Diamat is the backbone of Marxism, period. Without a clear understanding of it, along with Historical Materialism,

seconded a hundred times; and it’s not just incredibly difficult to understand and analyze imperialist conflicts, Dialectical materialism and Historical Materialism is literally the “scientific method” of political-economic analysis and socio-historical analysis in Marxism. It is the methodology with which all of the prescient analyses of Lenin et all were built on and from which they sprung forth. In fact it’s almost dangerous in my mind to only read Lenin and other revolutionaries without understanding or working to understand and apply Diamat and Histmat; because then all (many) people end up doing is vulgarizing Lenin’s analyses from ~1916 and copy/pasting them to now as if we live in the same era, which is exactly how you get people calling China imperialist as a binary thing without coming to grips with the structures undergirding their exported capital or what opposing forces it is antithesis to.

They copy/paste as static facts these past analyses of Lenin, rather than trying to break down his methodology, with which he came to those realizations, criticisms, and analyses, and build from his analyses forward to now using that methodology; deepening your understanding and ability to apply this methodology from which the predictive power of Marxism comes to new conditions. Lacking the undergirding methodology leads inherently and inevitably to opportunism; because you will just fill in the gaps with your own preconceptions because you don’t have the tools for the necessary criticality and rigor to understand the underlying forces and contradictions in things, let alone how to orient in or between them; just as people did in the off-the-wall nonsense that permeated basic science before the scientific method was developed – just as before the theoretical and experimental methodologies underlying modern science were put to solving problems and accomplishing tasks by removing the factor of human bias and instead discovering the underlying forces and conditions and patterns in things.

It’s like that Sankara saying “Without patriotic political education, a soldier is only a potential criminal.” the same applies to a revolutionary without a cohesive political education, which needs to at its base include the methodology for analysis and an understanding of the hows and whys and whats of it. Not having so is how you get opportunists and how you get adventurists who vulgarize theory to justify their own ends.