1. I think “dialectical materialism” walks on crutches as a scientific framework until and to the extent its logic achieves a more formal expression. For example, a mathematical logic and an optimization model that is reproducible would be especially helpful. Evolutionary theory (and its mathematical techniques (like genetic algorithms)) seems the best, and AFAIK, only candidate for this role. Contradiction, negation and synthesis are all captured and modeled in evolutionary theory, and mathematics. Optimization, cardinality and direction are all aspects of both dialectical materialism and evolutionary theory.

However there is a cost to certain policy and ideological legacies of MarxISM, and LeninISM in adopting evolutionary models — but, IMO, a cost well worth paying. The first is the emphasis in evolutionary theory on variation. Environments that can tolerate the greatest variation produce more successful adaptations. Marx once commented on the need to balance (not negate) the role of competition, vs cooperation, in Darwin’s Origin of the Species. But most MarxISM has ignored competition because of its ugly side-effects, especially in the more barbaric phases of capitalism. Yet clearly any post-capitalist society must model both. It is the hope of civilization that some alternative to death or poverty as the penalty for lost competition, some path for losers to become winners, can be found, and be sustainable.

2. The materialist side of dialectical materialism dictates a priority of objective over subjective considerations in social and economic development. For example, capitalist relations can only be superseded or transformed to the extent commodities — and the economics of scarcity in the necessities of life — can be superseded; and this is NOT primarily a matter of political POLICY, but of technological and overall cultural (including scientific) advance of society. Social change will always include both evolutionary (in the political sense) and revolutionary aspects. Institutions will always lag economics and culture, and at times suffer complete failure before they can be transformed or replaced. It is inconceivable that a political system other than Democracy — in the sense of the widest and most varied empowerment of all working people — worldwide — can realize the balance of cooperation and competition envisioned in the ideal of a communist society; and do so without the condition of constant war that the era of scarcity and commodities imposes.

JOhn