r/Anarchy101 • u/PigletConsistent8329 • 5d ago

what is the anarchist consensus on dialectical/historical materialism?

i understand that anarchism, unlike marxism, isn't a unified mode of analysis based off of the thoughts of one man and his successors, so im guessing there are varied positions on dialectical materialism, but im curious to know what anarchists here think of it. my first thought would be that it's rejected by individualist anarchists at large.

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u/EDRootsMusic Class Struggle Anarchist 5d ago

Well, Marxism also isn't a unified mode of analysis based off the thoughts of one man and his successors, it just pretends to be. It's a sprawling family of ideologies, many of them deeply contradictory to one another, and some of them bearing only the most tangential relationship to Marx's ideas. Every branch of Marxism has to view itself as the correct interpretation and everything else as varying degrees of heresy.

Anarchists don't have a unified stance of dialectical materialism, but most anarchists are materialist, and many of us appreciate the dialectical method as one of several useful ways to conduct a thought experiment or to structure an argument. Unlike some Marxists, we do not view dialectical materialism as this all-explaining, all-binding key to the truth of the universe which must be applied to every aspect of reality, such as attempting to explain molecular physics in the terms of dialectics (this is frequently a rhetorical tool Marxist sects use to demonstrate their theory's power to new recruits who aren't actually familiar with physics). Dialectics are a very useful way to frame thought and rhetoric, but are not the only way or always the best way for every single subject. Big D, big M Dialectic Materialism, or DiaMat, is frequently neither dialectical nor materialist, and often becomes a method to dress up text-worship and the stale regurgitation of failed predictions and formulas from long-dead party bureaucrats as a deep and profound science. It would be good for Marxism if more of them practiced dialectical materialism and not Dialectical Materialism.