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?
I was gonna go really into detail but I keep getting interrupted so I will do my best with limited words. It starts with the idealist (Hegelian) dialectic which describes the progress of ideas in which a person has a thesis that is challenged by the antithesis, therefore forming a contradiction. This contradiction is eventually resolved resulting in a new thesis called the synthesis. Hegel saw this as the origin of human advancement. The idea creates the material world through this process. Marx adapted this process to a materialist perspective, proposing that the material world created the idea which altered the material world which then altered the idea. This is materialism with a dialectical relationship between the material and the idea in which both affect eachother back and forth while progressing in a single historical direction.
Here is a infographic which should help
This shows how the contradictory material interests between nobles and slaves progressed the means of production to a point where it produced the new economic relation of lords and serfs. This also formed the contradiction between bourgeois and proletariat, all the while being governed by ideologies created by each unique material contradiction. This other infographic is also helpful but I got rate limited so I couldn’t put it in the comment. :(
Dialectical materialism is not a list of rules governing the world; it is a tool that we can use to understand the forces behind the progress of history as it relates to production. Someone proposing the former to you is misinformed or not explaining it well. If anyone notices something I got wrong please point it out, its been a minute since I directly read up on this.
To comment on this further, it is not a list of rules governing the world but it is describing something universal which exists everywhere and in all things.
All things at all times have internal and external contradictions which are at play. All living things are caught between life and death, all non living things are subject to entropy and are being built up and broken down over time. So while diamat itself isn’t a law of the universe, you can look at the laws of the universe and understand them dialectically.
The laws of the universe are the primary material conditions that all other material conditions are based off of, but studying them and applying diamat to that study isn’t going to change society in the way that changing the economic base is so it isn’t really useful for Marxists or for liberation of oppressed people
I thought the Thesis Antithesis Synthesis thing was Fichtian and a misconception about how Hegelian and Marxist dialectics work
I don’t know its origin but it definitely is the idealist dialectic.
Edit: looked it up and it is Fichtian but Hegel mostly took issue with the terminology not its function. He found it to be a “lifeless schema” imposed upon various contents according to wikipedia. The thesis, antithesis, synthesis model is still useful however. The terms abstract, negative, and concrete used by Hegel suggest a flaw or an incompleteness in any initial thesis. For Hegel, the concrete must always pass through the phase of the negative, that is, mediation. This is the essence of what is popularly called Hegelian dialectics. It is sort of semantic imo.
Infrographic is very cool, but the slave and serf arrows can be confused as them becoming lords and bourgeoisie respectively.