DIALECTICAL AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM—REVISITED
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By Gaither Stewart
The old man was right, after all. Marx said it all, almost two centuries ago, but the system’s apologists buried him. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) 
Though this discussion belongs to the realm of history, it is a history that reflects on our lives today and perhaps also tomorrow. Dialectical materialism was the Weltanschauung of the Soviet Communist Party because its “method” of studying the phenomena of nature is dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis and resulting new synthesis. At the same time its conception “method” of perceiving the phenomena is materialistic. Historical materialism is the application of the dialectical method to the study of the development of society.
On this cloudy winter day in Rome, I was searching through bookcases that reject order for Lenin’s State and Revolution, when I stumbled onto a thin black and totally blank hardcover book … no title, no author, not a word. To my delight I found inside the English text of Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Joseph Stalin, published in 1940 by International Publishers, New York. I had forgotten I had it, a gift from my first wife who had written my name on the first inside page of the 48-page booklet. A sticker on the inside cover shows the used book was purchased at the famous old Saville Book Shop , on P Street NW, in Georgetown- Washington, D.C. where we lived for several months while I completed a course at Georgetown University. The same text is available on Internet under the book title.
An editor’s note in the printed book explains that Stalin’s text was included in the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union being complied at the time. That the “ignorant and evil” Stalin portrayed by western historians wrote the text which formed the political doctrine of the Soviet Union will surprise those readers who think of him as a mad, culturally ignorant tyrant.
In his biography of Stalin, Leon Trotsky contributed to this widespread image of Stalin, his rival for power after Lenin’s death in 1924: “Stalin is neither a thinker, a writer nor an orator. Stalin took possession of power not with the aid of personal qualities, but with the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not him who created the machine, but the machine that created him. … Lenin (instead) created the machine through constant association with the masses…. Stalin’s first qualification was a contemptuous attitude toward ideas.”
Trotsky. A gifted intellectual and revolutionary organizer, he nonetheless objectively and greatly facilitated the Stalin demonization, thereby making the work of anti-communist propagandists a lot easier. [CC BY-ND by Flawka]
Another excerpt from Trotsky’s biography written in the 1930s in Mexico City-Coyoacan while Stalin was consolidating his power in Moscow clarifies his position vis-a-vis Stalin for all time: “Our epoch is above all an epoch of lies….I do not think that in all of human history anything could be found even remotely resembling the gigantic factory of lies which was organized by the Kremlin under the leadership of Stalin.”
On a less personal basis, Bertrand Russell wrote in his The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism of 1920 (that is, before Stalin came to power and before his writing on the subject): “The materialistic conception of history … is due to Marx, and underlies the whole Communist philosophy…. The name does not convey at all accurately what is meant by the theory. It means that all mass-phenomena of history are determined by economic motives. (My italics) This view has no essential connection with materialism in the philosophic sense …(According to which) all apparently mental occurrences … have purely physical causes.” Russell concludes that there is no logical connection between philosophic materialism and the Marxist-Leninist materialistic conception of history.
About midway through the text, on page 21, appears what is perhaps the most significant citation of the famous quote from Marx: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
Shortly afterwards, on page 25, Stalin again cites Marx from Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: “Theory becomes a moral force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”
These two quotes set the tone of Stalin’s message but not his style of which we will see some few examples here. First I have summarized the online edition’s outline of Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. However, in this article I will not delve into Stalin on historical materialism, which concerns the conditions of the material life of society in detail and instead will concentrate on the “dialectic method” pointed forwards and upwards to revolution.
(However, it must be said in this regard that in Stalin’s views, “the chief force in the complex of conditions of the material life of society which determines the physiognomy of society, the character of the social system … is, according to historical materialism, the method of procuring the means of life necessary for human existence, the mode of production of material values …which are indispensable for the life and development of society.)
“Theorist” Joseph Stalin divides his booklet into three parts: 1. an outline of the dialectical method, in which he contrasts it with metaphysics. Nature is in perpetual motion the development of which is the transition from quantity to quality; natural phenomena possess internal contradictions as part of their (dialectical) struggle, and cannot be reformist, but rather revolutionary. 2. since the nature of the world is materialistic and our being objective reality, our thinking is a reflection of matter thus contributing ideas back to our being. Socialism is a science concerned with objective truth. 3. Historical materialism: the mode of production of material goods and NOT the geographical environment or the growth of population determines the material life of society while the party of the proletariat controls the laws of development of production. 4. Finally, Stalin shows the historical development of society concomitant with the change and development of the productive forces of the society, with men’s relations with production and men’s changing economic relations. Stalin lists five main types of relations of production in history: primitive communal, slave, feudal, capitalist and (finally, as the most advanced) socialist.
Bust of Socrates, an early inquirer into the dialectics of natural phenomena. CC BY-NC-ND by Bradley N. Weber
[dropcap]C[/dropcap]ontrary to metaphysics, dialectics, (from the Greek dialego, to discourse), does not regard nature as an accidental agglomeration of phenomena, unconnected with each other, but as whole in which things are determined by each other and can be understood only as such. Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics holds that nature is in continuous change and development, where something is always developing and something always dying away. The dialectical method considers that which is arising and developing as the most important.
And here is the essence: dialectics, contrary to metaphysics, holds that quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes which however occur rapidly, in the form of a leap from one state to another. Not circular movement, nor repetition, but as an onward and upward movement, as a transition from an old qualitative state to a new one, from the lower to the higher. Stalin cites Engels The Dialectics of Nature to make his point: “In physics … every change is a passing of quantity into quality…. For example, the temperature of water has at first no effect on its liquid state, but as the temperature of liquid water rises or falls, the moment arrives when … the water is converted in one case into steam and in the other into ice.”
Thus, Stalin writes, according to the dialectical method the process of development from the lower to the higher level does not take place harmoniously but as a disclosure of the contradictions inherent in things, as a struggle of opposite tendencies. “In its proper meaning,” Lenin writes in Philosophical Notebooks, “dialectics is the study of the contradiction within the very essence of things.
Stalin was almost always portrayed as a sinister, tyrannical figure. This cover, on LIFE magazine, a media organ owned by the rabid anti-communist Henry Luce, does not deviate from the propaganda mould.
At this point, Stalin drives the dagger into the heart of Capitalism: “… if the passing of slow quantitative changes into rapid and abrupt qualitative changes is a law of development, then it is clear that revolutions made by oppressed classes are a quite natural and inevitable phenomenon. Hence, the transition from capitalism to socialism and the liberation of the working class from the yoke of capitalism cannot be effected by slow changes, by reforms, but only by a qualitative change of the capitalist system, by revolution. Hence, in order not to err in policy, one must be a revolutionary, not a reformist.
Therefore, also, Stalin continues: “We must not cover up the contradictions of the capitalist system, but disclose and unravel them, we must not try to check the class struggle, but carry it to its conclusion ….One must pursue an uncompromising proletarian class policy, not a reformist policy of harmony of the interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, not a compromiser’s policy of ‘the growing of capitalism into socialism.’”
Hence, Stalin adds, the capitalist system can be replaced by the socialist system. Just as at one time the feudal system was replaced by the capitalist system.
So already here on page eleven of his booklet, Stalin indicates the dialectic path for depicting Capitalism as the old, full of contradictions, which is withering away, while Socialism is the new, making the qualitative leap forward to replace the old system. I remember well how we once chuckled at the Communist claim of “the withering away of Capitalism”, or, as Lenin quipped, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Today, as Capitalism staggers drunkenly from one war to the next, from one disastrous economic policy to the next, wealth is held by an ever tighter circle, social justice is on its way out, the police state rules almost worldwide, and we become aware how “onward and upward” looking were Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin.
Near the end of his booklet, Stalin includes a long quote from Engels whose comments on historical materialism as formulated in The Communist Manifesto were then used as the preface to the German edition of The Communist Manifesto: “…ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of the land all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominating and dominated classes at various stages of social evolution, … this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie) without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles.
Then, Marx himself writes in The Communist Manifesto: The proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class …by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production….The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class….
“Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.”
Senior Editor Gaither Stewart serves as The Greanville Post European correspondent. A retired journalist, his latest novel is Time of Exile (Punto Press). He’s also the author of several other books, including the Europe Trilogy, of which the first two volumes (The Trojan Spy, Lily Pad Roll) have been published by Punto Press. These are thrillers that have been compared to the best of John le Carré, focusing on the work of Western intelligence services, the stealthy strategy of tension, and the gradual encirclement of Russia, a topic of compelling relevance in our time. He makes his home in Rome, with wife Milena. Gaither can be contacted at gaithers@greanvillepost.com. His latest assignment is as Counseling Editor with the Russia Desk.
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