Keep it very simple at first. It’s common (but maybe not natural ;) ) to think linearly. If x changes then y changes proportionally. (y=mx+b)

But that’s a simplified version of reality.

Maybe using ideas like: If I go for a walk in the forest, the forest affects me. It makes me feel calm, I can see the beauty, etc. But I also affect the forest. When I am there, fewer animals are in my vicinity. I leave foot prints, and maybe eat berries so that there are fewer for the animals.

I think starting with this give and take sort of idea can provide a foundation.

It’s just a small step to: the system influences my behaviour and I influence the system through “these” real things.

Its an terribly dirty and overly simplistic and isn’t the “end all be all” but you might be able to make headway by demonstrating it either through a “troubleshooting of a situation where there’s a problem” or “kludging a solution” to a problem.

First iteration troubleshooting:

• I have an unsliced loaf of bread.

• I need it to be sliced.

• I get a butter knife to cut the bread.

What happened? The butter knife didn’t do a good job of cutting the bread into slices.

Second iteration troubleshooting:

• I have an unsliced loaf of bread. I now know that using a butter knife kinda works to make slices but its not very good.

• I need to slice the loaf of bread. But I don’t want the results of using a butter knife.

• I get a steak knife to cut the bread.

What happened? The steak knife did a somewhat better job than the butter knife at slicing the loaf of bread.

Third iteration troubleshooting:

• I have an unsliced loaf of bread. I now know that the butter knife does a terrible job at slicing bread. I now know that a steak knife does a better job at slicing bread than the butter knife but the results still seem to be lacking.

• I need to cut a loaf of bread into slices with better results than I get from a butter knife and steak knife.

• I get a bread knife to cut the loaf of bread.

What happened? So far, I get the best results from the bread knife. Now I know that of the three options I’ve tried so far, the bread knife is the best solution going forward.

So every attempt to solve this problem has increased my knowledge and experience. I didn’t forget what I learned in the early iterations so I get to build upon previous experiences and now have that moving forward.

Essentially, just push against individualism and keep reminding them that context (social, economic, etc) going back decades will determine much of life. It’s also helpful to try to remove binary good/bad morality from politics and explain the historical context of something, eg Russia/Ukraine, North Korea. That’s laying a foundation for more complex moves later.

Just remember that you’re not just explaining materialism, you are helping them unlearn brain worms. And that can take a long time with a lot of conversations

Point out frequently in different contexts how change is constant and there are contradictions in all things. Promote empathy by showing interconnections and why material conditions would make people do “bad” things.

I always start with “what makes a thing itself?”

A bowl is a bowl because you eat out of jt, a shoe is a shoe because you put in on your foot, ect.

And if what gives meaning to a thing is its relationship to other things, what kind of relationships do we live in? Why do we live in these relationships, and how does it change us?

Sorry, I can only teach you a noob view of historical materialism

Economic base makes superstructure (culture, society, law), which in turn, reinforces it…

the materialism part, maybe by teaching some basic physics? pointing out how everything conforms to law, gravity is a simple one to explain i think.

for the dialectics part, i like boiling it down to “things as a process”. maybe a good way to teach it is by growing plants, telling the kid to observe the plant each day, watch the gradual changes, use the different phenological stages of the plant to explain how imperceptive quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes.

i don’t have a kid so idk if it would work, but this is how i imagined i would do it. obviously it’s a process, everyday talk about it and such until the kid internalizes it.

Nature is the proof of dialectics. It’s easy to visualise the dialectic between a bee and a flower, with both of their lifecycles intrinsically dependent on the other and their material/social role. The bee exists through its metabolism, collecting pollen/nectar and supplying them to its complex hive society for use as honey. Its body evolved sacs to carry even more of it. If a flower can’t self-pollinate, it has evolved to attract pollinators. It will draw from its dialectical relationship to sky/soil and synthesise new chemicals, it will evolve its body to look like the female version of a particular wasp so the males try to mate with it, it will find new ways of attaching more pollen to each bee. As long as the material conditions exist for the flower and the bee, their metabolic interaction with them will sustain and develop their dialectic with each other and their individual lives as a result of it. Take away the flower and the bee no longer exists, take away the bee and the flower no longer exists. They are structurally interdependent and no individual bee can decide to take up farming or accounting instead because the material conditions don’t allow for that.

There’s also climate change, the organs of the human body, predators and prey, rocks and rain forming waterways over time, and the good ole Heraclitus’ “No man steps in the same river twice, for he is not the same man and it is not the same river.” with a breakdown of all the ways those two things have changed as a result of their other dialectics in-between swimming sessions.

I like the example of a clay ball and car/bicycle wheel/rim, as it’s easy to understand. For instance, a clay ball has little value on its own. But by removing some clay from the centre to turn it into a bowl or cup, it becomes more valuable, even though there is less clay. Same with a wheel rim. A solid block of steel doesn’t have much value beyond its raw material. But by shaping it into a circle and removing material from the centre to create spokes, it now becomes light enough to be a wheel, and is more valuable, despite there being less steel. The formal laws of logic would state that the more of something you have, the more valuable it is. But here the opposite is true, by having less of something, we have made it more valuable. How can this be, it’s a contradiction! However, the contradiction is synthesised by understanding that the labour to remove material from the object in a specific way, so that the object can be used to complete specific tasks, has drastically increased the use value of the object, to the point that is is much more valuable than the raw material it is made out of. The lack of material in certain locations actually makes it very valuable. That is dialectics.

This is paraphrased from an explanation of Zhongyong Dialectics that I saw a few years ago. I hope I didn’t screw it up too much.

Everything that exists takes its shape from a balance of opposing forces internal to its structure, and everything that exists is either coming into existence or fading from it.

For the first point, imagine a suspension bridge. The shape of the bridge is formed from the opposing forces of its wires pulling in opposite directions, but instead of cancelling out or one force winning over the other, the two opposed forces result in a synthesis - the structure of the bridge holding up against gravity.

For the second point, consider a mountain range. It is either rising up due to tectonic shifts or it is weathering away from wind, rain and frost. Either it’s rising up faster (as the Himalayas are today), or it’s weathering away faster (as most other places) - if the two rates happen to be exactly equal for a time then you have a moment of equilibrium, which are very rare in nature and only ever exist as a dynamic equilibrium. This is the complete opposite conclusion to the kind of ‘mechanistic’ materialism that underpins liberalism, where stasis and stillness are assumed to be the natural state of any system. With a dialectical understanding we can see that change is the natural state of a system, while equilibrium is fleeting and even the most seemingly ageless mountains will inevitably become dust in the wind, indeed are already becoming dust.

Consider also the suspension bridge again. While it’s being built, it’s coming into being, but the instant that construction is finished it begins to suffer the decay of entropy. It starts to rust and crumble away, and will fade out of existence unless it is actively maintained - unless energy is expended ‘bringing it into being’ once more and restoring the balance of the opposed forces that make it up. Otherwise, if one force begins to weaken (one side of the cables begin to rust) the forces may become so unbalanced that the structure disintegrates.

Now to combine these two points, think of fire. Fire is a particularly good illustration of a dialectical process, because it is a process that abolishes itself. Fire has to consume fuel to exist, in fact its existence is nothing but the consumption of fuel, but once it has consumed the fuel it disappears: its existence inevitably destroys the very conditions that allow it to exist. It spreads, rapidly bringing more and more of itself into existence, until all available fuel is being burned and it starts dwindling away. And this happens not because of “conscious will” (neither God reaching down to snuff it out, nor the fire ‘choosing’ to burn to ash), but because of its internal structure and the resolution of its internal contradictions.

Another such example would be yeast turning sugar into alcohol, inevitably poisoning itself to death… and a further example would be capitalist society creating the conditions for a socialist revolution. The capitalists cannot do away with the workers, their labor is the only thing that allows capital to be expanded. But competing in the market obliges the capitalists to drive their workers into such miserable conditions that they inevitably ask things like “Why is this happening to me? What has caused this situation? And how can I stop it?”

And in answering those questions, they are brought face-to-face with stark reality, they are driven by necessity to seek a true understanding of the world’s historical development. They are forced to learn how the currently existing society rose out of the previous social structure, which, due to its internal contradictions, caused its own abolishment - the workers with the greatest understanding discover dialectical materialism, and thus finally they are able to understand the process by which they were inevitably forced into discovering dialectical materialism. So the process of capitalist society’s development leads, inevitably, to the existence of the communist workers that will overthrow it.

Can you link those videos? That will help me in the near future where I have to talk this stuff with my daughter.

Edit. A small ping @VeganicTankie@lemmygrad.ml

things happen due to material conditions