Marxist theory posits that all things develop through material contradictions according to historical materialism and dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism argues that political and historical events are caused by conflicts between social forces resulting from material needs. Marx adapted Hegel's dialectic method but replaced idealism with materialism, believing material sources primarily drive modes of production. As contradictions between new and old productive/social relations intensify due to technological advances, social revolutions ultimately occur as the proletariat becomes conscious of their collective power to transform the economic system and relieve their misery.

1. Chapter Four
Marxist World View and Social Revolution

2. Historical Materialism and Dialectical Materialism
Historical materialism: rooted in Marx and
Engels’s philosophy of dialectical materialism,
which posits that all things develop through
material contradictions.
Because the world is material in nature made
entirely of matter rather than mental or spiritual.
All institutions of human society (e.g., government
and religion) are the outgrowth of its economic
activity.
Consequently, social and political change occurs
when those institutions cease to reflect the “mode of
production” that is, how the economy functions.

3. Contradictions cannot be harmonized through
reason or divine power; incompatible elements must
oppose each other until adaptation or destruction
takes place.
 Marx was inspired by Hegelian notions of
dialectical materialism.
 He retained dialectical approach of Hegel but
replaced the idealism with materialism.
Marx believed that material sources are important in
the working of any mode of production. Not ideas
 Material world is characterized by its own
independent existence and is not a result of human
thinking.

4. Historical materialism applies the logic of
dialectical materialism to human civilization.
 All human beings must engage in economic
activity for the necessities of life.
Every society relies on its mode of
production.
All institutions of that society must therefore
follow from that mode, adapt to it, or be
eliminated.
This condition is the “motor of history”.

5.  Dialectical materialism:
 Dialectic in philosophy is the art of discovering and
telling truths in discussion and logical argument.
 Materialism on the other hand is the theory or belief
that only material things exist.
 Dialectical materialism, in Marxist Theory argues that
political and historical events are due to the conflict of
social forces caused by man’s material needs.
 Marx called himself a materialist. In his view, all
sensation or perception is an interaction between subject
and object.

6. Dialectical materialism is an abstraction of general laws
of change that takes place in the physical world of
nature.
 The perpetual change occurring among natural
phenomena follows certain designed scientific laws.
 which operate on a linear pattern in the form of thesis,
then antithesis to form a synthesis which then becomes a
new thesis. This philosophy borrowed from Hegel,
 Hegel had argued that in contradictions in nature, man strives to
higher stages of purity.
 Therefore, in material nature, before a new thesis is formed, the
old must be destroyed.
 The synthesis thus formed, is the new thesis.

7. In Marx’s dialectics, three main contradictions take
place from Hegel.
In the first contradiction, there is the exchange of or
interaction between man and nature in the social
aspect of labor.
 In the second contradiction, it starts with
appearance of contradiction between new productive
forces and old productive forces.
 The third contradiction results from contradiction
between new product relations and the old
superstructure.

8.  Marx’s method entails the examination of the
relationship between ideas and material reality,
specifically as it pertains to class struggle and the
emancipation of the proletariat.
 Marx’s dialectics are called “dialectical materialism”
in contrast with Hegel’s dialectics.
 To realize this revolution the working-class must not
only understand the interaction of forces behind the
development of society, but it must understand itself as
one of those forces.
 The dialectic is a powerful weapon because it breaks
through the capitalist illusion of individualism and
atomism.

9. The Development of Capitalism and Class Based
Society
Capitalism is a society based on the production and
exchange of commodities for money as a means of
obtaining a profit.
Each class is the way they obtain money: workers
get a wage and capitalists a share in the surplus
value produced by the former. However, this is a
consequence of belonging to a class.
Workers receive a wage because they are workers.

10. Class Struggle/Conflict and Social Revolution
 Class Struggle is the confrontation which is
produced between two antagonistic classes when they
are struggling for their class interests.
 The class struggle appears when one class opposes
another in action.
 The class struggle takes place on three levels,
economic, political and ideological.

11. Marx said that every class struggle is a political
struggle.
This means that, if the proletarians and capitalists
are waging an economic struggle against each other
today, they will be compelled to wage a political
struggle tomorrow.
class is defined by the ownership of property.
 In relation to property there are three great classes
of society: the bourgeoisie (who own the means of
production), landowners (whose income is rent), and
the proletariat (who own their labor and sell it for a
wage).

12. As Marx saw the development of class conflict, the
struggle between classes was initially confined to
individual factories.
The several theories of violent conflict considered
here attribute violent conflict, at least in its
revolutionary form, to disparities in the shares of
valued goods held by different, horizontally
stratified classes.
Aristotle helped establish this tradition of theorizing
in his efforts to explain the circumstances of
political revolutions in the Greek city-states.
 The principal cause of revolution, he proposed, is
the common people's aspiration for economic or
political equality when they lack it.

13. Marx finds revolution essentially a function of
economic change, specifically the development of
contradictions between productive forces of society
and the relations of classes to production.
 The mode of production of the material means of
existence conditions the whole process of social,
political and intellectual life.
At a certain stage of their development the material
productive forces of society come into contradiction
with the existing productive relationships.
Revolutionary movements begin when workers
become conscious that their collective misery can
be relieved only by a total transformation of the
economic and its dependent political system.