A humorous sketch of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in 1867, putting the finishing touches on their their dialectical materialism philosophy, which outlines an explanation of the "laws of motion" of the capitalist economic system.
In science, dialectical materialism is Georg Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis method applied to material economic change, albeit reformulated as presented in Karl Marx’s 1867 Capital: Critique of Political Economy, and is the philosophical basis of Stalinist Marxism.
The term “dialectical materialism”, an extension in some way of Friedrich Engels' Marxist philosophy term "historical materialism", e.g. to include the laws of thought, was used in 1891 by Russian political theorists Georgi Plekhanov and in 1894 by Vladimir Lenin to describe Marx’s philosophy. [2]
Scientific conflicts The logic of dialectical materialism, over the 20th century, has been the theoretical backbone of communism, in respect to governmental direction and as the basis of moral standards.
Both quantum mechanics and general relativity, since at least the 1930s, in communist-controlled areas, have either been banned and or censored and presented in a manner that conform to dialectical materialist principles.
In 1931, in Russian, George Gamow was forbidden to speak about Werner Heisenberg’s version of quantum mechanics as it was deemed anti-materialistic and incompatible with the state’s increasingly rigid version of Marxist philosophy. [1]
The Russian translation of Paul Dirac’s 1930 The Principles of Quantum Mechanics fell out with censors on the objection that his quantum mechanics was in conflict with dialectical materialism and eventually found translation only after an apologetic note was put in before the preface, arguing that its methods are needed to advance dialectical materialism. [1]
At the time, conducting researches on relativity theory and cosmology in China was very risky politically, because these theories were considered to be "idealistic" theories in contradiction with the dialectical materialism theory, which is the official philosophy of the Communist Party. According to the dialectical materialism philosophy, both time and space must be infinite, while the big bang theory allows the possibility of the finiteness of space and time.
In China, during the Culture Revolution, campaigns were waged against Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity in Beijing and Shanghai, as evidenced in the resistance of Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, top ten Google Books scientist existive (Ѻ) , who found that after he published his theory, some of the critics of the theory of relativity, especially a group based in Shanghai, prepared to attack Fang politically. Into the 1980s and even as late as the 1990s, articles criticizing the big bang theory as "pseudo-science from the west ... in violation of the principles of Marxism philosophy", and "politically incorrect" still appeared frequently in newspapers and magazines in paper.
References 1. Farmelo, Graham. (2009). The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (pgs. 199-200). Basic Books. 2. Thomas, Paul. (2008). Marxism & Scientific Socialism: From Engels to Aothusser (pg. 87). Routledge.
