Dialectical materialism is a misnomer. I’ll give you an example. Suppose Alice’s boss pays her one dollar an hour, while Bob’s boss pays him a thousand dollars an hour. A dollar is not a material object. It’s a social construct. These quantities are, material, simply numbers in a bank account. Less than that, because numbers are social constructs too. Materially, these are magnetised bits on a hard drive. There is no material sense in which Bob earns more than Alice. The fact that Bob earns a thousand times as much is purely social, not material. Yet, as a result of the exchange of social constructs, Alice lives in a slum and cannot afford medical care for the tumor that will kill her in a year’s time, and she is driven by necessity towards revolution. While Bob lives a life of privilege in a mcmansion with three healthy kids from three different ex-wives, and Bob is incentivised to maintain the status quo and oppose revolution.

If the dialectical philosophy of marxists were aptly named, it would be called dialectical determinism. Alice and Bob’s lives are governed by cause and effect, not by materials. They are governed by the cause and effect of social constructs. We can say that materially, Bob is more wealthy because he has a mansion, but why does he have a mansion when Alice does not? Because of a social construct. Not a material. It is wrong to say Alice’s desire for revolution is driven by materials. It is in fact driven by cause and effect, which is much more universal than mere matter.

Being a soulist does not make me the enemy of dialectical determinists, which is to say Marxists. But it does make me the enemy of realists, who misunderstand the lessons to be learned from Marx’s writing and fixate upon the physical to the exclusion of truth.