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What does materialism have to do with communism? (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've taken several undergraduate courses in evolutionary biology and done a 4th year research course. I really struggle to understand what is being said.

I often try to take what others say prima facie and interpret it my own way, that is in a scientific and materialist way.

Perhaps one interpretation could be the sum total information available to our sensory organs needs to be filtered through heuristics to determine what is useful in order to contend with immediate needs so as to survive and reproduce. Any deviation from the 'analog' world or of whatever external material world there is and our own reductionist understanding hides the truth from us. Therefore the claim is the ownership of an epistemic advantage or insight unavailable to most others. This treads on relativism and solipsism, since if this is true, it does not do very much to help the rest of us.

I don't know, I tried to engage respectfully but I'm still drawing blanks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I think the academic in question is making a very simple claim while using obscuring language and methodologies.

It's literally just that perception can do a good, and even better job of increasing fitness by latching on to not-exactly-true things, and in fact does not necessarily ever need to actually identify true things. Just true-ish things such that there can be useful response to the environment.

Kind of like how we see faces where they don't exist. Our brains have evolved to recognize certain patterns as faces, which is surely very useful for fitness in various contexts (recognizing another human). But the perception is buggy, it's fuzzy, it makes a pretty good number of false positives. Did we evolve to see the "truth" of existing faces, or just an approximation?

Anyways the topic is cool but I'm convinced OP doesn't understand it.