Marx and Engels both concluded that Hegelian philosophy, at least as interpreted by their former colleagues, was too abstract and was being misapplied in attempts to explain the social injustice in recently industrializing countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, which was a growing concern in the early 1840s, as exemplified by Dickensian inequity. Marx was also familiar with Lucretius's theory of clinamen. Marx's doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, was concerned with the atomism of Epicurus and Democritus, which is considered the foundation of materialist philosophy. Marx and Engels each began their adulthood as Young Hegelians, one of several groups of intellectuals inspired by the philosopher Hegel. Stalin further delineated and defined dialectical and historical materialism as the world outlook of Marxism–Leninism, and as a method to study society and its history. Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, first used the term 'dialectical materialism' in 1891 in his writings on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Marx. Engels further explained the 'materialist dialectic' in his Dialectics of Nature in 1883. Marx himself had talked about the 'materialist conception of history', which was later referred to as ' historical materialism' by Engels. Casual mention of the term 'dialectical materialism' is also found in the biography Frederick Engels, by philosopher Karl Kautsky, written in 1899. The term was coined in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen, a socialist who corresponded with Marx, during and after the failed 1848 German Revolution. Marx and Engels never used the words 'dialectical materialism' in their own writings. 10 As a heuristic in science and elsewhere.The formulation of the Soviet version of dialectical and historical materialism in the 1930s by Joseph Stalin (such as in Stalin's book Dialectical and Historical Materialism) became the official interpretation taught in Soviet education, while other interpretations and conceptions of dialectical materialism, such as Mao's On Contradiction, exist across the world. Jordan noted, 'Engels made constant use of the metaphysical insight that the higher level of existence emerges from and has its roots in the lower that the higher level constitutes a new order of being with its irreducible laws and that this process of evolutionary advance is governed by laws of development which reflect basic properties of 'matter in motion as a whole'.' ĭialectical materialism accepts the evolution of the natural world and the emergence of new qualities of being at new stages of evolution. Marx supposed that the most effective solution to the problems caused by said contradictory phenomena was to address and rearrange the systems of social organization at the root of the problems. This is in contrast to the idealist Hegelian dialectic, which emphasizes the observation that contradictions in material phenomena could be resolved by analyzing them and synthesizing a solution whilst retaining their essence. Marxist dialectics, as a materialist philosophy, emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of contradictions within things, in relation to but not limited to class, labor, and socioeconomic interactions.

Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of science, history, and nature developed in Europe and based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Dialectic defined