Introduction

Abstract

With such excellent press – for similar comments can be found in the works of Trotsky, Lukács, Gramsci, Luxemburg, Mao, and Sartre – one might have thought that, at least among Marxists, dialectics would be well understood by now and dialectical studies the norm rather than the exception. As we all know, this is not the case.

If one were to attempt to define in a single word the focus, so to speak, of the whole [Marx/Engels] correspondence, the central point at which the whole body of ideas expressed and discussed converges — that word would be dialectics. The application of materialist dialectics to the reshaping of all political economy from its foundations up, its application to history, natural science, philosophy and to the policy and tactics of the working class — that was what interested Marx and Engels most of all, that was where they contributed what was most essential and new, and that was what constituted the masterly advance they made in the history of revolutionary thought.

(Lenin, 1973, 554)