“Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party,”[1] reads the first sentence of Stalin’s text, which explains the importance of his book, Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Originally published in 1938, it was a section of a chapter in a larger book entitled History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. [https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1939/x01/]
In the year of publication, Stalin was the secretary-general of the Communist Party and already he had amassed a lot of power. He will become the premier of the Soviet Union three years later. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, he exercised dictatorial rule over the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century. Among his achievements is his industrialisation of the Soviet Union, bringing it from peasant nation to the country with the 2nd highest industrial output only behind the US. During his rule, the USSR also defeated the Nazis during the second world war, and he led the Soviet Union into the nuclear age. However, he did all these through a paranoid reign of terror that led to the deaths of tens of millions including the most powerful members of the elite closest to him. [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Stalin]
So there is a lot to say about him, to praise or to condemn him. My aim is not to go into his cult of personality, his achievements or his failures, even though I’d touch upon them, but to examine his text on its own merits. Even if you hate him or hate communism, you still need to know what you hate and hence it is worthwhile to understand his intellectual output. After all, Stalin is certainly not the only one who might have started with perhaps good or noble intentions which finally led to what we with the benefit of hindsight regard as catastrophes. Can you name a few? Mao Tse Tung comes to mind but you might say that he is also a communist. How about Adolf Hitler then, or even fictitious characters like Paul Artreides from the Dune saga or almost every leader from Game of Thrones? Or on a smaller scale, any politician that have broken their promises or compromised on their values?
If so, then let Stalin’s book be seen as that kind of promise-breaking but on a grand scale. But to understand why, you first need to understand what was the vision, the dream he had placed in front of the people and why it was alluring. So alluring that he perhaps became the kind of leader seized with a grand vision for his people, who would stop at nothing to attain the vision, even if it means having to kill the very people his vision is suppose to be benefitting. Visions can be blinding, they can arouse such great passion that one does not even realise one is beguiled.
If my rhetoric has so far failed to convince you to listen on, then consider the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald who said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” [The Crack-up, Esquire Magazine, 1936] So try to manage your dissonance even as we examine Stalin’s doctrine.
This essay is a scholarly exercise based on his text, which is clearly written, with lucid arguments linking its premises though there exist gaps in his arguments and non-sequiturs. It is a short book, a pamphlet that quickly explains what the underlying philosophy of the Marxist-Leninist party is. It is a polemic, a text meant to persuade and convince its audience so you should maintain a critical eye or ear while reading or listening and after reading the book, assess whether the reality has fallen behind the promise of his ideas, and why.
The book as the title suggests, has two halves. The first half focuses on the dialectical dimensions of his philosophy while the second half extends the principles of dialectical materialism into practice in society which would then constitute its history. The book explains all the terms used such as dialectics and materialism and its distinctions towards opposing concepts – between materialism and idealism, between dialectics and metaphysics – drawing on Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Stalin is making a study of the intellectual heritage of Marxism to draw out what is important to his strain of Marxism and explain it simply to the people.
Dialectics
The term dialectics comes from the Greek dialego, or to dialogue. “In ancient times, dialectics was the act of arriving at the truth by disclosing the contradictions in the argument of an opponent and overcoming these contradictions,” writes Stalin. So you can see that dialectics is primarily conducted in the realm of thoughts and ideas but it can be extended to nature, where nature develops also according to the “interaction of opposed forces” to the contradictions in nature.
Stalin states that “in its essence, dialectics is the direct opposite of metaphysics.” Why? According to him, metaphysics regards nature as a bunch of independent isolated things and phenomena. You could see where he’s coming from, since metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality. Here, he is referring to a metaphysics which investigates the essence of things. One way to discover the essence of something is to isolate it so you can study it on its own without interference from other factors and things. You will consider it in its “state of rest,” as a fixed unchangeable entity.
He contrasts this approach with dialectics where phenomena are “organically connected with, dependent on, and determined by, each other.” He asserts that the dialectical approach is the right one, since to truly understand the phenomena, we need to understand it in relation to its surrounding phenomena. We also need to understand phenomena as something continuously changing, renewing and developing.
These are fair points, though metaphysics is of course not so naïve as to disregard connections and causation. If anything, he is extolling a process metaphysics but he makes the contrast just to elucidate his point on the dialectical method, which is that the study of phenomena needs to consider their connections, dependence, movement, change and development.
“Something is always rising and developing, and something [is] always disintegrating and dying away,” he writes about the dialectical movement. It then follows that what is important is not what seems at the moment durable but is already fading but what might at the moment seem unimportant or unenduring but is rising and developing. Attentive listeners would know that he is clearly hinting at something. What is that which at the moment seem unimportant but is rising in importance in his time?
According to Stalin, metaphysics assumes that when things grow, they quantitatively change but remain in essence the same, for e.g. a tree is much larger than its seed but both have the same essence, the essence of which its final form is the tree. Dialectics for Stalin goes from small imperceptible quantitative changes to important qualitative ones. He asserts that the qualitative change when it happens is sudden, the way water suddenly becomes ice upon cooling though the temperature change might have taken place gradually.
“The dialectical method therefore holds that the process of development should be understood not as movement in a circle, not as a simple repetition of what has already occurred,” he writes, my example being the way a seed becomes a tree that bears seeds which became trees. Instead the dialectical movement is in his words “an onward and upward movement, [...] as a development from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher.” You can see why this book is a polemic, where he plants in his readers the image of improvement. He uses examples from science to validate his views, talking of Darwinian evolution, of phase changes such as water becoming ice, and chemical reactions that produce compounds with properties that are qualitatively different from its constituent elements and everything else.
Metaphysics for Stalin has an essentialism that is absent in dialectics. “Dialectics holds that internal contradictions are inherent in all things,” he writes. “The struggle between […] opposites, […] between that which is dying away and that which is being born, between that which is disappearing and that which is developing, constitutes the internal content of the process of development.” It is not a “harmonious” process but he uses the word “struggle” to express what happens between the contradictions. As Lenin writes: “dialectics is the study of the contradiction within the very essence of things.” [my italics]
Not to lose his readers in abstraction, about a quarter way through the book, Stalin applies these dialectical principles to society. Just like phenomena and things should not be viewed to have a kind of eternal essence, social systems and social movements should likewise not be “evaluated from the standpoint of ‘eternal justice’ or some other preconceived idea.”
He continues: “Everything depends on the conditions, time and place.” He briefly examines some societal systems of the past, starting with slavery. Slavery might seem “senseless, stupid and unnatural” today but at that time when it existed, it was not only “quite understandable and natural” but even an advance from the system preceding it, the communal system. Likewise, a bourgeois society was sought after from the times of imperial rule in the USSR since it would be a step forward but he asserts that such a bourgeois republic would be a step backwards in his time compared with the communist system of the Soviet Union.
Using the dialectical method to assess historical events then reveals the progress and development, while without it, history would seem like a “jumble of accidents and an agglomeration of most absurd mistakes.” Since the world is constantly changing and developing, there is then no unchangeable social system or eternal principle that is the final aim. He extends this logic to how the capitalist system with its concepts of private property and labour exploitation which seems so inevitable today is in fact like previous systems which have been overtaken. He, in line with Marx, believes that capitalism will come to be replaced by Communism, in the same way the feudal system was displaced by the capitalist system. He will argue for this further in the second half of his essay.
Just like how water changes to ice suddenly, dialectical qualitative change is a “law of development”, i.e. it is a law of nature and hence “revolutions by the oppressed classes are a quite natural and inevitable phenomenon,” he reasons. In that way, the transition from capitalism to socialism and the liberation of the workers cannot be done through gradual changes and reforms but through revolution.
Materialism and Idealism
Having made a detour into the practical, he returns to the more philosophical aspects of the doctrine. He contrasts materialism and idealism. Idealism is the concept where ideas are what the world is made of while materialism is the concept where the world is made of material, where “the multifold phenomena of the world constitute different forms of matter in motion.”
Marx and Engels had criticised Hegel’s idealism, where Hegel conceives the world as propelled by ideas in a progress towards “absolute spirit.” According to Stalin, idealism “asserts that only our consciousness really exists, and that the material world, being, nature exists only in our consciousness” while materialism holds that “matter, nature, being, is an objective reality existing outside and independent of our consciousness; that matter is primary [...] that consciousness is secondary.” He writes: “one cannot separate thought from matter without committing a grave error.” This suggests that consciousness is simply an epiphenomena of material bodily processes, a “reflection [like the reflection in a mirror] of being.”
Engels argues that “if we are able to prove the correctness of our concept of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end of the Kantian incomprehensible ‘thing-in-itself.’” His examples are our ability to synthesise chemicals and make scientific theoretical predictions that lead to new discoveries of planets, which demonstrates that we can indeed know nature and the world, in contrast to Immanuel Kant’s reasoning that all we know are appearances and we can never know the true reality of things-in-themselves.
Materialism is important to Marxism since it means as Marx asserts: “It is not the consciousness of men that determine their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Stalin adds that materialism will mean that “the connection and interdependence of the phenomena of social life are laws of the development of society,” and history is not just driven by ideals of reason, justice and morality. It also means that such laws can be discovered, through a “science of the history of society” which can then guide the development of society in a ‘scientific’ way. His arguments regarding materialism lead him to conclude that “the source of formation of the spiritual life of society, the origin of social ideas, social theories, political views and political institutions, should not be sought for in the ideas, theories, views and political institutions themselves, but in the conditions of the material life of society, in social being, of which these ideas, theories, views, etc., are the reflection.”
Dialectical materialism explains why in certain epochs of history, societies are organised differently. According to Marx, societies pass through five different stages of societal development – primitive communal society, slave society, feudalism, capitalism and finally communism. Stalin explains that for instance under the slave system, the material conditions were different than under the feudal system. The reason for such a system then was not that it arose out of ideas and theories by the thinkers then but because it matched the material conditions of that period. It is the material conditions that drive what system comes about, that drive the “ideas, theories, political views and political institutions of that society.”
The point Stalin is making is that “the party of the proletariat must not base its activities on abstract ‘principles of human reason,’ but on the concrete conditions of the material life of society, as the determining force of social development; not on the good wishes of ‘great men,’ but on the real needs of development of the material life of society,” as he writes. According to him, utopians fail because they lacked understanding that their activities needed to match the needs of the developmental stage of their society but instead they hatch “‘ideal plans and ‘all-embracing projects’ divorced from the real life of society.” Knowing how the history of the Soviet Union and Stalinism had worked out, reading these words is rather heart-breaking since he seems to disregard his own convictions when he had the power, instead becoming the anti-thesis of what he had said with his purges, forced collectivisation of agriculture and reign of terror to wrought what he thought would be the ideal society. He recognised the dangers of utopianism but seem to have walked straight into them.
The argument in summary is: material conditions are what drive the coming into existence of new social ideas and theories. Such ideas and theories need to correctly reflect the needs of development of that society. Because they reflect the developmental needs of that society, they can mobilise the masses to overcome the “reactionary forces and to clear the way for the advanced forces of society.” This however is a non-sequitur since it presupposes that the people are able to understand such theories and then are able to motivate themselves to act on them willingly.
Historical Materialism
Having established the concept of dialectical historical materialism, Stalin now wants to explain what the “conditions of material life of society” mean and comprise. He considers the geographical environment and population factors. Important as they are, they are not the key determining conditions since society changes faster than the slow changes of geography and population density does not correlate with social development. According to Marx, the key condition is the mode of production of “material values,” which are the goods required to live, such as food and clothing. Mode of production comprises the instruments or forces of production such as machines and labour, and social relations of production.
Stalin is saying that the history of society is really the history of political economy and not the history of wars, “kings and generals”. “The history of social development is at the same time the history of the producers of values themselves, the history of the labouring masses, who are the chief force in the process of production and who carry out the production of material values necessary for the existence of society,” writes Stalin. Hence we can then study such a history to uncover the laws of production and political economy.
Changes in production happens because of changes in the instruments of production. When the instruments change, the economic relations between men correspondingly change. This correspondence of the productive forces and the relations of production sooner or later must happen because a disconnect between the two would eventually lead to “a disruption of production, […] a crisis of production.” He points to how capitalist economies face such a disconnect, since the means of production are owned by a small group, the bourgeoisie, who then use them to exploit the working class.
He maps a development of how the instruments of production have changed, from stone tools to bows and arrows, to metal tools, to bellows and pottery to machines. These changes saw correspondent changes in our modes of life from hunter to farmers to manufacturers. These changes correspond to societal development in accordance to Marx’s stages. The use of primitive tools corresponded to the stage of primitive communal society. The advent of metal tools allowed wealth accumulation in a few hands leading to slave society where the slave owners owned also the workers. This led to a class struggle. Further development of iron-work and early mechanisation such as the iron plough and the loom allowed craftsman to own their own tools. The feudal lords saw that it was in their interest to discard the slave society and move to a feudal one since the workers now displayed some initiative for their work and they can profit more with a new societal arrangement. However, exploitation was still severe leading to the next class struggle. With industrialisation came a need for better educated workers which made the shift to wage workers away from serfdom necessary.
However, capitalism creates its own contradictions since “capitalism intensifies competition” which ruined small holders. The need to cut costs meant lower wages for workers which then led to a reduction of purchasing power, which then leads to overproduction since goods produced could not be sold if the masses could not afford it. In addition, the concentration of workers in mills and factories gave the production process a social character.
“The social character of the process of production demands the social ownership of the means of production,” reasons Stalin. Because capitalist relations of production are now out of sync with the forces of production, capitalism became “pregnant with revolution, whose mission it is to replace the existing capitalist ownership of the means of production by Socialist ownership.” He extols the Soviet Union’s socialist system as having reconciled this contradiction with the social ownership of the means of production.
Marx writes: “In acquiring new productive forces, men change their mode of production […] The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.” Here, Stalin seem to run into a contradiction, since industrialisation in the Soviet Union still uses the same instruments as capitalist society, of the mill and factory, except it has shifted their ownership from private hands to the state.
Stalin next observes that the changes do not take place outside the old system but within it. It is not something deliberate but is spontaneous and unconscious. This is because firstly, people are born into an already existing system of production. Secondly, when the new instrument is invented, “men do not realise, do not understand or stop to reflect what social results these instruments will lead to, but only think of their everyday interests,” writes Stalin. Hence those who invented metal tools did not realise that it would eventually lead to the slave system, similar to how those who innovated mills and factories did not realise that it would culminate in the revolution predicted by Marx.
Stalin reiterates: “Out of the conflict between the new productive forces and the old relations of production, out of the new economic demands of society, there arise new social ideas; the new ideas organise and mobilise the masses; the masses become welded into a new political army, create a new revolutionary power, and make use of it to abolish by force the old system of relations of production, and to firmly establish the new system.” This sounds plausible, and yet it was not how the transition between the various Marxian stages of societal development had happened. Was it by revolution that slaves were abolished? Did the bourgeoisie rise up with revolutions against the feudal lords? No. However, in the transition between the previous stages, there was no massing of people the way factories and mills concentrated the workers. Marx further predicted that the proletariat would somehow organise themselves, seizing the instruments of production and centralising them in the hands of the state, to form the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The vision Marx presents is certainly a dazzling mesmerising one, though there remains some gaps in the arguments since it does not follow that the proletariat, despite their concentrations can somehow muster up the will and the organisation to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Marx had explained elsewhere [Letter to Ruge] that it is for this reason that he writes his books and articles, to stir up in the proletariat a consciousness of how exploited they are, so that they can then form a class imbued with the unity of a class-consciousness that empowers them.
The last quote Stalin makes from Marx at the end of the book is particularly poignant: “Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; […] we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.” Was the communism that Marx had envisioned simply been just too early for humankind? Has the doctrine of Marxism been permanently damaged by the excess of the communist regimes? Were the material conditions even already existent? Can the people organise themselves for revolution without an avant-garde or messianic leaders? Or does mankind set itself also impossible tasks? As I have pointed out, the tools of capitalism had not really changed from the mills and factories in their time, but perhaps the new tools we may have in the future such as Artificial Intelligence may indeed herald a new stage of development perhaps even unforeseen by Marx.
Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism is a polemic pamphlet summarising the ideology behind Marxism-Leninism. While intellectual, its quick pace and succinct reasoning lends a certain breath-taking and invigorating feeling to its readers. However, with our knowledge of the history of the Russian Revolution and how things had panned out under Stalin’s reign, the work assumes a tragedy borne of Stalin’s paranoia and broken promises.
Thank you.
All quotes from Stalin or others, unless otherwise noted, comes from Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Stalin, Joseph. Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Calcutta: Mass Publications, 1975.
[1] Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (Calcutta: Mass Publications, 1975).
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