The study of phenomena and matter in motion and counterposed in the unity of opposites.
Materialism is a first principle which states that the material, actually-existing world is primary and conditions all other knowledge; that it conditions the “ideological” or “social” world.
Materialists recognize that ideas do have a material existence: they are electrochemical impulses that form the basis of all human interaction with the world and with each other. Therefore, the chiefest and most important difference between materialism and idealism is that, for the materialist, ideas and ideology are historical (they are conditioned by past material circumstances), contextual, and temporally contingent. Ideas are reliant on something other than human cognition; they also come about, gain value, and then pass away as conditions change.
Materialism rejects the idea of universals. Ideologies are created by material conditions in the world; they are temporal and bound by time; they are rooted in actually-existing relations.
If relations change, ideas change.
Marxism is not a psychological science that describes the motivations, desires, and behaviors of individuals. Our analysis is social and we perform that analysis across broad categories. Indeed, Marxism has very little to say about the individual. We, as Marxists, study events on a historical scale. We must therefore deal with great aggregates of society, and Marxism is the study of entire social classes. These vast, social forces are made up of many individuals. On this scale, the ideology or action of a single person does not register. Thus, while it is possible that, on the individual level, material conditions will result in individuals that fall far outside the cultural norm, that maintain ideas and ideologies that are not “supported” by the social or material relations of the society, Marxism is not concerned with the behaviors of those individuals. It is the social aggregate that moves history.
We can sum up all of the above with four main principles:
1. Nature is connected and semantically determined. No phenomenon or thing can be understood in itself, isolated from its context, but must be analyzed in its surrounding conditions; it is the network of relationships that we, as dialecticians, are interested in.
2. Nature is in a continuous state of motion and change. Phenomena must be studied in their movement, change, development, coming into being and going out of being. We can say that this is also a way of examining phenomena and things not in themselves, but in relation to their past and future.
3. Quantitative change leads to qualitative change. As a slow increase of temperature in water leads that water eventually to boil, changing its fundamental physical properties and as the slow increase of pressure on a glass will eventually shatter it, so development passes from insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes to massive and structural qualitative changes.
4. Contradictions are inherent in nature. The process of development is driven by the struggle between contradictions; it is not a harmonious unfolding of phenomena, but a struggle of opposites. Nature is the very embodiment of opposites, which interact to create new basic phenomena, which create new struggles, and so on.
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