Reading a few articles and posts, and I'm still just not getting it beyond a very basic understanding of dialectics being "stuff impacts other stuff and then affects other things including the original thing". Materialism is easier for me to get.
Can anyone recommend a good book about it that is good for non-philosophers? Something that would work as an audiobook? I love Marx and Engels and generally I would agree with first going to the original sources to tbh their language can be too arcane for me to understand a concept I struggle with this much.
The thing that made it click for me was to think about what it's in response to.
I think leftists naturally think in terms of dialectical materialism now, but the term is a response to non-dialectical idealism: a simplified version of the world where two-way causal effects are ignored (non-dialectical) and ideas are more powerful than the material world (idealism).