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?
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
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.