Marx’s Materialism: Dialectical and Historical Analysis
Marx’s Materialism
Karl Marx, born in 1818 in Trier, Rhineland, Prussia, and died in 1883, was a highly influential 19th-century philosopher in social, economic, and political fields. His main influences included:
- The Left Hegelians, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach, who introduced a materialistic perspective and the concept of alienation in the religious sphere.
- Utopian socialist ideas, which opposed conservative thinkers and addressed economic and social issues, advocating for social reforms.
These influences led Marx to create his significant work.
Meaning of Marx’s Work
Marx questioned rational explanations and the usefulness of metaphysics, viewing it as justification for speculation. He believed philosophy should be action-oriented, analyzing society to transform it. He defended workers and labor against the bourgeoisie’s concentration of capital. Marx argued that philosophy’s ultimate goal is creating a just and egalitarian society, based on materialism.
Dialectical Materialism
Marx rejected speculative and sterile metaphysics, emphasizing that the world should be changed, not just explained. He adopted Hegel’s idea of a dynamic reality full of contradictions, evolving to overcome them. However, Marx saw this world as material, driven by forces like human labor. Relations of production, the relationships between people in the production process, constitute the true reality of human existence, shaping ideologies and material relations.
Ideas are a result of material reality, not the other way around, contrasting with Hegel’s idealism. Marx explained this relationship using the concepts of infrastructure and superstructure. The infrastructure consists of the forces causing economic relations and tensions. These economic relations serve the ruling class, which creates an ideology aligned with its interests. This ideology forms the superstructure, encompassing metaphysics, religion, morals, customs, laws, and political organization.
This ideology serves to help people identify with their world and overcome disorientation, but it is also an instrument of ideological alienation and then economic alienation. This theory of material reality is the basis of historical materialism.
Historical Materialism
History is a science that objectively and rigorously studies social and cultural changes. Society advances through dialectics: the struggle of opposing classes. These classes, with conflicting interests, are in a dialectical relationship, driving societal progress. Studying this process is history, which aims to provide a unitary explanation. Drawing from Hegel’s thesis/antithesis/synthesis model, Marx stated that the interests of the ruling class (thesis) conflict with the interests of the dominated class (antithesis), generating a new situation (synthesis). Within this new situation, new contradictions and struggles will emerge.