About dialectical and historical materialism
Josef Stalin's work “ On Dialectical and Historical Materialism ” was one of the most important components of Soviet ideology. It first appeared in 1938 as part of the 4th chapter of the " History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), short course ".
Outline of the script
Stalin's writing is divided into three parts and presented in a very systematic way:
A: Basics of the Marxist dialectical method as opposed to metaphysics
- Nature is a unified whole
- Nature is incessant movement
- The development process of nature takes place in the transition from quantity to quality
- Natural phenomena have internal contradictions that are in a "struggle" with one another and cannot develop in a reformist way, but only in a revolutionary way
B: Basics of Marxist philosophical materialism as opposed to idealism
- The world is materialistic in nature
- Being is objective reality, thinking is the reflection of matter, ideas have an effect on being.
- The knowledge of natural laws is tested through practice, the laws of development of society are objective truth, analogous to biology; Socialism is science
C: The historical materialism
- What shapes "in the last instance" [Engels] society? The mode of production of material goods and not the geographical environment or the growth of the population.
- The “real” party of the proletariat controls the laws of development of production
- A schematic picture of the story:
- a. Original community / original communism
- b. slavery
- c. feudalism
- d. capitalism
- e. Socialism (there evolution instead of revolution)
expenditure
- Josef Stalin: On Dialectical and Historical Materialism , complete text and critical commentary by Iring Fetscher , Berlin 1961
- About dialectical and historical materialism on stalinwerke.de