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What does materialism have to do with communism?
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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askchapo
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Because scientific socialism derives itself from a materialist analysis of human history. Scientific socialists realize you cannot understand history and society without analyzing the mode of production, which in turn depends on the relations of production and the productive forces. Let me give a brief example. Capitalism could not exist without certain technologies and certain classes. Advances in textile manufacturing that used hydropower (productive forces) allowed for the private ownership of factories owned by capitalists that employ an industrial proletariat (relations of production). The competing interests of these classes results in class struggle. Certain economic laws - namely the tendency for the rate of profit to fall due to the rising organic composition of capital (in other words, firms increasingly automate to gain a relative profit but once the entire industry automates, they lose profitability) - make this economic arrangement more untenable. Over time, capitalism makes it harder and harder for itself to continue, and the class struggle inherent in the system will overthrow it. That is roughly the materialist/scientific socialist conception of capitalism/communism.
As a worker, you're likely to have an impulse towards communistic ideals like "people should have access to the stuff they need to live" because it is in your class interest. But the bourgeoisie genuinely don't believe in this. Sadly, these ideals are not universal. A historical example would be the European enslavement of Africans. There were many liberals who despised it on principle, but it was an integral part of the economic system as well as being in the direct class interest of the ruling class for a very long time.
There were non-materialist communists. They were the utopian socialists of the 19th century.
Hope this helps, sorry if I got anything wrong.
Well, I agree with everything you just said, and I don't think it supports a materialist conclusion. There is a point of friction in our beliefs, which is where you say technologies are required for capitalism to exist. I agree, but that's only because we have different ideas underlying our conception of "technology". For example, I would say the invention of currency is just as essential to capitalism as the mill. And currency is surely, as you'll agree, a cultural technology. I also argue that mills are a cultural technology too, because they are merely a means of shuffling about symbols within our perception to grant us pleasures such as having warm clothes.
Surely the actual utility of a dollar, a warm coat, and a mill are not all the same, right? Your comment here kind of sounds like you're saying that because things are cultural technology (or symbols, which all things are), they therefore are purely symbolic, that they're somehow not real or useful outside of their cultural symbolism. This is true for money, which would be useless in a society that does not use money, but untrue for things like clothes (which can always keep people warm or protected from the elements) or mills (which can always act as shelter, or places for people to do things, for example).
A dollar, a coat, and mill are only useful because they can bring me pleasure. Which is a mental construct. If I were an organism that could not experience pleasure, like, say, an advanced robot, then all three of those things would be equally useless to me. Perhaps I'm a robot that believes in helping others and will give the coat to a cold human to make them feel better, but again, that's still just mental constructions - my philosophy and the human's pleasure.
ok now mentally construct a pig pooping on its own balls
The commodities are the materialization of our subjective needs, and our needs are a 'subjectification' of some practical experience, some interaction with the material world. It seems that the main problem with your arguments is that you assume the mind is it's own entity, without a beginning and without any relation to the material world, when, in fact, the mind is a product of the material world.
Are you arguing real life or a world that you thought up just now? Surely you can exemplify your point with real life, if you think it's correct?
Not quite. My problem with your ideas is that I think the material world is a product of the mind. I used to think it was the other way around, like you, but I got radicalised by intersectional feminism.
I was exemplifying my point about real life by imagining a situation in which I didn't value things for pleasure. I'll exemplify my point about a fictional world by referring you back to the point I was making about real life.
Actually, it's realism and materialism that are exclusionary to neurodivergent people. Because society always assumes that objective reality aligns with neurotypical perception, and that neurodivergent perceptions are wrong simply for being different. It's intersectional feminism that argues much of the world we live in, if not all of it, is made of social constructs.
Yes, the same thing I criticised - the mind preceding material reality, preceded by nothing. Needs springing into existence by themselves and emerging before the material.
Btw, how does the "the mind creates the material world" point of view analyses, let's say, groups of native amazonian tribes mostly not wearing any sorts of clothes before first interacting with europeans, or even today? Or the poverty of Haiti, for example?
Anyway, if you're really interest in finding arguments and not just adopting a point of view and ending thought right there, this question is maybe the most basic of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. That Vietnam book Luna Oi translated lays it out in very simple language while providing a lot of further sources, so it's a good place to start, and Bukharin wrote a book that goes a little bit deeper.
Just a nitpick: the barter economy is a myth that came from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which has since been repeated ad infinitum in every economics textbook.
There is no evidence of barter economy ever existing in human society until after money has been invented, when anthropologists started to look into it (I think they found one in a primitive tribe in Polynesia and a couple other random cases but that’s about it).
Money has always existed as debt, both David Graeber and Michael Hudson have collaborated and written about the role of money in early human societies - Graeber on the anthropology side, and Hudson on the economic history side.
Take a screwdriver as an example. Its purpose is to screw and unscrew screws. Screws are a social construct. I can use the social construct of screws to fix the social construct of my air conditioner. That'll create the social construct of cold air, which will give me the pleasant sensation of staying cool in the summer. The screwdriver is just a tool for manipulating my perceptual interface to grant me pleasure. It's a cultural technology.
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)
Haha, that’s valid. If nothing else, a good reminder for me not to take it so seriously 🙏 And also to read more theory
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
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.
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.
Marx talks about the social necessity of currency for capitalism in like the first chapter or two of Capital Volume I. And everything described thus far involves the duality of technology as a thing in itself as well as a social relation.
Have you read Marx?