That’s by definition of propaganda, though? The word “propaganda” doesn’t imply “false”, it just implies that it’s propagated with a political goal in mind
Look into literally every war they supported, it’s always false pretenses. They instigated Kuwait to get in trouble with Iraq, then told Iraq they wouldn’t oppose them invading Kuwait, then after Iraq invaded the US media apparatus lied everywhere that Iraqis disconnected hundreds of babies from incubators, killing them.
Still with Iraq, they told the world that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, that they had to be stopped for the safety of all USAmericans. Even though the weapons inspectors said it was patently false. The US invaded, many European countries supported them. After a very painful invasion where it’s estimated between hundreds of thousands to a million Iraqis were murdered by the US and their allies (and many, many more when you count those who died from other factors caused by the invasion, such as lack of infrastructure, hospitals, food, etc), after all of this did they find WMDs? Take a guess.
The US told us that Gaddafi was using mass rape against his enemies, and people believed it until after they bombed Libyans to rubble. Turns out, they lied.
Amnesty International curiously enough lied as well, they echoed the claims about Kuwait babies killed by the Iraqi army and the mass rape by Gaddafi’s troops until after the US punished those countries and their peoples severely. Then they went back on their word, because as it turns out they were lying. So if even organizations that occasionally do decent work can’t be trusted not to amplify imperialism, how can we trust those that are even worse?
Can you trust the same newspapers that have told us for years that no genocide is happening in Gaza? That we should condemn Hamas? That Israel has the most moral army? We saw with our own eyes what they did and still do to children in Gaza. And to this day BBC, NYT and others still frame Israel as victims of aggression, and the real victims as untrustworthy terrorists. We can’t trust a word about anything involving politics because even now they lie through framing, through omission.
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 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.
I am familiar with On Contradiction, and I think it is a load of word salad.
As best as I can tell, people who have drank the dialectical materialism kool-aid fetishise the word ‘contradiction’ and use it in place of any number of more correct words and terms.
Imperialists and their subjects have contrary interests. Definitionally opposed interests, even. Things being opposed doesn’t make them contradictory the way everyone uses the word.
You can legitimately say that US imperialism is the biggest problem in the world. You can’t say the US imperialism is the biggest contradiction in the world because that doesn’t make any god damned sense in English.
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.
On Contradiction isn’t word salad, and dialectical materialism isn’t Kool-Aid. Dialectical materialism isn’t a formula to impose on the world, but a tool for us to see where to look when analyzing existing phenomena. It doesn’t give answers, but it helps us find them.
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.
In what way is the interconnection of production and distribution increasing? Why is that contradictory with the concentration of profits into fewer and fewer hands? Our systems of production and distribution have been getting increasingly complex since the middle ages and yet the concentration of wealth has certainly ebbed and flowed in time. In what way are you suggesting one affects the other?
The old system of imperialism is dying away,
This is not a profound statement. It has literally always been the case since society has existed. The system of imperialism in the city states of antiquity died and gave way to the imperialism of the classical empires, which gave way to the imperialism of the feudal monarchies, and then the nation states, and the colonial empires, and so on to the capitalist economic imperialism of today.
while the interconnected, post-imperialist world is rising
Post-imperial? I doubt that and you have provided no evidence that that would be the case. It seems to me that the economic imperialism of the Western nation states is in transition to some kind of fascist corporate techno-feudalist imperialism.
And again, how does this relate to the distribution of wealth and systems of production of distribution? It’s not big and it’s not clever to say they are related because the fact that everything is related everything else is basically axiomatic of the system of analysis. You have to point out how.
On Contradiction isn’t word salad
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
It doesn’t give answers, but it helps us find them.
Which answers, exactly? Because the answer always seems to be the downfall of capitalism and to be replaced by socialism and then communism. And when that continues to not happen, the response always seems to be “but it totes will, eventually.” That isn’t analysis, that’s a teleological belief.
Try George Politzer “Elementary principles of philosophy” maybe? Its a term coming from Hegel, it makes more sense in german (Widerspruch literally means contradictory statement, e.g. parents might say “I don’t want to hear a Widerspruch!” to their kids when they’re refusing to cooperate).
I also don’t know what you mean by “dialectical materialism kool-aid”, it’s a useful toolbox for analysing society not some belief system one professes. And yeah someone using that toolbox will use the names those tools are called by other people who use the same toolbox. If you don’t use diamat, then the names won’t make much sense to you. E.g. I had to present a math paper where the person destructed a graph into “blocks”, and called that destructure a “blockade”. Which doesn’t make much sense, when we think of a “blockade” it’s an obstacle, not something we want on our way to prove a theorem, but within this framework it’s a tool that was used to find a certain type of graph within the larger graph and not at all an obstacle.
I also don’t know what you mean by “dialectical materialism kool-aid”
It seems to me that dialectical materialism is a tool for post hoc analysis of society that is useful for constructing narratives and not much else. I can’t see that it is in any way useful for generating falsifiable predictions. Yet people call off-the-dome predictions “scientific” just because they have identified the two things that are in contradiction ™.
If you don’t use diamat, then the names won’t make much sense to you. E.g. I had to present a math paper where the person destructed a graph into “blocks”, and called that destructure a “blockade”.
Yes words have different meanings in different contexts. “Blockade” has a common meaning and a different meaning in graph theory. But if you used it in its graph theory meaning unbidden in an online discussion thread that wasn’t already about graph theory, and without introducing the context of graph theory into the conversation first, then I would say you are using the word incorrectly.
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”.
Sure, reasonable: as long as we also apply that standard the next time someone says “Russian propaganda”. If we apply this standard universally, then we’re in a much better position to understand the world.
But also … just because something is used by the US as propaganda doesn’t necessarily mean it’s untrue.
That’s by definition of propaganda, though? The word “propaganda” doesn’t imply “false”, it just implies that it’s propagated with a political goal in mind
Look into literally every war they supported, it’s always false pretenses. They instigated Kuwait to get in trouble with Iraq, then told Iraq they wouldn’t oppose them invading Kuwait, then after Iraq invaded the US media apparatus lied everywhere that Iraqis disconnected hundreds of babies from incubators, killing them.
Still with Iraq, they told the world that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, that they had to be stopped for the safety of all USAmericans. Even though the weapons inspectors said it was patently false. The US invaded, many European countries supported them. After a very painful invasion where it’s estimated between hundreds of thousands to a million Iraqis were murdered by the US and their allies (and many, many more when you count those who died from other factors caused by the invasion, such as lack of infrastructure, hospitals, food, etc), after all of this did they find WMDs? Take a guess.
The US told us that Gaddafi was using mass rape against his enemies, and people believed it until after they bombed Libyans to rubble. Turns out, they lied.
Amnesty International curiously enough lied as well, they echoed the claims about Kuwait babies killed by the Iraqi army and the mass rape by Gaddafi’s troops until after the US punished those countries and their peoples severely. Then they went back on their word, because as it turns out they were lying. So if even organizations that occasionally do decent work can’t be trusted not to amplify imperialism, how can we trust those that are even worse?
Can you trust the same newspapers that have told us for years that no genocide is happening in Gaza? That we should condemn Hamas? That Israel has the most moral army? We saw with our own eyes what they did and still do to children in Gaza. And to this day BBC, NYT and others still frame Israel as victims of aggression, and the real victims as untrustworthy terrorists. We can’t trust a word about anything involving politics because even now they lie through framing, through omission.
True true, and their ‘justifications’ for war are entirely bogus.
But I just caution against over-correcting. Just because someone is an enemy of the US doesn’t mean they’re perfect. Or even good.
Yes it does. Relative to the US they are good.
The primary contradiction in the world right now is US imperialism.
If you are talking about an enemy of the US in the context of anything the US is doing, they are the good guys.
A contradiction to what? You can’t just say something is a contradiction unless it’s contradicting something else.
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 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.
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
Seconding this, being a military guy Mao is very good at explaining big concepts in clear, simple language
I am familiar with On Contradiction, and I think it is a load of word salad.
As best as I can tell, people who have drank the dialectical materialism kool-aid fetishise the word ‘contradiction’ and use it in place of any number of more correct words and terms.
Imperialists and their subjects have contrary interests. Definitionally opposed interests, even. Things being opposed doesn’t make them contradictory the way everyone uses the word.
You can legitimately say that US imperialism is the biggest problem in the world. You can’t say the US imperialism is the biggest contradiction in the world because that doesn’t make any god damned sense in English.
I explained up here how it’s a contradiction:
On Contradiction isn’t word salad, and dialectical materialism isn’t Kool-Aid. Dialectical materialism isn’t a formula to impose on the world, but a tool for us to see where to look when analyzing existing phenomena. It doesn’t give answers, but it helps us find them.
Again, word salad.
In what way is the interconnection of production and distribution increasing? Why is that contradictory with the concentration of profits into fewer and fewer hands? Our systems of production and distribution have been getting increasingly complex since the middle ages and yet the concentration of wealth has certainly ebbed and flowed in time. In what way are you suggesting one affects the other?
This is not a profound statement. It has literally always been the case since society has existed. The system of imperialism in the city states of antiquity died and gave way to the imperialism of the classical empires, which gave way to the imperialism of the feudal monarchies, and then the nation states, and the colonial empires, and so on to the capitalist economic imperialism of today.
Post-imperial? I doubt that and you have provided no evidence that that would be the case. It seems to me that the economic imperialism of the Western nation states is in transition to some kind of fascist corporate techno-feudalist imperialism.
And again, how does this relate to the distribution of wealth and systems of production of distribution? It’s not big and it’s not clever to say they are related because the fact that everything is related everything else is basically axiomatic of the system of analysis. You have to point out how.
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Which answers, exactly? Because the answer always seems to be the downfall of capitalism and to be replaced by socialism and then communism. And when that continues to not happen, the response always seems to be “but it totes will, eventually.” That isn’t analysis, that’s a teleological belief.
Try George Politzer “Elementary principles of philosophy” maybe? Its a term coming from Hegel, it makes more sense in german (Widerspruch literally means contradictory statement, e.g. parents might say “I don’t want to hear a Widerspruch!” to their kids when they’re refusing to cooperate).
I also don’t know what you mean by “dialectical materialism kool-aid”, it’s a useful toolbox for analysing society not some belief system one professes. And yeah someone using that toolbox will use the names those tools are called by other people who use the same toolbox. If you don’t use diamat, then the names won’t make much sense to you. E.g. I had to present a math paper where the person destructed a graph into “blocks”, and called that destructure a “blockade”. Which doesn’t make much sense, when we think of a “blockade” it’s an obstacle, not something we want on our way to prove a theorem, but within this framework it’s a tool that was used to find a certain type of graph within the larger graph and not at all an obstacle.
It seems to me that dialectical materialism is a tool for post hoc analysis of society that is useful for constructing narratives and not much else. I can’t see that it is in any way useful for generating falsifiable predictions. Yet people call off-the-dome predictions “scientific” just because they have identified the two things that are in contradiction ™.
Yes words have different meanings in different contexts. “Blockade” has a common meaning and a different meaning in graph theory. But if you used it in its graph theory meaning unbidden in an online discussion thread that wasn’t already about graph theory, and without introducing the context of graph theory into the conversation first, then I would say you are using the word incorrectly.
Nah. Being attacked by evil doesn’t make you good.
You’ve got to stop with this black-and-white thinking.
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.
Lol try harder fed
There are several socialist countries. What do you mean by “friend to the working classes” if not socialism?
State capitalism is not socialism, and it is not a friend of the working class.
Sure, but I’m not talking about the ROK or Singapore, I’m talking about socialist countries like the PRC and Cuba.
“State capitalism” is not a thing
Sure, but I’ll defend any government protecting its people from being bombed by imperialists, after the war is over we can critique again.
It means it’s either heavily exaggerated or untrue.
Sure, reasonable: as long as we also apply that standard the next time someone says “Russian propaganda”. If we apply this standard universally, then we’re in a much better position to understand the world.
But it’s a pretty good indicator