This essay is inspired by my undergraduate thesis. It is a thorough explanation of Hegelian-Marxism, with numerous examples and without mystification, and of its tool, dialectical materialism in its practical application of political praxis interacting with the complex, non-linear and chaotic system of society. Thank you to Harun Šiljak for his invaluable support during the course of writing.
The Dawn of Humanity
At the dawn of humanity, for the first time perhaps in the entire universe, object became intertwined with subject, subject became intertwined with object. The blooming of a flower under the watchful eye of the sun, the migration of geese across the autumn sky, the explosion of a supernova born from a dying star unimaginably far away were mute affairs, sans conscious observers, lost to the vastness of the cosmos. By a chance occurrence in nature, life-force became self-aware, interpreting its own existence. This is an act of violence which forces a fundamental ontological shift in reality, centralizing it in an observing force, introducing a hostile entity, by unveiling the blindfolds of nature. No longer blind to its own becoming due to the presence of the subject in the processes of life, humans are able to assemble thoughts of boundless creativity in a virtual manner of projection, interpreting nature as an act of encapsulation in the mind and proceeding to transform it. At this precise moment, nature’s counter-attack takes place, placing a demand on the mind to reproduce the conditions for its own survival. This whiplash to prevent consciousness from reaching its constitutive limit of absolute power is the will to power of nature, trapping it within the corporeal prison of flesh, blood and bones, eternally. Allegorically taken up by (Luis Borges et al., 1941/2000), we are all in the Library of Babel, the ill-fated religious Purifiers, who traverse the vast library in search of meaning, sorting through the rubbish, limited by the size of the construction, the arduous task of sorting and the laws of physics. The mind is deadlocked to interact with nature, establishing a necessary unity rather than creating a dualism. Humans actively oversee their thoughts, unlike other machines in nature, but have to operate within the totality of the subject-object dialectic.
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Marx, 1867: paragraph 2)
The radical contingency of consciousness marked the beginning of history, chronicling the interaction between mind and material conditions in the strive for survival. The primitive arrow used to pierce the thick skin of the mammoths evolves into industrial agriculture, logistics systems, and supermarkets supplying the means of subsistence. There is no moment of rupture with nature, only a transformation of the relationship, traced step by step across history (Mau, 2023). It is the need to survive combined with the ability of consciousness to transform nature that enables humans to construct complex social, economic, and political systems, while observing necessary laws of development. The construction of the village next to the river provides a stable source of hydration, fishing and irrigation; to live in a hospitable climate is beneficial for life; to jump off a cliff is inadvisable due to the laws of gravity … to think is to survive, to survive is to think.
[Man] begins to distinguish himself from the animal the moment he begins to produce his means of subsistence, a step required by his physical organization. By producing food, man indirectly produces his material life itself. (Marx, 1845a: First Premises of Materialist Method)
Man must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, habitation, clothing and many other things. (Ibid: History: Fundamental Conditions)
Once jump-started, society unfolds in a complex manner, seemingly without an underlying order in a non-linear fashion. Nonetheless, society has rules, frameworks and regularities, but these are chaotic. The system does not proceed along orderly and predictable lines. However, the steps of world-history are reliant on the steps taken before, therefore it maintains a latent order, showing evolution and transitions on a gradient of periodically less- and more-chaotic situations (Plaza & Dandoy, 2006). In Adam Curtis’ 1992 television episode ‘To The Brink of Eternity’ in the British TV series Pandora's Box, a government agency attempts to safe-proof the United States against nuclear threat, only to find:
[The] seemingly unpredictable and irrational nature of politicians, societies, and individuals, which rendered elements of the theory difficult to apply, as well as the challenge of finding accurate, impartial, and unmodified data on which to base concise predictions. (artandpopularculture.com, 2025: Part 2. 'To The Brink of Eternity')
A market fluctuation, the election of a politician or a policy change can bring about periods of societal upheaval. Sociology, in its broad sense, is society’s self-reflective science. Humanity reflects on itself, but is often stuck in immediatism. The senses capture reality’s immediate appearance, collecting facts through empirical observation, but this remains kaleidoscopic. A fact here and a fact there does not result in understanding of the overarching dynamics of the world around us. The unobservable is of importance to Marxism, transcending causation via theoretical linkage to establish the underlying essence of phenomena (Park, 2013: last paragraph). Its role, and its methodological tool of dialectical materialism is to narrativize a coherent story out of disparate facts, in a strive to understand the latent order that underlies the actions of humanity. At the same time, this science is the least understood of all, and blame for this lies not only with the naivety of bourgeois frameworks, but Marxists themselves. Marxists are often known for their polemics in which they accuse other leftists of ‘undialectical’ thought, or whatever other insults we like to throw at each other due to minutiae, or indeed serious, differences. However, there is a lot of vagueness, obfuscation and mystification around this concept, despite its centrality to Marxist analysis.
Dialectics is one that I’ve never understood, actually — I’ve just never understood what the word means. Marx doesn’t use it, incidentally, it’s used by Engels. And if anybody can tell me what it is, I’ll be happy. I mean, I’ve read all kinds of things which talk about dialectics — I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is. It seems to mean something about complexity, or alternative positions, or change, or something. I don’t know. (Chomsky et al., 2003: 228)
The faculty of reasoning does not possess magical characteristics, no matter the framework used. There are categories of thought which help scaffold reasoning, i.e. the scientific method. Simplification, heuristics, probabilities, statistics and approximation fall in its ranks; so does induction, deduction, hypotheses, logic and axioms. None of them guarantee correctness of reasoning by themselves. Historians fall prey to the Great Man Theory when they see Napoleon Bonaparte riding atop a majestic horse conquering continents; biologists search for the fixed essence of our species and believe that systems are contoured around this as a simple cause-and-effect; the liberal economist sees the market with its supply-and-demand as eternal; the mainstream sociologist misses the forest for the trees; the theologian sees the spirit of God, reaching down to earth through institutionalized religion, as guiding humanity. It is not that these approaches are outright wrong per-se, offering no insight, but they are one-sided. This is the allegory of the blind men and the elephant, each touching only a part of the animal, without understanding its whole. Marxism, then, is the estimation of the totality of the elephant, since it attempts to take into account all factors influencing the course of world-history as its starting point of reasoning.
It is precisely dialectics that constitutes the most important form of thinking for present-day natural science, for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another. (Engels, 1878: paragraph 6)
Despite it being an advanced form of thinking, there is nothing special about dialectical materialism as a tool for reasoning. It is merely a tool which helps make judgments about the world. There are Marxists who confidently proclaim that the path to socialist revolution is through reform, while others protest loudly and stress revolution. Some Marxists swear by Deng Xiaoping, and believe China to be still constructing socialism, yet others condemn him as a capitalist roader and idolize Mao Zedong. One Marxist notes the degeneration of the 1917 October Revolution took place because of material conditions, the failure of the German Revolution, while another points out the subjective factor inherent in the repressive vanguardism of Vladimir Lenin, yet a third believes the USSR was socialist until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. The reasoning of its practitioner can be flawed or correct. The form thus precedes the content. The form is filled with content by the practitioner.
Marxism is not a body of doctrines derived from a scientific analysis of nature, society, and human thought; it is simply a method without any essential, determinate content and would be valid without its specific conclusions. (Novack, 1978: 109)
What novelty does it offer to the thinker? What categories does it birth? What crutches does it bequeath upon the revolutionary? The scaffolding that Marxism forces on the practitioner extends the scope of analysis to such a degree that it considers all social phenomena an ephemeral manifestation of history. Nothing is fixed. Everything is in motion. Dialectical. No longer is it the kings, priests, economists, biological urges or philosopher-kings which drive history, but a widened scope which encompasses a totality.
[I]t apprehends the totality and does not take the abstract units into which that totality is divided in capitalist society as given. (Rose, 2025: 8)
Importantly, the categories of form, content, (intensive and extensive) quantity, quality, contradiction, nodal points, over- and under-determination (Althusser, 1962), the base-superstructure model of subjective and objective moments, and the trifecta of dialectical laws (Engels, 1883) merely supplant, but do not replace, hitherto existing methods of thinking. These are blanket thinking-aids which have to be combined, and then applied to the analysis of the direction of social phenomena, used as the vocabulary with which to articulate freedom for humanity. Mary Manning, a 21-year old individual, refuses to handle grapefruits from South Africa in an Irish supermarket in 1984, sparking a movement which forces the State to ban apartheid products. A nodal point has been hit, and like lightning, the simmering quantitative attitudes of the masses is transducted into boiled-over qualitative change, a culminatory point of history hitherto. North Korea proclaims itself socialist in name, yet practises capitalist dynasticism, because the form and content differs. The brutal Zionist oppression of the Palestinian people reaches a zenith on October 7th 2023 as an objective moment of resistance, and like a smoldering cigarette left in a forest causes a wildfire only because the flora and fauna around is flammable in its potentiality, solidarity groups in the West are thrust in a leadership position of a worldwide movement as the subjective moment takes root. In the 1919 German Revolution, the Social-Democratic forces crush a Communist uprising, employing the fascist Freikorps paramilitary, because the plurality of societal processes, their ties to the bourgeoisie, reformist attitude and the balance of class forces over-determined this course of action, while under-determining another. So too the balance of class forces in a Nation-State, the political leanings of the leadership in a trade union, the prediction of alliances between imperialist powers and so on and so forth can be understood with their help. They propel the practitioner through a series of reminders towards non-dogmatic, holistic and scientific thinking about society.
[W]hen presented as guidelines for a philosophy of change, not as dogmatic precepts true by fiat, the three classical laws of dialectics embody a holistic vision that views change as interaction among components of complete systems and sees the components themselves not as a priori entities, but as both products and inputs to the system. The law of "[unity and struggles of opposites]" records the inextricable interdependence of components: the "transformation of quantity to quality" defends a systems-based view of change that translates incremental inputs into alterations of state, and the "negation of negation" describes the direction given to history because complex systems cannot revert exactly to previous states. (Gould, 1987: 9. Nurturing Nature)
Due to its starting point being holistic, it is able to transcend the ‘antimonies of bourgeois thought’ (Lukács, 1923). That is to say, it avoids one-sidedness, contradictory lines of thinking and dogmatic worldviews, such as the split of subject and object, freedom and necessity, value and fact, form and content (Feenberg, 1981: 90). Biological essentialism, liberal economy and mainstream sociology stresses necessity and the object, the theologian and Great Man Theory puts the onus on freedom and the subject, indicating a bi-polar split. The vantage point of the bourgeoisie, standing at the top of society, looks down at the vegetating masses and conceives of them as mere things, while in its self-understanding, assures itself that its noble ideas rule the world (Molyneux, 1995). It is either a voluntaristic-idealist God-like belief, or a mechanical materialist rigidity (Ibid). Instead of this narrow conception of society, the part-in-totality, the totality itself has to be taken under examination. With this approach, understanding of the world explodes into a universalist vantage point. Marxist, as such, understands that society’s various phenomena are contingent structures arising from history, gone from one moment to the next, in eternal transformation.
[T]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations. (Marx, 1845b: thesis VI)
With the advent of humanity, came the need for survival, food, water, shelter, forcing individuals to cooperate to reproduce the conditions for the survival of the species against the adversity of the environmental factors. The nature of homo sapiens thus became social, working together to perfect construction tools, hunting methods and agricultural practices, in a process of mutual entrenchment (Atilla, 1938). The division of sexual labour between man and woman, the primal factor of procreation, is thus distilled into the division of productive labour, specialization and inter-reliance where each member of society is reliant on the other in various ways (Ibid). This gives birth to social relations amongst members of humankind. Social relations are the assemblage of the forces of production, the means of production and the mode of production, interlinked chains of dependence in the process of production, comprising the totality of an individual’s relationship with the external world. Feudalism, capitalism and socialism are examples of social relations. Social relations are passed down from history. Upon our Thrownness into the world, we are forced to enter the pre-existing social relations in order to survive.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (Marx, 1852: paragraph 2)
Insofar as everything in the universe is material, this is a ‘materialist’ philosophy. Its starting point is how things actually are in the world. It is the activity of human beings themselves.
The chief defect of all previous materialism … is that the object, actuality, sensibility, is grasped only in the form of the object of intuition but not as human sense-activity, not as praxis, not subjectively. Hence, in opposition to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism which of course does not know actual sense-activity as such. (Marx in Rose, 2025: 7)
Masses of people, through their labour combined with the organization of such labour, create social relations. If humanity ceased to exist, so would social relations. Social relations arise subjectively, but become objective forces in what is called the process of ‘reification’ (Lukacs, 1923: I: The Phenomenon of Reification), when they appear as a naturalized thing-apart from our conscious, everyday act of their creation. Dislodgement of a social relation is difficult after they come into existence due to the deadlocked, interdependent relationship they form with our need for survival intertwined with their laws of their motion. The capitalist must steal as much surplus value of labour as possible, or face being out-competed and wrecked into bankruptcy, and the worker must sell their own labour to the capitalist, or face poverty, but for both the exploited and exploiting classes the relationship to nature has become mediated by the laws of capitalism, which no one really controls. The world stands rudderless, and humanity is subjected to a force it can no longer tame, and thus modern bourgeois society is like ‘the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’ (Marx and Engels, 1848: Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians). In a globalized world, billions of people engage in the rituals of a social relation, and the individual is powerless; but the individual, at the same time, brings the social relation to life, as a collective activity, and thus has power over it, if organized against it in a collective manner.
History is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man. (Lukács, 1923: paragraph 3)
This collapses dualistic distinctions between materialism and idealism, subject and object, external world and internal consciousness. The subject-object of history is identical. Part-and-parcel of an overall progression, each moment of history conforms to the cognitive actions of billions across the world. The Hegelian World-Spirit, as such, becomes humanity itself, brought down to earth, specifically, the toiling masses who form the basis of the capitalist social relation, the working-class, and thus can form a socialist social relation, best expressed by the epithet ‘philosophers have merely interpreted the world, the point, however, is to change it’ (Marx, 1845b: thesis XI). This is, in its essence, an inspiring thought, as it stresses agency rather than subjugation.
Man himself is the objective foundation of the historical dialectic and the subject-object lying at its roots, and as such he is decisively involved in the dialectical process. (Lukács, 1923: paragraph 12)
Thought and existence are not identical in the sense that they ‘correspond’ to each other, or ‘reflect’ each other, that they ‘run parallel’ to each other or ‘coincide’ with each other (all expressions that conceal a rigid duality). Their identity is that they are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process. (Lukács, 1923: paragraph 46)
The subjectively-arising objective social relations can be overthrown, for instance, by increasing class consciousness through this being successively mediated by the necessary steps of agitation, within the organic totality of society.
Reification doesn’t fall away in one moment but can be challenged only through a series of ‘mediations’, or collective leaps in consciousness and organisation. (Nineham, 2023)
This is the birth of political praxis, the analysis of moving from point A to point B, in breaking down reification. The process for doing so can be approximated by a subjective articulation of the objective world, although this will remain imperfect. The political praxis of social revolution is a drawn-out process which seeks to create an organized collective subjectivity, within the confines of the material world around us, seizing political power in student unions, trade unions, parliaments as well as dual-power structures and within the sphere of intellectual-cultural production to prepare for paradigm shift.
In other words, ‘objective reality’ is ultimate not because scientific practice uncovers inviolable objective structures but because—no matter how extensive or developed our knowledge may be— these objective structures are always subjectively articulated and contingent theories of objective structures and, consequently, repeatedly displaced by actual objective reality as a power independent of the intellect and which cannot be wholly grasped by particular, individual man.
(Gandakin, 2025)
Base and Superstructure
Marxists often speak of the base-superstructure model. This seems to bring back a dualism, chasm or opposition between matter and mind. It is often manifested in writings which seek to establish either a ‘reciprocal’, ‘reflexive’, ‘two-way’, a ‘primary factor’ or ‘determination in the last instance’ link between the economics and the non-economics. It leaves room to bring back antinomies of bourgeois thought, specifically that of a dominant factor in the development of society, rather than dissolving it in the category of totality.
[P]olitical, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything else only has a passive effect. (Engels, 1894: paragraph 5)
This base-superstructure model is an abstraction, a schema, a model, which seizes a moment of the totality of society to elucidate relevant factors influencing the unfolding of history. It is true in a generalized sense. The generalisation helps scaffold reasoning, presenting the following factors for consideration.
The ‘base’ of social relations that define the means, forces and mode of production as well as infrastructure, geography and atmospheric conditions.
The ‘superstructure’ which includes political, legal and cultural institutions.
The necessary addition to the model, which is peoples’ subjective attitudes, or simply put, consciousness as such (Reich et al., 1933). As per (Ibid), an in-depth examination of how society, specifically the family structure, shapes people's subjective attitudes, emotions and worldviews, was produced. This should be explicitly stated so as to not be overlooked.
These moments are really-existing and separated, but sublated into a higher moment of unity. This means that, in social reality, these factors are collapsed into each other, cross-mediating outcomes through one another. It is consciousness which determines history, bringing these factors alive through self-awareness, hallucinated into existence as a delirium. Nation-States, bureaucracies, and parliaments, and the capitalist social relations which course through them, are illusory, yet real; paper tigers which have entrenched themselves in the world.
Consciousness and thinking, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the products of a material, bodily organ, the brain. (Engels, 1886: paragraph 9)
Consciousness, in turn, is imprinted with the base-superstructure factors. Consciousness is everywhere within the base-superstructure model, jolting it into existence through the vitalistic life-force of desiring-production (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009). Society’s development is an organic totality.
The presuppositions with which we begin are not arbitrary presuppositions; they are not dogmas; they are real presuppositions from which one can abstract only in fancy. They are the actual individuals, their actions and the material conditions of their lives, those already existing as well as those produced by action. (Marx, 1845a: First Premises of Materialist Method)
Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of any other production that he carries on. All circumstances, therefore, which affect man, the subject of production, more or less modify all his functions and activities, and therefore too his functions and activities as the creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this respect it can in fact be shown that all human relations and functions, however and in whatever form they may appear, influence material production and have a more or less decisive influence on it. (Marx, 1969: 288)
The entirety of Karl Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte illustrates this in practice (Marx, 1852). In this brilliant essay, it is clear that masses of people make their own history through their conscious acts. Yet, these conscious acts are influenced by pre-existing material conditions which limit choices. During this process, certain classes are more rigidly-determined than others, in descending order from the bourgeois, petty-bourgeois and the working-class. Free will is 'dragged towards' being influenced by a mix of factors as a center of gravity. As such, the development of society is neither determined nor indetermined, rather, it is relatively-determined. Objective situations produce subjective questions, as a dialectical cycle, moments of choice, allowing us to steer the course of history.
What is a ‘moment’? A situation whose duration may be longer or shorter, but which is distinguished from the process that leads up to it in that it forces together the essential tendencies of that process, and demands that a decision be taken over the future direction of the process. That is to say the tendencies reach a sort of zenith, and depending on how the situation concerned is handled, the process takes on a different direction after the 'moment'. (Lukács, 2002: 51)
The dialectical interaction of subject and object in the historical process consists in the fact that the subjective moment is, self-evidently as I stress again and again, a product, a moment of the objective process. It works back on the process, in certain historical situations, whose emergence is called forth by the objective process (e.g. HCC, p. 313), and gives it direction. (Lukács, 2002: 56)
Once the action is completed, the subjective moment slots back into the sequence of objective moments. (Lukács, 2002: 56)
Reality is grasped through human praxis, participation in nature and the society built on it alike, and in this way it is observed to be dialectical. It makes no sense to speak of reality without a subjective observer. If there is no one to grasp reality, then there is no one to transform it towards social revolution. The subjective is part of the objective as the objective cannot exist divorced from the subjective within an organic totality. Marxism was birthed, and valid, from the birth of Manu, the progenitor of humanity within Hinduism, the patient zero of self-awareness on earth, but it was only elucidated in the 19th century as a coherent system of philosophy. It seems foolish to protest this line of thinking, because one cannot argue from nihil for a system of thought, it must be uncovered from the standpoint of the living, not the dead.
[Korsch’s] position was that knowledge of nature, no less than knowledge of history, came within the scope of human praxis and was therefore no less dialectical. Seen in this way, there seemed to him to be no ground for rejection of the dialectics of nature. [...] Within the framework of his epistemological relativism, nature was so radically historicized as to make it impossible to speak of natural processes as dialectical independently of interaction with human processes. Nature could only be known in and through human praxis. Thus, only human thought, only human historical activity, could be dialectical. (Korsch as summarized by Sheehan, 2017: Chapter 5, Marxism and Philosophy)
There is an element of contingency that is inserted into history through this method. Events are probabilistic. However, if history was probabilistic in itself, it would set up the individual as a powerless entity in the face of chaotic probability-generating structures, as per (Lad, 1983). Instead, human agency has a role in shaping the probabilities, affirming the contingent nature of history.
To the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life [...] in the last analysis, all economic circumstances (either its own personal circumstances or the general conditions of society)-do not reach that which they seek but are fused in one general media in a common resultant, by this fact one cannot conclude that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to produce the resultant, and is contained in it. (Engels, 1890: paragraphs 6 and 7)
The organic totality is as follows, showing why the factors cannot take primacy, but are merged together:
[T]he economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. – are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘[determination in the] last instance’ never comes. (Althusser, 1962)
Here is another example which shows that it is the activity of human beings themselves that define social relations rather than a God-like primary factor:
There is a tendency for old patterns of working and living to crystallise into relatively inflexible structures. They become ‘sanctified’ with the development of systems of religion, magic, taboos, rituals and so on. At first these systems are carried on even in ‘bad times’, when the short term needs or desires of the individual might lead to actions which ruin the long term interests of the social collectivity. But, by this very fact, they discourage innovation and move to new forms of production, which would be of long-term as well as short-term benefit. (Harman, 1986: Social production)
Rather than cleanly following the demands of economic determination, the human is often struggling against them. Crystallized, ossified and outdated forms of thinking also determine the course of history, even if only as the mode of resistance to historical progress and the changes in production it calls forward. This tension underlines our existence as a society, factors outside of our control weigh down on us, propelling us to act, resist or give in, transform or be transformed. Primitive societies are haunted by the premonitional emergence of the State-Form, insofar as their existence is set up to anticipate and ward-off such a hierarchical subjugation; in its very acting of anticipation and warding-off, by its mere existence as the negation thereof, when at its constitutive limit it is pushed over the threshold, it calls forth its own capture by the State-Form (Sibertin-Blanc, 2016: 56-60). The failure of countless uprisings against feudalism, immortalized in the song of Wir sind des Geyers schwarzer Haufen chronicling the 1524-1526 German Peasants' War and revolutionary leader Florian Gray, delayed epoch transition. Smoldering within modern bourgeois society are the ashes of potentiality, for the social revolution, patiently waiting to be lit into a raging fire of tremendous force, towards actuality. When will circumstances allow this to take place? Humans are limited by their circumstances. This makes the human a ‘suffering animal’. The self-awareness of the mind is anchored to material conditions. The subject is always in tension with the object, despite being one and the same.
As a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. (Marx, 1844)
In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx examines the base-superstructure factors, but does so with reference to the actuality of the historical event (Marx, 1852). It is a concretized analysis, guided by an understanding of the base-superstructure model. Thus, we can state that the base-superstructure model is:
A symbolic generalization—a heuristic device that guides analysis and practice. (Gandakin, 2025)
Or:
[T]o be quite precise, a spatial metaphor: the metaphor of a topography (topique). Like every metaphor, this metaphor suggests something, makes some thing visible. (Althusser, 1971: Infrastructure and Superstructure)
The greatest disadvantage of this representation of the structure of every society by the spatial metaphor of an edifice, is obviously the fact that it is metaphorical: i.e. it remains descriptive. (Ibid)
Thus, this is merely a generalized representation of reality. The charge could be levelled that in this case, it says nothing about the world by itself. This charge is to be accepted. It has merely stated that the base-superstructure variables work together to produce history. The practitioner would use this tool for political praxis, namely towards the aim of social revolution, imbuing it with a teleological spirit.
What drives social change? There is a question in dialectical materialism, which is the puzzle of which of the variables contribute in what quantities to social change. This is the ‘degree-influence’ issue of dialectical materialism. Given that these variables can be attributed diverging weights of importance, it is no surprise that dialectical materialism itself has different versions. Does social change arise from changes in material conditions, with consciousness being a mere auto-reflection thereof, do ideas directly overrule material conditions, or perhaps is it a balanced mix of both… the viewpoint chosen is relevant when discussing issues within history, such as the causes of the degeneration of the 1917 October Revolution. The practitioner must be wary of restoring the antimonies of bourgeois thought within a nominally anti-bourgeois framework. As stated before, the view of history professed by dialectical materialism is not absolutely deterministic nor absolutely indeterministic, but correctly applied, lies somewhere in between in relative determinism. The conceptualization of divergent applications of dialectical materialism leads to their categorization in the sense of ‘determinist’, ‘relative-determinist’ and ‘indeterminist’ as per a modification of (Molyneux, 1995).
‘Vulgar Marxism’, which is ‘determinist’.
Western-Marxism, which is ‘relative-determinist’
Voluntaristic-Idealistic ‘indeterminist’
The ‘vulgar Marxist’ tendency stresses the importance of economic forces as a determining factor in history. This sees human behaviour strictly defined by the laws of a given mode of production. This is automatism in which consciousness has no role, conceiving of social revolution as a mechanistic process, without conscious political organizing. This deterministically teleological approach strips the method of its radical contingency, that is to say, the actions of humans in creating a variety of social structures, and limits it to the a non-contingent process of history from ‘feudalism’ to ‘capitalism’ and then to ‘socialism’ arising due to changes in the forces and means of production and its collision with the mode of production. This treats the base as a one-to-one motivator, an ‘auto-reflection’ of human behaviour sans deviation, as if it were a definitive process of nature without conscious participation. The object dominates the subject.
The most important example of the determinist trend was the version of Marxism developed by Karl Kautsky which dominated German Social Democracy and the Second International in the period leading up to the First World War. In Kautsky’s view the economic laws of capitalism guaranteed the growth in numbers and consciousness of the working class to the point where power would ‘automatically’ fall into its hands. All that was required of the socialist movement was that it build up its organisations, strengthen its vote and avoid adventures while patiently waiting for economic development to do its work. (Ibid)
Other philosophical consequences include the dogmatism of Lysenko, who proclaimed that the crops are of the same class, therefore they will refuse to fight for resources, even if planted close together. Similarly, the Soviet Union’s increasing dictatorial-bureaucratic path can be considered a result of the assumptions inherent within the deterministic tendency. If the outcome of each historical event is dictated by the process of a natural science, then it must follow that contending policies within the Party can be categorized neatly into a revolutionary and a counter-revolutionary box, thus dismissing the importance of the democratic development of a collectivist society. Or, the belief in the complete alignment between an individual's class background and their class consciousness rendered revolutionary socialists powerless against Adolf Hitler's rise to power due to down-playing the subjective, psychological and emotional-libidinal element inherent in social change (Reich et al., 1933).
On the flip-side, the ‘Voluntaristic-Idealistic’ tendency stresses the importance of consciousness in bringing about social change. This down-plays the importance of structural factors, such as the economy, infrastructure, the limits of nature and the position of the world-wide social revolution. The subject dominates the object. This is indeterministic. John Molyneux writes:
Maoism proclaimed not only the possibility of industrialising China by will power in the disastrous Great Leap Forward but even the direct transition to complete communism in China alone without any regard for objective material circumstances. (Ibid)
Marxism is a practical philosophy. It is possible, however unlikely, that from one day to the next, the entire world changes its consciousness and becomes Communist for no reason! However, these abstractions do not interest the political revolutionary, who seeks to live in the real world, and who understands that the social machines of capitalist society under- or over-determinate the development of certain types of consciousness through the plurality of societal processes (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009).
The synthesis which transcends the ‘vulgar Marxism’ and the ‘Voluntaristic-Idealistic’ tendency is Western-Marxism. It reflects a balanced outlook which centers human agency within its interaction with material conditions, in which neither subject nor object dominates. This is the synthesis which professes that society is a relatively-determined system, into which revolutionary socialists can intervene through political praxis. Vladimir Lenin writes:
Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it. (Lenin, 1914)
These above-described generalizations are presented as the bi-polar extreme weighing adjustments done on a probabilistic basis to the relevant base-superstructure variables, followed by its synthesis, the golden mean. The divergent approaches are on a gradient. The exact weighing will vary according to what social phenomenon is under examination and when it is taking place.
[There are] moments that are consciously made, that is to say brought into being by the subjective side (by the conscious acting subject - grouping of forces, surprise attacks, etc.). And on the other hand, they point most markedly to purely subjective moments (decisiveness, moral superiority, etc.). Insurrection as an art is, then, one moment of the revolutionary process where the subjective moment has a decisive predominance. (Lukács, 2002: 58)
In the 1920s, as debates were raging in the Communist International about the increasingly mechanical approach of Soviet Marxist philosophers, (Lukács, 2002: 51-53) enthusiastically argued against ascribing the outcome of each phenomena to objective conditions. In one case Rudas László, a philosophical opponent, insisted that the failure of the 1919 Hungarian Revolution was down to the counter-revolutionary actions of the army, which would have been impossible to surmount (Ibid). (Ibid) responds, pointing out the obvious flaw, that the Communist Party could have influenced the events by undertaking agitation within the ranks of the army. When the mind falls prey to dogmatic thinking, a common occurrence, it should correct itself. Debates of this nature about dialectical materialism are best expressed by (Lenin in Dalbey, 2008)’s stick metaphor, which should not be bent too far in either direction so as to break, but remain balanced when it is in use to uncover the world. The types of sticks discussed are merely versions of the form. They need to be filled with content. It is none other than the practitioner who undertakes this task.
Political Praxis
By April 1917, Russia was in a state of political upheaval. The February Revolution had just overthrown Tsar Nicholas II, ending centuries of autocratic rule. Power had fallen into the hands of the Provisional Government, composed of liberals and reformist socialists. This government was in the midst of collapse, having lost legitimacy, and de facto power fell into the Congress of Soviets, composed of workers’ councils. This was a ‘dual-power’ situation, with these administrative bodies vying to take advantage of the power vacuum. On the 3rd of April 1917, Vladimir Lenin, socialist revolutionary, arrived in Russia and stepped off the train in Petrograd and declared the immediacy of the socialist revolution to the gathered crowd of workers.
Long live the socialist revolution! (Lenin in Zinoviev, 1924: A triumph)
His mind has, within a moment, penetrated through the act of thinking, masses of social nodes, evaluating using the help of dialectical materialist base-superstructure model, categories and trifecta of laws. He issues a ‘prediction’ which is at the same time a ‘call to action’, i.e. an ‘hyperstition’ (Land & Carstens, 2009). This is a political judgement based on informed intuition. Behind informed intuition, lies heuristics, and behind heuristics, lies a probabilistic calculation of political success based on empirical observation. The mood of the masses, the state of the trade unions, membership of the party, the balance of class forces, the power of the State and geo-political factors … the list continues on and on, like lightning which reaches from the skies to the ground and branches out while in the air, he has understood, in an approximate fashion, the essence of society’s direction in its eternal movement.
The human mind, undoubtedly, is limited, but nevertheless, it can craft judgements based on a limited sampling of variables within the present moment in history, considering push-and-pull factors for a hypothesized event. This is like the dirac delta function which is used to sample a mathematical function at a given value. Whether by a supercomputer, or an individual, the abstracted tool of dialectical materialism is instantiated in the real-world, filling the form with content.
There is a temporal standpoint. It is only from the present moment that contingent possibilities are visible.
Consequently, there is a "historic moment" only when the present is ordered in terms of the future, on the condition that the future makes its way into the present not in an immediate manner (unmittelbar; the case of a utopia), but having been mediated (vermittelt) by the past - that is, by an already accomplished action. (Kojève, 1980: 136-137)
The system of social reality as relatively-deterministic is revealed within this observation of temporal dynamics. There is a dialectical relationship between historical necessity and human agency: the past structures the possibilities of the present, while the present, in turn, conditions the trajectory of the future. Within the present, stand bifurcation points, possible divergences in world-history, which can be activated by conscious political intervention. The socialist revolutionary merely intervenes through the lens of class struggle to provide clarification to the working-class on human social activity, but importantly, they cannot ‘build’ a revolution safe by relying on already-ongoing processes.
A dialectical materialist approach focuses on identifying bifurcation points, paths of divergence in world-history, and directing the efforts of communists to push singular events that can ‘tap into’ mass consciousness. In this, history reveals its relatively deterministic nature, neither determined nor indeterministic, but spawning bifurcation points as time marches. (Molnárfi, 2025)
Thus, the efforts of communists should be focused on possible moments of class struggle [...] to ‘help’ them into existence. (Ibid)
Dialectical materialism thus cannot predict the future far-ahead, but day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, a series of interventions are produced that influence the present moment. Society is a complex, non-linear and chaotic system. Human foresight in society is foggy, but not blind. On the one hand, there is a predictability horizon which is the visible bifurcation points, visible as the intensifying energies of the masses to the keen-eyed revolutionary, which can be acted upon within the time-limited maximal Lyapunov exponent. On the other hand, there are general patterns which can be examined to help with political praxis, even making predictions far-ahead.
Dialectical materialism is best suited to access whatever little foresight humans have on the development of society. In the midst of chaos, the practitioner acts as a ‘chaos controller’, and relies on short-term bifurcation points, the state of the masses at the present and how to intervene in the ongoing class struggle, and directs the creation of a bifurcation point in the long-term, which is the social revolution. Not only is the practitioner of dialectical materialism a scientist at this given moment, they are also part of the experiment. Theory and practice are united in praxis. This is an attempt to locate a point of rupture within the social totality. Due to the subject-object collapse, it is the momentum of history which is under scrutiny, not its static position. James Connolly states:
[T]he only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce. (Connolly, 1915: CHAPTER VIII)
In the fictional work of Isaac Asimov, the Foundation series, the protagonists conceal their plans for the future based on ‘psychohistory’ (a theoretical tool that is able to transcend the predictability horizon), because mere knowledge of the plans will change the course of history (Asimov, 2018). In the case of Vladimir Lenin’s speech, the opposite is true. It is put out in public view, so as to influence events. Such actions can be called probabilistic-relational, because on the one hand, they are judgements of the probability of success of whatever is proposed and on the other, they are formed in relation to the masses, who the speech is supposed to both motivate and predict for, towards the long-term aim of social revolution. During the course of political praxis, there are sub- and prime-teleological variables, with the former being the mini-steps taken towards increasing class consciousness - for instance, putting candidates forward for State elections, taking over a trade union or holding office in a student union - and the latter being the actual leap of social revolution, forming a singular teleology.
The outcome of an analysis which evaluates the momentary situation in the conjecture, is for example, a claim like ‘Intensified periods of class struggle which do not reach their peak of revolution lead to improvements in the welfare state’ or ‘The leadership of social-democratic forces will side with the capitalist over the socialists in the case of the class struggle approaching revolutionary levels’ or ‘The struggle of Communists against reactionary leadership in the trade unions is the task ahead, and will succeed, if resources are focused on it’. The ellipsis is at the end of these statements and ends with a hidden probabilistic qualifier, and each statement is defined by the speaker’s desire for social revolution. In addition, such statements can be collected, forming a library of knowledge which can be used for further investigations. Without a doubt, errors can be made which over- or under-estimate aspects of the totality, due to the ‘degree-influence’ issue, that is the difficulty ascertaining the degree of influence each factor plays in the result. Also, factors can be overlooked or wrongly-introduced. However, social reality is a playground in which these statements can be tested.
The application of a limit function to the probabilistic-relation method of dialectical materialism is essentially a verification through a Bayesian statistical calculation through temporal progression. The accumulation of historical facts impulses the calculation to approach either a probability of zero or a one, confirming or rejecting hypothesis, as time passes. The calculation is bounded by a number of contingencies which can be understood as dialectical contradictions, but which are resolved at the end of the calculation, embodying the law of the unity and struggles of opposites (Engels, 1883). A research institution focusing on Bayesian Marxism states:
[The] prior distribution of an event becomes negligible, and the full posterior converges to a distribution that represents the best of our knowledge of that event given the infinite series of evidence. (Bayesian Marxism, 2025)
The introduction of a factor, its overlooking or incorrect weighing, at the discretion of the practitioner will lead to a rupture in the calculation process, and it entirely goes off-track. There is thus a certain risk involved when making political judgments, a ‘leap of faith’, as historical events can, due to their contingent nature, go multiple ways. It is relative to the political action at hand, which is set as a teleological variable, that is then integrated into an n-way Bayesian process that accumulates empirical data to produce the probability of success for the selected course of action, moment-by-moment. Contingency is further assured by the subject's own participation in this process as subjectivity itself alters Bayesian weights.
The prime example of this process in real-life is the approach of a revolutionary moment. It is uncertain whether revolution will take place, whether quantitative change, the combination of intensive and extensive characteristics, will be powerful enough to act on the necessary nodal points to phase into qualitative change, shooting off into a new world-historical trajectory, having negated the negation. As time passes, and revolution takes place, the facts that led to the revolution become apparent. The facts then serve to illuminate the reasons for the revolution after the fact, even if before the fact, it was unclear whether revolution would take place. Or, on the opposite side, the call to revolution fails, and then it becomes clear why the revolution failed after the facts have accumulated. The objective factors only become apparent through reflection, having been imbued with subjective instability only moments prior, inside the dialectical cycle. The overthrow of Tsarism starting with the Petrograd women’s textile factory strike; the Kornilov affair; the instability of Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government; the strength of the Bolshevik Party, the Left-SR and the anarchists forces; Lenin’s personalized insistence on the revolution opposed to a reticent Central Committee … these facts elucidate themselves after the event of the 1917 October Revolution has concluded, once having been seen as impossible, then as contingent, afterwards as inevitable, drained of criss-crossed potentiality in its transition to actuality. Within this process, human agency is the key mediator.
As demonstrated, Marxism’s dialectical materialism is an abstracted tool which uses the base-superstructure model of subjective and objective moments, over- and under-determination, categories of form, content, nodal points, contradiction, intensive and extensive quantity, quality in addition to the trifecta of dialectical laws, to force the practitioner to take a holistic approach combined with approximation, heuristics, probabilities in its traversal towards its real-life instantiation where it applies a limit function to an n-way Bayesian statistical calculation after sampling a limited number of push-and-pull factors in the present within our relatively-determined complex, non-linear and chaotic social reality to derive empirically-verifiable conclusions about sub-teleological events in the near-future and the prime-teleological event of social revolution in the far-future, as far as the time-limited maximal Lyapunov exponent and general patterns allow it to do so, naturally creating a chaos controller in the process due to the identicism of the subject-object in history which helps bring the aforementioned events into existence.
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