What is dialectical materialism, really?
I’ve seen dialectical materialism used to refer to two different concepts it seems, and I’m unsure about the relationship between the two of them.
In the first camp, I see dialectical materialism used as a static sort of list of qualities that govern all of reality and nature, basically creating a list of universal laws that have predictive and explanatory power in all cases, scenarios and scales, no matter the context. Sometimes people on the internet I see engaging with dialectics in this way are using it in a catechistic sort of way, and sometimes it seems misapplied, like trying to explain black holes using the “three laws of dialectics”.
The other camp seems to view dialectical materialism more as a method of analyzing a system, rather than being a list of rules that describe the behavior of a system, based on internal processes of that system. This seems more similar to what i have read in Capital and how Marx himself tended to engage in dialectics.
What is the origin of this conflict? Is this a real back-and-forth issue between Marxists, or is this some kind of subtext I’m overreading?
Both camps are in agreement, in a sense. It’s a method, a form of modelling and understanding reality, that follows its own axioms. Every model will have its own laws, which are taken as a premise (given sufficient evidence of their truth), like gravity. I think what you’re seeing might just be that usual phenomenon of people trying to sound smart by reciting phrases rather than writing actual content.
Like, yeah one could probably talk about black holes in terms of “unity of opposites” with regards to fundamental forces or something like that, but there’s already a lot of physics jargon that is more specific and fitting.