“Dialectical materialism” in Marxist thought is basically just an application of this dialectical thinking to economics. One could approach economics analytically by first, say, constructing a model of individual economic agents, and then trying to figure out what happens when these agents interact under certain conditions. The proponent of the dialectical method (like Marx) would, however, insist that this is mistaken.
The example of Marx’s economics book, Das Kapital, seems worth telling (as I remember it, having read it years before). There are three volumes: in volume 1, he sketches a basic picture of how everything fits together. (Here the ‘labor theory of value’ shows up, which is the claim that “if you turn A into B with an hour of labor, and the price difference between B and A is less than what an hour of labor is worth, this is an unsustainable practice that will only exist transiently.”) In volume 2, he fleshes out the picture. (We can extend our example by pointing out that material also has costs that are determined by the other things that material could be used for, and so we should expect unprofitable uses of materials to be transient.) In volume 3, he finally has a working model. (Now we could also include capital- unprofitable use of machinery should also be transient.)
This makes sense as an explanatory model in that it’s very difficult to talk about the economy from scratch. It’s much easier to build a toy model of the economy, and then once you have basic reference points for every individual piece and their interactions we can make it more and more complex until it approximates reality closely enough to use.
But it also has the huge pitfall that you could, say, stop reading one volume in, and think that the labor theory of value implies that only labor adds value to anything.
I’ve found thinking about theories in terms of ‘thesis,’ ‘antithesis,’ and ‘synthesis’ to be useful because concepts are many-dimensional, and so ‘antithesis’ does not mean opposite instead of just a ‘challenger,’ and so a synthesis is often more of a course correction than a complete turnaround.
The example of Marx’s economics book, Das Kapital, seems worth telling (as I remember it, having read it years before). There are three volumes: in volume 1, he sketches a basic picture of how everything fits together. (Here the ‘labor theory of value’ shows up, which is the claim that “if you turn A into B with an hour of labor, and the price difference between B and A is less than what an hour of labor is worth, this is an unsustainable practice that will only exist transiently.”) In volume 2, he fleshes out the picture. (We can extend our example by pointing out that material also has costs that are determined by the other things that material could be used for, and so we should expect unprofitable uses of materials to be transient.) In volume 3, he finally has a working model. (Now we could also include capital- unprofitable use of machinery should also be transient.)
This makes sense as an explanatory model in that it’s very difficult to talk about the economy from scratch. It’s much easier to build a toy model of the economy, and then once you have basic reference points for every individual piece and their interactions we can make it more and more complex until it approximates reality closely enough to use.
But it also has the huge pitfall that you could, say, stop reading one volume in, and think that the labor theory of value implies that only labor adds value to anything.
I’ve found thinking about theories in terms of ‘thesis,’ ‘antithesis,’ and ‘synthesis’ to be useful because concepts are many-dimensional, and so ‘antithesis’ does not mean opposite instead of just a ‘challenger,’ and so a synthesis is often more of a course correction than a complete turnaround.