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What does materialism have to do with communism?
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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.