Dialectical Materialism One of Marx's main contributions to philosophy was his role in helping to create and define a branch called Dialectical Materialism. The . dialectical. Part of dialectical materialism comes from Hegel's ideas that everything in the world was constantly changing and in flux. The synthesis will eventually become a thesis, and the process repeats itself. This continual struggle between thesis, antithesis, and eventual synthesis is how change in this world comes about.
Materialism is a branch of philosophy based on tangible, and observable phenomena.
Marx believed that ideas could only exist as reflections of material conditions. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rise a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material production forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or what is but a legal expression of the same thing with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.