dialectical materialism

Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of science and nature, developed in the late 19th century based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. By synthesising Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectic with philosophical materialism, dialectical materialism proposes that the world is material, that all phenomena are the result of matter in motion, and that the world's evolution is the product of a dialectical process driven by internal contradiction. It posits a set of general laws—most notably the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation—that are claimed to govern nature, society, and thought. The philosophy became the official state philosophy of the Soviet Union and other Marxist–Leninist states.

The intellectual origins of dialectical materialism can be traced to 19th-century German idealism, particularly Hegel's theory of the dialectic as a logical process of development. Marx and Engels inverted Hegel's idealist system, proposing that the dialectic was not a process of the "Concept" or "Idea" but of the real, material world. While Marx never used the term "dialectical materialism", he applied some of its principles in his critique of political economy and his theory of history, historical materialism. After Marx's death, Engels extended the dialectical method to the natural sciences in works such as Anti-Dühring (1878) and Dialectics of Nature, formulating what he saw as its general laws. The Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov later formalized the system and coined the term "dialectical materialism" in the 1890s.