ABSTRACT
Dialectical materialism was the name given by the doctrinaires and political stalwarts of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to official Soviet philosophy. These stalwarts did not come up with the term, which was originally the brainchild of Joseph Dietzgen,1 and which was subsequently adopted by Georgi Plekhanov, the “father of Russian Marxism”. But it was Party stalwarts who made it stick by awarding it “official” status. In this way dialectical materialism was a constituent part of what was, arguably, the major political innovation of the twentieth century, official “Soviet Marxism”. The part played within Soviet Marxism by dialectical materialism has been variously described as that of a philosophy, that of an ideology or that of both. Buried within this issue is another: whether dialectical materialism was sufficiently well-formed to give adequate or appropriate intellectual support to the Soviet experiment. Unsurprisingly, this has been a much-debated question; whatever the right answer may be, the point remains that since CPSU officials (and party stalwarts elsewhere) were powerful enough to impose their definitions on a captive audience, dialectical materialism enjoyed a remarkable shelf-life during the mid-twentieth century, as indeed the concept and reality of scientific socialism did too, and for many of the same reasons. Indeed, it was dialectical materialism that gave scientific socialism its officially-sanctioned purchase and wherewithal.
