I feel like I understand communist theory pretty well at a basic level, and I believe in it, but I just don’t see what part of it requires belief in an objective world of matter. I don’t believe in matter and I’m still a communist. And it seems that in the 21st century most people believe in materialism but not communism. What part of “people should have access to the stuff they need to live” requires believing that such stuff is real? After all, there are nonmaterial industries and they still need communism. Workers in the music industry are producing something that nearly everyone can agree only exists in our heads. And they’re still exploited by capital, despite musical instruments being relatively cheap these days, because capital owns the system of distribution networks and access to consumers that is the means of profitability for music. Spotify isn’t material, it’s a computer program. It’s information. It’s a thoughtform. Yet it’s still a means of production that ought to be seized for the liberation of the musician worker. What does materialism have to do with any of this?
Well I don’t believe in spacetime either. I think it’s a mental construct. In the Information age, much of the means of production are explicitly, indisputably made of information. Agreements to buy, sell, and distribute which form the basis of capitalism are social constructs, existing only as products of human thought. Belief in currency, and capital, and wealth, is the driving force of history. That’s part of culture.
I think it’s a matter of scope you’re not considering. Mechanical materialism is what you are referring to when you are creating a division between mechanical substance and metaphysical substance. Marx draws on Hegel who draws on Spinoza who says that mechanical substance and metaphysical substance are composed of the same thing, while understanding that metaphysical substance is self generative and not determined by mechanical substance in and of itself.
Marx’s dialectical materialism is a unity of social reality meaning it’s an understanding that there is both a true form of existence in the material world with complex social concepts existing as a part of that reality. The point of this epistemology is that it helps us understand where truth comes from (that is beyond metaphysical symbolic truth), which is a useful tool in actually changing the world.
Sure there are mystic truths beyond the scope of Marxism, but they are functionally useless in changing the world which is the primary goal of Marxism.
Are you saying that property dualism is compatible with Marx’s materialism?
Oh, now this seems like a concrete claim we can test. So, would propaganda fall within one of these mystic truths or within Marxian materialism?
Marxian materialism. It is not property dualism because in my view Marx agrees with Hegel that property dualism subjects the metaphysical to be subordinate to the physical. Propaganda is a metaphysical notion informed by physical observations but those also physical observations get their character from the notion. It’s a bit ridiculous to assume propaganda, which is defined by its capability to propagate ideology, is a purely physical thing and would involve a ridiculous amount of loopholes to explain within a mechanical materialist worldview. Marxian materialism doesn’t hold a primacy of one or the other but doesn’t claim an agnosticism to the difference, rather there is a very specific dialectic between the two.
“It is dualist because it is monist. Marx’s ontological monism consisted in affirming the irreducibility of Being to thought, and, at the same time, in reintegrating thoughts with the real as a particular form of human activity.” Sartre, Critique of Dialectic Reason
Philosophy is not exactly my strong point but I think you might get a kick at least out of Critique of Dialectic Reason if you are trying to triangulate how you feel about Marxian materialism. As you are now, you are completely denying the character of the real as possible to be understood at all and reducing it to a matrix of symbols completely detached from the real at all, which doesn’t incorporate that while the symbolic and social reality is the lens with which our minds functions to make “sense” of the real there still exists a real that informs those symbols at the same time.
Or in other words how can you possibly hope to change anything when you can only ever know nothing.
There’s an old saying from chaos magic, and maybe you’ve heard it in Assassin’s Creed as the philosophy of the Assassins too: “nothing is true. everything is permitted.”
If I believe in nothing, then I can choose to believe in anything. I find unrealism to be revolutionary.
I think that is a great basis for revolutionizing our ideas, and in many many ways I adhere to that same ethos. I think it needs to be dialectically balanced however with the need to enact real social change on a society wide scale, where things are true given certain assumptions. While the assumptions may be problematic in certain contexts, the outcomes are undeniably real and that is the strength of Marxism. We can deny the symbolic as “truth” but we can’t deny the real no matter how we try.
Outside of a misunderstanding of materialism, what does this mean? Like, do you not believe that time is a dimension of space? That was the big breakthrough of Einsteins theory of relativity. He proved that gravity only works if time is a dimension of space.
Oh, Einstein’s theory is beautiful. It’s elegant, and there’s a lot of truth to it. It accurately predicts our future perceptions within relativistic situations, far better than Newton’s theory. However, that’s all it is - perception. Einstein accurately described the interface of our minds and created a model we can use to better use that interface. But understanding an interface is not the same as understanding the truth beneath the interface. That’s probably why Einstein’s theory can’t account for quantum science.
What? It’s not just perception, it’s repeatable measurements. Anyone on earth, even a machine, can run the same experiments (or for astrophysics, observe the same phenomenon) and get the same numbers.
I suppose technically it’s just a model, but if it answers all of our questions it seems to be correct.
No, that’s because that’s a different problem entirely. Though all models of quantum physics assume that time is a dimension of space as well.
A repeatable perception of measurements. To think that perceiving something enough times in a row makes it true is a fallacy. Every time I load this here silver disk into my DVD player, I perceive Luke Skywalker lifting a rock with his mind. That doesn’t make my perception true, no matter how repeatable it is.
You mean you can perceive a machine running the same experiments and you will perceive the machine agreeing with your perceptions. That’s hardly an unbiased experiment.
If we cannot currently influence this interface, and as of our current perception it is effectively one and the same with reality, why is this at all relevant to Marxist materialism?
It wouldn’t be relevant if we couldn’t influence it, but we can influence it.
Wait, so, on what grounds does this author you mentioned make the argument of evolutionary fitness over truth? How did they even come to the conclusion that evolutionary fitness is a real thing? The existence of their argument seems heavily reliant on the existence of at least an environment which selects for things in a way similar or identical to evolution, implying an objective reality which can kill, regardless of how hard a subject tries to banish it with their mind
https://hexbear.net/comment/3894130
Ultimately, though, all the infrastructure to support that exists in the material world. You cannot have a modern information age economy without the material basis of mines to dig up the raw material for those computers, factories to assemble those computers, and power to run those computers.
Right, but the mines, factories, and power are just a symbol created by the human brain to abstract away reality from our perceptions.
You can call them what you want, but you won’t have an information economy without them.
Oh yes, I believe in taking the rules of my perceptual interface very seriously. If people believe in mines, then I get to work on computers. See, that’s culture creating labour relations. That’s what I’m talking about with idealistic communism.
Taking the rules of your perceptual interface seriously is literally just Marxist materialism
The idealist perspective (which it opposes) would suggest that merely the ideas of mines (as in, the simplistic, vague abstractions we make when imagining things, not the perceptual interface idea of mines), is important.
The Marxist materialist, and by extension, the someone who took their perceptual interface seriously, would instead contend that the information (the imaginary mine in our heads) is not as important as the abstraction either our brain made for us or the real physical mine that exists (depending on what you believe). In the case of the non-realist, I;E, the one who suggested the mine is not “real” but is a useful abstraction made by our brains, it would still be more important than our even more unreal imaginary conception of a mine, because the former is an abstraction of a an actually real real thing, albeit one we can’t comprehend, and until/if we’re able to figure out what the mine represents in our perceptual interface, it is literally the most important iteration of the Mine that exists