Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Red Menace. All right. This is going to be a fun, if, you know, kind of perhaps challenging episode today. What we are going to do, and I'll talk in a second about why we're doing this, but what we're going to do today in a nutshell is basically take dialectical

and historical materialism and show how it can be applied to a real world event, in this case,

the war in Iran. We're going to break down dialectics, dialectical and historical materialism into

its three parts, dialectics, history, materialism, kind of break

them apart to show how what each piece adds to the overall analysis, keeping in mind, of course,

that they all ultimately go together, and that will become clear as well. And after we go through

that process, we're going to compare and contrast dialectical materialism to some other analytical

lenses or some other ways of apprehending, you know, political events that are taken seriously

in academia and then some that are like kind of folksy, that are that are alive and well in the

popular consciousness, though they're not taken seriously academically,

but still play a major ideological role in our society. One of those, for example, would be

like conspiracy thinking, right? And why we're going to do this, it's multifaceted on one,

and I am actually teaching a class for socialist night school tomorrow from recording this

on historical and dialectical materialism. So I've been diving into it, you know, revisiting it once

again. I've been making notes and it dovetailed really well with this episode because I actually

got the idea for this episode from some comments from a really

smart, close friend of mind and from a patron on Rev Left Patreon asking two related but kind of

differently articulated questions. The patron said, you know, I love like dialectical materialism,

like I love learning about it. Sometimes, though,

it feels very abstract and I struggle applying it to the real world. So I loved that question.

I think, you know, got a lot of likes, which means a lot of other people feel in a similar position.

I've always said, you know, the last thing that I really grasped within Marxism, not to say that there aren't things that I can still deepen my grasp on, of course, but the core concept within Marxism that I, you know, struggled the most throughout the years, throughout my 20s to kind of understand was dialectical materialism. It is challenging. And so I totally understand as people are trying to

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