I grew up in USSR, and I was generally happy with my life there during Soviet times, and I lived through some really horrible shit during the collapse. That said, I was a kid at the time, and I didn’t really think about politics all that much. All I knew was that my life in a communist country was just fine, and that things got worse after we transitioned to capitalism.
My family moved around a lot after the collapse, and I got to live in a few different western countries. I saw incredible amounts of opulence contrasted with incredible poverty. It never sat right with me that some people should live on the street while others live like royalty.
As I got older, I reflected more on these things and it became clear to me that the capitalist model was fundamentally exploitative and unjust. Reading history I realized that Marxism-Leninism was the only ideology that provided a clear and consistent path away from capitalism.
I think that the theory that Marx and Engels built is fundamentally sound, and it lucidly explains material relationships within our society. Why things are the way they are makes perfect sense when seen through the Marxist lens. Marxism is not utopian, and its application provides real and tangible improvement in the quality of life for majority of the people. This is why I’m a Marxist.
I didn’t decide to be a Marxist. I became one when I learned more about the world and communism.
I “decided” to become a Marxist in the same way I “decided” to accept the laws of thermodynamics
I’ll start with my background and material conditions, because of course that is pretty important.
I grew/am finishing growing up pretty privileged. Still working class, to be sure, but you know. Straight, white, male, and never have had to worry about money issues. Progressive liberal single mother, worked hard to take care of me. She never had the time to really dive into the why and get a great understanding of it all, just meant the best for people and kind of that well-intentioned social Democrat type.
I had always been interested in how we organize our society, though. Liberalism/Social Democracy, which I had subscribed to until the Ukraine/Russia conflict, still left me with so many questions. I really had no understanding of the world around me.
A very small but impactful moment was when I was watching Bo Burnham’s Inside in 2021 and he sang a line about private property being inherently theft and neo-liberal fascists destroying the left and it was like “whoa. I’m a liberal. What’s wrong here?” It also didn’t help that I didn’t know the difference between personal and private property then, so it caused a lot of anxiety.
That kind of kick-started a little exploration into the real left and sticking my toes into some Second Thought. Watched all his videos, read some of the Manifesto, and got on Lemmygrad.
Since then, I’ve read State and Revolution, Blackshirts and Reds, watched tons of informational videos, and am getting into ‘What is to be Done?’
I am now a developing Marxist.
If anyone made it this far (apologies for taking up so much space, I don’t know how to do the spoiler thing), can you help me understand Dialectical/Historical Materialism a little more or recommend some reading? That’s really the only part of all of this I don’t understand fully, and I’m aware it’s one of the most important.
DiaMat/HiMat can be tough nut to crack. Once it’s cracked, though, Marxists texts, and the problems of liberalism, become a whole lot clearer. I’ll give my summary, but others may have other views.
spoiler
Essentially, it’s the study of change. According to the DiaMat worldview:
- there are no ‘things’, isolated from other ‘things’; there exist only relations and processes, and these are all internally connected
- from this it follows that every relation is a contradiction, a unity of opposites
- these opposites are identical and different at the same time – they are distinct, in a way, but one cannot exist without the other, and they interpenetrate each other
- quantitative changes lead to qualitative leaps (progress is not linear), and
- change is constant, because contradiction is everywhere, in all
thingsrelations, processes.
In sum: DiaMat studies how the struggle of contradictory opposites drives change. If the ‘relations’/‘processes’ bit throws you, try to think of something simple and analyse it in your head. Like a ball. It appears to be a thing, separate from other things.
But zoom in. The air pushes out while the rubber pushes in. Zoom in further, that rubber is imperfect, a mesh of tightly connected chemicals. There are tiny gaps, through which the air inside can slowly escape, meaning the air inside is connected – ‘internally’ related – to the air outside, even if the ball – seen as a ‘thing’ appears to be separate from that outside air.
A good way to understand DiaMat is to take some time to think about the above summary, then to read an example, then come back to the summary to see if you can identify the moves in the example. Then read another example and do the same thing again before delving into some of the theory.
If you want a good, concrete example, take a look at how Marx and Engels discuss the bourgeois and proletariat in the Communist Manifesto or read Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’. If you’re up for a challenge, read the first 3 or 4 chapters of Capital to see how Marx applies DiaMat to explain the commodity.
For the theory, you might try:
- Lenin, ‘Three Sources and Component Parts of Marxism’,
- Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’ (this includes extracts from his Anti-Duhring, and
- the Postface to the second German Edition of Capital, from and including the text ‘The European Messenger of St. Petersburg in an article dealing exclusively with the method of Das Kapital (May number, 1872, pp. 427–436), finds my method of inquiry severely realistic, but my method of presentation, unfortunately, German-dialectical.…’ (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm)
- Mao, ‘On Contradiction’.
- If you can find a copy, Bertell Ollman’s Dance of the Dialectic is good (he used to have a copy on his website, but I’ve not been able to find it for a long time; the paperback is easy to find and there a likely other versions on the internet) – As are Maurice Cornforth’s books on DiaMat and HiMat. These may be a better start. They’re excellent.
Carlos L Garrido recently put together a collection of texts on DiaMat for Midwestern Marx. It looks good. Could be worth a read. There’s also a good ‘Marx, Engels, Lenin, Historical Materialism’ collection from the Soviet Era. It’s rare in physical form, I think, but there are PDFs.
I would also add a book that helped me quite a bit with understanding diamat along side the things already mentioned, although I don’t know how valuable the examples are if you’re not familiar with some biology.
The Dialectical Biologist by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin
Specifically the last chapter “Conclusion: Dialectics” is great because they go through the various aspects of dialectics with various biological (and some other) examples. A critical reading of this chapter with me analyzing the examples given and also trying to come up with my own really helped me.
Some essays like this one were also quite useful: https://redsails.org/what-is-dialectics/
Funnily enough, I just started The Ecological Rift by Foster, Clark, and York (MR Press), and I thought, this would be a good example of dialectical materialism. The preface states,
We have also benefited from the support of Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, and from their dialectical approach to biology.
It sounds like others have found Lewis and Lewontin helpful, too. Might have to add them to my list after working through Foster and Burnett.
Sometimes I like to work forwards, starting with the oldest author and reading chronologically. There’s nothing quite like seeing the debate unfold like that. But when I’m shorter on time or the subject is less familiar, I like to work backwards as the examples of more modern writers can be easier to get on with; and reading the previous work with some background knowledge can make the task a bit easier.
My development was similar to everyone else’s but I’d add that I was always questioning the disparity between rich and poor since I was very young, why we had to pay for food and water and housing, why the people with money don’t help. Why charities exist but there being a lack of progress.
Why, when my mom has been working since she was a toddler, wasn’t she rich like everyone said she’d be. I mean, hard work pays off, right? While I’ve always had a comfortable life, you’d think we’d be rolling in dough with how long my mom has been a labourer.
I also looked at my own privileges and want others to have it and more. There’s the fury that has grown with the knowledge of solutions to the problems we have and yet nobody wants to go through with it. My fury at the complacency of the people around me, especially family. My opposition to the “fuck you, I got mine” attitude that permeates.
I grew up learning that the word “communism” was bad but never knowing why (except Holodomor, I guess), and yet all my values lined up with it. Reeducation is a big one for me, trying to undo all the damage created by a red-scare propagandized education system.
