Grasping Science and Philosophy by the Dialectical Method

Dear young comrades,

At the root of being human and of the will to transform the world lies a simple but very powerful question: "How can we truly understand this universe we live in, nature, and society?"

Every day we witness how easily the concept of reality is distorted in everyday life, in the academy, or in media channels. When we begin to think about a subject or a process, we must first interrogate method: Where does the path to reality pass, and of "which reality" are we speaking?

Today the ruling culture and world of thought set before us two misleading options:

Positivist Reductionism (Scientism): It compresses everything into lifeless data, momentary statistics, and market-oriented formulas. It mistakes reality for a frozen, unchanging, and fragmented warehouse of objects.
Subjectivist / Mystical Tendencies: It feeds on postmodernism's approach that "Everyone has a reality of their own" or on New Age mysticism that ambushes the gaps science has not yet answered. By tying reality wholly to perceptions or to invisible powers, it abolishes the objective ground.

The reality we seek is neither heaps of statistics frozen between laboratory walls nor a subjective fairy tale that everyone invents at will in their own mind. Reality is the totality of objective processes that exist independently of our consciousness, yet advance in constant motion, change, contradiction, and interconnection.

A seed's becoming a sapling, a technology's shaking of social relations, or class struggles' shaping of history are not frozen states; they are dynamic processes guided by internal contradictions. The human mind does not watch these processes as a passive spectator; through practice it transforms nature and society while developing its own consciousness as well.

So what must our method be on the journey of grasping this dynamic reality?

Here two fundamental instruments form a dialectical unity: Science and Philosophy.

Discipline	Its Role in Grasping Reality	Its Philosophical/Methodological Limit
The Natural and Social Sciences	They present the particular laws of motion of matter and society, their concrete data, and experimental results.	If severed from philosophical method, they fall into a blind empiricism that drowns in data and cannot see the whole.
Dialectical-Materialist Philosophy	It treats phenomena not in isolation, but integrally through the most general laws of change, contradiction, and development.	If severed from concrete scientific data and practice, it turns into abstract conceptual games with no footing on the ground.

Karl Marx, taking humanity's desire and curiosity to know out of passive thought and placing them at the center of action, wrote in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach:

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

To change the world requires the courage to grasp it in its objective and dialectical totality—without surrendering it to the narrow molds of market-oriented scientism or to the narcotic discourses of mysticism.

In this study we will take up the historical line of science born from practice, examine the roots of positivist and mystical deviations, and together discover how the dialectical method opens our horizon in today's science.

Under the guidance of reason, curiosity, and dialectics, come—let us make sense of processes and of reality together.

The Birth of Science: From Practice to Theory, from Manual Labor to Mental Labor

One of the greatest distortions of bourgeois historiography and of idealist philosophy is to reduce science to the abstract ideas of solitary "genius minds," descending as if from the sky on a rope. We are told the fairy tale that science began in a freewheeling way through the momentary illuminations of isolated individuals. Yet dialectical materialism shows us clearly: thought is not a first cause independent of matter; it is a historical product of the relations of production human beings establish with nature and of their practical struggle.

To grasp the historical adventure of science, we must first look to the place where knowledge is born in its simplest form—human practice.

The Primacy of Practice: Humanity Creating Itself and Knowledge

Friedrich Engels, in his magnificent study "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" in Dialectics of Nature, summarizes the birth of human consciousness—which is also the foundation of science—as follows:

"Labour is the source of all wealth… But labour is infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself."

In primitive communal society, knowledge was not a theoretical formula tested in laboratories; it was the direct life-practice of the collective that hunted, built shelter, and domesticated fire. In this period there was no cleavage between mental and manual labor. The dialectical relation human beings established with nature was immediate: how stone was to be worked, which plant was poisonous, the direction of the hunt's movement—these were learned and transmitted within the community's common physical production.

For the primitive human being, "to know nature" was synonymous with transforming it. Material practice produced experiential knowledge directly, and this experience shaped collective consciousness. Yet the consciousness of this period did not yet have the capacity to grasp the laws of the objective world at the level of general principles (theories); for concrete practice had not yet reached a level of production that would need abstraction.

Surplus Product, Classes, and the Severing of Mental from Manual Labor

The appearance of science as an independent, theoretical discipline on the stage of history was made possible, unfortunately, by one of humanity's greatest tragedies: the birth of class societies and of property.

With the Neolithic Revolution, the passage to agriculture and adaptation to settled life enabled humanity to produce more than it would consume—that is, surplus product. The emergence of surplus product opened the way for a section of society to be exempted from direct physical production (manual labor).

Marx and Engels draw this historical threshold in The German Ideology:

"Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real."

As J. D. Bernal stressed in the history of science, the birth of theoretical science is directly bound up with the growing complexity of social organization. This historical rupture harbors a dialectical contradiction:

The Direction of Progress: The administrative and clerical class freed from production invented the time to watch the sky, the calculating tools to measure land, writing, and mathematics. In Egypt the need to determine the Nile's flood times and property boundaries gave birth to geometry; in Babylon the necessity of adjusting the agricultural calendar gave birth to astronomy. The possibility of scientific abstraction was opened.
The Direction of Alienation: This mental labor severed from production was turned into an instrument of domination over the producing majority (slaves and peasants). Scientific truths were mystified, wrapped in theological tales and temple mysteries. Knowledge became, in the hands of the ruling class, an illusion of a "divine secret."

Ancient Greece: The Rise of Logos and the Limits of the Slave Mode of Production

The explosion of philosophy and rational thought in the Ionian port cities (Miletus, Ephesus) in the sixth century BCE is no accident. These were the intersection points of Mediterranean trade. The merchant class, to open onto distant seas, needed not religious dogmas but objective calculations and the laws of nature.

When Thales sought the first principle (archē) behind the universe not in the caprices of the gods but in a material element—"water"; when Democritus advanced that everything was composed of particles invisible to the eye ("atoms")—the first great blow was struck against theology. The brightest dialectical genius of this period, Heraclitus, declared that the universe was not a frozen heap of things but a continuous motion: "Everything flows (Panta rhei)" and "Strife (contradiction) is the father of all things."

Yet despite its revolutionary steps, ancient Greek science hit a historical wall: the slave mode of production.

Because bodily work in the Greek city-states was done by slaves, the ruling class of free citizens held manual labor—that is, "experiment" and "practice"—in contempt. Science was conceived only as "pure reasoning" and as a logic exercise. This conception of science, severed from experiment, could not make the technological leaps that would transform nature; in the hands of Plato and Aristotle it was poured again into idealist and teleological molds and became material for medieval theology.

Historical Period	Mode of Production and Relations	The Character and Form of Knowledge	Dialectical Contradiction / Class Function
Primitive Communal Period	Classless; hunting-gathering. No property.	Practical, vital, and experiential knowledge. Mental and manual labor are a whole.	No contradiction; yet capacity for abstraction is limited; theoretical science has not yet formed.
Early Class Civilizations (Egypt, Babylon)	Early State / Asiatic Mode of Production appropriating surplus product.	Geometry, astronomy, calendar. Mental labor has been severed from manual labor.	Advance: The birth of theoretical abstraction. Step Back: Knowledge's fusion with religion into an instrument for suppressing the masses.
Ancient Greece (Ionian Period)	Early slave city-states based on trade.	Secular (laic) natural philosophy. First dialectical and materialist theories.	Advance: The passage from mythology (mythos) to reason (logos). Step Back: Contempt for practice because of slavery; absence of the experimental method.

As can be seen, science was born within a historical-materialist process and took shape in proportion to humanity's relation with nature and with class conflicts. Science is neither a sterile gift from the heavens nor the eternal property of capital. It is a product of humanity's common practice of production and of its historical march full of contradictions.

What Does "Science" Mean for Materialists?

Having seated the birth of science in its historical and class context, we must now approach the center of the philosophical front with this critical question: We Marxists, as materialists—what exactly do we mean when we say "science"?

The ideology of the ruling class either presents science as a "whole of technical procedures" squeezed between laboratory walls and exempt from social struggles, or, under the influence of postmodernism and empiricism, counts science as nothing but "useful fictions produced by the human mind." Both approaches aim to cloud our minds.

For materialist philosophy, science is neither the subjective conventions of professors in ivory towers nor random formulas flung onto nature. Science is the historical and dialectical reflection, in the human mind, of the laws of motion of objective reality (matter) that exist independently of human consciousness.

Objective Reality and the Source of Knowledge: Lenin and the Defense of Matter

Bourgeois philosophy continually tries to shift the foundation of scientific knowledge onto the "subject" (that is, onto human perceptions, mental categories, or structures built through language).

In Spinoza's monist philosophy, which pioneered materialism, nature and the universe are a single infinite substance that is its own cause (causa sui). When at the beginning of the twentieth century Ernst Mach and his followers departed from this materialist grasp and sought to drag science into the swamp of subjective idealism by saying "Matter has dissolved; only our sensations remain," Vladimir Ilyich Lenin smashed this attack to pieces in his work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

Lenin lays the foundation stone of the materialist conception of science as follows:

"The material world exists independently of human consciousness and perception. Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them."

For materialists the starting point of science is this:

The world is discoverable and knowable.
Behind the events that take place in nature and society lie not mystical or random powers, but material and objective causalities.
The task of science is to bring these causalities and laws of motion to light within humanity's practical struggle.

The Dialectic of Absolute and Relative Truth: Against Dogmatism and Relativism

The bourgeois conception of science oscillates between two dangerous extremes: either it proclaims science a final "dogma" that has solved everything, or it falls into relativism/postmodernism that denies the objectivity of scientific knowledge by saying "Everything is relative; there is no certain truth."

Dialectical materialism, by contrast, grasps truth not as a frozen point but as a historical process:

Relative Truth: The scientific knowledge human beings obtain at every historical stage is afflicted with the technological, practical, and class limits of its own period. Newtonian physics explained an objective fact, yet that explanation was a "relative" truth bound to a determinate scale and speed limit.
Absolute Truth: Absolute truth is formed from the sum of the relative truths obtained along science's historical march. With every new scientific discovery (for example, passing from Newton to Einstein and to quantum physics), humanity approaches asymptotically (ever more closely) the infinite absolute truth.

As Engels expressed it, matter is infinite and in motion. For this reason the object of science is never exhausted. Science is not a completed library; it is an unending dialectical excavation toward the depths of objective reality.

The Revolutionary Aim of Science: From the "Thing-in-Itself" to the "Thing-for-Us"

For the bourgeois scientist the ultimate aim of science is to produce profitable patents for capital or to control nature and generate markets. For materialists, by contrast, the aim of science is the emancipation of humanity.

Friedrich Engels, in his work Anti-Dühring, establishes that unbreakable bond between freedom and scientific knowledge as follows:

"Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends… Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity."

When we think Gaston Bachelard's conceptualization of epistemological break on a materialist ground, scientific practice reaches the objective law by overcoming the barriers of everyday common sense and of ruling ideology. Thus humanity transforms what Immanuel Kant called forever unknowable—the "Thing-in-Itself" (Ding an sich)—into the "Thing-for-Us" (Ding für uns): known, transformed, and offered to social utility.

If we can decode a virus's genetic structure and produce its vaccine; if we have grasped the energy in the atom's nucleus; if we have set out the laws of motion of social classes—then we are becoming free subjects who take our fate into our own hands, no longer slaves to the blind necessities of nature and society.

Criterion of Examination	Bourgeois / Positivist Conception of Science	Dialectical-Materialist Conception of Science
Source of Knowledge	Subject-centered. Perceptions, measurements, and mental models are essential.	Matter-centered. Objective reality existing independently of the human mind.
View of Nature	Sees nature as a heap of fragmented, static, and isolated "things."	Sees nature as a "process" interconnected, in constant motion and contradiction.
Grasp of Truth	Either frozen dogmatism (definite formulas) or extreme relativism (there is no truth).	A historical and dialectical process in which relative truths accumulate and approach absolute truth.
Class / Practical Aim	To feed capital accumulation and legitimize the existing social order.	To emancipate humanity from the blind necessity of nature and of systems of exploitation.

For materialists, science is neither a profit apparatus at capital's command nor a flexible fiction to be trampled under mystics' feet. Science is the most revolutionary torch humanity has won in its struggle with nature and with exploitation.

Science and Philosophy: A Dialectical Partnership and Distinction

One of the lies bourgeois ideologues and technocratic academic circles love most is this: "Science can now measure everything; there is no need for philosophy; philosophy is a remnant of the past."

This insidious discourse of positivism is in fact a strategy for leaving scientists and young minds without philosophy and surrendering them to the dominant cognitive molds of the capital order. They present science and philosophy to us as two enemies severed from each other, or as completely isolated compartments.

Yet dialectical materialism says neither that these two disciplines can be substituted for each other nor that they are alien to each other. Between science and philosophy there is an unbreakable, mutually nourishing dialectical relation.

The Dialectic of Particular Laws and General Laws: Where Is the Distinction?

The first clear difference between science and philosophy lies in the scale of their objects of inquiry and of their fields of coverage.

The Field of the Particular Sciences: Individual scientific branches such as physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology examine the determinate and particular forms of motion of matter and society. For example, biology investigates the working of organelles, chemistry molecular bonds, and sociology social stratification in a particular form of society. They establish experimentally and observationally the laws of their own particular fields.
The Field of Marxist Philosophy: Dialectical Materialism, by contrast, examines the most general laws of motion, change, and development of nature, of human society, and of thought (the unity and struggle of opposites, the transformation of quantity into quality, the negation of the negation).

When Hegel constructed the first systematic mold of dialectics, he established the identity of logic and reality in an idealist form. Marxist philosophy sets Hegel's dialectics on its feet and takes philosophy out of being a dogmatic authority standing above the sciences. Philosophy offers a universal method that encompasses and surpasses (Aufhebung) the results the particular sciences reach, synthesizing them.

Science without Philosophy Is Blind; Philosophy without Science Is Empty

Friedrich Engels, in Dialectics of Nature, summarizes in a single sentence the trap scientists fall into when they claim to be "independent of philosophy":

"Natural scientists may say what they please, they are still under the domination of philosophy. It is only a question whether they want to be dominated by a bad, fashionable philosophy, or by a form of theoretical thought which rests on acquaintance with the history of thought and its achievements."

The scientist devoid of a philosophical method unconsciously adopts the bourgeoisie's shallowest, most mechanical philosophical prejudices (for example, the dogma that "science is neutral," or shallow empiricism).

Science without Philosophy (Blind Empiricism): Science buried only in data, statistics, and experiments, unable to establish the integral causal bonds among events. It sees the part but misses the whole. In the end science turns into a technical servant of capital.
Philosophy without Science (Barren Idealism / Scholasticism): Philosophy not nourished by concrete scientific findings, facts, and experiment. Severed from the material world, it sinks into abstract conceptual games, metaphysical speculation, and religious mystification.

The Real Philosophical Ground: Integrating Scientific Data

The materialist philosopher does not enter the laboratory to teach the physicist how to experiment; yet he helps the physicist grasp what the findings obtained mean within universal reality.

As Louis Althusser noted, philosophy is a theoretical class struggle against ideological deviations in the field of science. For example, the theory of evolution in biology (Darwin), the law of conservation of energy in physics, and the discovery of cellular structures proved in the nineteenth century that nature is not frozen but in continuous transformation. It is precisely by setting these great discoveries of the particular sciences side by side that Marxist philosophy draws the dialectical-materialist picture of nature.

Dimension of Examination	Particular Natural and Social Sciences	Marxist Philosophy (Dialectical Materialism)	Dialectical Integration (Synthesis)
Scope	Particular and specific forms of motion of matter (e.g., cell division, subatomic particles).	The most general laws of motion and development of the universe, society, and consciousness.	Science provides particular data; philosophy brings out the general law.
Method	Observation, experiment, measurement, hypothesis, mathematical modeling.	Logical abstraction, dialectical method, historical-materialist analysis.	Experiment and observation gain meaning through the dialectical method; experiment without method goes blind.
Dangerous Deviation	Rejecting philosophy and falling into shallow positivism and "technocratism."	Rejecting science and sinking into abstract metaphysical speculation and dogma production.	The unity of science and philosophy blocks both dogmatism and blind empiricism.

As can be seen, the effort to sever science from philosophy is not an innocent academic preference. The capital order does not want us to transform the immense potential science offers into a dialectical consciousness for society's emancipation.

A scientist without philosophical depth cannot interrogate the destructive consequences of the technology he produces. A philosopher without a scientific foundation cannot grasp the material instruments that will change the world. Our task is to illuminate our struggle by blending scientific truths with dialectical philosophy.

The Misery of Bourgeois Positivism: The Trap of "Scientism"

In the part of our article so far we have set out the historical roots of science and its unbreakable bond with materialist philosophy. Now we are obliged to tear the mask from an insidious ideological illusion we encounter most widely in today's academy, media, and intellectual circles: bourgeois positivism and the trap of "scientism" it creates.

Today capitalism offers us a vast package of illusion under the name of science. When we do not treat the matter through a dialectical process analysis, we face the danger of swallowing this ideological poison that the capital order packages under the names of "neutrality" and "technical expertise."

The Fine Line between Scientificity and "Scientism"

Bourgeois ideologues try to isolate science from social classes, historical conditions, and philosophy and to turn it into a "religion" on its own. It is this attitude we call scientism.

Scientificity: The effort to grasp nature, society, and thought in accordance with their objective reality, in constant motion, contradiction, and change. It is skeptical, critical, open to renewing itself, and serves humanity's practice of emancipation.
Scientism: A dogmatic attitude that blindly tries to apply the processes of quantitative measurement and data collection—the method of the natural sciences—to everything, including human and social fields. It treats science not as a method but as an unassailable authority (a fetish).

This understanding, whose foundations were laid with Auguste Comte and which in the twentieth century put on the garb of "logical positivism," tries to sideline philosophy, ethics, class struggle, and historical processes by saying "What I cannot observe and measure does not exist or is meaningless."

This approach turns nature and society into motionless "data warehouses." Yet dialectics teaches us that data alone do not speak the truth; what is essential is the historical and class context in which the data are read.

Mechanical Reductionism, Reification, and the Lie of "Neutral Science"

The greatest methodological crippling of bourgeois scientism is mechanical reductionism. The concept of reification (Verdinglichung) that György Lukács worked through in depth in History and Class Consciousness explains precisely this situation: capitalist commodity relations make the historical and social relations among people appear as if they were lifeless relations among objects. Bourgeois science, too, freezes dynamic processes into frozen "things."

Friedrich Engels explains this limit of mechanical/metaphysical thought in his work Anti-Dühring:

"To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all… He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses… In his eyes a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another… For him, a thing is either alive or dead; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. He forgets, looking at the trees, the forest."

Beyond this, as we see in the light of Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony, the ruling class uses scientific institutions to produce its own hegemony by consent. We are told the fairy tale "Science is neutral; it is above politics." Yet we are obliged to ask:

Who decides how much budget is allocated to which research?
Whose property are scientific patents?
Why are billions of dollars poured into products with higher profit rates instead of into cancer drugs?

To claim that science is "neutral" in an order financed by capital, whose laboratory limits are set by monopolies, serves nothing but to legitimize the bourgeoisie's domination. Science is not neutral; under capitalism science has been turned into a technical instrument for increasing capital's profit and for controlling the masses.

The Class Function of Positivism: Legitimizing the Status Quo

Positivism does not only cripple the natural sciences; its most destructive effect shows itself in the social field. It tries to present social relations, too, as "unchangeable, objective laws," just like the laws of nature.

The bourgeois academy wants to palm off capitalism's wheels of exploitation and market conditions as inevitable laws of nature, like the "law of gravity." Reactionary discourses of the kind "Human nature is selfish," "Market equilibrium is a law of nature," "Classes are the natural result of productivity" are always served with this positivist sauce.

Positivism, which sees society not as a historical process but as a static "heap of facts," rejects the dialectical law that quantitative accumulations will turn into qualitative leaps (that is, into revolutions). For them there is evolution but no revolution; improvements (reforms) are possible but a root change of the system is impossible. This is the greatest service positivism offers the bourgeois order: to inoculate young minds with the illusion that "another world is not possible."

Dimension of Examination	Genuine Scientificity (Dialectical Materialism)	Bourgeois Scientism (Positivism)
Grasp of Nature and Society	A totality of constant motion, contradiction, transformation, and processes.	A static, frozen, fragmented, and isolated heap of facts.
Method	Integral, dialectical, historical, and bringing contradictions to light.	Mechanical, reductionist, based only on quantitative data and measurement.
Social Transformation	Accepts the transformation of quantitative accumulations through qualitative leaps (revolution).	Accepts only gradual change (reformist evolution); rejects revolution.
Claim of "Neutrality"	Knows that science cannot be independent of class conditions and relations of production.	Spreads the illusion that science is neutral and above class.
Ultimate Aim	To emancipate humanity from the slavery of nature and of the order of exploitation.	To feed existing capital accumulation and legitimize the status quo.

This narrow, mechanical, and soulless vise of positivism cannot emancipate science and human reason. On the contrary, at the limit points where science struggles to answer or has not yet reached, it leaves vast voids in the human mind. Those voids where positivism is stuck begin this time to be filled by mysticism, idealism, and New Age charlatanry.

The Trap of Agnosticism: Mysticism that Sprouts in the Gaps

In the previous section we exposed the shallowness of bourgeois positivism and mechanical "scientism," which fragment nature and society and turn them into static heaps of data. Now we are obliged to decode the other face of the coin—a reactionary channel that feeds precisely on the destructive result this mechanical shallowness creates: agnosticism and the modern mysticism that sprouts in scientific gaps.

Dialectical thought shows us that no void in nature or society simply remains empty. At every point where mechanical materialism and positivism prove inadequate to explain nature's complex, contradictory, and leaping structure, bourgeois ideology immediately brings idealism and mysticism onto the stage. The questions science has not yet answered are turned into profitable shelters for idealist charlatans and neo-liberal "personal development" merchants.

The "God of the Gaps" and the Misery of Quantum Mysticism

The modern world of science obtains magnificent findings in complex fields still at the front lines of scientific research—the dialectical nature of subatomic particles (quantum physics), the neurological origin of consciousness, the initial conditions of the universe, or black holes. Yet because these findings have not yet reached wholly completed final formulas, they harbor "scientific gaps."

It is precisely in these gaps that bourgeois ideologues and New Age charlatans lie in ambush. Dialectical phenomena such as the "observer effect" or "wave-particle duality" in quantum physics are distorted into subjectivist idealist nonsense of the kind "Reality is created in the human mind," "Change your fate by sending positive energy to the universe," "Heal with a quantum leap."

This attitude is the methodology of the "God of the Gaps," which paralyzes rational reasoning:

An objective event that science has not yet fully explained is found.
The unknown aspects of this event are declared "material non-causality."
Into this breach of unknowability are placed mystical powers, "universal intelligences," or spiritual energies.

This is to surrender to the dark embrace of agnosticism instead of expanding, with historical dynamism, the limits science has not yet reached. Immanuel Kant's impassable wall that declared the objective world an forever unknowable "Thing-in-Itself" is today being rebuilt by modern mystics to cut off the path of science.

Lenin's Warning: From the "Matter Has Vanished" Crisis to Today

This crisis is not being lived for the first time in history, comrades. At the end of the nineteenth century, with the discovery of the electron and the splitting of the atom, mechanical physics underwent a great shock. The bourgeois scientists and idealist philosophers of that day cried out in chorus, just as today: "The atom has been split; matter has dissolved; only equations and mental fictions remain!"

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, written at this historical breaking point, gave this unshakable answer to the bourgeois scientists who took refuge in idealism and agnosticism:

"To say that 'matter disappears' means that the limit within which we have hitherto known matter disappears, and that our knowledge is penetrating deeper; properties of matter are disappearing which formerly seemed absolute, immutable, and primary… The sole 'property' of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside our mind. The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom, nature is infinite, but it exists infinitely."

Lenin's intervention remains an unshakable lighthouse for today as well. The uncertainties we encounter in quantum mechanics or in neuroscience do not show that "matter has vanished" or that "we are captives of a mystical mind." On the contrary, they prove that matter moves in ways too dialectical, flexible, and complex to fit our mechanical molds.

The Class Function of Mystical Channels: Spiritual Opium against Class Consciousness

It is no accident that mysticism and agnosticism find so vast a market in the contemporary world. Directly behind this situation lies capitalist alienation and the aim of pacifying class struggle.

For the millions of young people oppressed under late capitalism, face to face with futurelessness, caught in the vise of unemployment and precarity, escape spaces suited to the system are created so that they will not interrogate the material source of the pains they live (that is, the capitalist order of exploitation).

Instead of conducting organized class struggle against exploitation and poverty, they are advised to "send frequencies to the universe," "seek cosmic alignment," or "believe they will grow rich by the law of mental attraction."
Social contradictions are reduced to individual problems of "aura" and "energy."

Karl Marx's famous determination on religion and mysticism remains valid today for neo-liberal New Age cults and the mystical personal-development industry:

"Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world… Religion is the opium of the people."

Today modern mysticism functions as a digital opium that anesthetizes the deep decay capitalism creates. Filling scientific gaps with invisible "spiritual powers" holds youth's revolutionary energy back from changing the objective world and imprisons it in inward-turned virtual daydreams.

Dimension of Examination	Mystical / Agnostic Approach (Idealism)	Dialectical-Materialist Grasp
Approach to Scientific Gaps	Fills the unexplained with "God," "Spirit," or "Cosmic Energy."	Counts gaps as a natural part of science's historical process of development.
Grasp of Truth	Declares truth unknowable ("Thing-in-Itself") or wholly a subjective fiction.	Accepts that truth is objective and is known gradually with the development of practice.
Relation of Nature and Reason	Counts nature as a derivative/reflection of the human mind or of a superior consciousness.	Counts the human mind and consciousness as the highest organ of evolved matter (the brain).
Social / Class Function	Pacifies the masses; conceals exploitation by tying pains to abstract energies.	Calls the masses to organized action; targets the material order that is the source of pains.

We will not kneel at the limit points science has not yet reached, surrender to nonsense, or take refuge in the comfortable embrace of "agnosticism." The mysteries of nature and society are not the property of gods or mystical energies; they are only dialectical riddles not yet solved. Just as we have rescued science from mechanical narrow-mindedness, we are obliged to tear it from the claws of mysticism and reaction as well.

The Possibilities the Dialectical Method Offers Us in the Modern Age

On the journey of our article so far we have examined the historical roots of science, decoded the shallowness of positivism, and exposed how agnosticism and mysticism serve the capital order. Now it is time to leave the defensive line and pass to the attack.

Bourgeois ideologues try to present dialectics to our minds as an abstract schema flung at us, a dogmatic "formula." Yet the truth is the opposite: Dialectical materialism is not a series of rules imposed on nature and society from outside; it is the clearest expression, in our consciousness, of the logic of operation that already exists in the essence of nature, society, and mind.

Twenty-first-century modern science—despite all the fragmenting and positivist efforts of the bourgeois academy—confirms dialectical materialism with magnificent force every day. From quantum physics to neuroscience, from ecology to artificial intelligence, all the frontiers of modern science present a complexity that cannot be understood without dialectical grasp.

"Dialectics of Nature" Updated: The Victory of Modern Science

Friedrich Engels, in Dialectics of Nature, written at the end of the nineteenth century, evaluating the level the natural sciences of his period had reached, made this historical determination:

"Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically."

Engels's determination is valid today in a far more burning form. Let us look closely at how dialectical laws are concretized in the disciplines of modern science:

Unity and Struggle of Opposites (Quantum Mechanics): Classical bourgeois physics preached that an object must be either a "particle" or a "wave." Yet quantum mechanics proved that light and electrons carry both wave and particle character at the same time (wave-particle duality). Even at the most basic level of matter, opposites do not exclude each other; on the contrary, each is the condition of the other's existence. This contradictory unity of opposite poles is the source of motion and of existence.
Transformation of Quantity into Quality (Punctuated Equilibrium and Evolutionary Biology): The bourgeois evolutionary understanding sees change only as a gradual, slow, and uninterrupted (straight-linear) "quantitative accumulation." Yet Marxist biologists and paleontologists (for example Stephen Jay Gould) have shown that evolution in nature proceeds by punctuated equilibrium. Genetic changes and environmental pressures accumulate quantitatively for a long time; then, in geologically sudden leaps, new species appear (qualitative leap). Change in nature takes place not only through evolutionary drift but through leaping revolutions.
Integral Interconnection (Ecology and Systems Theory): Ecology teaches us that no living being or ecosystem is an isolated "object." Nature is a totality of processes woven with dialectical nets, such that when one part is touched the whole structure is shaken. Capitalism's logic of seeing nature as a commodity and fragmenting it has today hit the wall of the global climate crisis.

Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, and the Contradiction of Property

Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and neuroscience—at the most advanced front of technology and the natural sciences today—make our need for the materialist and dialectical method more urgent than ever.

Neuroplasticity and Epigenetics: For centuries bourgeois idealism has spread the lie "Human nature is fixed, selfish, unchangeable." Yet modern neuroscience has proved that our brain is continually physically restructured through practice and the social environment (neuroplasticity). Epigenetics shows that our genes open and close in interaction with environment and social conditions. Human nature is not frozen data; it is a historical process shaped dialectically within social practice.
The Quantitative and Qualitative Leap of Artificial Intelligence: Large language models and deep-learning algorithms show that vast quantitative accumulations of data turn, at a determinate threshold, into a qualitative "leap of mental capacity." Yet artificial intelligence is presented in the bourgeois order as a threat that leaves workers unemployed and deepens the surveillance society. From the dialectical-materialist standpoint, by contrast, artificial intelligence is the historical accumulation of humanity's manual and mental labor. The contradiction between private ownership of the means of production and this vast social character of the means of production once again proves capitalism's unsustainability.

A Compass for Young Scientists and Revolutionary Mentality

The dialectical method is, for a young scientist working in the laboratory, the possibility of escaping fragmentary mentality and carrying research to an integral horizon. For youth conducting social struggle, it is the compass for not being taken in by momentary images on the surface of events and for seeing the contradictions in the depths and the ripening revolutionary possibilities.

Dialectical materialism teaches us the following:

No social or natural event is infinite and frozen; everything is born, develops, matures its contradictions, and leaves its place to the new.
The capitalist mode of production that today seems invincible and eternal is historically doomed to negation because of the deep contradictions it feeds within itself (capital–labor, human–nature, productive forces–property relations).
The future is not hidden in the passive data of bourgeois scientism or in the prophecies of mystics; it is hidden in the dialectical practice that grasps the laws of objective reality and changes it through organized action.

Scientific Discipline / Field	Dialectical-Materialist Law / Principle	Bourgeois / Positivist Illusion	Dialectical Analysis and Reality
Quantum Physics	Unity and Struggle of Opposites	"Matter has vanished; everything is a fiction of consciousness" (Subjective Idealism).	Proof that even at the lowest level matter has a contradictory, mobile, and dialectical structure.
Evolutionary Biology	Transformation of Quantity into Quality (Leaps)	That change is only slow, gradual, and uninterrupted (evolutionism).	Quantitative genetic accumulations leading, at determinate thresholds, to sudden speciation leaps (punctuated equilibrium).
Neuroscience and Epigenetics	Primacy of Matter over Consciousness and the Role of Practice	"Human nature is fixed; genetic destiny" (Biological Reductionism).	The human brain and gene expression continually change in dialectical interaction with environmental and social practice.
Artificial Intelligence and Informatics	Quantitative Accumulation and the Contradiction of Property	That AI will bring humanity's end, or that it is "neutral technology."	The clash of technology—humanity's collective accumulation—with capitalist property relations.

A Call to Young Comrades — Building the Future in the Light of Truth

Dear young comrades,

The philosophical and historical line we have traversed on our journey shows us an unshakable truth: In the age of decay of late capitalism we can surrender neither scientificity and reason nor dialectical materialism.

The ruling class surrounds minds in a vast circle of ideological illusion in order to hide its own existential crises. On one side stands positivist "scientism," which takes science out of being an instrument of humanity's collective emancipation and reduces it to capital's profit mechanism; on the other stand reactionary ideologies that, at every limit point where they are stuck, push the masses into despair, mysticism, and the waters of "post-truth."

We Marxists will neither turn a blind eye to science's being turned into a market technocracy nor allow our consciousness to be dulled by metaphysical fairy tales.

Youth's Dialectical Role in the Historical Process

Dialectical thought teaches us that every existing social system grows its opposite within itself. While the old decays, the new sprouts in the womb of the old. Today the capitalist mode of production has brought humanity to the brink of ecological disasters, wars, futurelessness, and deep alienation. Yet precisely in the midst of this decay, the most dynamic force carrying the possibility of change in its bosom is youth.

Youth, in the dialectical sense, is not a frozen age category; it is a qualitative force that represents the future against an order that is aging. Yet for this potential to turn into action, young minds must shed the following three great illusions of ruling ideology:

Digital Alienation and Passivity: Virtual universes, algorithmic narcotics, and consumer culture imprisoning the individual in their own shell.
Apocalyptic Pessimism (Cynicism): The despair and inaction spread by the perception that "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."
Mystical and Individualist Escapes: The diversion of seeking solutions to social problems in "mental frequencies," "personal development," or New Age fairy tales severed from concrete reality.

The sole weapon that will smash these illusions to pieces is the dialectical method that grasps the world concretely, objectively, and with its contradictions.

The Revolutionary Unity of Theory and Practice (Praxis)

Throughout the history of philosophy the bond between knowledge and action has been severed again and again. Idealism imprisons knowledge in abstract reason, while empiricism reduces it to observation without action. Yet the greatest revolutionary leap Marxism has offered humanity is praxis—that is, the dialectical unity of theory and practice.

The principle Marx stated in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach—"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it"—is not a call to blind activism that belittles theory. On the contrary, it is the emphasis that the action that will change the world can only be armored with a solid theory that grasps its laws of motion objectively.

Theory without Action: A barren intellectualism squeezed into the laboratory, the academy, or the pages of books, severed from social life.
Action without Theory: Blind activism that does not know where to strike, is deceived by the immediate images the system offers, and exhausts its energy.
Praxis (Revolutionary Unity): The reaching of the power to transform objective reality when scientific and philosophical grasp unite with social opposition and organized practice.

Youth's Methodological Stance in Building the Future

To concretize our grasp, let us examine the difference between the mental molds the ruling system imposes on youth and the dialectical-materialist attitude:

Field of Examination	Attitude Imposed by the Ruling Bourgeois System	Revolutionary Attitude of Dialectical-Materialist Youth
View of Science	Sees science as an instrument of profit and technocracy at capital's command.	Counts science as the collective instrument of emancipation humanity has won in its struggle with nature.
Perception of the Future	Pessimism, anxiety about the future, or fatalistic passivity.	The consciousness and hope that historical processes can be changed by human action.
Grasp of Reality	Either fragmented heaps of data (positivism) or "everyone's own truth" (relativism).	A totality of objective processes existing independently of consciousness, in constant motion and contradiction.
Approach to Problems	Individual solutions, personal-development nonsense, and inward escapes.	Organized practice; the will for root change that goes to the source of social contradictions.

The March toward a World of Freedoms

As Friedrich Engels indicated, humanity's historical march is the struggle of "the leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom." We have in our hands the possibility of leaving slavery to nature's blind laws and to the destructive necessities of capitalist production, and of planning those laws for humanity's common benefit once we have grasped them.

It is precisely here that the vast developments in modern technology, artificial intelligence, biology, and physics—while in capital's hands they are a threat or a source of unemployment—possess, in a classless society, a magnificent potential to shorten humanity's working hours and to spread to everyone the possibility of engaging with Art and science.

Dear young comrades;

Do not surrender your curiosity to market molds. Continue to interrogate nature, the universe, and society with an integral curiosity.
Tear science and philosophy from the ivory towers. Test your theoretical accumulation in the midst of everyday life, class struggle, and production processes.
Stand on the side of reality. Do not allow mystical charlatanry, neo-liberal fairy tales, and digital illusions to cloud your minds.

The future will take shape not in the soulless formulas of bourgeois laboratories or in the sweet daydreams of New Age currents, but in the action of youth who organize to build a classless, exploitation-free, and free world by grasping the dialectical laws of nature and society.

In the light of reason, scientific curiosity, and dialectics: to understand the world is not enough—we will change it together!