Dialectical Materialism (philosophy of Marxism:) A Very VERY Bare Bones Basic Introductory Thread!

Dialectical Materialism(DM) is one of the three pillars of Marxism, which includes historical materialism and Marxist economics. What it is not: Fatalism (we have free will to a point,) or a crystal ball (It's more like a compass.)

Heraclitus the pre-socratic sad boy dropped the law of unity of opposites: "All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream."

He also noted that nobody steps into the same river twice, for it's not the same river and they're not the same person. We are and are not simultaneously

I'm not the same person as I was 10 years ago, but you wouldn't argue that it wasn't me. Cells have died, and been replaced. blood cells are in different parts of my body than they even were a few seconds ago. You get the idea. We aren't the still frame, we're the animation.

Heraclitus was resurrected from obscurity by Hegel, who expanded on it with additional laws. The law of quantity into quality shows how small changes will at a certain point erupt into a qualitative change and vice versa. My favorite example of this is the Cambrian explosion.

Or you can think about water on the stove. It doesn't boil right away. It appears nothing is happening while degrees are added to the pot. Things add up until reaching the straw that breaks the camel's back.

The law of negation: Everything negates itself. The seed is negated by the bud, which is negated by the flower, etc. Everything taken to it's logical conclusion based on their own inner contradiction falls into it's opposite. Those three laws work together.

But Hegel was coming at it from an idealist (the philosophy, not the colloquial definition) perspective. Marx turned Hegel back on his feet by applying dialectics to materialism. From there he and Engels applied this philosophy to understanding of history and social development

Marx didn't invent materialism. He inherited these ideas, and expanded on them to create something closer to the truth, as others continue to expand on Marx. Materialism as a philosophy already existed in various time periods globally.

I sometimes hear people reject Marxism on the grounds that it's obsolete or irrelevant to modern times because something Marx, or a Marxist said turned out to be wrong. But that would be like rejecting Paleontology because at one point an iguanadon was thought to look like this

DM doesn't need to replace formal logic. A good way to look at the relationship between FL and DM, is to look at the classification of animals vs. evolution. One looks at what something is and the other looks at the drawn out process of how it got there, and what it might become

So why is any of this important? Well, because our philosophy informs how we see things like capitalism. From a DM perspective, capitalism can't be the end of history, can it? As for using DM, it comes down to practice.

There is Waaaay more to Marx than "fuck capitalism." And I really don't feel like I'm doing dialectical materialism justice, here. There is only so much that can be covered here on twitter. Plus, I'm spent. Feel free to expand on/correct this.

If you'd like to read more, this link has an explination and a reading list: https://www.marxist.com/what-is-dialectical-materialism.htm

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