This one is a bit more difficult to simplify. I won’t be covering all of dialectical materialism, but simply the part that I am very versed in, namely how to use it to analyse history, or anything else for that matter.
Dialectical materialism is first and foremost about the idea that the universe always changes, that nothing stays the same. Even if it is just on a smaller atomic level in some seconds, and in a rock shattering explosion in others. The forces of nature are always at play, as matter and energy moves carefully through new formations.
On the higher macroscopic scale of this, we see the same thing. People, cities, societies, markets, factories, wars, peace, treaties, laws, addendums, decrees, and so on. All manner of things change each day all over the world. This is how Marxism sees history, as a kind of pattern of natural forces rather than a lateral chain of singular events.
So let’s say you are Martin Luther. Not the modern one, but the German one. You translate and print the bible in German. This is a radical thing, and will change Europe forever. But you did not do it alone.
Instead the book is printed, scribed and copied. After that it is read by the German people, especially the peasants, following this, the peasants rebel. From the tip of your quill, to the tip of their pitchforks. Suddenly you have multiplied your input into history by the millions.
And this was not brought on by magic, but rather by the forces of such a history. By the oppression of the church, by high taxes, by letters of indulgence. Had the church been loved by the people, then Martin Luther would’ve been killed as a heretic by the same mob. The only way the Lutheran reformation happened was through an intricate stage of material conditions.
Singular people and motives cannot account for their own context.
Similarly, take Christ, born in the shadow of the Roman republic. Some 30 years following the establishment of the Roman empire. As he grew up he witnessed the tyranny of Caesar Augustus and his league of slumlord senators, he witnessed the purges and death squads against republicans and populists, he witnessed the rueful poverty, hunger and the fires of Rome, that would swallow up the population of the Suburas; Working class neighborhoods.
It was by arriving just at the right time that Christ became one of the most well known names to history. Had he been born 100 years before, or 100 years after, things would have been very different. He found himself just at the right moment, and just at the right place.
This is why, for instance, Marxists reject the notion that WW1 started with the assassination of the archduke. Rather, this is when the narrative started. It offers a convenient milestone so you don’t go on forever. But the real cause of WW1 involved every single citizen of Europe and the colonies, and the conditions they found themselves in.
Once again we see the forces of history, moving in all manner of directions creating tensions and pressures all over the map, until finally it began to fragment with this one catalyst.
But the Serbian Empire, the Bolshevik revolution, the British Empire, the German Empire, the Prussian Empire, the French Empire all of these forces, with their military ambitions, their sovereignty, their territories and their borders, did not begin with the assassination of the archduke.
If it had not been the assassination, then it would’ve been something else. Because this is what Marxists call a contradiction. Contradictions are like the points of history where several forces push against one another, and eventually something has to give in. When this happens, history happens.
A good example of a contradiction is for instance the Viet Nam war. The US public did not like it, the US troops did not like it, but the US military and the US government did like it. For them it was profitable, both in terms of arms sales but also in CIA drug sales. But for the public it meant death, carnage, drug addiction and high taxes. This is a contradiction, two forces of history at odds with one another.
As long as they are at odds, history stands still. The people resist and get teargassed, the soldiers come and go from their tours of deployment, the president makes statements on CSPAN.
It was not until the end of the war that history moved forward, as the US and Vietnamese people successfully resisted the American, French, Cambodian and Diem governments and finally resolved the contradiction.
These contradictions are known as theses, and antitheses. IE: Action and reaction. The end result is the synthesis. Because these forces are not destroyed, instead they are merged into a new thesis.
That’s why, for instance, the respective governments did manage to make concessions with the Vietnamese victory. The Vietnamese gained their sovereignty, but at the cost of ruin, poverty and predatory debt from the former colonisers. America may have left Viet Nam, but it also maintain influence over Viet Nam.
Suddenly the Viet Nam war was over, and a new contradiction emerged: Viet Nam postwar. As the Viet Nam nation now struggled against the International Monetary Fund and its plundering of Viet Nam’s banks and national budget with shylock loans that Viet Nam never actually agreed to.
So in short, dialectical materialism is about looking at history by examining material influences. How people, countries, institutions and cultures are able to drive history forward. History becomes relative in doing so. There are two wonderful Russian proverbs about dialectical history:
“There are decades where years happen, and years where decades happen.”
And “The past is unpredictable.”
It is easy to imagine history as merely a practice of recordkeeping and examination, but to Marxists, history is a pattern of determination. It ebbs and flows with a volumetric property, some periods are eventful, some are not. The iron ages was very slow history, the 1990s was very fast history.
This is because in Marxism, the speed of history is measured by how rapidly it can change things. So when each day is similar and without much consequence, this is slow history. When each day is unpredictable, and highly subject to consequence, this is fast history.
Right now we are living in fast history. Especially in the last 3 years, as critical moments flew into the headlines on an almost daily or weekly basis. Right now the world is changing in all manner of ways, and by looking at things dialectically, it will stop seeming like chaos.
