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?

  • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    Interesting ideas. But if all humans disappeared suddenly, the screw, air conditioner, and screwdriver would still exist as specific configurations of atoms. It is true that humans have conceptions of what those things are but they are merely reflections of the real material things, not the things themselves. If the air conditioner activated on its own, after all humans were gone, it would still measurably cool the air (as in slow the speed of interactions between the molecules of the air).

    • very_poggers_gay [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      The more OP comments, the less I believe OP is here in good faith, tbh. It’s starting to feel like the user is here to waste people’s time, prodding others to jump through infinite hoops of explaining basic theory while brushing everything off by saying “it’s a social construct”, “it’s perception”, etc…

      like an unstoppable force (hexbearian posters) meeting an immovable object (wrecker that says everything is imaginary and nothing is real)

        • very_poggers_gay [they/them]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, I feel bad about having to look at the user’s other posts, but I can see a lot more about its way of understanding itself and the world after doing that. It’s got a unique way of approaching things, which differ from and contradict what I know, have lived, and have studied about politics, psychology, etc. - so much so that the discussion is a bit frustrating, but I gotta remember not to become a bigger a stinker when I think I smell something afoul

    • DroneRights [it/its]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      It couldn’t measurably cool the air, because there would be nobody to measure it. But that’s beside the point. The real point is: there would be nobody to believe in those atoms, which would render then nonexistent, because atoms are a mental construct. Even a materialist would agree with me there, if they’d heard of protons and neutrons.

        • Abraxiel@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          1 year ago

          We didn’t discover atoms in the sense of revealing some True Thing. We slowly built successive models of a set of phenomena we identify as atoms, which we continue to revise to make more reliable in descriptive and predictive applications and from there host of other applications.

          From the best of our understanding it seems like matter exists independent of our belief or observation, which works well enough that we continue to use this understanding.

          OP seems to reject this in favor of something like phenomena behaving in a way that’s generated from our consciousness.

          • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            9
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            This is true. I didn’t mean to imply atoms are the final, completely true, and perfectly-reflective-of-reality model of matter that will be developed.

            I decided to edit the comment you replied to.