Regardless of if it’s practical to live that way in daily life, the world seems pretty determined. Everything happens because a vast amount of interactions between infinite factors causes it to. You can’t really say you choose between things as many influences have been taken in by you and many things have affected your psychological state. Has everything been practically decided by the big bang? Now, this is not to say we can know everything or predict the future, but we know what’s likely. Socialism or extinction may be inevitable, but we don’t know yet. Socialism can only happen if people keep fighting, regardless. People will be convinced or principled or not. Science seems to agree with this, and only few, like the wrong Sartre would propose we have ultimate free will. So are there any arguments against determinism? I know there is a saying that you’re freer when you recognize how your freedom is restricted, and that recognition may make your actions better, but isn’t there ultimately no freedom?
I’m leaning towards the idea that, from a Marxist perspective, the question “do we as individuals have free will” involves a category mistake. Instead, as Marxists, we want to ask, “how have various relations of production impacted human freedom?” The latter is a question we can easily answer by understanding the relations between workers and capitalists, peasants and lords, etc.
Moreover, just as we use dialectics to understand history and society, we can and should use it to understand nature. What is evolution but the relational process of selecting the individuals (and species!) most adapted to their environment? Or of their impacts on environments that can cause the environment itself to change?
Two examples. Capitalist-induced climate change is an obvious case of a species altering their environment in profound ways. Likewise, some of the earliest organisms on earth, which produced oxygen, created the conditions for the atmosphere as we know it.
Tl;dr - relations are not deterministic, especially not at the level of ecology or society.
Does something worth calling free will “emerge” out of this fact? I think so, at least.
I agree to a certain extent. It’s definitely not the most important question, but as materialists we at least have a basis for discussing it. I think in any society freedom doesn’t really exist. Freedom is meaningless because we are subject to conditions and roles and biology. Freedom suggests a Cartesian dualism. A spirit separate from the body.
I think you are substituting deterministic for simple or mechanical here.
Very true, this points to the absurd and unlikely nature of our existence. Everything had to go “right” up to this point. That does not contradict determinism.
I’ll look into it.
Edit: socialism limits “freedom” to accumulate, be antisocial, or be poor, but promotes a default of flourishing.