Thanks! I'll check 'em out!
Althusser has a number of interesting ideas, in Lenin and Philosophy chiefly, but his structuralism gets the better of him at times (such as the crucial question of the state), and his style is irritatingly French. Mao's On Contradiction is good. I would also recommend Afanasyev, the History of Soviet Philosophy.
The most extensive work on dialectics I have read was by Spirkin (Dialectical Materialism, the whole work is reproduced on the MIA, which is how I found it) - it was a bit schematic, but mostly alright - and several articles by Healy and Slaughter - which are utter rubbish. I learned dialectics, so to speak (the process is far from over!), chiefly by reading works in which the materialist dialectics is applied to some concrete problem - Fok's article in Pod Znamenem Marksizma (I don't know if it's online), discussing the interpretation of quantum mechanics from a dialectical materialist standpoint is something I would particularly recommend if you're familiar with modern physics. Omelyanovsky as well. Vygotsky's work - again, most of it is on the MIA - is also highly dialectical, so to speak, but it can be too subtle at times, at least for me.
Comrade, if it isn't too great a thing to ask, could you recommend me some literature on the materialist dialectic? You seem to have a rather good grasp of it, and I fear mine is rather elementary (if that!).
