The dialectical approach

"Dialectical material"(辩证的唯物主义) is a general label for Marxian philosophy, expressing the simple fact that Marxian uses the approach called "dialectics" by Hegel and is also in the centuries-old philosophic tradition known as materialism.

What Marxian philosophy derived from Hegel was that the way to understand the world was not to see it as a collection of things but as an evolving process.


Dialectics in Plato referred to the counterpoints of an argument. Dialectics in Marx referred to opposing forces in reality--internal and inherent forces whose mutual conflicts produce metamorphoses. It is the unfolding (演变) of internal forces that transform one thing into some other thing, predetermined by what they went before. Seeing only a particular phase of it as it exists empirically at a given moment is being deceived by appearances.


From Marxian perspective, an "appearance" is not simply a delusion without foundation. It is quite real, however incomplete and therefore misleading. The dialectical approach rejects uncritical acceptance of existing empirical appearances, and seeks instead the inner pattern from which these appearances derive and evolve.

Marx is a believer in abstraction, systematic analysis, and successive approximations to a reality too complex to grasp directly.

It was not material poverty that Marx saw as the basic tragedy of the workers under capitalism, but their stunted development.

Money originally had value only because it represented the real goods it could buy, but eventually goods appeared to have value only because they can be sold for money.