Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science

It is widely felt outside Marxist circles that, whatever the economic and political value of Marxist teaching, its incursion into the field of science is unwarranted. This is most strongly felt in relation to natural science, but it extends also to the social sciences in so far as these tend to imitate in their techniques the methods of natural science. Marxism is taken to be just another philosophic intrusion, adding nothing of importance and essentially superfluous in a region where the existing development of scientific method gives all the analysis which is necessary for the understanding of nature. Such an attitude, which has indeed been held by many who call themselves Marxists, implies at best a superficial view of Marxism and a lack of appreciation of its comprehensive nature. Much of this misunderstanding arises, particularly among those who have been trained in the English empirical tradition, from the fact that Marxist philosophy arose in part from Hegel and still retains a Hegelian terminology. The new direction which Marx gave to Hegelian philosophy and the solid material basis which he established for it are neither understood nor appreciated by those who are frightened by the phrases of "the transformation of quantity into quality" or "the negation of the negation." Those writers, on the other hand, who have attempted to remove from dialectic materialism its particular terminology generally also succeeded in removing the specific contributions which it has made to the understanding of the process of the universe and reduce it to a merely generalized application of normal scientific method. Now Marxism is not scientific method, nor is it in any sense an alternative method; it is at the same time more comprehensive and more advanced. Both the method of science as hitherto understood and the content of scientific discovery can be incorporated in the Marxist scheme. They need, however, to be criticized and extended.