“Marxism” is a combination of “dialectical and historical materialism,” terms coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as their methods of analysis. Neither defined these terms entirely, but Engels laid out three key principles of the “dialectical” element: (a) quantitative and qualitative changes directly impact one another and to change one we must change the other; (b) the unity of opposites which is essentially means that things, phenomena and ideas have two elements that are in competition with one another to be dominant and this is what gives them motion, these can also be called contradictions; and (c) the negation of the negation or just as we create conditions to form a new reality and negate the old, this is not permanent and new conditions will be formed to replace the new reality, while keeping some elements of the previous conditions.

The crux of the “materialist” part dialectical materialism is that there is an actual world “out there” that is not dependent upon, though not isolated from, our ideas of that world. In fact, it is our interaction with this material world that gives rise to our ideas, our consciousness. The objective of dialectical materialism is to have our consciousness, our ideas, accurately reflect reality, but this is a pursuit because part of the dialectic is what we know and what we don’t know. There are other principles such as looking for the macro in the micro and vice versa as well as looking for essence of phenomena and vice versa. However, what is most important is that it is fundamentally critical of racial capitalism, because this system has many unresolvable contradictions including collective production and private accumulation and posing the supremacy of European people and culture with only evidence of the opposite. Marx and Engels used dialectical materialism to develop historical materialism, which provides a number of analytical tools with which to understand capital.