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?
I pieced this together reading Marx, Engels, and secondary sources. It’s interesting to read Marx and Engels arguing about Engels project to frame science dialectically.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/jordan/article2.htm
http://isj.org.uk/dialectics-nature-and-the-dialectics-of-nature/
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/189339531.pdf
Dialectics of Nature
Anti-Duhring
I can’t seem to find the correspondence between Marx and Engels where Marx claims that the physical manifestation of phenomena is irrelevant to the task at hand, that only the relationships and processes matter and whether the underlying reality is one way or another doesn’t change anything. If it did, it would merely be incorporated immediately because it has causal linkage, but it would then immediately come under question of what “really” is happening behind the metaphysical curtain.
Materialism in this sense is not the circular reasoning of the material reductionism. It is inclusionary not exclusionary. And it does not attempt to explain fundamental metaphysical reality but to explain how things relate to each other in dialectical processes so as to find how we relate to those processes and can then change them.
Thanks! I knew about the secret debate in Marxism about reality being dialectical itself but I didn’t know Marx disagreed with Engels about it…
I don’t have a source for it, but I know the source I found wasn’t that Marx disagreed with the claims Engels was building arguments for but rather that Marx disagreed that it mattered.
