by Thomas Weston, from the website marxist philosophy
Dialectics is the general theory of how things
come into existence, change, and die out. Dialectics concentrates on processes,
relations, and systems, and maintains that the main causes of the changes in
processes, relationships or things are their internal conflicts
(“contradictions”).
Opposition is a relationship between two things
(“sides,” “aspects”) that exclude each other but are also connected, where that
each side is what it is partly because of its relation to its opposite. This
means, in particular, that if something were separated from its opposite
(assuming that is possible), it would have to change a lot. Opposition does not
automatically imply conflict.
