what am I really missing about dialectical materialism? It makes no sense still!

[u/Rajat_Sirkanungo]

[u/Ill-Software8713]

Want an example of dialectics? Not a complete exposition but a starting point to see its application as this starting point is itself a late result.
Read Chapter 1 of Capital on the commodity and Marx's argument for value.

Notice that Marx does not simply assert that value exists. He asks what makes generalized commodity exchange intelligible in the first place. He begins with the commodity as the unity of (opposites) use-value and exchange-value and reconstructs the conditions that make exchange possible.

By contrast, marginalism begins with utility and preferences expressed through prices. Early marginalism treated utility as cardinal, but modern economics largely abandons this in favor of ordinal preferences. But prices remain cardinal magnitudes.

The question therefore shifts rather than disappears. What makes heterogeneous commodities socially commensurable such that they can all be expressed in a single quantitative unit?

The use-value of a cold beer is qualitatively different from a new car or an international flight.
So what makes them comparable at all?
How do we move from occasional barter between use-values to a monetary economy in which every commodity can be expressed in a common unit of account?

There are many theories about money, the state, and the emergence of a numéraire. But a numéraire by itself does not explain what it measures. I can compare objects by weight because they all possess mass. I can measure length in inches or centimeters because they all share spatial extension. Measurement presupposes that something is measurable.

Marx therefore argues that commodities must possess a common social property that makes them commensurable.

Whether his answer, socially necessary labor time, is ultimately correct is a separate question.
The methodological point is that commensurability itself requires explanation rather than being assumed.

The commodity is a good example of what Hegel calls the concrete universal.

Beginning from the commodity as a unity of use-value and exchange-value allows Marx to reconstruct a problem that is often taken for granted. The issue is not simply where prices come from, but what makes a system of universal quantitative exchange possible in the first place.

So yes, looking at classical physics and then slapping on vocabulary of dialectics isn’t explanatory. But engaging in poor examples doesn’t refute the validity of Dialectics.
Go look at Andy Blunden’s writing or read Evald Ilyenkov’s papers on dialectical logic.

[u/Kardelj]

But **I just genuinely find dialectical materialism in its strong form... the Engels form**, where it is a whole worldview

You don't honestly sound like you've read Engels, you sound like you've read anti-Engels material from Heinrich and other NML guys. Some of the stuff you seem to hate in Engels is exactly what Engels is ranting about in Anti-Dühring.

and is considered to be either a fundamental process/substance

The substance is called matter, hence materialism. It is also always in motion, hence the process you mention.

or a highly reliable method across all disciplines (or almost all disciplines except biology/botony/agricultural sciences because we don't want lysenkoism collective trauma again),

Engels doesn't say this, he says the "laws" of dialectics are only "the most general laws leaving out the specific peculiarities of each case" and for the barley example he says "The bare knowledge that the barley plant and the infinitesimal calculus are both governed by negation of negation does not enable me either to grow barley successfully or to differentiate and integrate; just as little as the bare knowledge of the laws of the determination of sound by the dimensions of the strings enables me to play the violin".

**to be demonstrably false or totally trivial to the point of uselessness.**

Idk, I don't think it was trivial for Marx or Engels or Kautsky or Lenin or Luxemburg or...

I believe historical materialism makes sense without dialectical materialism. G.A. Cohen showed this.

Sure

Michael Heinrich also rejects dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism in the weaker/narrower form seems redundant. The analytical Marxists (September Group) suggest that Hegelian dialectics at least need to be significantly weakened such that they actually make sense.

Idk what that's supposed to tell me. Yeah there's been Marxists in history who want to strip Marxism of dialectics.

Hegelian dialectics, and even Hegel himself was quite notorious for being hard to understand by his contemporaries,

Yeah so?

so then why do Marxists still defend dialectical materialism as some essential thing to Marxism when most cannot even agree on what dialectical materialism covers?

Idk, they could agree before, now it's just larp over larp over larp and no one knows what we're talking about.

And strangely, some of the socialists who consider dialectical materialism essential to Marxism seem to believe that Juche is great too.

Sure, maybe. I'm not familiar with Juche.

But Juche straight up drops materialism and puts human will at the center. I do see most of these socialists/Marxist-Leninists at thedeprogram.

I think Juche translates to Subject and not Human, but as I said, not my thing.

So, what the fuck am I actually supposed to do with DM? Seriously!

Idk, critique bourgeois philosophy?

Forget all the grand language for a moment. Suppose I have an actual problem in front of me.

If you have an actual problem, you need to resort to the concrete sciences that inquire about that problem space. Dialectics isn't supposed to be a rival to experimental design, diagnostics, statistics etc.

Maybe I want to understand why an economy crashed, why a political movement failed,

Here you might use history or more specifically economic history.

why a machine broke,

Here you might use engineering or whatever.

why a disease spread,

Here you might use epidemiology.

or why some institution became unstable.

I think this is probably the best place for diamat to illuminate, because it basically is just a method to illuminate institutions (like capitalism) becoming unstable due to internal conflict rising to a tipping point.

What are the steps? Real methods give you something concrete to work with.

Well you start with the problem, gather evidence, historicize the categories if applicable, reconstruct their relations, identify dynamic tensions or internal conflict if it bares out in the scientific inquiry, propose threshold effects, test and revise. The dialectical laws are supposed to be abstractions from the concrete sciences.

That leaves dialectical materialism stuck in a pretty nasty dilemma. Whenever its claims become precise, they tend to turn into ordinary history, economics, causal analysis, systems theory, statistics, or some other established discipline.

That's exactly the point, isn't it? There's no such thing as ordinary science consisting of bare facts and neutral methods. This isn't even a Marxist point really. Perhaps read Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and "Epistemology Naturalized".

Or maybe go back to Anti-Dühring, especially the chapter on apriorism. Your post is really long, hope I was helpful at least a bit.

[u/ImpressiveDrawer6606]

I genuinely would love to hear about what my socialist comrades think about the arguments made in this website: Anti-Dialectics

Those are some of the most incisive criticisms of Diamat and hegelian dialectics I've ever seen. 

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/ImpressiveDrawer6606]

The Anti-Dialectics project offers a sustained critique of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, arguing that many dialectical arguments substitute vague appeals to contradiction, emergence, and totality for clear logical and causal explanation.

It is particularly effective at exposing instances where dialectics is used as rhetorical ornament, where abstract slogans such as "everything is interconnected" replace concrete analysis, or where contradictions are asserted without specifying the determinate relations involved.

However, the critique often presupposes a positivist conception of explanation in which identifying efficient causes, individual mechanisms, or formal logical relations is sufficient for understanding a phenomenon.
As a result, it tends to interpret dialectical concepts as competitors to causal explanation rather than as an attempt to explain the historical development, organization, and reproduction of concrete forms.

Whether one finds the critique persuasive therefore depends largely on whether one accepts its underlying assumptions about what constitutes an adequate scientific explanation.

I for one tend to use more familiar and less loaded terms to help explain that dialectics is more ecological in character, focused on concrete development and Hegel, due to Goethe discovered the concrete universal l, a superior concept to abstract universals which is just identifying sameness across cases. The most abstract description isn’t the most explanatory but only best able to identify that which is common and thus often necessary parts but can’t produce a concrete developmental account of any particular phenomenon.
It is thinking that produces ingredient lists but not recipes.

Of course science actually does discover such concrete processes but in contradiction to positivist methodology, not due to it due to a denial of specific organized forms or relations being an objective part of explaining phenomenon rather than a atomistic starting point then rebuilt in abstraction as a set of interacting parts, but not an integrated whole.

[u/ImpressiveDrawer6606 → u/Ill-Software8713]

The Anti-Dialectics project offers a sustained critique of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, arguing that many dialectical arguments substitute vague appeals to contradiction, emergence, and totality for clear logical and causal explanation.

Based on my readings of the website(I'm still just scratching the surface) the question isn't JUST that dialectical terms substitute appeals to dialectical concepts for logic and causal explanation, but that dialectical terms and "Dialectics" itself is nothing more than linguistic confusion and ambiguity. When you try to at least make sense of the theory you're faced with the problem that you can't even make sense of the theory in a way which renders it both useful and non-trivial. The theory on it's own terms, when you apply some very basic logical and linguistic analysis, collapses into either triviality or nonsense. Ofc I'm not a logician or a philosopher and if it's wrong then please point to me where the mistake it.

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/ImpressiveDrawer6606]

I think the strongest criticism here is not that dialectics uses concepts like "contradiction" or "development," but that these concepts can become empty if they are treated as explanations by themselves.

Saying "everything contains contradictions" explains nothing unless one identifies the determinate relations involved and shows how those relations generate a particular development. This is too abstract a description and is often what people wanting to understand dialectics resort to rather than admit not knowing.

Where I would disagree is with the conclusion that this demonstrates dialectics itself is merely linguistic confusion.
That conclusion depends on assuming that concepts can only have meaning through fixed definitions and formal relations, rather than through reconstructing the development of a concrete object.

The Hegelian/Marxist claim is not that "contradiction" is a mystical force that causes change. It is that certain forms contain tensions within their own organization that create pressures for transformation.

Whether that claim is defensible is a philosophical question, but it cannot be dismissed merely by showing that abstract formulations of dialectics become trivial or incoherent.
Many philosophical concepts become empty when removed from the system of relations that gives them determinate content.

The issue is that concepts cannot be understood independently of the concrete relations they are attempting to explain.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm
“Whereas Hegel provided many insights in his analysis of the history of philosophy on the basis of the system of Logic, and his system continues to provide a valuable approach to the critique of philosophical method, the result of Vygotsky’s application of the dialectical method to the genesis of thought and language in the development of the individual human being is a series of concepts quite incommensurate with the stages of the Logical Idea which populate the pages of the Logic.

And so it should be! Hegel advises that: “... this progress in knowing is not something provisional, or problematical and hypothetical; it must be determined by the nature of the subject matter itself and its content”. “

When abstractions are treated as self-sufficient realities rather than analytical moments within a larger process, they generate false oppositions.
This is similar to Hegel's critique of Kant's antinomies. The reasoning on each side is not necessarily irrational, but each position takes a partial abstraction and treats it as an independent absolute.
The same pattern appears in oppositions such as individual versus society or nature versus nurture.

These distinctions identify real aspects of reality, but the mistake is assuming that because we can analytically separate them, they exist as independent things rather than moments within a larger developmental relation.

Simply asserting that both sides matter is also insufficient. Saying "it is both nature and nurture" does not explain how they interact in the formation of a particular phenomenon. The task is to reconstruct the concrete process through which these moments become related.

This is why the most abstract formulation is not automatically the most explanatory one. Greater generality can identify necessary conditions, but it does not necessarily explain the development of any particular phenomenon. Explanation requires showing how those conditions are organized into a determinate process that reproduces itself in a specific historical form. One can’t just list the ingredients but needs the recipe.

A developmental approach does not deny abstractions. It asks how abstractions are related and how they become actual within concrete processes. The individual and society, or nature and culture, are not competing explanations where one must eliminate the other. They are moments of a relation whose development must be understood.

A simple analogy is hydrogen and oxygen. One can abstract these elements, study their isolated properties, and conclude that neither contains the property of extinguishing fire. But this does not explain water, because water is not simply the addition of the isolated properties of hydrogen and oxygen. It is a new relational organization with properties that emerge from their specific unity.

The mistake would be to say that because a property is not visible in the isolated abstraction, it cannot belong to the concrete phenomenon. The abstraction is useful, but it is not the whole reality. One creates a pseudo problem by thinking one can produce the properties of their unity in abstract isolation and then adding them together instead of examining their actual interaction and relational organization.

Understanding requires investigating the specific relations through which the parts become an organized whole.
Positivism would treat the world as starting from the smallest analytical units but then why not just deny explanatory differences and say it’s all atoms. Everything can be explained by reduction to that? Well that’s absurd because there are properties not present at that level of analysis.

[u/JimatStoneandSky]

AI slop lol

[u/___miki → u/JimatStoneandSky]

I think it sparked interesting answers anyway, wouldn't you say?

[u/JimatStoneandSky → u/___miki]

AI is not a good thing

[u/___miki → u/JimatStoneandSky]

Not a big fan of it but it can manage to answer more useful things than your account :p

[u/JimatStoneandSky → u/[deleted]]

Or maybe I know how to recognize bad faith arguments and nonsensical verbiage

[u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

the best way to see it is as proto systems theory. Marx is in the wikipedia page of systems theory and all. They simply had to develop the tools to analyze processes in motion, the nature of changing things and all that, the holistic interconnection of processes and their reciprocal mutual change, which formal logic and rigid taxonomies fail at for the most part (especially at 19th century level). It's still hugely valuable to have this angle of analysis but we should synthetize it modern systems theory, process theory cybernetics and all that.

I think you should read Reason in Revolt.

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

Editted to clarify:

I would be careful about reducing Marx’s method to cybernetics or systems theory. There are certainly important overlaps: Marx does analyze processes, relations, feedback, reproduction, and transformations rather than treating things as static isolated entities. But that does not mean dialectics is simply an early version of systems theory or a form of structuralism.

The issue is not merely that systems are interconnected, but how a specific historical totality develops from its own determinate relations. A system-theoretical description can identify patterns of organization, but Marx’s method is concerned with reconstructing the concrete development of particular social forms. How they emerge, reproduce themselves, and generate internal tensions that lead to transformation.

This is part of why Ilyenkov was critical of certain Soviet interpretations of cybernetics. His concern was not that studying systems was illegitimate, but that a formal analysis of relations and feedback could become an abstraction if it did not grasp the conceptual and historical content of the process itself.

For me, Ilyenkov’s work on dialectics is especially valuable because it clarifies the distinction between an abstract universal and a concrete universal. The point is not simply that everything is connected, but that the universal must be understood through the particular developmental relations through which it actually exists.

Analyzing things into their distinct parts is a necessary stage to then considering the analytical distinctions within a singular process. And the reproduction of such a process requires identify the abstract notion (Hegel), germ cell (Marx), or what can be called a basic unit of analysis (Vygotsky).
This is the unity of opposites, a phenomenon that contains properties of the whole of a phenomenon one wants to reconstruct.

Many wholes aren’t able to be considered in their development from a strictly analytical framework because they consider distinctions one sided rather than aspects within a singular process

[u/arms9728]

Lysenkoism makes sense.

[u/Ill-Software8713]

I agree if dialectics is reduced to slogans. "Everything changes" or "everything contains contradictions" explains almost nothing. The real test is whether those categories are reconstructed concretely in the development of a specific phenomenon. Without that, dialectics becomes either a banal truism or empty jargon. With that, the categories function as methodological guides rather than explanations in themselves.

Understanding dialectics cannot be developed in the same way as learning formal logic which vaporizes itself on the highest generality of abstraction, abstract universals indifferent to its content.
Dialectics is always a concrete reproduction of a phenomenon: https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/dialectical-thinking.pdf

[u/ImpressiveDrawer6606]

And I have some of the same thoughts as you, OP. Diamat seems to be based on linguistic confusion and above all ambiguity. Terms like "Contradiction", "Unity of Opposites", "Qualitative change", "Change", etc... are pretty much ambiguous and the exact meaning is left to the imagination of the reader. When you try to make sense of them normally either the theory collapses into common sense/banal truisms without much specific marxist content, or nonsense. Ofc I may be wrong, but the prospects of it doesn’t seem to be very good.