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Introduction to Marxism
LESSON FOUR: A dialectical approach to politics
Why does philosophy matter? Because 21st century capitalism, fuelled by the profit motive, has led to an ever-spiralling wealth gap between mega-rich multi-billionaires and the rest of us, unsurpassed in modern human history. Many millions know that capitalism isn’t working for them, but the question of whether there is an alternative and if so, how it can be built, is the burning issue. Being angry at all the injustices of capitalism is not enough. Having a philosophy that can correctly interpret world events, and the stages of the class struggle, is indispensable for channelling anger into effective action.
The pitiful response to capitalism’s failures from political parties that in the past claimed to support the working class and to stand for socialism, means that the starting point for all those entering struggle today – to defend jobs and services, fight for genuinely affordable homes, oppose privatisation of health services, education and public utilities, and combat war, climate change, racism, sexism and all forms of oppression – is to understand the methods and ideas needed to build the fightback and construct mass workers’ parties that can overthrow this system.
Though never claiming to be a crystal ball that allows us to see all aspects of future processes in their manifold possible forms, dialectical materialism provides a compass that allows socialists to understand events in their interconnectedness and most importantly, to intervene in them with a programme that can link immediate struggles to an explanation of the need for a full socialist transformation of society, in their own country, and internationally.
Marxism developed the science of perspectives. Through applying the method of materialist dialectics, we can study the complex processes constantly unfolding and evolving in capitalist society and the workers’ movements everywhere, in order to intervene in these developments both with a clear political analysis and a programme that arms the working class with the ideas needed to progress the struggle at each stage.
What stage is world capitalism passing through, what character will the next recession have, how powerful is the modern working class, how can new workers’ parties be built and under what conditions might we expect big workplace struggles to break out? Marxists use dialectics to examine all of the conflicting factors in every process in order to form perspectives that enable us then to intervene most effectively in the unfolding class struggle.
Explained in a Marxist manner, the development of all past and present forms of class society would show that at certain moments in history when the mode of production comes into acute conflict with the mode of exchange, economic crises, heightened levels of class struggle and even wars and revolutionary movements can follow.
The forms of class struggle have changed through different historical epochs, but the fundamental struggle over the division of the ‘surplus value’ (the new value created by workers in excess of the wages they are paid), between exploiter and exploited, has been a continuous line from the early slave societies to the present day.
Although most scientists, excepting those very few who steadfastly hold to creationist beliefs, naturally and unconsciously think dialectically in pursuit of their research, it quickly becomes a very different question in the field of politics. For the philosophers and apologists of capitalism to openly espouse dialectical thinking in this realm would be very dangerous, for it would risk exposing that their own system has only a temporary existence.
In trying to undermine the revolutionary theory of materialist dialectics, capitalist theoreticians and philosophers cloak themselves in the straitjacket of ‘formal logic’. They tend to examine ‘form’ over and above ‘content’ and abstract the form as if it were unchanging.
Translated into politics, this limited thinking process often becomes a justification for the status quo, rejecting sudden changes, instead fostering the idea of almost imperceptible organic evolution. They are therefore taken by surprise when anger boiling under the surface is suddenly revealed in revolutionary social explosions.
However, formal logic has its place in human thought and science. It was indispensable in the 18th century, for example, in assisting doctors to learn how separate human body organs functioned and also in the spheres of mechanics and engineering. However, no aspect of life is ever ‘black or white’, and cause and effect are not polar opposites as we may assume in our daily lives, but are constantly merging, mixing and melting into each other, all the time. Trotsky’s comparison of formal logic with dialectics as being the difference between a still photograph and a continuous film [‘see the ABC of Materialist Dialectics’ in the previous lesson] remains very apt.
For instance, we often describe an election result as a mere snapshot, a moment. While it provides us with the facts on how people voted on that day, it tells us little about the myriad underlying causes of that result and less about how subsequent events may decisively negate or strengthen that outcome.
Marxism explains processes dialectically, looking at all the different, often contradictory, forces at play. For example, some workers voting for right-wing populist parties are undoubtedly driven by elements of racist prejudice and backward nationalism – but, on the other side of the coin, they are driven by deep-seated anger at the capitalist establishment and the massive gulf between rich and poor, an anger that could be harnessed and given a positive direction by new mass workers’ parties.
Similarly, former workers’ parties such as the Labour Party in Britain could be, at one and the same time, both a ‘bourgeois’ party and a workers’ party too. In the 1920s, Lenin described Labour as a “thoroughly bourgeois party” because of its reactionary pro-capitalist leadership. However, he stressed that this was just one side of the Party; through its trade union base in particular, it was also a working-class party. That’s why “so long as this party preserves its character as an alliance of all the trade union organisations of the working class”, the Communist International recommended the Communist Party should seek to affiliate to it.
In this age of sharp turns and sudden changes, the application of dialectical materialism - of Marxism - can help prepare the workers’ movement for the many stormy events that are to come, at least partially insuring us, in Trotsky’s words, with the ability of “foresight over astonishment”.
Recommended books & references
10. Leon Trotsky (1931) The Spanish Revolution in Danger. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/spain/spain01.htm (Accessed 24 February 2026).
11. Leon Trotsky (1939) The Nature of the USSR. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/09-pbopp.htm (Accessed 24 February 2026).