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?
Surely the actual utility of a dollar, a warm coat, and a mill are not all the same, right? Your comment here kind of sounds like you’re saying that because things are cultural technology (or symbols, which all things are), they therefore are purely symbolic, that they’re somehow not real or useful outside of their cultural symbolism. This is true for money, which would be useless in a society that does not use money, but untrue for things like clothes (which can always keep people warm or protected from the elements) or mills (which can always act as shelter, or places for people to do things, for example).
A dollar, a coat, and mill are only useful because they can bring me pleasure. Which is a mental construct. If I were an organism that could not experience pleasure, like, say, an advanced robot, then all three of those things would be equally useless to me. Perhaps I’m a robot that believes in helping others and will give the coat to a cold human to make them feel better, but again, that’s still just mental constructions - my philosophy and the human’s pleasure.
ok now mentally construct a pig pooping on its own balls
The commodities are the materialization of our subjective needs, and our needs are a ‘subjectification’ of some practical experience, some interaction with the material world. It seems that the main problem with your arguments is that you assume the mind is it’s own entity, without a beginning and without any relation to the material world, when, in fact, the mind is a product of the material world.
Are you arguing real life or a world that you thought up just now? Surely you can exemplify your point with real life, if you think it’s correct?
Not quite. My problem with your ideas is that I think the material world is a product of the mind. I used to think it was the other way around, like you, but I got radicalised by intersectional feminism.
I was exemplifying my point about real life by imagining a situation in which I didn’t value things for pleasure. I’ll exemplify my point about a fictional world by referring you back to the point I was making about real life.
Huh? In my experience, thinking that the material is defined by the mind is usually the opposite of intersectional. It excludes neurodivergent people heavily, implies their experiences could be “fixed” by just “pulling themselves up by the bootstraps” and “becoming neurotypical”.
Actually, it’s realism and materialism that are exclusionary to neurodivergent people. Because society always assumes that objective reality aligns with neurotypical perception, and that neurodivergent perceptions are wrong simply for being different. It’s intersectional feminism that argues much of the world we live in, if not all of it, is made of social constructs.
Yes, the same thing I criticised - the mind preceding material reality, preceded by nothing. Needs springing into existence by themselves and emerging before the material.
Btw, how does the “the mind creates the material world” point of view analyses, let’s say, groups of native amazonian tribes mostly not wearing any sorts of clothes before first interacting with europeans, or even today? Or the poverty of Haiti, for example?
Anyway, if you’re really interest in finding arguments and not just adopting a point of view and ending thought right there, this question is maybe the most basic of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. That Vietnam book Luna Oi translated lays it out in very simple language while providing a lot of further sources, so it’s a good place to start, and Bukharin wrote a book that goes a little bit deeper.
It’s trying to quote Donald Hoffman but i don’t think it works here
Donald Hoffman thinks our perception of reality is basically a false matrix which is an effective tool of evolutionary survival. So not only are our perceptions illusory, but likely so is much of our science. Despite that, it’s still useful, because it works within our own interface/simulation of reality.
Hoffman explained it like a computer GUI, where, it looks like we’re putting a file in the trash bin, but in reality the computer is modifying a bunch of bits and bytes around.
I think Hoffman’s language when writing their theory fucking sucked and would naturally lead to problems of misunderstanding like this, an issue no doubt caused by the capitalistic incentive towards clickbait and pseudoscientific-adjacent hype.
They claim multiple times that “reality does not exist”, but at no point make any kind of argument which could assert that. Everything they say merely implies that the human conception of reality is likely a flawed one created for evolutionary advantage and which cannot comprehend large swathes of reality, which checks out, but isn’t nearly as exciting
Hoffman thinks space and time are illusory, for instance, but not because there’s no underlying mechanics at all and we made everything up from literally nothing. They are illusory because they are a fundamental part of our “interface”, which is illusory, but is also part of us fundamentally interacting with a real world, which has to exist for any of this theory to make sense
Like a programming library