this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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None of those things you mentioned are non material. They’re just patterns that exist in the material configuration of physical matter. For example, a stack of wood is only different from a wooden chair because of how that wood is arranged. That’s a material change even though the underlying substance is identical. Value is just a way of describing changes in configuration in the material world that are found to be useful to humans. Social relations are also more complicated but still exist in material form as they are embedded in the complex arrangements of neurons and chemicals within the human brain.
The problem then with idealism is that if you don’t understand how concepts like capitalism are embedded in the physical world, you are very unlikely to understand how to change them.
None of those things consist of any matter. They are not material things. They have connections to material stuff, but they are not themselves such.
Furthermore, when discussing, for example, social relations, people very rarely talk about the material stuff, and, indeed, we usually do not have much of an idea of the configurations of the brains of relevant people, or about other relevant material stuff. That does not impede us from, well, discussing those.
Understanding connections between capitalism-as-an-idea and material stuff, including what I would describe as manifestations of capitalism, creates no conflict with idealism, though.
If you don’t think the configuration of material objects in relation to one another is a material phenomenon then I have no idea what is.
As for when people talk about social relations people they are talking about materials things! It’s just when you have highly complex repeating and interrelated patterns in the way in which matter is arranged it’s easier to think only about the relevant information.
To go back to my chair example. Quarks and leptons and other subatomic particles are interacting to create atoms which are structured into highly complex molecules which form the basis of a cells which were assembled into what was once part of a large organism. That organism was split into pieces and reassembled into an object you can sit on. A simple chair is so complex in fact that we can’t even conceive of all the specific information embedded within any given chair. That does not mean the idea of a chair is meaningless. It just means our minds have produced a highly simplified reflection of what a chair is in order to direct the way our material bodies interact with it.
Capitalism is the same way. It is manifest in the material world. It is a consequence of the ways in which matter interacts. The concept of capitalism as it exists in our heads is just a highly simplified material reflection of the material phenomenon itself.
This is such a critical point in Marxism. It’s why dialectical materialism is not a positivist phenomenon. We can never truly know everything about a material object as long as the information embedded within said object is more complex than our brains can mirror. If that’s true then as the world changes our ideas must change with it and indeed they do! That’s the dialectical process in action.