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?
It’s both, pertaining to the dialectics and the materialism. But it’s not simply mushing the two together to make them into a neat ball. Dialectical materialism compared to its hegelian idealist form has different laws or rules that emerge.
Explaining black holes with dialectics is possible, it’s just we may not be able to explain them yet. I can see a black hole as the negation to… gravity, probably? Light? I’m not sure even the most advanced research on black holes could tell us for sure how exactly it fits within diamat. And things don’t exist in isolation but in relations, which the sum of it forms what we call nature. We are as much part of the natural world as black holes, the planets, the mountains and the animals, and subject to its universal laws all the same.
It can be helpful because darkness is not the negation to light, as negation/contradiction is not the direct opposite/antonym. The contradiction of light/photons is not solved by “the absence of photons” (darkness), it’s solved by its negation - so what negates light/photons? So like I can see people trying to apply dialectics to stuff around them to get a feel for it.
Conversely at times diamat can help us analyze where the material conditions stand, and at times can help us determine a trajectory. Actually it can do both but philosophy is tough lol, it’s tough to go from “I read about this example of dialectics in motion” to “this is my own analysis of the current situation” and this is why there’s so much mistaken dialectics. I probably make a lot of mistakes too.
When Mao analyzed that Japan was an empire on the decline (On Protracted Warfare if I’m not mistaken) he based his analysis on the material conditions in Japan, these conditions themselves subject to dialectics, and from that was able to analyze their trajectory and how he foresaw the war progressing.
Contradictions are the motor of change as they explain not only that change is possible but the mechanism to how it happens. It explains why we don’t live in a metaphysical (static) universe. But as Marx said The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, and this is true of dialectics as well. We inherit the current material conditions (of nature - which includes but is not limited to society) we live under, but also have the power to resolve these contradictions. When applied to social life we call it historical materialism (it’s not just “applying diamat to history”, it refers specifically to social life as per Stalin)
A good diamatical analysis is powerful, but it’s tough to make a good one. It usually comes about after a process of collective struggle, unearthing the dialectic over trial and error and struggling with the material.
I’m not well versed in physics, but in regards to black holes if treated as a system in itself within general relativity their principal contradiction is between gravity and the energy of all it’s particles, including light. Gravity is such a dominant force that nothing escapes the event horizon (no motion), but this contradiction also dictates the motion of objects around the black hole. To be more precise, the phenomenon we call black hole is this contradiction.
The main issue is that black holes can’t be described and predicted in the same way within quantum mechanics (mechanics and dynamics here being key dialectical words), another scientific theory that is fundamentally incompatible with general relativity and is part of the Standard Model of particle physics. There we have another contradiction, now between ideas and the material world, which is what would be solved by a successful development of a Unified Field Theory that can describe both theories in their entirety while also being self-consistent. That is the principal contradiction as present in science itself.
Mechanics (physics) is usually the perfect analogue for dialects, since Marx and Engels very explicitly borrowed words from that field (i.e. “Laws of Motion”).