I’m reading through The Curriculum of Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism at the moment so I’ve been trying to get my head around this lately. It would be super helpful if someone could, say, talk about some historical political development or some contemporary issue and tell me examples of what an idealist, nondialectical materialist, and dialectical materialist analysis of that issue might look like? Thank you 🙏
It boils down to analyzing the world in terms of interconnection and contradiction, as processes moving in time rather than static. The vulgar materialist sees history as a series of snapshots without context, which leads them to believe Russia randomly decided to enter the Ukrainian Civil War or that the genocide in Palestine started on October 7th. To think dialectically is to understand that the motive force of change is the self-movement of contradictions, diametric coexistent opposed forces, which for example centers class struggle (bourgeois and proletarian), national liberation movements (neocolonized vs. neocolonizer), settler-colonialism (settlers vs. indigenous), and imperialism (monopoly finance capital and the super-exploited).