Claim. Marxist dialectical logic originally rejected formal logic’s laws of identity and contradiction as belonging to the superstructure, but Stalin’s 1950 paper forced their re-acceptance — exposing an aporia at the heart of materialist dialectic.
Elaboration. Sang Hun Lee traces the historical reversal (C. Dialectical Logic (Marxist Logic)). Marx inverted Hegel — accepting the dialectic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis but locating it in matter, not Idea. Ideas became mere reflections of the material world. From a materialist conception of history, Marxists assumed the forms and laws of formal logic belonged to the superstructure and had class nature, and therefore should be rejected. The slogan: for development, A must be A and not-A simultaneously.
A parallel argument was made about language — that Russian should be replaced by a ‘new Soviet language’ since language too belonged to the superstructure. This proved impossible. In 1950 Stalin published ‘Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics’ declaring language neither superstructural nor class-bound. From 1950–1951, a Soviet discussion extended the same conclusion to formal logic. The settlement: ‘formal logic deals with the elementary laws and forms of thinking, while dialectical logic is a higher logic concerning the laws of development of objective reality and of thinking.’
Lee identifies the resulting aporia: Marxism’s core tenet was that thinking is a reflection of the objective world. If thinking now follows the law of identity (A=A, unchangeable) while objective reality follows the dialectical law of contradiction (A is both A and not-A, developing), then thinking is not mirroring objective reality. The two laws have been separated, contradicting materialism’s own reflection thesis.
Furthermore, accepting the law of identity even partially means affirming the unchanging nature of things — at least in thought. This is, Lee argues, a ‘revision, or even collapse’ of materialist dialectic, since its foundational claim was that everything changes and develops. The Unification Thought solution is to hold that changeability and unchangeability are united in both thinking and the objective world — through the identity-maintaining and developmental four-position foundations. Critics typically engage on whether Stalin’s settlement actually constitutes the collapse Lee claims.
See also. formal-logic-four-laws-of-thought, development-through-harmony-not-contradiction, ut-correlatives-vs-opposites