ABSTRACT
Historical materialism is the theory of social change developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. History is divided into a series of epochs or modes of production. Each is characterised by a distinct economy and a distinct class structure. Historical change is fuelled by the progressive expansion of the productive power of the economy (and thus the development of technology, or the forces of production) and is manifest in overt class conflict and revolution. Dialectical materialism encompasses those aspects of Marxist phi-
losophy other than the theory of history, including epistemology and ontology. It became the dogmatic official philosophy of the Soviet Union. The term was not used by Marx or Engels, with attempts to develop a coherent dialectical materialist philosophy beginning with Plekhanov and Lenin, building on Engels’s AntiDu¨hring (1947), and Dialectics of Nature (1973). Dialectical materialism is characterised by its materialism and its rejection of any form of scepticism. The material world is held to have primacy over the mental, so that the body is the precondition for consciousness. It is held that this material world is, in principle, knowable through the work of the empirical sciences. In addition, the philosophy is dialectical, in that it presents reality as in development. This is to argue, not simply that there is change in the material world, but rather that reality is characterised by the emergence of qualitatively new properties.
