ is the essence of things which have in themselves…the principle of motion.”[22] This is not the mechanical conception of motion as something imparted to an inert mass by an external “force”, but an entirely different notion of matter as self-moving. For them, matter and motion (energy) were one and the same thing, two ways of expressing the same idea. This idea was brilliantly confirmed by Albert Einstein’s theory of the equivalence of mass and energy. This is how Engels expresses it:

Motion in the most general sense, conceived as the mode of existence, the inherent attribute, of matter, comprehends all changes and processes occurring in the universe, from mere change of place right up to thinking. The investigation of the nature of motion had as a matter of course to start from the lowest, simplest forms of this motion and to learn to grasp these before it could achieve anything in the way of explanation of the higher and more complicated forms.[23]

  1. Trotsky, L. In Defence of Marxism, p. 66.

  2. Marx, K. Capital, Vol. 1, p. 19.

  3. David Bohm, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, p. 1.

  4. R.P. Feynman, Lectures on Physics, chapter 1, p. 8.

  5. Aristotle, Metaphysics, p. 9.

  6. Engels, F. Dialectics of Nature, p. 92.