Definition
Material Dialectics
Material dialectics, more commonly called materialist dialectics, is an approach associated with Marx and Engels that explains development through internal tensions in material conditions and relations, rather than through the self-development of ideas alone. It reworks Hegelian dialectics by locating the basis of social change in how people produce and reproduce their lives.
A contradiction here is a real opposition within a shared system, such as the conflict between social production and private appropriation under capitalism, rather than a logical inconsistency between propositions. Such oppositions can drive structural change through human practice and struggle; they do not prescribe a fixed sequence of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.