WEEKS FOLLOWING the conclusion of another revolution around the sun, reflecting on contemporary world events feels appropriate and horrifying. The last year has demonstrated harrowing atrocities, flirtations with the descent into fascism, and existential conundrums about the future of the planet. The Zionist genocide in Gaza has devolved into depths unimaginable of death, injury, and sheer, unadulterated human suffering. Elected leadership of states around the globe have adopted or transitioned into fascist regimes with alarming simultaneity. Extreme climate events and global heating continued to break records, launching our society closer and closer to climate tipping points, past the point of no return. In other words, crises abound.
These crises are not the respective products of “ancient” religious or cultural enmity, greed and bigotry, or stubbornness of generations past. To believe so would be to ignore the throughline in history upon which each crisis is situated. The throughline is capitalism and, more specifically, the contradictions it inherently yields. Through the lens of dialectical materialism, we can make sense of the world around us and the dire circumstances in which we find all exploited peoples living. We should feel grounded, if not consoled, by the framework developed by our socialist predecessors to identify and ultimately disrupt the power imbalance between the haves and have-nots.
Dialectical materialism is a philosophical framework for thinking about the world. Popularized by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, the framework emphasizes the constant motion of all objects, events and phenomena, and the contradictions, or the existence of opposing forces, within each of them that drive that motion or development. These opposing forces — or contradictions — often come into conflict, usually based on material needs. Their contentious nature, as well as the way that conflict is solved, is what makes history.
We focus especially on what dialectics holds is the principal contradiction of our capitalist society, that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The aspect of the contradiction that holds the power, the dominant aspect, informs the context of the contradiction. In our principal contradiction of capitalism, the bourgeoisie are dominant, so it follows that our economic system is capitalism rather than socialism. This contradiction, between the bourgeoisie class that controls most of the wealth and the means of production and the working class, shapes our society.
At first, placing our material conditions on a simple binary axis may seem reductive. Do the current genocide and general disposession of Palestinians, the rise of global fascism, and the destruction of the biosphere all simply amount to conflicts between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat? The answer both affirms and complicates the narrative (contradictorily, one might say). Within and of the principal contradiction, we find an endless array of secondary contradictions all as dynamic as the principal. This is how we analyze the crises du jour.
For example, the colonial regimes and colonized people make up the aspects of a secondary contradiction of capitalism. Settler colonial occupation is in direct contrast with the self-determination and agency of a colonized people. It is a contradiction that they both exist within the same geographic confines, they will not both be able to exert dominance at once. It is also one bred by the principal contradiction — settler colonies aim to displace native populations within the context of the capitalist system. Even if the characters of the dominant colonial aspect have aims other than owning the means of production in the land in question, they will inevitably attempt to do so and will also exert their force over the other aspect (the colonized people) to achieve capital supremacy. When one applies dialectics to the situation in historic Palestine, it becomes clear that the Zionist regime is operating as the dominant aspect in this secondary contradiction, a subset of the principal contradiction of capitalism. Dialectics debunk the mainstream explanation for Israel’s violence — a century-old religious or ideological conflict between Jews and Muslims. Dialectics instead offers a critical analysis of one entity vying for control over a land with the ultimate (local) goal of displacing an indigenous population, which serves the greater goal of reaffirming bourgeois dominance in a capitalist society.
The results of presidential and parliamentary elections around the world can also be analyzed through this framework. Liberalism and fascism are two aspects of a secondary contradiction of the principal contradiction. In the US, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and other once-liberal strongholds, far right, neo-fascist parties saw favorable election results in victory or serious growth in elected representation over the last year. These rightward pivots or continuances can be partially attributed to a number of factors — post-pandemic inflation, disdain for incumbent administrations, rising xenophobia and bigotry towards immigrants — but ultimately this secondary contradiction is a product of the principal. Liberalism and fascism, while not as permanently and diametrically opposed as the two aspects of the secondary contradiction of colonialism, are playing tug of war for dominance in their situational contexts. They both, however, ultimately aim to serve the greater contradiction’s dominant aspect — the capitalist class.
Finally, global climate catastrophe involves secondary contradictions of the same principal contradiction. The evolving climate science generated by expert scientists, statesmen, institutions, and other actors to address worsening consequences of climate change and the survival of the investor class are fundamentally at odds with one another. Capitalism’s economic motivations always center the continued compilation of wealth into the hands of the ruling class. Thus, they cannot exist in tandem with the implementation of radical climate solutions, which involve an end to extractive industrial growth and acceptance of the ecological limitations of the planet.
Both the secondary contradictions, between colonial empires and colonized peoples and between unfettered industrial expansion and a livable future, are antagonistic contradictions. Force, not a peaceful transfer of power, is required to dethrone the dominant aspect in these cases. We have seen decades of creative and brilliant nonviolent resistance from Palestinians, whose merit should not be discounted. But the end of Zionism will happen by force, not by appealing to the good nature of Zionist occupiers. Similarly, extractive industries will not decide to usher in a new wave of economic production on their own because of legislative pressure or convincing civil society reports. Rather, a form of revolution is necessary to disrupt the current economic dominance in powerful states that are in bed with the fossil fuel industry. Non-antagonistic contradictions, such as that between liberalism and fascism, do not necessarily require force to be resolved. Liberal and fascist actors, while sometimes at odds for immediate goals, can coexist, and can even jointly serve capital.
The gravity of these concurrent crises tell us that we need to transform our society. Luckily for us, history shows that our world — its phenomena and matter — constantly change along with the dynamism of these contradictions. The dominant aspects will not hoard their power forever, the non-dominant aspects will not be held in service of or exploitation by the dominant aspect forever, and the entire contradictory relationship itself will inevitably change. But it won’t happen without force.
Quantitative changes or incremental improvements won at the ballot box or through a United Nations vote, for example, will not be enough to unseat Zionism in historic Palestine, to turn the tide on sweeping reactionary rightwing popularity, or to salvage the human-habitability of the environment. We need a qualitative transformation, one that can only be wrought through the upending of the dominance currently held by capitalist aspects in today’s principal and secondary contradictions.
The last year has affirmed the suspicion of many socialists of our precarious temporal position “in the waiting room of history,” to borrow a phrase from Revolutionary Left Radio. While we may not see the exact pathways to the disruption of our society’s contradictions yet, we can rest assured knowing that contradictions are dynamic and dominance will not be hoarded by the ruling class forever. Yes, something does gotta give. Dialectics helps us analyze power and the nature of society, and when we are at a loss for challenging the systems that yield such astonishing inequality and suffering in the world, our default approach can simply be to sharpen these contradictions for the people around us. Media professionals, or “spin doctors” as one Washington Socialist editor likes to call us, have a critical role in this task, but writers, lawyers, bureaucrats and professionals of most strata can use their tools to highlight, if not challenge, capitalist contradictions. We all can take it upon ourselves to simply spend time thinking through the elements of society that reify the dominance of certain aspects of contradictions. We can share that thinking with fellow proletarians so we can build the theoretical understanding of power that underlines the contradictions we suffer from.
Grounding ourselves in dialectics, at the very least the conception of contradictions, is an important, even necessary start to foment economic revolution. But it is not enough. Marx warned, “Philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Reminded of our materialist roots fresh off of a year characterized by compounding crises, the work to disrupt dominance in our contradictions continues.
