Now that we have talked about the Marxist theory of knowledge and examined the meaning and function of dialectical materialism, let’s look at how that is applied to studying the historical development of society. Marx called this “the materialist conception of history,” or historical materialism. It is historical materialism that demonstrates the link between dialectical materialism and political economy. Here we have dialectical materialism applied to history.

In our last article we saw that Marxism-Leninism bases itself on a materialist worldview. But we saw, at the same time, that materialism as it came to be understood with the rise of bourgeois society was still metaphysical in its method of analysis. At this point, let’s look at the difference between the metaphysical and dialectical method. Then we can better understand how Karl Marx established the philosophical basis of revolutionary science, dialectical materialism.