ABSTRACT
Yet, just as Plato’s dialogical form of dialectics had been subsumed under the dogma of scho-
lasticism, Marx’s critical notion of dialectics-its emphasises on human agency, historical
activity, and political transformation-succumbed to Dialectical Materialism (Diamat) in the
early twentieth century. Whilst Diamat took many forms, all were marked by gradations of teleo-
logical, mechanistic, and positivistic accounts of dialectics and human development. Whether
Kautsky’s vulgar evolutionism, Plekhanov’s teleological objectivism, Stalin’s dogmatic
method of the four ‘essential features’ of dialectics, or Mao’s account of contradiction
between old and new that ended in their suppression, Diamat surrendered the critical function
of dialectics to determinism (for a general account see Marcuse, 1985). Diamat held that capit-
alism’s passing away was inevitable, thus eliding contradiction and relationalism before a pro-
cedural and dogmatic epistemology, and, a teleological and mechanistic ontological world view.
An active posture to history and political struggle was altogether lost under doctrines of econ-
omic determinism. In many ways, dialectics is still yet to recover from this deformation or its
association with it.
