It is extremely important that the question of methodology be raised, not to assert a philosophical introduction in abstraction, but to show the concrete relation between method and analysis or more specifically between dialiectical materialism and political economy. It is the fusion of the Marxist philosophical method and outlook with the political economic analysis which makes that analysis a Marxist-Leninist one. In other words the method of political economy must be dialectical materialism. In the Preface to Capital, Marx states:
whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually nxy method in this striking and (as far as concerns my own application of it) generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectical method?
In respect to the importance of the diatectical method and its relation to political economy, V.I. Lenin stated:
It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic (dialectical logic). Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx/
In the same light, it can be stated that unfamiliarity with dialectical materialism can lead to an analysis that is not dialectical but metaphysical (i.e. one-sided, isolated and subjective). Hence there have been and still are “Marxist-Leninist” groups who parrot dialectics in isolation, but use the metaphysical method in analysis and practice.
What then explicitly is dialectical meterialism? Materialism, in the Marxist sense, states that matter i.e. the total, real objective world exists independent of the human will (mind). Dialectics is as, expressed by Engels as follows:
It is . . . from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three: The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice-versa; The law of the interpenetration of opposites; The law of the negation of the negation.
Dialectical materialism is diametrically opposed to the idealist world outlook and the metaphysical method (previously described), which are the ideological bases for the bourgeois forces the world over. Consequently, it can be seen that proletarian political economy differs from bourgeois political
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