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.

  • LeninsBeard [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I would also recommend Mao's On Contradiction for a good intro to DiaMat. IMO Mao is the best among the five heads at simplifying complex topics and putting it in easily understandable language.

    The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable. Such change as there is can only be an increase or decrease in quantity or a change of place. Moreover, the cause of such an increase or decrease or change of place is not inside things but outside them, that is, the motive force is external.

    As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development.

    It's a pretty quick read, I was able to get through it in a couple days.