Dialectics Dialectics is the method of reasoning which aims to understand things concretely in all their movement, change and

interconnection, with their opposite and contradictory sides in unity. Dialectics is opposed to the formal, metaphysical mode of thought of ordinary understanding which begins with a fixed definition of a thing according to its various attributes. For example formal thought would explain: a fish is something with no legs which lives in the water. Darwin however, considered fish dialectically: some of the animals living in the water were not fish, and some of the fish had legs, but it was the genesis of all the animals as part of a whole interconnected process which explained the nature of a fish: they came from something and are evolving into something else. Darwin went behind the appearance of fish to get to their essence. For ordinary understanding there is no difference between the appearance of a thing and its essence, but for dialectics the form and content of something can be quite contradictory parliamentary democracy being the prime example: democracy in form, but dictatorship in content!
And for dialectics, things can be contradictory not just in appearance, but in essence. For formal thinking, light must be either a wave or a particle; but the truth turned out to be dialectical light is both wave and particle. We are aware of countless ways of understanding the world; each of which makes the claim to be the absolute truth, which leads us to think that, after all, Its all relative!. For dialectics the truth is the whole picture, of which each view is a more or less one-sided, partial aspect.

Means and Ends The dialectic of Means and Ends is of deep historical, ethical and political significance. The Means is the activity a subject engages in with the intention of bringing about a certain End. The End

has initially only an ideal existence, and the Realised End the actual outcome of the adopted Means may be quite different from the abstract End for which the Means was adopted in the first place. (MUY IMPORTANTE PARA DANSEN).

Both Means and Ends are therefore processes which are in greater or lesser contradiction with one another throughout their development constituting a learning process of continual adjustment of both Means and Ends in the light of experience until, at the completion of the process, Means and End merge in a form of life-activity, which is both its own End and its own Means. The dialectic of Means and Ends is manifested in certain maxims which express aspects of the dialectic in a one-sided or limited way. We do not have the means to achieve our ends is something which radical socialist groups have been saying for more than a century, reflecting the absolute gulf between their capacity to imagine socialism and the smallness of their own resources. The problem here is simply to mistake the socialist imaginary for an End, and to understand the purpose of socialist agitation to be to bring into being a socialist utopia. The socialist utopia is an ethical precept rather than a state of affairs which has to be brought about. As Marx said in The German Ideology:
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Thus, the perception that there is an impossible gulf between ends and means results from an abandonment of the critique of existing conditions, in favour of a hankering after a distant utopia, or simply a role far out of line with a groups actual sphere of activity. Whenever a radical group finds itself with such an absolute contradiction between means and ends (perhaps resulting from a gradual change in conditions, a weakening of its base), then it should consider re-orienting itself towards the critique of existing conditions, since these conditions necessarily provide the means for their own critique.

Dialectical Materialism Dialectical Materialism is a way of understanding reality; whether thoughts, emotions, or the material world. Simply stated, this methodology is the combination of Dialectics and Materialism. The materialist dialectic is the theoretical foundation of Marxism (while being communist is the practice of Marxism).
"Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, or motion without matter, nor can there be." "Change of form of motion is always a process that takes place between at least two bodies, of which one loses a definite quantity of motion of one quality (e.g. heat), while the other gains a corresponding quantity of motion of another quality (mechanical motion, electricity, chemical decomposition). "Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics (dialectical thought), is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature."

Fredrick Engels Dialectics of Nature

"For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher."

Fredrick Engels The End of Classical German Philosophy

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/m/e.htm#means