Do you understand dialectical materialism?

[bedstuy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism

STILL don't know what it is after reading that. Can someone explain it in layman's terms?

Well according to this it's a combination of dialectics and materialism. Gee thanks, very helpful.

I think a critical part of the far left is that ideas can only be expressed in dense, convoluted text. 

Here's my reader's digest take:

Basically, it refers to one take on Hegel's theory of history.   Hegel thought that history progresses from one major era to another through this process where a new idea comes on the scene, then there's chaos as society struggles to deal with it and then society reaches a stable point until a new major era begins. 

Marx took that idea, but refined it with a "materialist" or economic foundation based analysis.  Basically, the stages of history are defined by the economic relations.  So, feudalism was defined by the agriculture of the middle ages, the industrial revolution period was defined by factory labor, etc.  So, within that theory one might say, the industrial revolution was the key inciting event, the labor clashes and unionism were the resulting chaos and the stasis was the building of the welfare state. 

Marxist probably have 10 million problems with that quick dirty explanation, but there you go.