A contradiction is what you call the relationship between two opposing forces. In this case, it’s the opposition between the US/NATO/CaptialismInGeneral imperialist core and ‘The Global South.’

It’s like the contradiction between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ but the whole world

Going to respond to all your comments in one go here for ease of reading.

It is understandable to a degree that dialectical terminology can seem opaque if encountered without context, but dismissing it as word salad without engaging the framework is ridiculous. You entered a space built by communists, for communists, using the conceptual tools developed within that tradition, and then criticized the vocabulary without first learning the grammar.

Let’s start with the simplest example of a dialectical contradiction: the relationship between worker and owner under capitalism. These two classes are not merely opposed in the sense of having different preferences. They are bound together in a single productive relation, yet their fundamental interests are antagonistic. The worker must sell their labor power to survive. The owner must extract surplus value from that labor to accumulate capital. This is not a logical contradiction like A and not-A. It is a material contradiction: two forces that coexist, depend on each other, and simultaneously undermine each other. This tension drives wage struggles, technological change, crises of overproduction, and potentially, revolutionary transformation. Chairman Mao’s 《矛盾论》(On Contradiction) explains this, showing how to identify the principal contradiction in any given period and how secondary contradictions shift around it. Applying that method today, many Marxists argue that imperialism is the principal contradiction of our era. Not because empires vanish by fate, but because globalized production, financialization, and interimperialist rivalry generate concrete antagonisms: between core and periphery, between capital’s global reach and national political forms, between endless accumulation and ecological limits. These are the material tensions that shape war, migration, debt, and crisis.

Your “critique” leans on an idealist expectation: that theory should offer tidy, linear narratives or falsifiable predictions in the positivist sense. But dialectical and historical materialism are not idealist schemas imposed on history. They are methods for analyzing the material basis of social life. Historical materialism starts from the premise that the mode of production shapes social relations, politics, and ideology, not the reverse. Dialectical materialism adds that these relations are not static but contain internal tensions that propel development. This is not post-hoc storytelling. It is a framework for identifying which contradictions are principal at a given moment, how they interact, and where leverage for change might exist. Chairman Mao’s 《实践论》(On Practice) and Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific both emphasize that knowledge arises from material activity and that socialist theory becomes scientific when it grounds itself in the analysis of real contradictions, not moral aspiration.

Terminology matters because names define tools. Every field has its lexicon. Blockade in graph theory (as was already pointed out to you), work in physics, contradiction in dialectics. To reject Marxist terms in a Marxist space without engaging their defined meaning is equally as ridiculous as rejecting any of these other lexicons. The point is not obscurantism. It is precision. Contradiction in dialectical materialism carries a specific theoretical weight. It signals a dynamic, historically situated antagonism, not just any opposition. Using the correct term is how we avoid conflating distinct phenomena and how we build cumulative analysis.

For anyone seeking a structured introduction, the Chinese university textbook 《马克思主义基本原理概论》(Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism) systematically walks through these and more concepts with some concrete examples.

Finally, the charge that dialectical materialism is teleological belief shows a deep lack of understanding. Communism is not an inevitable endpoint guaranteed by history. It is a possibility opened by the resolution of capitalism’s contradictions through conscious praxis. When developments do not follow a predicted path, the response of serious Marxists is not wait longer, but to re-examine the analysis. Was the principal contradiction correctly identified? Did secondary contradictions shift? This is scientific in the sense of being self-correcting, materialist, and grounded in practice, not in the positivist sense of generating lab-style predictions.

If you wish to engage dialectical materialism seriously, contemporary Chinese Marxist scholarship offers rich resources for seeing the method applied to current conditions. Journals like 《马克思主义研究》(Marxism Studies) and platforms like 求是网 (Qiushi Journal) or 人民网理论频道 (People’s Daily Theory Channel) regularly publish analyses that apply dialectical materialism to issues from global supply chains to ecological crisis.

If you wish to critique dialectical materialism, we welcome that. But do so by engaging its actual concepts, its canonical texts, and its contemporary applications. Dismissing its language from outside the framework, in a space explicitly built around that framework, is again ridiculous.

the contradiction is between the imperialists and their subjects. That’s what they meant by the primary contradiction. It’s a term from dialectics.

“On contradiction” by mao zedong is a good introduction to the concept

The contradiction is between the increasing interconnection of production and distribution, and the concentration of the profits of this system into fewer and fewer hands. The old system of imperialism is dying away, while the interconnected, post-imperialist world is rising, trying to overcome the old. The interconnection of production and distrubution creates the elements of the downfall of imperialism as the global south develops.

For the sake of finding common ground, do you condemn, or commend Hamas?

You talk about black and white thinking in the same breath you talk about good and evil, which is some shit that isn’t real. It’s leftover christian DNA in our psychology, it’s the long shadow of the church looming over our thoughts. There’s no grand referee, there’s no universal morality. There’s just a bunch of animals trying to survive, and we make our own moral code, and we do so in the understanding that it’s not about pleasing some absentee god but about living with ourselves.

Ironically, it’s you who is thinking in black and white right now, in binary “good or bad, saints or sinners”. You are, without meaning to do so I think, pulling a “he was no angel” about the country of Iran. We have to think relatively, not ideally, because there is no fixed good or evil: it’s all defined by what’s around it. Comparative analysis is all we have. In this context, between the US zionist axis of empire and Iran, Iran is indeed the “good guys”.

Yeah there isn’t a nation-state on earth that is a friend to the working class.

Citation? It is known isn’t really good enough. Also who brought up Stalin?