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?
The first camp seems to be derived from novices trying to understand and apply it like a formula.
But when you know how it works, really, you don’t need to know to the full rules of the formula as much as how it works practically.