Dialectical-materialist synthesis

The dialectical-materialist process involves recognition of a thesis, its anti-thesis, and therefore the whole, or synthesis, composed of both thesis and anti-thesis. At any stage of this process, however, the synthesis is itself unsatisfactory because the elements of the synthesis suggest and require other relationships which therefore demand an enlargement of the universe considered and the formulation of a thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis at a new level. This dynamic has been applied by the Marxist and Hegelian analysis of historical processes in which each historical situation is said to contain tensions, conflicts and contradictory elements which are the driving force of change. History dialectically progresses from one condition to its opposite and then to a synthesis at a higher level. (Thus it is suggested that the contradictions of the world system will lead to a crisis and eventually to the emergence of a new order as a higher form of synthesis).