Class Struggle: Dialectics versus Metaphysics
Haz Al-Din
Abstract
This article, Class Struggle: Dialectics versus Metaphysics, offers a critique of the dominant “Western Marxist” and academic–textualist approach to class struggle, arguing that their metaphysical fixation on fixed categories, formal universality, and abstract theorizing has severed Marxism from concrete historical development and living revolutionary practice. Haz Al-Din contrasts metaphysical Marxism — rooted in dogmatism, scholasticism, and a rigid reading of 19th-century European conditions — with the materialist dialectic, which recognizes class struggle as an ever-recurring, historically specific, and transformative process. Drawing on Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the revolutionary experiences of the 20th century, the article asserts that social revolution proceeds independently of consciousness, and that proletarian theory becomes decisive only when it grasps the concrete reality of its moment rather than prescribing universal formulas detached from material conditions. In particular, Haz Al-Din challenges the Western dismissal of the “peasant element” and small proprietors as outdated, showing that these strata continue to serve as essential sites of social contradiction and revolutionary renewal within modern capitalism. The essay ultimately calls for a return to dialectical thinking that prioritizes content over form, universality through particularity, and the negation of the negation as the path to historical advance. By re-grounding Marxism in concrete reality rather than textual purity, the article seeks to reorient contemporary revolutionary theory toward the real movement of history and the living forces of social transformation.
Keywords
class struggle, dialectical materialism, Western Marxism, peasantry and proletariat, social revolution, Haz Al-Din
