I couldn’t even hack stalin’s explanation rip 😢
I roughly understand dialectical materialism to be a view of things being in a constant state of change driven by conflict between opposing forces.
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.
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
Sorry that was a lazy answer - if you’re looking for a simple, easy to understand description honestly Mike Duncan’s episode The Three Pillars of Marxism has one of the most concise and simple descriptions that a layperson could understand. You don’t have to listen to the whole episode but I think he finished with diamat in the first 15 mins if I remember correctly.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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.
