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.
Infrographic is very cool, but the slave and serf arrows can be confused as them becoming lords and bourgeoisie respectively.