Granted I’ve only read The Elementary Principles of Philosophy and On Contradictions from Mao, but the examples are still very vague and abstract. I’ve been trying to think of every day situations where I could apply dialectical materialism but I just can’t seem to understand it well enough.

EDIT: Amazing replies from everyone, everything is much more clear.

    • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
      5·
      5 months ago

      So I read a fair bit of this, the material seems really good and since it has stuff for young ages included, it simplifies a lot that may otherwise get bogged down into chunky academic language.

      The one caveat/warning is I noticed on the about page, the author says:

      When the socialist bloc began collapsing in the late 1980s I concluded that Marxist economics was flawed (see What Does Dialectics have to do with Communism?, an essay on this site). However, I continue to feel that dialectics is valid. I believe that placing dialectics on a material basis is Marx’s greatest achievement.

      And the essay begins with:

      The short answer to the above question is “nothing”. Understanding dialectics does not lead to any particular political or economic viewpoint. Hopefully reading the first four pages of this web site have made this clear. Dialectics does make some assertions. For example, dialectics insists that everything changes through the movement of opposing forces. Such a description is certainly true of a competitive capitalist economy. Likewise contradictions and conflict certainly continued under socialism, with the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 serving as a good example of quantitative change leading to qualitative change.

      It goes on to basically be one of those “communism good in spirit but not in practice, plz don’t ostracize me for talking about dialectical materialism” style essays so characteristic of the western “left.”

      It’s a good example of how understanding dialectical materialism in theory does not necessarily mean understanding it in practice!

      I think it is a very valuable resource nonetheless. I wouldn’t people want to be scared away from the learning material itself. Just recommend caution in sending this to people who don’t already have an ML understanding of some kind.