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Dialectical materialism is the method of Marxism. It gets less airtime, especially outside of left academic circles, than the political conclusions of Marxism, but it’s no less important. Usually if I want to explain dialectical materialism, as I often do to my students, I appropriately have to start dialectically. In the late 18th-century an odd German named Hegel developed “dialectics,” which comes from the same route as dialogue. There’s an incorrect way this is often taught, which I won’t explain, because it’s bad pedagogy to start with the thing that is wrong, because that then determines the shape of how you say it is right– which is quite dialectical! 

(This is June’s bonus post for premium subscribers only!)

Hegelian dialectics is a conversation of contradictions. All things are unstable bundles of contradictions. Things contain the negatives of themselves in the same way a silhouette contains the shape of the thing it is a silhouette of. The seeds of something’s undoing are within itself; you are your own Kryptonite. These internal contradictions of an idea or a society or a world are a kind of motor propelling change ever forward.