Dialectical Materialism - How to actually analyse something

There’s a version of political analysis that most of us are familiar with. A thing happens, someone on the news says it’s good or bad, someone else disagrees, and then everyone argues about whose values are better. Was the government right to do X? Is it fair that Y happened? Should we be outraged? Should we be pragmatic? The whole thing plays out on a terrain of opinion, where the question is always what you think about a situation rather than why the situation exists in the first place.

This post is about a different way of doing it. Dialectical materialism is the analytical method that sits underneath Marxist theory, and it’s the method I use in everything I write on this Substack. I’ve used it to analyse UK arms exports, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the structure of Western imperialism, but I’ve never actually laid out what the method itself is, or how someone would go about applying it. So this is that post.

I want to be clear about what dialectical materialism is not, because the misconceptions are as common as the method itself. It is not a set of socialist ideals. It doesn’t start from the premise that equality is good and inequality is bad, and then work backwards to find evidence. It is not ethics. It is not a moral framework. It is an analytical one, a way of looking at the world that begins with material reality, with the concrete stuff of economic production, social organisation, and institutional power, and asks how that reality produces the politics, the culture, and the ideas that we see on the surface.

The reason this matters is that most political analysis starts in the wrong place. It starts with ideas, with values, with what people say they believe, and then tries to explain the world through those ideas. Dialectical materialism does the opposite. It starts with the material conditions and then explains why people believe what they believe, because their ideas arise from the conditions they live in, not the other way around.

Start with what is actually there

The first move in any dialectical materialist analysis is to strip away the commentary and get to the material facts. Not what people are saying about a situation, but what the situation actually consists of, in concrete, measurable, documentable terms. What are the economic arrangements? What are the institutional structures? Who controls what? What are the real pressures and incentives shaping people’s behaviour?

This sounds obvious, but it’s remarkable how rarely political commentary actually does it. Take housing in the UK. The mainstream debate is about whether the government is doing enough, whether planning reform is the answer, whether NIMBYism is the problem, whether we need more social housing or more private development. These are all arguments about policy preferences, and they can go round and round forever without anyone actually establishing what the material conditions are.

A materialist starting point would look different. It would ask: what is the actual structure of housing ownership in the UK? Who owns the land, who profits from the current arrangements, what financial instruments are tied to property values, what happens to pension funds and bank balance sheets if house prices fall significantly? Once you’ve established those facts, you start to see why the policy debate never goes anywhere, because the material interests that benefit from high house prices are embedded in the financial system in ways that make meaningful reform structurally difficult regardless of which party is in power. The debate about policy preferences is real, but it’s happening on top of a material reality that constrains what any of those preferences can actually achieve.

The emphasis on primary sources is not pedantic, it’s the whole point. If you want to understand what a government is actually doing, you read the legislation, the Hansard records, the court judgments, the financial disclosures, not the newspaper columns about those things. Primary documents are the closest you can get to material reality in a world where everything is immediately interpreted, spun, and packaged for consumption. A journalist tells you what they think the budget means. The budget document tells you what it does.

Nothing fell from the sky

The second step is historical development. Nothing that exists today exists in isolation. Every institution, every policy, every conflict has a history, and understanding that history is not just academic background, it’s analytically essential, because the history tells you why the present looks the way it does rather than some other way.

This is where dialectical materialism parts company most sharply from mainstream analysis, which tends to treat situations as if they appeared fully formed.

The UK claimed to be taking a backseat on the war in Iran. Here's why that's rubbish

When Western media covered the 2026 US-Israel strikes on Iran, the framing was almost entirely presentist: Iran is a nuclear threat, the strikes were a response to that threat, what happens next? The history, the 1953 coup against Mossadegh, the decades of Western interference, the JCPOA that was working until the US pulled out, was treated as background colour rather than as the explanation for why the situation existed at all.

Historical materialism, which is the application of dialectical materialism to history, insists that you trace the development. How did we get here? What prior structures, decisions, and developments produced this moment? What old forms are becoming obsolete, and what new forms are emerging? The point is not to find someone to blame in the past, but to understand the process of change, because if you don’t understand the process, you can’t understand where it’s going.

With the privatisation of British Rail, you can analyse the current state of UK railways by looking at franchise agreements, fare structures, and performance metrics, and you’ll learn something. But you’ll miss the fact that the current mess is not a market failure in the abstract, it’s the specific product of a specific political decision made in a specific historical context, one that was driven by a particular set of class interests and ideological commitments. The Thatcher and Major governments didn’t privatise the railways because privatisation was objectively the best policy. They did it because the material conditions of the 1980s and 1990s, the defeat of the miners, the weakening of organised labour, the dominance of finance capital, created the political space for it. Understanding that history changes what you think the solutions are. If the problem is a bad policy that can be reversed, you campaign for better policy. If the problem is a structural arrangement that emerged from and is sustained by specific class interests, then you need to understand those interests before you can know what “fixing it” would actually require.

The word “historical” here is doing real work. It doesn’t just mean “things that happened before.” It means that the present is the product of a process, and that process has a direction, not in the sense of destiny or inevitability, but in the sense that material conditions create pressures that push development in certain directions rather than others. Understanding those pressures is what lets you move from describing what happened to explaining why it happened, and from explaining why it happened to anticipating what might happen next.

Find the tensions that drive change

This is the dialectical core, and it’s the part that people find hardest to get their heads around. Contradictions, in the Marxist sense, are not just problems or disagreements. They are internal tensions within a system that drive it to change. A contradiction is when two forces that depend on each other are simultaneously opposed to each other, and the resolution of that tension is what produces development.

The classic example is the contradiction between labour and capital. Capital needs labour to produce value. Labour needs wages from capital to survive. They depend on each other. But their interests are fundamentally opposed, because every pound that goes to wages is a pound that doesn’t go to profit, and vice versa. This isn’t a problem to be solved through better negotiation or fairer contracts. It’s a structural feature of the system. The tension is built in, and it expresses itself in everything from wage disputes to political parties to the structure of the welfare state.

Mao’s ‘On Contradiction’ is probably the most useful text for getting the hang of this. He makes a distinction between the principal contradiction and secondary contradictions, and between the principal aspect and the secondary aspect of a contradiction. In any situation, there are usually multiple contradictions operating at once, but one of them is the main driver of change. Identifying which one is principal, which is secondary, and which aspect of each is dominant at a given moment, is the analytical skill that separates good dialectical materialist analysis from bad.

In the NHS there are multiple contradictions at work: between the stated purpose of universal healthcare and the material reality of underfunding, between clinical need and financial constraint, between public service ethos and creeping privatisation. But which one is principal? If the main contradiction is underfunding, then the solution is more money. If the main contradiction is between public provision and the logic of capital accumulation, which pushes health into the private sector not because private is more efficient but because it opens new markets for profit, then more money alone doesn’t resolve it, because the structural pressure toward privatisation will continue regardless of the budget.

One thing I’ve found useful in my own practice is to take two genuinely opposing views on a topic and map them against each other, not to find the “truth in the middle” (this is not centrism), but to identify where the real tension lies. If two serious people disagree about something, the disagreement itself is data. It tells you something about the contradictions in the situation. But you have to make sure you’re engaging with the strongest version of each argument, not a strawman. If you can’t articulate the opposing position in a way that its proponents would recognise, you haven’t understood the contradiction yet.

Contradictions also have a feature that Mao called the “generality” and “particularity” of contradiction. Some contradictions are general, they show up everywhere, in every society, in every historical period. The contradiction between productive forces and relations of production is general. But the way that contradiction expresses itself is always particular, specific to the time, place, and conditions. The contradiction between labour and capital is general under capitalism. The way it plays out in the UK gig economy is particular. Good analysis moves between these levels, using the general to illuminate the particular and the particular to test the general.

Zoom out and map the totality

The fourth step is what I call mapping the totality, which is a fancy way of saying: don’t analyse anything in isolation. Every issue exists within a broader system of interconnections, and if you only look at the issue itself, you’ll miss the forces that are actually shaping it.

This is where a lot of single-issue analysis goes wrong. You can produce a perfectly competent analysis of, say, UK immigration policy by looking at Home Office data, legislative changes, and enforcement outcomes. But if you don’t situate it within the broader system, the labour market requirements of British capital, the post-colonial relationships that shape migration patterns, the role of immigration rhetoric in managing domestic class tensions, then your analysis will describe what’s happening without explaining why.

Totality doesn’t mean you have to account for literally everything. It means you have to account for the relevant connections, the ones that actually bear on the issue. The question to ask is: what larger forces are shaping this situation from outside? What would I miss if I only looked at the issue itself?

When I analysed UK involvement in the US-Israel strikes on Iran, the material conditions of arms licensing were important, but they only made sense once you zoomed out to see the F-35 programme (£45.2 billion by 2046), the dollar-clearing system that locks UK financial institutions into US sanctions compliance, the NATO alliance structure that frames Iran as a Euro-Atlantic threat, and the Gulf arms contracts that create a straightforward economic incentive for alignment against Iran. Each of these could be studied on its own. Together, they constitute a totality, a system of interconnections that explains why UK foreign policy on Iran looks the way it does regardless of which party is in government.

The totality is also where you start to see how different contradictions relate to each other, how a contradiction in one area feeds into or intensifies a contradiction in another. That’s when the analysis starts to come alive, when you can show that housing policy, financial regulation, and pension fund management are not three separate issues but three expressions of the same underlying contradiction in how capital operates.

What you do with all of this

The final step, which I mostly leave for readers to work out for themselves but which is built into the method, is praxis, the insistence that analysis has to connect to action. Marx’s point in the Theses on Feuerbach was that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.” Dialectical materialism isn’t an academic exercise. It’s a method for understanding the world well enough to know where to intervene.

This doesn’t mean every analysis has to end with a to-do list. It means that the analysis should clarify what the actual possibilities are, given the material conditions, historical development, contradictions, and systemic forces you’ve identified. What can actually be done? Which actions address the principal contradiction rather than a secondary one? What would need to change before certain possibilities become available?

This is where the method is most honest with you, because it will often tell you that the thing you want to do is not yet possible, that the conditions aren’t there, that the contradiction hasn’t sharpened enough, that the class forces needed for transformation haven’t organised. That’s not pessimism. That’s realism about the terrain you’re operating on. And it’s more useful than optimism that ignores the terrain, because it tells you what needs to be built before the change you want becomes achievable.

It also forces you to ask not just ‘what is the solution?’, but ‘what is the solution to implementing this solution?’. It’s great having a solution that feels like it will work, but if there is no real plan for implementing it, or there are real obstacles that haven’t been considered, it very well could fail.

Why bother?

I think the reason dialectical materialism matters, beyond its usefulness as an analytical tool, is that it changes the questions you ask. Instead of “is this fair?”, you ask “who benefits from this arrangement, and what material forces sustain it?” Instead of “why won’t the government fix this?”, you ask “what structural pressures make this outcome more likely than the alternative, regardless of who is in government?” Instead of “what should we believe?”, you ask “what conditions produce these beliefs, and whose interests do they serve?”

These are better questions. Not because they always give comfortable answers, but because they give accurate ones. And accuracy is the precondition for any serious attempt to change things. You can’t fight a system you don’t understand, and you can’t understand a system by starting from what you wish it was. You have to start from what it is, from the material reality, and work from there.

That’s what dialectical materialism is. Not a set of conclusions, but a method for reaching them. The conclusions might change as conditions change, but the method holds.