Eli5 what exactly is dialectical materialism
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The dialectical materialism is a metaphysical theory of 19th century invented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that is based on denying all and any metaphysics. It allegedly inherited Hegel’s dialectics, which is a very obscure theory.
There are three main ideas of the dialectical materialism.
1) There is a thing called matter and it is the only reality that exists.
2) There is something called movement of the matter.
3) Our thoughts about the matter, movement and whatever else is just a kind of the movements of a matter (see 1 and 2)
That is, the process of thinking is just a process of one matter becoming knowledgeable (whatever it means) about another matter.
If you noticed the circular inference, it is there. Also there are three laws of the Universe (three is a magic number, isn’t it?)
1) The law of the unity and conflict of opposites
2) The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes
3) The law of the negation of the negation
Sometimes the fourth law is added which is a summary of all three:
*) Every development or evolution of anything appears in a spiral fashion.
It means that there are similarities between certain phases of the development, a sort of perpetual reinventing of the wheel.
It works like this: every development is driven by a conflict. This conflict cannot be solved with the current technical level of advancement, so people accumulate knowledge, invent new technologies and finally are able to overcome the initial conflict only to develop a new one. And this goes on and on.
Unlike, for example, Ohm’s law these three laws do not describe any particular physical process, but are metaphysical. Their intent is to give the “general direction” for any natural philosophy, which included physics, social sciences and almost everything else except theology, religion and other such things.
These laws appeared to be almost useless in physics, but were used by many left-wing thinkers to justify different social theories.
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