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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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Sorry you're getting bad answers. There is actually a real answer to this.
The first part I think most people got right: you are using a different definition of materialism than Marx did.
What Marx means when he says materialism is where everyone is failing you. For example, Marx and Engels disagreed on Engels project to demonstrate that the physical world operates dialectically. Marx was very clear on his position: the metaphysical expression of that which is material is immaterial.
And here we have a glimpse of the meaning of materialism.
Material here is not a noun. It's an adjective. That which is material TO SOCIETY stands in opposition to that which is immaterial (not material) TO SOCIETY. Not "is it matter?" but "does it matter?"
Society exists in the real world. Human society is also socially constructed in the minds of persons. What is in the minds of persons is material to society, even if that which is in the minds of people refers to things that are immaterial.
How is this possible? It is possible when we use this definition of materiality:
That's it. Cause and effect are the easiest way to understand materiality. What is immaterial? Objective morality is immaterial. Whether something is objectively good or objectively evil has zero causal impact on the world (except mentally, but I will get to that). Whether morality is objectively real or not is also immaterial, again because of a lack of casual connection to anything. Platonic forms, also completely acausal.
So whether the expression of that causality is through substance or not is immaterial, in so far as the metaphysics has no bearing on causal relationships. If it turns out that matter is not real, as you say, we must still contend with cause-effect relationships. If your chosen metaphysics is closer to real reality than contemporary mainstream understandings, it will be judged so because it offers better explanatory power for society to bring about changes to conditions. The correct answer to what is reality is always material to society if it offers society causal mechanisms for effective change.
So what about beliefs? Persons act. That much is true. Those acts we call behaviors. Those behaviors are causally linked. They cause things to change. But what are behaviors caused by? Beliefs. Your behaviors are caused by your beliefs. And what causes your beliefs? Your experiences. Experiences cause beliefs, beliefs cause behaviors, behaviors cause changes in the world. That causes experiences? Changes in the world. So when someone behaves near you, you sense those behaviors and the changes those behaviors cause and you experience something and it causes changes to your beliefs.
Why does this matter? Well, if you believe in objective morality, your behavior will be different than if you did not. If you believe one thing to be good and another to be evil, those beliefs will impact your behavior. If those beliefs change, your behaviors will change. Therefore, what you believe is material to your behaviors, and your behaviors are material to society. Therefore, if we want to change society, we have to change it via behaviors and if the behaviors we observe are not the behaviors that will lead to the desired change then it becomes imperative to change beliefs. Knowing that beliefs change by experiences and that experiences are responses to change and change occurs through behaviors we can alter our behaviors to generate new experiences that will alter people's beliefs that will alter their behaviors that will alter society. In this way morality qua beliefs people have about morality is material but metaphysically objective morality is immaterial.
I hope that helps.
Notice that they are replying to others but not you lol.
The issue here isn't not answering the question correctly, it's that they don't know how to put together a coherent question about this in the first place but seem to feel threatened by/dismissive towards materialist critiques. Despite presenting as interested in feedback and learning, they're spending their efforts replying to disagree wherever they feel comfortable doing so. A faux humility to launder unearned dismissiveness.
The way I am reading your words is not matching the way I am conceptualizing these things, so I will attempt to both clarify and respond to your question and statements.
When I say altering behaviors I mean changing the behaviors of humans. So you go to the diner on the corner every Monday for dinner. That's a series of behaviors, both the "every Monday" series and the "go to the diner for dinner" aggregate of behaviors. These behaviors are rooted in beliefs. If you were to change your beliefs, your behaviors would change. For example, if you believed the diner was closed permanently your behaviors would change. If you believe the food was causing you intense distress, your behaviors would change. If you believed that making dinner on Mondays was more important to you than eating at the diner, your behavior would change.
So, beliefs have a causal linkage with behaviors. Therefore, if we wish to alter behaviors, we must alter beliefs.
Charitably, this would be a cognitive behavior. Uncharitably, this is impossible. You cannot change your physical brain through sheer force of will. However, there is evidence that you can change your physical brain through your behaviors, but your bodily behaviors and your cognitive behaviors. (CBT is an example). But what would cause you to attempt to change your brain through cognitive behaviors? Beliefs. Beliefs cause your behaviors, whether those beliefs are that a bus is hurtling towards you or your belief is that you can earn a profit from buying low and selling high.
Even that external prompting is mediated through sense experience to form beliefs. You can externally prompt someone all you want but unless they can form sense experience, organize that experience, and form beliefs about that experience your prompting will zero causal impact. Ultimately people change themselves in a causal linkage that involves their sense-making apparatus which formulates beliefs from their sensory experience. This is not to say that all we have to do is show people the truth and they will change. It is to say that if you wish to change the behaviors of others you must change the beliefs of others and if they don't change their beliefs that's on you for failing to figure out to create the change.
This is what propaganda is. Literally it propagates beliefs into the minds of other persons with the explicit goal of changing their behaviors.
Generally, this anecdote points to something we have observed pretty consistently - beliefs in the existence of morality are highly correlated with anti-social behavior and atrocities. Empirically we are seeing that the utility of morality is not social good but actually social ill - morality is invented by the ruling class to control the masses behaviors and to indoctrinate new members of the ruling class into the behaviors that maintain the status quo.
As for wanting to do the right thing but fighting an uphill battle to do it, welcome to the struggle. We're all here trying to figure it out. It turns out the ruling class will never yield without the masses forcing them to. Now the challenge is creating the beliefs in the masses that will result in coordinated effort to bring force against the ruling class, sustain it, and build a new society.
Apologies. I meant it as an embrace of solidarity instead of a knowing smirk. We all struggle to do the right things. The idea that beliefs are not enough to change behavior is, in part, a disagreement on what constitutes a belief. Believing that you will be happy or safe following an outcome is a belief that changes behavior. Believing you have more pressing problems that require attention is a belief that changes behavior. Adopting a net new belief is often not enough to change behavior. It takes time to incorporate that new belief into your system of beliefs and to change many other beliefs. Think of it this way - your behavior is caused by a network of millions of beliefs, so adding one more new belief is less than 0.001% of your internal causal network.
Of course, environment plays a huge part here in that if you believe you should always help dig holes when possible, but you never encounter a shovel in your life, well your behaviors are severely constrained. These are what are generally considered environmental conditions, but conditions en toto includes the beliefs of members of society. Often we find that propaganda is not sufficient, but it is in fact necessary. Likewise, environmental conditions are not sufficient but are necessary. The sum total of environmental and mental conditions are what we term the "material conditions", because they are all material to the revolution, that is to say they all have causal effects on the revolutionary potential of a moment.
Can people change their beliefs without outside prompting? I understand where you're coming from with this one, but it's tough to answer because I don't know you well enough. On the one hand, no, the liberal theory of individualism is garbage. On the otherhand, all prompting is external even if no other human is involved. For example, if I find that my beliefs lead to bad outcomes for me, I can choose to change my beliefs. A lot needs to be right for that to happen. I need to have beliefs about my beliefs, beliefs about the outcomes I experienced, beliefs about myself. But yes, I can change things about myself without someone else agitating me to do so, but yes there are preconditions, but no those preconditions are not universally external prompting by other people, but yes development of those preconditions is a function of society and therefore is dependent on other persons.
It's hard to answer. The best I can say is I firmly reject the liberal framing of individualism but I do not believe individuals lack the power to change their own beliefs and behaviors. Reality is dialectical in this way.
I did not receive in this way. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Again, I think this is more a problem of definitions than of disagreement. The learning process relies on the ability for the learner to change their beliefs. You see a berry, you believe the best way to get the berry is to grab it. You get stabbed by thorns. You change your belief because the old belief harmed you. This is how learning actually works. So it's not really up for debate whether a person can change their own beliefs. The question is the details - to what extent, under what circumstances, limited by what conditions, etc.
Right, I know this position and I agree that what liberalism and Christian free will are peddling is pure bullshit. However, the idea that you personally cannot choose to change your beliefs based on outcomes you experience is something I cannot comment on. But for everyone else, I've seen it happening in real-time. It is the basis for the learning process not merely for human persons but essentially for all persons. In fact, one of the things that clearly delineates persons from non-persons is the ability for persons to adapt their behaviors based on stimulus-response. Do plants have beliefs? Not the way we think of beliefs as embodied in neurological wiring within gray matter, but plants take actions based on what is best for them given that which they can sense and when they sense different things they change their actions. Do plants learn? I don't know. It seems like the research is heading that way.
You are both. As we all are.
This is a problem with defining what control means and what self means. I would argue that only persons have control over themselves, because I include brain physiology, neurology, stimulus response, and sensory apparatus in the self. When define this way, what else could possibly have control over a person in the sense we are discussing?
Again, a definitional problem because your claim on its face is clearly disproven by the body's responses to progressive load. Muscles become stronger in response to working harder. The components of the cardio-pulmonary system become more efficient in response to working harder. Blood vessels, neurons, connective tissue, even bone "improves" along certain qualities based on stimulus. If the body is the self, then self-improvement is literally how the body functions at its base level. Obviously you mean something different by what you're saying. I would contend that whatever you mean when you say what you say is probably more invested in the liberal/Christian concepts of mind-body dualism, free will, self-as-alien than my position is.
Which has never been what I've espoused. You are arguing against something that is worthy to argue against, and I argue against it too, but you are not arguing with me. You are importing your quarrel with someone else into this conversation. I do not blame you for it. It is something I have done in the past. I hope if you re-read our conversation you can find what I was actually saying and how it's possible to have volition and to change your beliefs even in a deterministic world without needing to rely on free will, quantum magic, or woo. There is a more nuanced position than the one you are espousing and the one your arguing against and I think I've done a decent job of representing that position (though I am open to critique in both my delivery and my argument)
I've appreciated your comments so far, and if it isn't rude I wanted to know your thoughts on something.
Your insistence on belief, does belief come before an environmental change?
As well, in evolutionary biology, evolution is define as a change in allele frequencies. Evolution does not act on individuals but rather populations. Evolution is not forward looking either, it is a result of to prior generation and how it is affected through several mechanisms (natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, and gene flow) which is why discourse about 'superior' beings or 'more evolved' doesn't make sense, it's at heart contextual.
If humans are affected by natural selection in the same way as other organisms (but at a slower rate or near zero rate) then what analogue is there for conscious animals (let's say dogs, crows, dolphins, elephants, gorillas, etc.) and belief? Claiming to know the belief of animals is tricky as neuroscience is not very developed at the moment. Inferences could certainly be made as long as their provisional nature is accepted.
To be clear, I see parts of your view as anthropocentric. This isn't a negative claim, only to clarify my understanding which is more probably than not wrong.
No, that's idealism. Belief is constructed by the physical substrate. I think some of our contention is under the question "what is environmental?" Many people think the environment is that which is outside of the person, and they bind person and body and set the boundary to outside the body. My arm is part of my environment, my nervous system is part of my environment, in fact, my beliefs are ultimately part of my environment. I am part of my own environment, dialectically speaking, because I am a product of my environment and my environment is a product of me.
This is poetics. Evolution doesn't act at all. Evolution, in fact, doesn't exist as such. Evolution is the name we give to a boundary that we defined that contains a subset of processes that we observe in the environment. Mutation doesn't occur within populations or even individuals but rather in individual protein complexes and "traits" of individuals are constructed from those individual protein complexes and those individuals make up the populations. When you analyze this process dialectically, it becomes very clear that the boundary between environment and organism is almost entirely artificial and invented by humans.
That's why the liberal/Christian concept of self-improvement is meaningless. Simultaneously, I have subjective experience, I have desires and aversions, and I can change my behavior to maximize my desires and minimize my diversions. Is that objectively better? Does objectivity exist? Useless questions. What matters is that my experience can change in ways that I can subjectively qualify.
Which they are.
To imagine only the human animal can have a belief is exceptionalism.
What are beliefs except for stored representations of heuristics for behaviors? Whether you are aware of those beliefs or not is barely testable, but also not prima facie relevant. The most relevant aspect of belief seems to be that it can change. If we accept the premise that some behaviors are coded for in DNA (like the Sphex wasp), then we can different between beliefs and non-beliefs by investigating whether an organism can "learn". What does it mean to learn? Ultimately it means to process stimulus into changes in stored representations that impact behaviors. If you can learn, then it implies that you have beliefs and that those beliefs can change.
Of course they are. I'm an anthro. I can only reason from my experience. There is not other for us to reason. If dolphins could communicate with us, their views would be dolphin-centric and every attempt I made to understand their position would be through a reasoning-through-metaphor and ultimately translated to my anthropocentric view, because I cannot become a dolphin. There is no objective position, there is no position held by humans that isn't anthropocentric. We can say that there are certain assumptions that are unfounded because they do no rely on logical argument but instead rely entirely on the assumption that because it applies to humans it must apply to other animals, but when describing belief, I think we have a pretty well reasoned position about what belief is and how we test for it that does not rely on the assumption that the human experience is universalizable.
Wrong is a normative framing. I think your view doesn't fit the evidence and relies on specific ideological positions, most of which are the foundation of Western thought - objectivity, material reductionism, epistemology, the nature of truth, etc. I went through that, and in a lot of ways I'm still going through it, but I'm finding other ways of thinking about the world that match the evidence better. Dialectics is one of those.
I appreciate the response. I suppose the only issue I have is the confidence and declarative nature of the statements you make.
I don't know if anthropocentric views are incommensurable and need to be translated through metaphor. Nagel talks about this in "What is it like to be a bat?" I don't think it makes sense to think we are at the stage where we know exactly what we don't know.
I think what you said about artificial distinctions and boundaries makes sense, I only use them as they are useful. Would you say there is a limitedness to their usefulness? If so is there some epistemic system which would be more useful? Maybe one where we accept our limits as our experience is seemingly limited to our being human.
I suppose I hold out for the possibility of some emergent phenomena hitherto unknown and avoid declarative statements.
EDIT: To comment on what you said about your experience and you being anthropocentric, are those claims themselves not artificial distinctions made and used as heuristics? Or does some level of observation of which operates on the relation of oneself of constitute an artificial distinction?
When I said I was probably wrong I don't think I was making a normative claim. You can specify further to help me understand. I saw it as a probabilistic claim where say you have a distribution, a gaussian curve, and this statement has some qualities which are within some range in that curve which when communicated in simple language is easiest to convey as 'wrong'. The intent was to open a space for discussion and to make it easier to share your views as I explicitly mentioned a space where that could happen, i.e. in the space of me considering myself to not have accurately understood. Then it wouldn't be wrong but more so not exact enough to my satisfaction.
I'm really curious how you would explain the emergence of vegetarians and vegans who were not raised to be one in your belief system.
For instance, my partner and I were never exposed to anyone not a meat-eater till we were adults, yet we came to the belief that eating animals is wrong and now eat a predominantly vegan diet without that decision coming from social pressure.
I'd really like an example then of the sort of changes you are talking about. To be clear, my partner and I didn't just start "buying vegan options at restaurants" but have fundamentally switched behaviors to eating more simply and at home vs a largely take-out lifestyle. The Covid lockdown was very conducive to making the switch, but it has been a large change in behavior, not just buying patterns.
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.
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.