I'm still trying to understand what "dialectical materialism" means.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/dialectical-materialism

For Marx and Engels, materialism meant that the material world, perceptible to the senses, has objective reality independent of mind or spirit.

Sounds right to me. Although I want to clarify, are they including light? We observe it with our senses, but it is massless, technically not matter.

Hegelian dialectics considers things in their movements and changes, interrelations and interactions.

Sure, that makes sense.

Everything is in continual process of becoming and ceasing to be, in which nothing is permanent but everything changes and is eventually superseded.

This gives me pause. Do we know this to be true? There is not a hard line between when a seed becomes a fruit. The macro objects we observe change, but the underlying particles just move. Molecules change; atoms change; baryons do not.

Marx and Engels change was inherent in the nature of the material world. They therefore held that one could not, as Hegel tried, deduce the actual course of events from any “principles of dialectics”; the principles must be inferred from the events.

It sounds like it has little to no predictive power. We observe events and infer "principles" from them. In hard science terms, we observe, hypothesize, experiment, and theorize. Repeatable experiments help us predict what will happen under similar conditions.

The concept of dialectical materialism—which is a theoretical basis for a method of reasoning—should not be confused with “historical materialism,” which is the Marxist interpretation of history in terms of the class struggle.

Is that the one you were referring to?

the contradictions inherent in capitalism require it. (Well, so long as capitalism doesn't succeed in overheating the planet first.)

Right, so... I still have no reason to believe dialectical materialism. The argument was that it has predictive power, but we don't know what will happen.

Another possibility I am thinking of: the capitalist class uses their resources to effectively enslave the working class through a combination of automation and surveillance. In this hypothetical, their control is airtight and revolution is impossible. Any dissent is punished with death. Forced breeding maintains the slave population if necessary, humans become more expendable. I am curious how that scenario might end.

I agree that capitalism is unsustainable and I would like to try some form of socialism, but I don't see how socialism is the inevitable outcome.

It's possible I'm just not understanding, or that I found a flawed definition. Thank you for the explanation.