A Didatic Example of the Dialectical Method – Haitian Revolution Podcast Episodes 1 & 2

You should listen to the first two episodes of this podcast if you want to see dialectical materialism in practice and made easy to understand without much jargon. It's two episodes of 37 minutes each. If you want, you can listen to the rest too.

In my opinion the greatest hurdle for a person to go from "leftist" to "marxist" is understanding what the heck is this "dialectical materialism" thing. We even have our own seasonal questions over it.

It's often presented in pretty abstract terms, and I believe some examples could better illustrate what a dialectical materialist analysis of a society looks like, specially ones which are alien to most people's preconceptions.

The Haitian Revolution section of the Revolutions Podcast is probably the best thing Mike Duncan has ever made, and I believe it's in large part because he had to rely way more on Marxist than liberal bibliography (Black Jacobins being a key text), and also due to not going in with too many preconceived notions from his USian upbringing.

I've been travelling a lot and been relistening to it, and the first two episodes reminded me of a lot of questions that get asked here.

In the first one he gives a general layout of the historical formation of the Saint-Domingue colony and analyses the classes that compose it in isolation at the time of the revolution. In the second one, he explores the tensions (contradictions) between those classes that dictate dynamics of the colony. Everything that follows is the results and reactions to these contradictions, given flesh and blood by his immersive narration.