I know I've said it before (though I can't remember where) but one of the deficiencies of the general anti-capitalist left, a population to which I belong, is its inability to think dialectically.  Even more of a problem is that, amongst marxists, this inability to think dialectically is often disguised as "dialectical"––so much so that there is a long history of one marxist group or individual calling another marxist group or individual "undialectical" for reasons that have nothing to do with dialectical logic.  And the semi-popular tendency of leftish academics calling every set of relational terms "dialectical" tends to produce all manner of confusion. In an old post, On Dialectical Materialism , I attempted to provide a simple primer, short and to the point, of what it meant to use dialectical logic as a historical materialist.  And while it may indeed be a fact that "dialectical materialism", which has a curious history of being short-handed as "diamat", is a term that was not used by Marx or Engels––prompting some of my readers to complain, at the time that piece was written, that I was using "Stalinist" terminology––this is simply a semantic problem.  Marx and Engels spoke of doing dialectics as materialists, other writers outside of the "Stalinist" tradition (including Trotsky) used the term "materialist dialectics" and so I see no problem to relinquish the most popularized term of Marx and Engels' philosophical method.  Whatever the case, semantic quibbles aside, the main reason I wrote that piece is due to what I saw as a deficiency in some marxist critiques, as well as anti-capitalist critiques in general, of the current conjuncture.  The implicit argument hidden behind my summary of dialectical materialism was that the absence of dialectical thinking amongst broad sectors of the left demonstrated a deficiency in thought.  The fact that some marxists were wont to use the name  of "dialectics" without any apparent fidelity to the concept  was perfect proof of this deficiency: the logical tools behind the science of historical materialism were either being abandoned or misused.
dialectical logic is essentially the "unity of opposites" Of course, there are trajectories of thought that want to reject dialectics altogether.  I'm not speaking of the traditionally right-wing rejection of dialectics––the snooty anti-intellectual arch-conservativism that, especially during the cold war, liked to mock dialectics (without understanding it in any real detail) as some sort of sophistic tool that communists used to escape logic––but of radically anti-capitalist theoretical tendencies.  Post-modernism saw it as a totalizing logic, a product of a modernity that was intrinsically bound up with murderous conquest and cultural imperialism.  Analytic Marxism saw it as illogical, Hegelian nonsense that Marx and Engels were better off without.  Then there are those thinkers, such as Deleuze and Guattari, who would advocate other and more eclectic methods of logic that they assumed better fit the marxist project of emancipation (i.e. the "rhizome").  Perhaps these rejections of dialectical thoughts are helped along by all of the nonsensical uses of dialectical thinking that have been the pit-falls of innumerable marxist organizations––after all, if your experience of people who claim to be dialecticians is an experience of people who defend their nonsense as "dialectical" then it makes sense to despise the concept. Take, for example, the bizarre claim tendered by more than one marxist organization or individual that dialectical materialism (or, to escape the trap of this terminology, "materialist dialectics") is some sort of queen of the sciences .  Such a claim follows from the older claim that philosophy is the queen of the sciences : for if we agree that philosophy is, as your average Platonist would have it, the queen of the sciences, and that marxism is the pre-eminent science, then it follows that the philosophy of marxism, dialectical materialism, is the  queen of the sciences.  Such an assumption, based on the faulty premise of a unifying scientific monarch, has led more than one marxist organization to imagine that they can comment with authority on all scientific disciplines and see themselves as more equipped to explain the meaning of these disciplines than those who have actually bothered to study them.  Here we have marxists believing, through the ultimate science of dialectics, that they know more about quantum physics and pure mathematics than trained physicists and mathematicians. And though we would not like physicists and mathematicians intervening as authorities, based on their expertise in physics and mathematics, on the field of historical materialism (and indeed more than