Confrontation of twelve characteristic theses of the system of dialectical materialism with the corresponding theses of philosophical materialism José Ramón Esquinas Algaba Lecture given at the School of Philosophy of Oviedo on Monday, February 26, 2024 https://www.fgbueno.es/efo/efo333.htm Twenty years ago, Gustavo Bueno spoke at the IX Philosophy Meetings of Gijón (July 2004) to commemorate the second centenary of Kant's death. In that intervention, he confronted transcendental idealism with philosophical materialism through twelve theses. We, in this year of Gustavo Bueno's centenary, want to pay tribute to this intervention by contrasting philosophical materialism with dialectical materialism. The fall of the Soviet Empire has undoubtedly had an impact on the global decline of Diamat as a philosophy worthy of being taken into account at least when confronting it. Two objections can be raised to this hasty analysis. On the one hand, it would be a gross progressivism to assume that philosophies succeed one another in degrees of greater truth than those that preceded them, in such a way that the History of Philosophy would be nothing more than a compilation of past errors that lead to the present truth. Past philosophical systems would be little more than ancient or reactionary waste, only interesting to doxographers and decolonizers of various kinds eager to detect evil in the past and blame it on the perfidious, meat-eating, Western, heterosexual white man. However, the truth is that all philosophical systems explore and test alternatives that must be explored at least in order to oppose them, once we postulate that all thinking is against someone and every philosophical system thinks against other philosophical systems that are more or less distant from it in its coordinates. Platonism, Aristotelianism, Thomism, Kantianism, Marxism, etc., are not dead but have dissolved in our present to the extent that their positions – insofar as these currents suppose modulations of Ideas against other possible modulations – continue to be present as alternatives that must be taken into account. Dialectical Materialism will continue to be one of those systems against which to think in the same way as the Catholic Church continues to refute Arius seventeen hundred years after his death: because its positions are not a mere anecdote but a possible alternative in the way of understanding the Ideas that nourish academic Philosophy. But furthermore, dialectical Materialism has not been swept away entirely. If in the “Euro-American area of ​​influence” it is practically anecdotal, it is not in the “Russian area of ​​influence”: a quick look at Russian academic article search engines shows that between 2022 and 2024, 197 articles appeared with the label “Kantianism” in the title or in the abstract compared to 1,098 articles on “dialectical materialism”, many of them written from its philosophical coordinates. Diamat continues to be a system from which a large part of Russian academic philosophy thinks or against which it thinks. And Russia today continues to be an important protagonist in the dialectic of States that surrounds us. Thus, from our Hispanic coordinates, it is necessary to delimit the differences between two philosophical systems that call themselves materialist in order to shed some light on those who, due to lack of expertise or bad faith, confuse both systems. If, as Don Gustavo often recalled, a wise man is one who understands flavours, what we will try to do is refine our palate in order to distinguish the complex Rioja wine of Filomat from the simplistic vodka of Diamat. José Ramón Esquinas Algaba (1979), a doctor in philosophy, has offered these lessons at the School of Philosophy in Oviedo: “Provisional Guidelines for a Philosophy of the Revolution” (25/Feb/2019), “Matter and Revolution: Exposition and Critique of Soviet Ontology” (26/Feb/2018) and “Disinfecting Relics. On Configurational History” (28/Feb/2022).