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?
that’s not what materialism means, at least in marxist therm. materialism means humans facts are dependent on space and time, so to say. so, the relationships of productions, are historically connoted and situated in space. that’s why we are materialists. historical materialists.
we reject idealism: we don’t believe that culture is the engine of history, for example. we reject all forms of idealism, we reject the “idea” of state (for example), the state for us is a product of the relationships of production . we believe material relationships of production are the engine of history.
that’s a very synthetic answer. but the point is: materialism is not primarily concerned with physical objects or “things.” Instead, it centers on the intricate interplay of historical and spatial contexts in shaping human realities.
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.
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.
No you don’t. You perceive a person standing next to a rock that is lifting upwards. More accurately you perceived photons hitting your sensory neurons that made a pattern that your brain interpreted as a person standing and a rock floating. A narrative told you it was Skywalker picking up a rock with his mind. If the narrative was that the rock was angry and was going to attack Luke, you would interpret that instead.
A repeatable observation does not change no matter the narrative that is assigned to it. I see no other possible explanation for that that besides the observation being the truth, or close enough that any distinction is inconsequential.
So if I were able to present a narrative which changes my observations of the world’s existence, then you would be wrong to say the world’s existence is true?
If you presented a narrative such that the measurement of a phenomenon changed, that would call certain things into doubt. I want to be clear, in the domain of scientific inquiry we are discussing an observation as a measurement of some kind. It can be quantified as a number. The narrative should be effective on anyone taking the observation.
As for the world’s existence, I can very clearly touch things outside of myself, I have nerves that are designed to send sense information to my brain. I can clearly measure the location of my desk in my room and my distance from it using a tape measure. There is no narrative that would, given a tape measure, cause anyone to observe a different distance between me and my desk.
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It wouldn’t be relevant if we couldn’t influence it, but we can influence it.
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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.
yes, all of this is the product of labour. and HOW it has been produced matters.
Right, but the mines, factories, and power are just a symbol created by the human brain to abstract away reality from our perceptions.
what do you mean by this?
Well, let’s start from within a materialist framework because you’ll understand what I’m saying better if I pretend I believe in quantum theory. That mine, and that factory, are really just a big bunch of quantum strings. Or if you prefer simpler science, they’re a bunch of atoms. It’s the human brain which creates the label “mine” to assign to that hole in the dirt, and “factory” to that lump of metal. It’s a symbol we invented. That’s the simple part. The complicated part is that the quantum strings are symbols we invented too, but that would take too long to explain unless you’ve read Donald Hoffman’s theory
This stuff? I’m not convinced that consciousness is more fundamental than matter. There are certainly things we do in order to be able to parse the world by reducing things into discrete ideas, categories, etc. and this is necessarily imperfect. But if you want to engage with the world as we experience it, materialist tools are the best ones we have for understanding it with any reliability. In the context of a political project, what else are you going to use to inform your behavior besides observations of reality?
Yep, that’s a summary of the end of Hoffman’s books. It’s missing the middle and beginning, though, which explain the problems with realism and answer your question.
Hoffman says that we must take our perceptions seriously, but not literally. I know that my perceptions are a tool to help me survive and reproduce, because the theory of evolution holds true whether the world is material or ideal. So if I see a snake in the grass, I can trust my perceptions to tell me that my life may be in danger. I can trust them because that’s what they’re for, warning me about life threatening situations. But should I take the content literally? No. There’s no such thing as a snake. There’s something there, and it’s something that could kill me, but it isn’t a snake. It’s a thing more complicated than a snake which my perceptions have simplified for my benefit. I trust my perceptions to help me with survival, but not with truth.
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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.
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Well, I think the mine only has miners because people believe it’s a mine, and I think the products of the mine only have value because people believe they’re useful.
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.
Why not a simple relativist answer to the problem?
“I want to have a revolution because capitalism causes me to perceive myself and others as suffering. I have a subjective distaste for suffering and choose to impose my personal views upon the world by supporting communism. I will use the scientific method to determine which actions of mine reduce perceived suffering, and then I will do those actions.”
yes, we believe capital is relational ofc, and historical situated. there is nothing natural or normal about it. it’s a phase, a period, an arrangement. But culture is a product of the relationships of production, that’s our epistemology. Humans do stuff, how “we create” our world (so, our labor) is what really matters. I hope it’s clear now.
We create the world by thinking about it. Mothers, teachers, priests, musicians, historians, scientists, analysts, artists, philosophers, and programmers are all workers, they all perform labour, and they all spend all day doing nothing but shaping human thought (except for mothers, who also have to raise the children). They spend all day producing culture.
all fine, you might be more Weberian than Marxist. Try to read about Max Weber. But he wasn’t a communist. at all.
Well if he’s not a communist then I’m not going to agree with him. Ownership of the means of production by the workers is essential to a fair society, as is the abolition of class, currency, and the state. Wealth must be distributed from each according to ability to each according to need.
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And I say that human behaviour is not defined by whatever may be real, it’s only defined by human perception, which does not align with whatever may be real if anything is.
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According to conventional neuroscience, the brain is somehow capable of transforming 130 million binary nervous system signals into the sensation of sight, without having been taught to do so. Likewise, the interface theory of perception holds that the mind is capable of transforming whatever does exist into the perceptual interface we see today.
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If genes can configure a brain to produce sensations in the absence of stimuli, what is hard to believe about conscious realism?
But there’s not an absence of stimuli. Genes encode for light receptors, which respond to light. This triggers something that is then amplified as a chemical signal, which is then sent to the brain, where the signals are then processed into an ‘image’.