omniharmonicDialectical Materialism
Dialectical materialism is the philosophical framework developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that applies Hegel’s dialectical method to the material conditions of society. Where Hegel located the engine of dialectical change in the realm of ideas and spirit, Marx and Engels argued that the contradictions driving historical change are embedded in the social and political structures of a given society at a given time. The oppression of peasants during medieval feudalism generates its own antithesis, which resolves into a new social structure. This logic traces the progression from feudalism to monarchy to enlightenment democracy to capitalist democracy to late-stage capitalism — each stage an expression of a dialectical process transforming material conditions and social relations over time.
In Benjamin Life’s philosophical framework, dialectical materialism provides an important but ultimately insufficient lens for understanding civilizational transformation. Marx and Engels correctly identified that contradictions are not merely abstract but are materially embedded in systems of production, ownership, and power. Communism, for instance, arose as an antithesis during the early industrial era and became its own thesis in the Soviet Union and Communist China. However, the dialectical materialist framework shares a deeper limitation with the entire Western dialectical tradition: it operates within the underlying assumptions of the story-of-separation. Dialectics are always building upon what came before them — responding to the contradictions of the previous stage without questioning the foundational ontological and epistemic assumptions that generate those contradictions in the first place.
Dialectical materialism connects to dialectics as its materialist expression, to metamodernism as part of the philosophical tradition that metamodernism attempts to transcend, and to the meta-crisis as a framework that illuminates how systemic contradictions compound over time. The essay “Dialectics and Spontaneous Evolution” argues that the scope of our current civilizational crisis demands not another dialectical turn but a return to first principles — a spontaneous evolutionary phase change that rewrites the underlying syntax of human culture rather than merely iterating within its existing possibility space.