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Dialectical materialism is a materialist theory based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with widespread applications. As a materialist philosophy, it emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of dialectical contradictions, including within social class, labour economics, and socioeconomic interactions. Within Marxism, a contradiction is a relationship in which two forces oppose each other, leading to mutual development.
The first law of dialectics is about “the unity and conflict of opposites”. An example of this unity and conflict is the negative and positive particles that make up atoms.
The second law of dialectics is ‘quantity into quality’: that small quantitative changes, such as increasing the heat of water by one degree at a time, at a certain point result in a qualitative change when the water turns into steam.
The third law is the ‘negation of the negation’. In the history of life on Earth, photosynthetic organisms evolved, and their byproduct—molecular oxygen—was toxic to life. At this point oxygen negated life. But when life evolved bacteria that utilized oxygen for its own metabolism, oxygen stopped being a toxin for a whole branch of organisms. This was the 'negation of the negation', and an example of something turning into its opposite.
Karl Marx stated in the postface to Das Kapital, "I openly avowed myself as the pupil of that mighty thinker Hegel," acknowledging his use of Hegel's dialectical method but stating that he stood it "right side up again" by grounding it in material reality rather than Hegel's abstract ideas, so creating dialectical materialism and applying it to economics.
Dialectical materialism recognises the evolution of the natural world, and thus the emergence of new qualities of being human and of human existence. Engels used the metaphysical insight that the higher level of human existence emerges from and is rooted in the lower level of human existence. He believed that the higher level of being is a new order with irreducible laws, and that evolution is governed by laws of development, which reflect the basic properties of matter in motion.
In the 20th century, the revolutionary Marxist Vladimir Lenin proposed his own interpretation of Marxist dialectics, which took an essential place among the views and doctrines of Leninism and was later propagated by his followers such as Leon Trotsky. Since the 1930s, a Marxist-Leninist reading of dialectical materialism introduced by such leaders of nominally communist states as Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union) and Mao Zedong (Maoist China) set forth the official formulations on dialectical materialism and historical materialism, which were taught in state systems of education. In the West, different approaches towards Marxist dialectics were proposed by such authors of Western Marxism as György Lukács and Slavoj Žižek.
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