Going to respond to all your comments in one go here for ease of reading.
It is understandable to a degree that dialectical terminology can seem opaque if encountered without context, but dismissing it as word salad without engaging the framework is ridiculous. You entered a space built by communists, for communists, using the conceptual tools developed within that tradition, and then criticized the vocabulary without first learning the grammar.
Let’s start with the simplest example of a dialectical contradiction: the relationship between worker and owner under capitalism. These two classes are not merely opposed in the sense of having different preferences. They are bound together in a single productive relation, yet their fundamental interests are antagonistic. The worker must sell their labor power to survive. The owner must extract surplus value from that labor to accumulate capital. This is not a logical contradiction like A and not-A. It is a material contradiction: two forces that coexist, depend on each other, and simultaneously undermine each other. This tension drives wage struggles, technological change, crises of overproduction, and potentially, revolutionary transformation. Chairman Mao’s 《矛盾论》(On Contradiction) explains this, showing how to identify the principal contradiction in any given period and how secondary contradictions shift around it. Applying that method today, many Marxists argue that imperialism is the principal contradiction of our era. Not because empires vanish by fate, but because globalized production, financialization, and interimperialist rivalry generate concrete antagonisms: between core and periphery, between capital’s global reach and national political forms, between endless accumulation and ecological limits. These are the material tensions that shape war, migration, debt, and crisis.
Your “critique” leans on an idealist expectation: that theory should offer tidy, linear narratives or falsifiable predictions in the positivist sense. But dialectical and historical materialism are not idealist schemas imposed on history. They are methods for analyzing the material basis of social life. Historical materialism starts from the premise that the mode of production shapes social relations, politics, and ideology, not the reverse. Dialectical materialism adds that these relations are not static but contain internal tensions that propel development. This is not post-hoc storytelling. It is a framework for identifying which contradictions are principal at a given moment, how they interact, and where leverage for change might exist. Chairman Mao’s 《实践论》(On Practice) and Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific both emphasize that knowledge arises from material activity and that socialist theory becomes scientific when it grounds itself in the analysis of real contradictions, not moral aspiration.
Terminology matters because names define tools. Every field has its lexicon. Blockade in graph theory (as was already pointed out to you), work in physics, contradiction in dialectics. To reject Marxist terms in a Marxist space without engaging their defined meaning is equally as ridiculous as rejecting any of these other lexicons. The point is not obscurantism. It is precision. Contradiction in dialectical materialism carries a specific theoretical weight. It signals a dynamic, historically situated antagonism, not just any opposition. Using the correct term is how we avoid conflating distinct phenomena and how we build cumulative analysis.
For anyone seeking a structured introduction, the Chinese university textbook 《马克思主义基本原理概论》(Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism) systematically walks through these and more concepts with some concrete examples.
Finally, the charge that dialectical materialism is teleological belief shows a deep lack of understanding. Communism is not an inevitable endpoint guaranteed by history. It is a possibility opened by the resolution of capitalism’s contradictions through conscious praxis. When developments do not follow a predicted path, the response of serious Marxists is not wait longer, but to re-examine the analysis. Was the principal contradiction correctly identified? Did secondary contradictions shift? This is scientific in the sense of being self-correcting, materialist, and grounded in practice, not in the positivist sense of generating lab-style predictions.
If you wish to engage dialectical materialism seriously, contemporary Chinese Marxist scholarship offers rich resources for seeing the method applied to current conditions. Journals like 《马克思主义研究》(Marxism Studies) and platforms like 求是网 (Qiushi Journal) or 人民网理论频道 (People’s Daily Theory Channel) regularly publish analyses that apply dialectical materialism to issues from global supply chains to ecological crisis.
If you wish to critique dialectical materialism, we welcome that. But do so by engaging its actual concepts, its canonical texts, and its contemporary applications. Dismissing its language from outside the framework, in a space explicitly built around that framework, is again ridiculous.
The contradiction is between the increasing interconnection of production and distribution, and the concentration of the profits of this system into fewer and fewer hands. The old system of imperialism is dying away, while the interconnected, post-imperialist world is rising, trying to overcome the old. The interconnection of production and distrubution creates the elements of the downfall of imperialism as the global south develops.
I am familiar with On Contradiction, and I think it is a load of word salad.
As best as I can tell, people who have drank the dialectical materialism kool-aid fetishise the word ‘contradiction’ and use it in place of any number of more correct words and terms.
Imperialists and their subjects have contrary interests. Definitionally opposed interests, even. Things being opposed doesn’t make them contradictory the way everyone uses the word.
You can legitimately say that US imperialism is the biggest problem in the world. You can’t say the US imperialism is the biggest contradiction in the world because that doesn’t make any god damned sense in English.
The contradiction is between the increasing interconnection of production and distribution, and the concentration of the profits of this system into fewer and fewer hands. The old system of imperialism is dying away, while the interconnected, post-imperialist world is rising, trying to overcome the old. The interconnection of production and distrubution creates the elements of the downfall of imperialism as the global south develops.
On Contradiction isn’t word salad, and dialectical materialism isn’t Kool-Aid. Dialectical materialism isn’t a formula to impose on the world, but a tool for us to see where to look when analyzing existing phenomena.
The contradiction is between the increasing interconnection of production and distribution, and the concentration of the profits of this system into fewer and fewer hands.
In what way is the interconnection of production and distribution increasing? Why is that contradictory with the concentration of profits into fewer and fewer hands? Our systems of production and distribution have been getting increasingly complex since the middle ages and yet the concentration of wealth has certainly ebbed and flowed in time. In what way are you suggesting one affects the other?
The old system of imperialism is dying away,
This is not a profound statement. It has literally always been the case since society has existed. The system of imperialism in the city states of antiquity died and gave way to the imperialism of the classical empires, which gave way to the imperialism of the feudal monarchies, and then the nation states, and the colonial empires, and so on to the capitalist economic imperialism of today.
while the interconnected, post-imperialist world is rising
Post-imperial? I doubt that and you have provided no evidence that that would be the case. It seems to me that the economic imperialism of the Western nation states is in transition to some kind of fascist corporate techno-feudalist imperialism.
And again, how does this relate to the distribution of wealth and systems of production of distribution? It’s not big and it’s not clever to say they are related because the fact that everything is related everything else is basically axiomatic of the system of analysis. You have to point out how.
On Contradiction isn’t word salad
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
It doesn’t give answers, but it helps us find them.
Which answers, exactly? Because the answer always seems to be the downfall of capitalism and to be replaced by socialism and then communism. And when that continues to not happen, the response always seems to be “but it totes will, eventually.” That isn’t analysis, that’s a teleological belief.
You keep saying “word salad,” but that doesn’t really follow.
In what way is the interconnection of production and distribution increasing? Why is that contradictory with the concentration of profits into fewer and fewer hands? Our systems of production and distribution have been getting increasingly complex since the middle ages and yet the concentration of wealth has certainly ebbed and flowed in time. In what way are you suggesting one affects the other?
A contradiction is the unity and struggle of opposing tendencies. Using the example of production and distribution increasing in interconnectivity (a process made certain by the growth of capital outward, turning all non-capitalist production into new capital ripe for production and appropriation), this is what creates the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. This creates a struggle between the international working classes and the imperialists, as production is socialized but the profits are still privately appropriated. Negating this concentration means socializing ownership.
This is not a profound statement. It has literally always been the case since society has existed. The system of imperialism in the city states of antiquity died and gave way to the imperialism of the classical empires, which gave way to the imperialism of the feudal monarchies, and then the nation states, and the colonial empires, and so on to the capitalist economic imperialism of today.
This isn’t really true, though. Roman imperialism dying away gave rise to feudalism, not to imperialism again. Imperialism has only really developed as an incredibly high level of development of a given mode of production.
Post-imperial? I doubt that and you have provided no evidence that that would be the case. It seems to me that the economic imperialism of the Western nation states is in transition to some kind of fascist corporate techno-feudalist imperialism.
As the global south develops, and socialist countries like China continue to grow and develop, the method of unequal exchange is being undermined. Western fascism is them bringing austerity home to cover for the loss in gains from imperialism, and the waves of wars to open new markets is an attempt to rescue imperialism.
And again, how does this relate to the distribution of wealth and systems of production of distribution? It’s not big and it’s not clever to say they are related because the fact that everything is related everything else is basically axiomatic of the system of analysis. You have to point out how.
As capitalism grows, rates of profit gradually tend to fall. This is fought by raising absolute profits, which requires growth, which results in outward expansion. This forces countries into economic inter-dependence and trade, at the barrel of a gun, but this interconnection alao provides the basis of futute cooperation.
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
You didn’t explain that.
Which answers, exactly? Because the answer always seems to be the downfall of capitalism and to be replaced by socialism and then communism. And when that continues to not happen, the response always seems to be “but it totes will, eventually.” That isn’t analysis, that’s a teleological belief.
I don’t follow, socialism is rising, the largest economy in the world by PPP is socialist. The reason we believe socialism is the next step is because capitalism has already socialized production, it just keeps the profits for the few. This creates a heightened class struggle that can only get worse as time goes by. We still have to overthrow capitalism and imperialism, but this is a process that is compelled by capitalism’s own centralization and monopolization. There’s no such thing as a static, unchanging system.
Try George Politzer “Elementary principles of philosophy” maybe? Its a term coming from Hegel, it makes more sense in german (Widerspruch literally means contradictory statement, e.g. parents might say “I don’t want to hear a Widerspruch!” to their kids when they’re refusing to cooperate).
I also don’t know what you mean by “dialectical materialism kool-aid”, it’s a useful toolbox for analysing society not some belief system one professes. And yeah someone using that toolbox will use the names those tools are called by other people who use the same toolbox. If you don’t use diamat, then the names won’t make much sense to you. E.g. I had to present a math paper where the person destructed a graph into “blocks”, and called that destructure a “blockade”. Which doesn’t make much sense, when we think of a “blockade” it’s an obstacle, not something we want on our way to prove a theorem, but within this framework it’s a tool that was used to find a certain type of graph within the larger graph and not at all an obstacle.
I also don’t know what you mean by “dialectical materialism kool-aid”
It seems to me that dialectical materialism is a tool for post hoc analysis of society that is useful for constructing narratives and not much else. I can’t see that it is in any way useful for generating falsifiable predictions. Yet people call off-the-dome predictions “scientific” just because they have identified the two things that are in contradiction ™.
If you don’t use diamat, then the names won’t make much sense to you. E.g. I had to present a math paper where the person destructed a graph into “blocks”, and called that destructure a “blockade”.
Yes words have different meanings in different contexts. “Blockade” has a common meaning and a different meaning in graph theory. But if you used it in its graph theory meaning unbidden in an online discussion thread that wasn’t already about graph theory, and without introducing the context of graph theory into the conversation first, then I would say you are using the word incorrectly.
It seems to me that dialectical materialism is a tool for post hoc analysis of society that is useful for constructing narratives and not much else.
have you not heard of the russian and chinese revolutions or what am I missing here? Two of the largest nations in the world mobilised their masses, led them into war against the ruling class and won. They lead huge literacy and industrialization campaigns that allowed their nations to leapfrog most other nations and made them able to compete with europe and the us in terms of technological advancements. Their leaders, now famous worldwide, are thought leaders in dialectical materialism and how to apply it. As a more concrete example Marx successfully predicted the monopolisation of market segments for instance. Which was a wild prediction to make in the 19th century when every town had their own factories and competition among them was fierce.
Yes words have different meanings in different contexts. “Blockade” has a common meaning and a different meaning in graph theory. But if you used it in its graph theory meaning unbidden in an online discussion thread that wasn’t already about graph theory, and without introducing the context of graph theory into the conversation first, then I would say you are using the word incorrectly.
You are free to do so of course, but there are quite a few people around who have read about imperialism and got the meaning behind the comment immediately, making an outright statement like “i mean contradiction in the diamat sense” seem superfluous to me.
A contradiction to what? You can’t just say something is a contradiction unless it’s contradicting something else.
Going to respond to all your comments in one go here for ease of reading.
It is understandable to a degree that dialectical terminology can seem opaque if encountered without context, but dismissing it as word salad without engaging the framework is ridiculous. You entered a space built by communists, for communists, using the conceptual tools developed within that tradition, and then criticized the vocabulary without first learning the grammar.
Let’s start with the simplest example of a dialectical contradiction: the relationship between worker and owner under capitalism. These two classes are not merely opposed in the sense of having different preferences. They are bound together in a single productive relation, yet their fundamental interests are antagonistic. The worker must sell their labor power to survive. The owner must extract surplus value from that labor to accumulate capital. This is not a logical contradiction like A and not-A. It is a material contradiction: two forces that coexist, depend on each other, and simultaneously undermine each other. This tension drives wage struggles, technological change, crises of overproduction, and potentially, revolutionary transformation. Chairman Mao’s 《矛盾论》(On Contradiction) explains this, showing how to identify the principal contradiction in any given period and how secondary contradictions shift around it. Applying that method today, many Marxists argue that imperialism is the principal contradiction of our era. Not because empires vanish by fate, but because globalized production, financialization, and interimperialist rivalry generate concrete antagonisms: between core and periphery, between capital’s global reach and national political forms, between endless accumulation and ecological limits. These are the material tensions that shape war, migration, debt, and crisis.
Your “critique” leans on an idealist expectation: that theory should offer tidy, linear narratives or falsifiable predictions in the positivist sense. But dialectical and historical materialism are not idealist schemas imposed on history. They are methods for analyzing the material basis of social life. Historical materialism starts from the premise that the mode of production shapes social relations, politics, and ideology, not the reverse. Dialectical materialism adds that these relations are not static but contain internal tensions that propel development. This is not post-hoc storytelling. It is a framework for identifying which contradictions are principal at a given moment, how they interact, and where leverage for change might exist. Chairman Mao’s 《实践论》(On Practice) and Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific both emphasize that knowledge arises from material activity and that socialist theory becomes scientific when it grounds itself in the analysis of real contradictions, not moral aspiration.
Terminology matters because names define tools. Every field has its lexicon. Blockade in graph theory (as was already pointed out to you), work in physics, contradiction in dialectics. To reject Marxist terms in a Marxist space without engaging their defined meaning is equally as ridiculous as rejecting any of these other lexicons. The point is not obscurantism. It is precision. Contradiction in dialectical materialism carries a specific theoretical weight. It signals a dynamic, historically situated antagonism, not just any opposition. Using the correct term is how we avoid conflating distinct phenomena and how we build cumulative analysis.
For anyone seeking a structured introduction, the Chinese university textbook 《马克思主义基本原理概论》(Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism) systematically walks through these and more concepts with some concrete examples.
Finally, the charge that dialectical materialism is teleological belief shows a deep lack of understanding. Communism is not an inevitable endpoint guaranteed by history. It is a possibility opened by the resolution of capitalism’s contradictions through conscious praxis. When developments do not follow a predicted path, the response of serious Marxists is not wait longer, but to re-examine the analysis. Was the principal contradiction correctly identified? Did secondary contradictions shift? This is scientific in the sense of being self-correcting, materialist, and grounded in practice, not in the positivist sense of generating lab-style predictions.
If you wish to engage dialectical materialism seriously, contemporary Chinese Marxist scholarship offers rich resources for seeing the method applied to current conditions. Journals like 《马克思主义研究》(Marxism Studies) and platforms like 求是网 (Qiushi Journal) or 人民网理论频道 (People’s Daily Theory Channel) regularly publish analyses that apply dialectical materialism to issues from global supply chains to ecological crisis.
If you wish to critique dialectical materialism, we welcome that. But do so by engaging its actual concepts, its canonical texts, and its contemporary applications. Dismissing its language from outside the framework, in a space explicitly built around that framework, is again ridiculous.
The contradiction is between the increasing interconnection of production and distribution, and the concentration of the profits of this system into fewer and fewer hands. The old system of imperialism is dying away, while the interconnected, post-imperialist world is rising, trying to overcome the old. The interconnection of production and distrubution creates the elements of the downfall of imperialism as the global south develops.
the contradiction is between the imperialists and their subjects. That’s what they meant by the primary contradiction. It’s a term from dialectics.
“On contradiction” by mao zedong is a good introduction to the concept
Seconding this, being a military guy Mao is very good at explaining big concepts in clear, simple language
I am familiar with On Contradiction, and I think it is a load of word salad.
As best as I can tell, people who have drank the dialectical materialism kool-aid fetishise the word ‘contradiction’ and use it in place of any number of more correct words and terms.
Imperialists and their subjects have contrary interests. Definitionally opposed interests, even. Things being opposed doesn’t make them contradictory the way everyone uses the word.
You can legitimately say that US imperialism is the biggest problem in the world. You can’t say the US imperialism is the biggest contradiction in the world because that doesn’t make any god damned sense in English.
I explained up here how it’s a contradiction:
On Contradiction isn’t word salad, and dialectical materialism isn’t Kool-Aid. Dialectical materialism isn’t a formula to impose on the world, but a tool for us to see where to look when analyzing existing phenomena.
Again, word salad.
In what way is the interconnection of production and distribution increasing? Why is that contradictory with the concentration of profits into fewer and fewer hands? Our systems of production and distribution have been getting increasingly complex since the middle ages and yet the concentration of wealth has certainly ebbed and flowed in time. In what way are you suggesting one affects the other?
This is not a profound statement. It has literally always been the case since society has existed. The system of imperialism in the city states of antiquity died and gave way to the imperialism of the classical empires, which gave way to the imperialism of the feudal monarchies, and then the nation states, and the colonial empires, and so on to the capitalist economic imperialism of today.
Post-imperial? I doubt that and you have provided no evidence that that would be the case. It seems to me that the economic imperialism of the Western nation states is in transition to some kind of fascist corporate techno-feudalist imperialism.
And again, how does this relate to the distribution of wealth and systems of production of distribution? It’s not big and it’s not clever to say they are related because the fact that everything is related everything else is basically axiomatic of the system of analysis. You have to point out how.
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Which answers, exactly? Because the answer always seems to be the downfall of capitalism and to be replaced by socialism and then communism. And when that continues to not happen, the response always seems to be “but it totes will, eventually.” That isn’t analysis, that’s a teleological belief.
You keep saying “word salad,” but that doesn’t really follow.
A contradiction is the unity and struggle of opposing tendencies. Using the example of production and distribution increasing in interconnectivity (a process made certain by the growth of capital outward, turning all non-capitalist production into new capital ripe for production and appropriation), this is what creates the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. This creates a struggle between the international working classes and the imperialists, as production is socialized but the profits are still privately appropriated. Negating this concentration means socializing ownership.
This isn’t really true, though. Roman imperialism dying away gave rise to feudalism, not to imperialism again. Imperialism has only really developed as an incredibly high level of development of a given mode of production.
As the global south develops, and socialist countries like China continue to grow and develop, the method of unequal exchange is being undermined. Western fascism is them bringing austerity home to cover for the loss in gains from imperialism, and the waves of wars to open new markets is an attempt to rescue imperialism.
As capitalism grows, rates of profit gradually tend to fall. This is fought by raising absolute profits, which requires growth, which results in outward expansion. This forces countries into economic inter-dependence and trade, at the barrel of a gun, but this interconnection alao provides the basis of futute cooperation.
You didn’t explain that.
I don’t follow, socialism is rising, the largest economy in the world by PPP is socialist. The reason we believe socialism is the next step is because capitalism has already socialized production, it just keeps the profits for the few. This creates a heightened class struggle that can only get worse as time goes by. We still have to overthrow capitalism and imperialism, but this is a process that is compelled by capitalism’s own centralization and monopolization. There’s no such thing as a static, unchanging system.
Try George Politzer “Elementary principles of philosophy” maybe? Its a term coming from Hegel, it makes more sense in german (Widerspruch literally means contradictory statement, e.g. parents might say “I don’t want to hear a Widerspruch!” to their kids when they’re refusing to cooperate).
I also don’t know what you mean by “dialectical materialism kool-aid”, it’s a useful toolbox for analysing society not some belief system one professes. And yeah someone using that toolbox will use the names those tools are called by other people who use the same toolbox. If you don’t use diamat, then the names won’t make much sense to you. E.g. I had to present a math paper where the person destructed a graph into “blocks”, and called that destructure a “blockade”. Which doesn’t make much sense, when we think of a “blockade” it’s an obstacle, not something we want on our way to prove a theorem, but within this framework it’s a tool that was used to find a certain type of graph within the larger graph and not at all an obstacle.
It seems to me that dialectical materialism is a tool for post hoc analysis of society that is useful for constructing narratives and not much else. I can’t see that it is in any way useful for generating falsifiable predictions. Yet people call off-the-dome predictions “scientific” just because they have identified the two things that are in contradiction ™.
Yes words have different meanings in different contexts. “Blockade” has a common meaning and a different meaning in graph theory. But if you used it in its graph theory meaning unbidden in an online discussion thread that wasn’t already about graph theory, and without introducing the context of graph theory into the conversation first, then I would say you are using the word incorrectly.
have you not heard of the russian and chinese revolutions or what am I missing here? Two of the largest nations in the world mobilised their masses, led them into war against the ruling class and won. They lead huge literacy and industrialization campaigns that allowed their nations to leapfrog most other nations and made them able to compete with europe and the us in terms of technological advancements. Their leaders, now famous worldwide, are thought leaders in dialectical materialism and how to apply it. As a more concrete example Marx successfully predicted the monopolisation of market segments for instance. Which was a wild prediction to make in the 19th century when every town had their own factories and competition among them was fierce.
You are free to do so of course, but there are quite a few people around who have read about imperialism and got the meaning behind the comment immediately, making an outright statement like “i mean contradiction in the diamat sense” seem superfluous to me.