chat

About diamat: Hmm I guess I never really understood the big deal about it, it just seems like the standard toolkit when trying to understand something.

If both are told to render them in plain language, a lot of the stated beliefs of a Marxist and a highly-secular liberal are going to be similar. From a certain perspective however, the Marxist seeks to take those truisms and push them to their logical extremes rather than just let them sit there as a meaningless token admission. Put a more palatable way, diamat and historical materialism are ways of taking the axioms that both parties (the Marxist and secular liberal) admit as being foundational to reality and systematize them. Vibes are not enough.

If you're interested in writing on the necessity of this approach, see Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which isn't bandied about like a meme in the manner that his three most popular works are, but is very philosophically interesting.

If you want meme texts, this is also covered in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and in Marx's The German Ideology. As others have noted, these things are fundamental to the nature of Marxism as "scientific socialism", so a shorter option is the very good essay This Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists: Marxism as Science, which I think also exists in an audio form if you want me to dig that up.