this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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I would like to clarify some things. It is not exactly true that Marxism is a materialist philosophy. Marxism is a dialectical materialist philosophy. One of Marx's key innovations in philosophy was to conceive of a feedback relation between ideas and matter. Matter constrains and guides the development of ideas, and ideas influence matter through human action.
Another aspect here is that this feedback relationship is self similar. If you zoom in to smaller parts of reality, you find new iterations of this loop. For example, you could find a feedback relationship between the legal system and the economic mode of production. But if you zoom into the legal system themselves, you will find some relation between the material base of the legal system (the courts, prisons, lawyers) and the ideal part (the laws on the books, the common juridical worldviews).
I think it’s more correct to say dialectical materialism is a subset of materialist philosophy. It’s not a dualist philosophy because the mental realm is not conceived of as a separate thing. Rather information and ideas are embedded in the complex chemistry of the human brain.
I think the true utility of dialectics to Marx was that it allowed him to intuit how change actually occurs in our material world without relying on the science of thermodynamics which didn’t exist yet.
Yup. I should have added that part but forgot.
It's more than just thermodynamics. I don't think dialects can simply be reduced to science (that is positivism, which marx rejected). It might be better to say that dialects is the philosophy of science.
Plus, marx was well aware of thermodynamics. In fact, the whole idea of labor-power was inspired by horse-power. And value was conceived of as the economic analogue of work.
Science doesn’t not have to be positivist. I think most scientists actually understand that. For example the laws of thermodynamics break down at a quantum level and we’re still trying to come up with and test better models that can incorporate that new information.
What I mean to say about the laws of thermodynamics is they are incredibly useful in describing how and why things change. These were not all worked out when Marx was developing his theories. Yes, Marx and Engels were up to date with the science of their time and they make reference to work and power. However they lacked an understanding of entropy if only because scientists had only begun to experiment with the concept. That’s very clear especially if you read Engels’s Dialectic of Nature. In it he explicitly argues against ideas that would come to be core to the science of thermodynamics.
That’s all to say I suspect if those developments in physics had occurred maybe 40 years earlier, Marx would have formulated a much more precise concept of value. Then maybe he wouldn’t have needed to write so much about linen coats.
This line of thinking indicates the assumption that the only type of idealism is the sort that posits that only matter and 'mental' non-material stuff exists. There are other types, including ones that do not consider said 'mental' stuff to exist.
I myself, for example, fall under the camp of considering non-material non-mental stuff to exist, in addition to mental stuff. I consider some, but not all, of the former to have no dependencies on material stuff, with material stuff being dependent on such, and that all mental stuff depends on material stuff. I am yet to find any sort of conflicts with Marxism on these grounds (or in general, sans, perhaps, some wording that is used by Marx or other people).
However, why call this 'dialectical materialism' if it can just as well be work just fine within an idealist framework/alongside subscription to idealist schools of thought? There doesn't seem to be any conflict in this regard.
Because Marxists think of ideas as themselves being material things. Marxism is not a dualist philosophy. For us, ideas exist as brains, books, TV programs and so on. There is thus even some interesting theories about how the medium itself changes the ideas. Furthermore, in marxist theories, ideas are not given equal weight to the rest of the system. Ideas are only a small part of material reality.