Do you understand dialectical materialism?

[anvi]

Wow, that wiki article really does suck.

Bedstuy's formulation is right.  I'll take my own crack at it.  First tackling dialectics and then dialectical materialism.  

Hegel invents a modern (19th century) conception of dialectics in order to explain the development of philosophy through history.  Dialectics in Hegel's sense basically means how one set of ideas or philosophical worldview necessarily follows from an earlier one, in an effort to resolve the contradictions or encapsulate the perspective of the latter.  By necessity, too, the social forms, religion, art, culture, political society ect. of every age are shaped by the ideas that give rise to them.  But, as history proceeds, the foregoing philosophical worldview, or its predominant grounding assumptions, are always supplanted (though partly preserved too) by the new set of ideas that envelopes them.  From this ongoing development of ideas, new social and political forms develop.  This is Hegel's dialectics of history, in which human beings are primarily Geist, "mind," "spirit," and it is their ideas, and a kind of necessary logical development of those ideas, that give rise to the kinds of social and political lives they live.

Marx, though he admired the basic idea of dialectics as necessary development through history, believed, in contrast to Hegel, that human beings are not essentially thinkers, but producers.  Before anything else, in order to survive at all, human beings need to fulfill material needs.  And so, any analysis of history must begin with an understanding of what human beings make to survive and thrive, how they make what they need, and how they organize their societies in order to achieve the desired production.  A historical age's or given society's philosophical worldview develops out of their material needs, out of the ways that they manage their material production and how they organize their society to make what they need and then want.  In Hegel, dialectics begins with ideas, but for Marx, it begins with material needs.  For Marx, then, there is a necessary (dialectical) relation between social forms and ideas, but that relation starts from the material conditions of production, which in turn give rise to social structures, and only then are ideas and philosophies formulated that rationalize or explain that production. This is dialectical materialism.

[anvi]

To elaborate: 'dialectical materialism' is infamous for meaning absolutely fyck all. It was essentially a magical incantation used by Communists to 'prove' that all of human history pointed towards the inevitable triumph of their beloved Soviet Union. As a theoretical term it is basically gibberish. Marx did not use the term himself (his understand of history, whatever can be said against it, was never that crude), and neither even did Engels.

Certainly true regarding how the Soviets used the expression.  Also true that Marx never employed the whole expression, and his view of history is not deterministic to nearly the degree that it's been portrayed.  He did talk about his "dialectical method" and its "materialistic basis" though, and this in contrast to Hegel.  Anyway, I don't really care about it.  The fact that there are three threads up about it now is ...well...Atlas.