Welcome to Gaia! ::

Please, sit down and relax. Yes, this will most likely turn into a thread where myself and another senior member of the guild argue a really long-winder and intricate argument about some minor point of a side-track that just happens to have world shattering implications.

However, that is not the point of the thread, merely the likely result.

For the newbies who consider themselves communist and want to learn about communism, what are your main questions?
Is there any theory you have heard about but don't know what it is?
Is there a term you do not understand?
Do you want books to tell you stuff but don't know what books have what stuff?

Ask away, and myself or one of the others (often both) will (try to) help you out.

I guess the first thing I should know is what you know of them before hand, unless you are just testing me for some reason, so as to know what to avoid due to redundancy, and what to focus on in terms of misunderstandings you may have. (And I believe I remember you being here quiet a while ago... Not so new. I may be mistaken though.)

The three main laws of dialectics are the Interpenetration (or Unity) of Opposites, the Transformation of Quality into Quantity and the Negation of the Negation.

(I started a thread that I was going to update weekly on just this question early this year, but was promtly informed by gallenger that he had made the exact same thread a short while earlier. My thread was promptly abandoned)

The Unity of Opposites can be understood to mean that everything has its opposite (north/south, hot/cold, good/evil, &c.) but that each contains within itself the seeds for the other.
Keep going north and eventually you will have nowhere else to go but south, severe cold can cause the same damage as heat, both heat and cold can preserve stuff, making something hot draws energy from other places depressing the average temperature, good enforced upon evil must rely on evil means, evil enforced upon good encourages good.
Each is inseperable from its opposite and under the right conditions must turn into it.

The transformation of quality into quality is the extremely basic understanding that by adding enough to something you change it into something different.
A really easy to understand example is the colour red.
Red is made up of many different shades. Some lighter and some darker. We can make red lighter without changing its nature as red for a while, however there will come a certain point when adding more lightness transforms it from an extremely pale red into white or from an extremely radk red into black. The quantity (shade) transformed the quality (colour).
By the same toke, taking black or white as our starting point, by adding any quantity, shade, at all we are changing what colour it is, be the end colour lime green or tangerene.
Another example could be the difference between ozone and oxygen: one is two oxygen atoms, the other is three, and yet we depend on one for our very existence and one is poisonous to us.
Another example could be Ions.
Changing the quantity of a given property in something far enough will chance the very nature of that something, and in the other way, changing something into something else requires quantitatively changing at least one property of it.

The negation of the negation is the last, and arguably most important law (E certainly thought so: 'it is the law which hold the system together' or words to that effect).
E explains it way better than I could (not that I explained the above, but I really like his explanation). From Anti Duhring:
Let us take a grain of barley. Billions of such grains of barley are milled, boiled and brewed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley meets with conditions which are normal for it, if it falls on suitable soil, then under the influence of heat and moisture it undergoes a specific change, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, it is negated, and in its place appears the plant which has arisen from it, the negation of the grain. But what is the normal life-process of this plant? It grows, flowers, is fertilised and finally once more produces grains of barley, and as soon as these have ripened the stalk dies, is in its turn negated. As a result of this negation of the negation we have once again the original grain of barley, but not as a single unit, but ten-, twenty- or thirtyfold. Species of grain change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it-was a century ago. But if we take a plastic ornamental plant, for example a dahlia or an orchid, and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the gardener's art, we get as a result of this negation of the negation not only more seeds, but also qualitatively improved seeds, which produce more beautiful flowers, and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation, enhances this process of perfection.

If you want a more precise explanation you may want to try your hand at E's Anti Duhring and Dialectics of Nature. Or Hegel--I won't cause you the pain of linking that.

Yesterday or before I went to sleep this morning I should say, Gallenger made a post in EDP quoting Molotov as saying that only Heroes read Capital and Hegel.
I am pretty sure Gallenger would not declare me a hero.
That is utter s**t. I read Capital as my first Marxist text (I thought it was the manifesto at first, and then realised the manifesto was appended at the back and it was a dual volume) at 15. I understood it good. It is rather intimidating to look at, but not so bad to read. Hegel on the other hand...
I read Philosophy of History. Easy read, fun read, good read. The Philosophy of Right that was in the same volume... Not so much. Phenomenology of the Spirit...

Gah.
That is where the heroes are, reading Logic, Phenomenology and Right. Hegel's hegelian s**t.

I'll jump in a bit here since I recently provided a big expo on diamat (the old Russian term for Dialectical Materialism).

While your explanation is basically adequate but I'll throw out my favorite examples.

1. Unity of Opposites: cut a magnet in half, the halves now have a south and north pole whereas previously there was one magnet with 2 poles joined together.

2. Ice Cube... quantitative changes (degrees of temperature) build up until the ice melts (qualitative change or leap). Sublation or I believe Aufgebehung was the term Hegel used is when the ice cube is formed again by a quantitative drop in temperature causes a qualitative change of the melted water into ice again - it's an ice cube, very similar perhaps but not the exact same ice cube.

If you're really huge on dialectics you may want to look at the works of Joseph Dietzgen if you can get ahold of them (not currently on MIA - at least his works on dialectics). Another good website to google is "dialectics for kids" or "Dialectics for 4 year olds" it's exceedingly good. Another few good sources before you attack Anti-Duhring or Dialectics of Nature - or Lenin's works on diamat, I'd recommend buying or trying to find Afanasyev's "Dialectical Materialism" or Stalin's short overview of dialectical materialism which appeared in The History of the CPSU(B) Short Course: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

Honestly, if you're totally unfamiliar with dialectics, I'd read Stalin's little article, then Afanasyev's book, then check out Dialectics of Nature, then browse through Anti-Duhring. Then check out Lenin's work on dialectics. If you're *really* interested in Dialectics then you need to back up after reading the above stuff and start looking at dialectics in ancient philosophy, and then as they appear in the works of Kant and German philosophers of the 19th century in general (which while widely available are pretty tough reading) and ultimately Hegel, who isn't as bad as Kant, but is still...really tough.

lol Gracchvs if you made it through Kapital volume 2 without a massive yawn fest then I applaud you. Volume one is typical Marx but volume 2-3 are pretty dry going and lack of lot of Marx's typical literary flare. I also would point out that Molotov commented on this because Soviet textbooks on Capital are quite useful, much shorter, and more digestible in many cases (volume 2 in particular) so only the most hardcore of Communists actually read Kapital all the way through back in the day.

ive basicly studied every book on communism/socialism...but i don't
presicly (spelt wrong) get what NEO- communism is could you put it in a nutshell or completely explain(if you feel) what it is for me, thanks in advance.

well the most important ones ive read were: the communist manifesto, socialism opposing view points, communism an americans view(not realy insightful), communism a soviet's view, and the major revolutionary speechs of lennin, guevara, stalin, marx, engel(marx & engels werent too much of speaches rather literature) thats realy all i can get my hands on in a school overrun with the bourgeoise.P.S. thanks for teh spell check, and just as an anouncement to all while writing this i received a piece of the berlin wall awesome :3. p.s.s. most were by commies

Even though I'd avoid reading the Trotsky until you've read the Lenin and Marx/Engels - because I disagree with Trotsky on several points - I would point out that Marxist economics can be dealt with to some degree by Marx's Wage Labour and Capital, and Value, Price, Profit. Leontiev also made a Marxist econ textbook that was big in the 40's.

Though it could be fun if I said one ought to read "on the opposition" by Stalin after you read the Trotsky lol that'd make for an interesting time.

thank you for that list grachvs, i'll get reading right away to further understand communism

wait your talking about the cpusa right? well does it say where branches are on their website?