Dialectical materialism
from 1845 The German Ideology; the phrase itself is Plekhanov's
Look for the explanation of a change in ideas in the material arrangements that changed first, rather than in the ideas themselves.
- Active
- from 1845
- Where
- Brussels, later London
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Continental procedures
What it is
Marx takes Hegel's dialectic and locates its motor in material conditions rather than in the development of thought. Ideas, institutions and values are treated as arising from the way production is organised, and changes in them are explained by changes there.
As a method rather than a doctrine it is a rule about where to look first. Confronted with a shift in how people think, ask what changed in the arrangements before asking what changed in the arguments.
How it works
Identify the change in ideas, values or institutions. Find what changed materially — in tools, in who owns what, in how work is organised — and when relative to the shift. Trace the mechanism connecting them. Check the direction: did the material change precede the ideological one, or follow it?
The last check is what makes it a method rather than an article of faith, and it is the one most often skipped by people using the framework.
The moves, in order
- Identify the change in ideas or institutions
- Identify what changed in the material arrangements
- Establish which came first
- Trace the mechanism from the material change to the ideological one
- Treat the ideological change as explained by the material one
The procedure
Proposition The shift to a safety culture at the mill followed the new saw, not the training.
- Between 2019 and 2022 the mill's reported near-misses rose fivefold and the workforce began describing itself as safety-conscious, which management attributes to the culture programme run in 2021.
- What changed materially: the breakdown saw was replaced in 2019 with an automated line, which removed the piece-rate bonus because throughput was no longer set by the operator.
- The order matters. Near-miss reporting began climbing in the last quarter of 2019, eighteen months before the culture programme, and its rate of increase did not change when the programme ran.
- The mechanism: under piece rates, stopping the line to report a hazard cost the operator money directly, and every worker on the floor could calculate the cost. Once throughput was machine-set, reporting cost nothing.
- The values did not change first and produce the behaviour. The cost of the behaviour changed, and the values followed.
Therefore The safety culture is a consequence of the payment structure the new saw made possible, which predicts that reintroducing any throughput-linked bonus would reverse it regardless of how much training is run.
The prediction in the last sentence is what makes this worth doing. An explanation in terms of changed attitudes has nothing to say about what would undo them; this one does.
What it is good for
Explaining changes in workplace culture, professional norms and public attitudes where a material change is available as a candidate. It is a corrective to the default assumption that people change their minds and then their behaviour.
Where it fails
It is very hard to falsify as practised. Where the ideological change comes first, defenders invoke lag, or relative autonomy of the superstructure, or the material change being anticipated — and with those available, no ordering of events counts against the theory. Popper's charge lands here rather more squarely than it does against Hegel.
The base itself is also underspecified. What counts as material — tools, ownership, technology, the organisation of work — has been drawn differently by every major writer in the tradition, and a base flexible enough to include whatever changed can explain anything.
And it is weakest where change is genuinely driven by argument. Some shifts really do begin with someone making a case, and a method that must find a material cause will manufacture one.
Common misconceptions
That it claims ideas do not matter or have no effects. Marx and Engels both insisted the relation runs both ways, with the material having primacy in the last instance — a formulation that has been criticised for a century as doing no work.
Where it came from
The German Ideology of 1845 and the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which contains the most compact statement. The phrase dialectical materialism is Plekhanov's, not Marx's.
What became of it
Codified into state doctrine in the Soviet Union, which did the method considerable damage, and revived in the West by scholars working to separate it from that codification.
Lasting influence
The whole tradition of social history, the sociology of knowledge, and any explanation that begins by asking who owns what.
Why it still matters
Alive as an analytical habit far beyond anyone who would accept the politics.
Put another way
Reading the ledger before reading the minutes.
Texts
Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Three pages containing the most compressed statement of the method Marx ever wrote.
Where to start
Read the 1859 preface. It takes ten minutes and is the whole framework.
The surprising bit
The method's most durable achievement is a research habit that historians of every political persuasion now use without noticing where it came from.
In their own words
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness
Who held it
Georgi Plekhanov
Connections
- Relies on
- Sublation
- Influenced
- Ideology critique
- Parallel to
- Genealogy
The verdict
An excellent first question about any change in values, and a poor last word.