I’m gonna hope that Cunningham’s law gets a better answer/correction if this one is in any way off:

• Things exist as opposites (hot/cold, night/day, etc.)

• There’s a push and pull between these opposites and they can be said to exist in contradiction with each other

• Things go through states of change (night turns to day, day turns to night)

• Resolving these sort of contradictions in social systems (rich/poor, etc.) can involve sort of “leveling them out” through a process of enforced change; the worker, who may be separated out from the “intellectual” in the prior system, becomes educated and the “intellectual” becomes a laborer (the gap between the two becomes narrower); the community leader who was before divorced from the political process becomes a representative not through campaigning but because their community selects them out and wants them to represent them; the worker who before had to rent (at best) access to the means of production (land, factories) gets shared, collective ownership of it.

• There must be a developed process of change: For example, if China were to today declare that it is now a stateless, classless, moneyless society and dissolve the state, what is likely to happen? The inertia and state apparatuses and social systems in place would likely continue as they are and replace the leadership who said such with new leadership who adheres to the current system. Were they to declare this and try to enforce it, such as by punishing people for exchanging goods and services via money, they would be contradicting the stateless part and generally losing sight of process in favor of blind adherence to a vague concept. Without a process of change to develop toward things, it’s little more than an aspirational declaration of intent. Like Michael Scott from The Office “declaring bankruptcy”; filing for bankruptcy is an enforced and designed process that functions a certain way in the context of a specific society. Declaring it literally doesn’t get you anywhere.

• Other example: You are in a dark room, so you flip the light switch. The switch is connected to wires, which (through complex processes I don’t understand well enough to explain) electricity gets created and a light bulb is powered. But, the light doesn’t turn on. This can mean a number of things: the power as a whole is out; something is wrong with the wiring (in which case, you need an electrician); or the more common, the bulb doesn’t work anymore. You turn the light switch off so you don’t get zapped while replacing the bulb, remove the old one, and try putting the new one in. You flip the light switch on. Light floods the room. This enables you to see in the dark, so now you can study for that exam you have even though it’s 2am. Where before you were limited to studying with the sun, you can now do it at night. This expands the range of things you can do, regardless of time of day, but also can mess with your circadian rhythms, making your sleep worse. The more you drill this stuff down, the more you get into how things push and pull with each other, and how humans and communities and societies effect change and are affected by change.

(This ended up being a big thing when I meant for it to be a small summary, but I’m gonna roll with it and hope it helps for discussion, if nothing else lol.)

The example that helped things start to click for me was the relationship between poverty and charity. At first glance they feel like opposites, poverty is a lack in essential needs, charity is an concentration of those essentials, distributed to those without.

But once you think about it some more, the only reason there is poverty is because some people have hoarded enough resources that they can dole them out as charity. Charity can only exist if poverty does, and poverty can only exist if the conditions for charity exist. Each contains the seed of the other within it, and they push and pull on each other. The more poverty there is, the more need for charity there is. The more charity exists, the more poverty that there must be. This is a dialectical relationship.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Elementary_principles_of_philosophy the audiobook linked on the page actually follows a slightly better translation imo that we’ve yet to incorporate. It flows better imo

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm

I was about to ask “Did you read Stalin?”

My read is that:

• dialectical relates to the tension between opposites. Pick “anything”, there’s something else in conflict with it, causing it to be, or not to be. This contrasts with a frictionless immutable analysis, where there’s no interaction between the “anything” you’re analysing and it’s surrounding context.

• historical means that this analysis is applied to historical aspects of society.

• materialism means that any support on the analysis must be originate in material reality, with as much context as possible. In contrast with idealism, which is kind of moral judgement on what things look like, or should be.

Am I too far off?

I roughly understand dialectical materialism to be a view of things being in a constant state of change driven by conflict between opposing forces.

There are many ways of modelling the same thing. Imagine you have a limited amount of money to fence in your yard.

An economist would say “you have a budget”. A cyberneticist or a linear programmer would say “you have a potentially binding constraint on your objective function”. A marxist might say “there is a contradiction between the size of your enclosure and the amount of fence you can buy”. A normal person would say “well there’s a tradeoff. I can fence in my whole yard or I can spend my money to go drinking on the weekends.”

All of these basically say the same thing. Marxists like to use dialectics which is a philosophical idea originally from idealist philosophers. When brought into the realm of materialist philosophy it gets called dialectical materialism.

Materialist philosophy is the idea that ultimately everything is matter and energy. Nowadays this gets called Physicalism sometimes. Idealist philosophy says that there are things which do exist but which are not material or energy. Ideas, gods, angels, conciousness, etc. Most people have a combination of these two ideas and so would accurately be called “Dualist” but internet leftists tend to use the term “Idealist”.

The simplest way to understand a “dialectic” is, I think, the following: At the start of the industrial revolution in England there were the old lords and a new wealthy business class. There was a conflict between them over the limited resources. There are only so many people to control, luxury goods to purchase, government positions to hold, etc. And these people have different interests. So a Marxist would say, when speaking in terms of dialectics, that “there is a contradiction between the aristocracy (landowners) and the bourgeoisie (business owners, capitalists)”.

Now obviously the relative strength of either side in this conflict can change. Maybe the business class start organizing and take more seats in parliament, maybe the lords begin raising their own knights and armies again, etc. A marxist would say that this change is actually not unusual but a key part of the system. They say that modelling things using dialectics and materialist philosophy means we can understand how things change and not be so surprised when they do. And when something does change they might say “the dialectic is in motion” or “the contradictions are sharpening”.

Ultimately the entire thing is fancy language from the 1800s that should probably be replaced because it’s alienating and bad for propaganda. “Conflict”, “tradeoff”, and “change” are much more sensible in 21st century English than “contradiction”, “dialectic”, and “motion”.

Dialectics:

People very often confused dialections for being all about opposing forces and contradictions. This is not fully accurate.

Hegel’s dialectics are more fully described as imminent critique, a method where one takes the internal logic of the object of analysis and takes it to its logical conclusion. This is done without bringing in external content or judgement. The point of this excercise is to show whether or not the object in question can stand on its own merit or not. Contradictions are a result of doing imminent critique. We see the internal forces inside an object that will eventually rip it apart. A contradiction is inherently Unstable (or meta-stable at best). No contradiction in the universe can last forever, not even the orbits of the celestial bodies.

Materialism: when hegel first made his imminent critique, it was about ideas evolving through human history. Marx changed it analysing physical and social systems. Mostly the latter, as science is usually more than sufficient to analyse the dynamics of the former.

More broadly speaking, materialism itself has a rich tradition. For most of history, materialist have had to fight against religion and superstition. Today, materialism’s basic premises, that reality exists independently of humans, does not sound like it could possibly be used to justify Communism. This is largely because materialist ideas have spread rapidly through the 20th century, although the associated communist impulse that inevitably goes along with it has been suppressed by propaganda.