Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical materialism is Karl Marx's inversion of Hegel's dialectical idealism, where Hegel held that the Geist (World-Spirit/ideas) drives material history, Marx argued that material economic conditions (who owns the means of production) drive ideas, culture, and politics, producing a theory of history as class struggle in which each economic mode of production (slave society → feudalism → capitalism → communism) contains internal contradictions that generate the next through revolutionary transformation.
Marx's Young Hegelian colleagues misread Hegel as an atheist (because he said 'God is dead,' meaning he was redefining God as the immanent Geist rather than a separate entity). Marx took this misreading in a productive direction: if Hegel's Geist is not transcendent but material, if it's not ideas but economics that is the underlying force, then history becomes comprehensible as a struggle over resources and production. The inversion is total: for Hegel, the superstructure of ideas (culture, religion, philosophy, art) creates the material base; for Marx, the material base (who owns what, how production is organized) creates the ideological superstructure.
The practical consequence: the dominant ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class, not because they are true but because the ruling class controls the institutions that produce and distribute ideas, churches, schools, newspapers, universities. This is what Marx called 'false consciousness': workers who believe in property rights, religious salvation, and nationalism are believing ideas that serve their oppressors' interests rather than their own. Class consciousness, the awakening to this structural reality, is the necessary precondition for revolutionary change.
Marx's teleological schema has five stages: (1) primitive communism (hunter-gatherer equality), (2) ancient slave society (surplus value extraction via slavery), (3) feudalism (surplus value via serfdom and land monopoly), (4) capitalism (surplus value via wage labor and capital ownership), (5) communism (collective ownership, no exploitation). Each stage contains the contradictions that generate the next, the master-slave dialectic eventually frees the slave; the feudal lord is eventually displaced by the capitalist; capitalism's concentration of wealth and proletarianization of labor will eventually produce the revolution that ends class society. The schema is sophisticated and historically informed; the error is assuming that the dialectic's logic points inevitably to communism rather than to fascism, nationalism, or the welfare state as responses to capitalism's contradictions.
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What is dialectical materialism? ＋
Marx's inversion of Hegel: where Hegel said ideas (Geist) drive material history, Marx said material economic conditions (who owns production) drive ideas, culture, and politics. History becomes class struggle, each economic system (slave society, feudalism, capitalism) contains internal contradictions that generate the next through revolution. The ruling class's ideas are the ruling ideas, not because they're true but because the ruling class controls idea-production institutions. Communism is history's endpoint, where Marx went wrong.