Try this one: http://www.readmarxeveryday.org/epop/contents.html

As within anything complex there is a learning curve where you need to know and understand a certain amount of terminology before some further reading can be useful.

If someone doesn’t know the difference between a box-end wrench, a philips screwdriver, a mallet, a spring washer, and attempts to read a carburetor manual and service it, they will for sure end up with a non-running engine.

Philosophy is the very top or the very bottom of all knowledge, everything else is a specific branch of philosophy (even the function and operation of a carburetor). Whether you are conscious of it or not, you use philosophy to learn, to communicate, to work and play. Physics, geology, and political economy, are parts of philosophy.

You can’t live without it.

I think to understand materialism you must understand first the fundamentals of science, methodology and constructing scientific theory. On the other hand it is to understand idealism (individualism, existentialism, and all the rest of the junk produced to confuse and manipulate the underclass). Simply is to shut down this back door in your head where any metaphysical trash can enter and confuse you. Once this door can be consciously shut, then the brain relaxes and vision becomes clearer, simpler, things begin to fall in the right places.

This is hard to do and easier to say, because we live in a world of communication, being a social animal, we utilize this instrument called language and language is fouled up of millenia of idealist/religious formation of what language is. Language is symbolism, and symbols are metaphysical themselves. The tree you have in front of you, you touch, climb, smell, cut, is not the same as the word tree. If the word tree and the object are so far apart imagine the leap one must make to understand class, or mental disorder, or reification. By the time you get to try to understand what Adorno and Horkeheimer are trying to say, you might as well tie a rope with a blob of 100cubic feet of concrete and dive into the middle of the Pacific.

Many people suffer from depression, it is the super-pandemic of the western world. Dialectical materialists do not suffer from such silliness. It is natural to be depressed living in a capitalist world, not being depressed living and experiencing this material reality should be a major concern of mental scientists. So healthy humans, especially living in urban centers, are all depressed. It is hard to ethically digest all this inequality, injustice, manipulation, exploitation, oppression, and pretend you are not concerned about it, it is nothing you can do, or anyway this can change.

So we are surrounded by delusional zombies who pretend they are OK with this all. Those that are having problems with the dillusion take a few more pills than the rest. The healthiest of them all attempt to organize and change this ugly reality. If you don’t like pills, there are many religions you can join and engage in delusional thought that will alleviate your pain of dealing with reality. You can find a scapegoat deity that will come some day and cure all this pain and injustice, and all you have to do is be on the right side of those being unpunished and guilty. But pills generally are more effective and cheaper than organized religion.

Am I making more sense? Unfortunately I have to use words to convey this message, if it was a computer language like C things may have been simpler to explain. Unfortunately we haven’t evolved enough to utilize a more objective language and be “absolutely scientific”. We do the best we can with the poor tools we have in common.