The term dialectical materialism, commonly used to describe the philosophy of Karl Marx, is suggested by certain statements of Marx, but was not a term that he himself used. In the afterward to the second German edition of Capital, Marx says, "My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite" (1996a, p. 1:19). For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the Idea is an independent power, a "demiurge," for which the real world is an external, phenomenal form. For Marx, "the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought" (19).

Species Being

Marx does not here directly call his method "materialist," however. In his early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 he rejects the antithesis of materialism and idealism as terms usually applied to separate individuals, for a social ontology of the...