What Is Dialectical Materialism?

A popular introduction to dialectical materialism, written for the general reader rather than the examination hall: matter and its forms of motion, consciousness, the knowability of the world, the laws and categories of dialectics, and the relation between philosophy and the natural sciences.

Krapivin writes plainly and without jargon, which is harder than it looks in this material, and the book has the virtue of a primer - it has to state its assumptions rather than bury them in qualification.

The date needs settling, because the spine misleads. The copyright page records a first printing two years earlier, and it is the earlier text that reached the reprint unchanged. The internal evidence is unambiguous: there is no mention of perestroika, glasnost or Gorbachev anywhere, and the Twenty-Seventh Congress of February 1986 - the obvious landmark for any later ideological text, since it rewrote the Party programme - appears in no form at all. Every dated citation in the apparatus is to a Progress volume of Lenin printed in 1977 or 1980.

So this is a pre-Gorbachev manual circulating under a Gorbachev-era imprint, and a reader looking for the moment official Soviet philosophy noticed its world was changing will not find it here. What it offers instead is the doctrine in its settled form, stated as clearly as it was ever stated for a non-specialist.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.