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?
Matter in the context of of philosophical materialism just refers to the external world that humans find themselves within. I suppose you don’t have to believe in the explanations given by the field of physics to recognize this world as something that exists, if that’s what you mean. Philosophical materialism is just the position that this external world and it’s relationships (including to humans) have the primary role in determining human ideas, and that ideas have no other basis than the material structure and internal relationships of the human brain (no Ideals floating around in the ether that humans have discovered).
Materialism became a core component of Marxism, scientific socialism, and the communist movement from the very beginning in contrast to other studies of political economy and philosophy of the time (and today!) because Marxism seeks to explain and analyze why society is the way it is and how to make it better by understanding the only observable, testable universe we know of: the universe of material things and their relationships that we live within. This stands in contrast to, for example, liberal political philosophy which holds that capitalism is just the natural, most advanced, and final state of society that humans were always inherently going to create. In other words, capitalism is just a fact of reality and a natural idea that humans have discovered and that it’s this idea that is responsible for creating capitalist society.
Check out this essay by Mao Zedong if you wanna read further in better words than my own lol: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_30.htm
Well actually the cutting edge of physics is beginning to get at the idea that this world doesn’t exist. And evolutionary science has already gotten there with the fitness beats truth theorem and the interface theory of perception.
The conclusion I’m getting from this thread is that marxists were already materialists before they learned about communism, and they need a material theory of communism because they wouldn’t understand the ideal theory of communism.
No offense, but do you have any proof? That’s kinda the thing about idealism, once you become separated from trying to analyze the testable, material world around us you can kinda just assert whatever you want to be true. That’s why Marxists care so much about materialism. Deviating from it can result in some really weird, ineffective stuff. Like maybe we just need to get enough people together to think communism into existence.
Donald Hoffman explains it very well in his book The Case Against Reality. Here’s the short version of the Fitness Beats Truth theorem:
If our ancestors had evolved to see truth, then they’d have all died before passing on their genes, because they would have been outcompeted by the organisms which perceive fitness. Perceiving truth is a waste of energy and resources. Creatures that perceive fitness will always adapt better to the environment with fewer resources.
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Our perception of reality isn’t consistent, though. Our perceptions can be changed quite easily. Optical illusions can show us things that aren’t there, schizophrenia can convince us of things that aren’t true, and religion and magick can change how we interpret what we see into a worldview. And actually, these facts are deeply relevant to surviving as a species and not killing each other –
When a transphobe looks at a trans woman, they see a man. When an ally looks at a trans woman, they see a woman. Perceiving a trans woman to be a man is a form of life threatening violence. It is our ethical duty to perceive trans people as they wish to be perceived, both as workers maintaining class solidarity and as fundamentally decent people. Trans liberation requires that we see our perceptions as malleable, and within our control. To pass the buck onto an imagined “material reality” and demand reality control our perceptions for us is irresponsible, transphobic, and violent.
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Demanding that trans people undergo visible transition and changes in gender presentation before we will perceive them as they wish is violent. Just change your thoughts, don’t put the burden on the person who may die if their efforts to transition fail.
I can’t say I’ve heard of that book. I’ll have to look into it.
About your theorem:
Tbh, I just kinda see it as an affirmation of the kind of materialism Marxism is talking about. There no eternal “Truth” to be perceived, it’s all relative. In the context of natural selection, maybe truth is the best strategy to survive. When organism are struggling for the best fitness they are entering into a complex web of material relationships with their environment. This process of natural selection has been going on for far longer than humans have been able to conceive of it. Marxism is just the theory of evolution by natural selection but for the development of human society. Unless I missed the point of your theorem…
I think you missed at least some of the point. Note that the theory of evolution holds true within any system of competing agents capable of hereditary changes. Even for memes, which can only exist in the minds of intelligent species. The theory of evolution holds true even in situations where the environment in which human beings truly exist is not a world. There must be an environment of some kind, yes, but that environment does not require matter, energy, spacetime, or any number of other symbols from our interface to exist. The FBT theorem does not depend upon there being a world in order to hold true. Rather, it erodes the concept of there being a world such as humans would understand it to be a world, because it confirms that our perceptions of the world are perceptions of fitness, not truth. Our reality is simply a tool to help us survive and reproduce. It is not passed down from God to show us truth.
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We can fundamentally alter our perceptions. That’s what the entire field of chaos magic is for. And chaos magic is essential to trans liberation, pagan coexistence, and, in my opinion, the revolution itself.
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The difference between perception and truth is not a criticism of the materialist perspective and would arguably align with it better than the alternative.
Though I’d say that anyone making sweeping generalizations about evolutionary fitness either doesn’t understand it or is oversimplifying for effect.
I’ve taken several undergraduate courses in evolutionary biology and done a 4th year research course. I really struggle to understand what is being said.
I often try to take what others say prima facie and interpret it my own way, that is in a scientific and materialist way.
Perhaps one interpretation could be the sum total information available to our sensory organs needs to be filtered through heuristics to determine what is useful in order to contend with immediate needs so as to survive and reproduce. Any deviation from the ‘analog’ world or of whatever external material world there is and our own reductionist understanding hides the truth from us. Therefore the claim is the ownership of an epistemic advantage or insight unavailable to most others. This treads on relativism and solipsism, since if this is true, it does not do very much to help the rest of us.
I don’t know, I tried to engage respectfully but I’m still drawing blanks.
I think the academic in question is making a very simple claim while using obscuring language and methodologies.
It’s literally just that perception can do a good, and even better job of increasing fitness by latching on to not-exactly-true things, and in fact does not necessarily ever need to actually identify true things. Just true-ish things such that there can be useful response to the environment.
Kind of like how we see faces where they don’t exist. Our brains have evolved to recognize certain patterns as faces, which is surely very useful for fitness in various contexts (recognizing another human). But the perception is buggy, it’s fuzzy, it makes a pretty good number of false positives. Did we evolve to see the “truth” of existing faces, or just an approximation?
Anyways the topic is cool but I’m convinced OP doesn’t understand it.
There is no evolutionary niche better served by perceiving truth than fitness, except perhaps for the niche that humanity has created for itself by inventing technology that is capable of destroying the Earth’s habitability to human life. And a situation like that has never existed on earth before now, so there is no way any organism can have adapted to it.
It’s very unclear what you’re trying to say because you’re using terms with common definitions in evolutionary biology but in ways that make no sense, but also difficult to understand as profound or meaningful if I try to understand them with other definitions.
For example, fitness isn’t an evolutionary niche at all. In evolution, niches are relevant to fitness, as they are patterns of (often mutually-excluding) ecological roles played by different organisms over time and space, suggesting some common constraints and situations in the overall fitness landscape. But fitness is not itself a niche. I have no idea what you mean by niche otherwise, but it doesn’t make in the context of the field you’re wading into.
Anyways I’ll try to explain this more by addressing the rest.
This is also not a niche. No other organism, to our knowledge, has such a role or can have it ecologically framed. It’s like saying Elon Musk is the best person on the “South African failson that owns SpaceX” team. It’s just the one guy, there’s no team.
So what? There’s no clear point here.
It really feels like you’ve read some pop science and maybe didn’t really understand it. Do you think that’s possible?