Wiktionary
n. (context philosophy English) The concept of reality in which material things are in the constant process of change brought about by the tension between conflicting or interacting forces, elements, or ideas
WordNet
n. the materialistic philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Wikipedia
Dialectical materialism (sometimes abbreviated diamat) is a philosophy of science and nature, based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and developed largely in Russia and the Soviet Union. It was inspired by dialectic and materialist philosophical traditions. The main idea of dialectical materialism lies in the concept of the evolution of the natural world and the emergence of new qualities of being at new stages of evolution. As Z. A. Jordan notes, "Engels made constant use of the metaphysical insight that the higher level of existence emerges from and has its roots in the lower; that the higher level constitutes a new order of being with its irreducible laws; and that this process of evolutionary advance is governed by laws of development which reflect basic properties of 'matter in motion as a whole'."
The formulation of the Soviet version of dialectical and historical materialism in the 1930s by Joseph Stalin and his associates (such as in Stalin's book Dialectical and Historical Materialism) became the "official" Soviet interpretation of Marxism. It was codified and popularized in text books that were required reading in the Soviet Union as well as the Eastern European countries it occupied. It was exported to China as the "official" interpretation of Marxism but has since then been widely rejected in China in the Soviet formulation.
A Soviet philosophical encyclopedia of the 1960s speaks of the evolution of complexity in nature as follows: "This whole series of forms (mechanical, physical, chemical, biological and social) is distributed according to complexity from lower to higher. This seriation expresses their mutual bonds in terms of structure and in terms of history. The general laws of the lower forms of the motion of matter keep their validity for all the higher forms but they are subject to the higher laws and do not have a prominent role. They change their activity because of changed circumstances. Laws can be general or specific, depending on their range of applicability. The specific laws fall under the special sciences and the general laws are the province of diamat." Each level of matter exists as a type of organization, in which the elements that make up a whole, or system, are marked by a specific type of interconnection.
The dialectical laws were criticized by Leszek Kołakowski for being fundamentally flawed—some of them being "truisms with no specific Marxist content", others "philosophical dogmas that cannot be proved by scientific means", yet others being just "nonsense".
Usage examples of "dialectical materialism".
It was a face that had lived through a lifetime of arguments about the absurdities of dialectical materialism and class consciousness, far from where human beings lived their lives.
But in the Soviet Union, Pauling's work on structural chemistry was denounced as incompatible with dialectical materialism and declared off-limits to Soviet chemists.
By the doctrines of dialectical materialism, simple truth as we know it is abolished as a concept.
Others had adopted the dialectical materialism of Engels and Haldane (and had duly, dialectically, split into further fractious factions).
And she took seriously the tenets of dialectical materialism presented in the schoolbooks, with their naive, romantic view of the perfectability of human nature through a mere socialist revolution.
Nevertheless it is possible to learn something intellectually of how the Communist mind works by studying, hard and sympathetically, Dialectical Materialism, the history of Communism and other aspects of Marxism-Leninism.