Dialectics

Dialectical, in contrast to "reflective" (or analytical), throught grasps conceptual forms in their systematic interconnections, not just their determinate differences, and conceives each development as the product of a previous less developed phase, whose necessary truth or fulfilment it is; so that there is always a tension, latent irony or incipient surprise between any form and what it is in the process of becoming.

Marx's dialectic is scientific because it explains the contradictions in thought and the crises of socio-economic life in terms of the particular contradictory essential relations which generate them (ontological dialectic). And Marx's dialectic is historical because it is both rooted in, and (conditionally) an agent of, the changes in the relations and circumstances it describes (relational dialectic).