>>2719390Marx never actually promoted a worldview of "dialectical materialism" thoughever, but only applied dialectics to social phenomena (e.g. History, as class struggle), which he saw as the development of labour abstracted as commodity and property, which through its dynamism, establishes a movement toward its spiritualisation (e.g. the self-moving substance, or "money in motion"; capital) and its abolition (e.g. the negation of negation of capital) which entails returning man to nature, and so ceasing his dialectical motion (e.g. Man-as-Man becomes positively conceived and thus gains self-determination, rather than contingency). This is why Communism can also be linked to "primitive" human society, which Marx clearly imagines man being free within, but only by the capacity of natural oppression. By the socialisation of Nature, Man thus controls his own destiny, by disciplining its organs of production to his own needs.
It was Engels who attempted to naturalise dialectics, such as in his unfinished work "Dialectics of Nature" (1886) in which he denies the Big Bang and Heat Death:
<the eternally repeated succession of worlds in infinite time is only the logical complement to the co-existence of innumerable worlds in infinite spaceHe justifies this by seeing that dispersed heat (e.g. frictional entropy) must regenerate into activity that gives birth to new worlds, but what scientists now say is that the course of entropy is absolute as a tendency, since reversing entropy requires more energy than the energy lost through simple dispersion. All things die. He supplements this by later citation from Ancient Greek materialists, such as Leucippus and Democritus, rather than any theoretical or practical science. He makes similar claims in his tract, Anti-Dühring (1877):
<It already becomes evident here that matter is unthinkable without motion. And if, in addition, matter confronts us as something given, equally uncreatable as indestructible, it follows that motion also is as uncreatable as indestructible […] [thus, granting an origin of motion] necessarily leads to the creation and destruction of motion, and therefore presupposes a creator.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch03.htmThis of course is the standard logic of Aristotle's "unmoved mover", and which is replicated in the Big Bang Theory, that there was a "time" before time and a "motion" before motion, which set things in order. Engels appeals to the eternity of the universe, and so the eternity of motion, and thus denies a beginning of things.
Engels is then the real origin of "dialectical materialism" which in its various propositions appear to be unscientific, due to their theoretical presuppositions. After Engels comes Plekhanov who writes (1891):
<The philosophy of Marx and Engels is not only a materialist philosophy, it is dialectical materialism.https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/xx/dialectic.htmThis is later adopted by the Bolsheviks and becomes their state philosophy, tutored by Stalin (1938). We also get Mao, who emphasises the naturalism of dialectics, or rather, of "contradiction" in the heart of matter (1937). We can follow the rabbit hole then to see where all this confusion begins.