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?
I’m not sure what you mean by mills shuffling around symbols but about currency:
Currency did not exist and could not exist until the productive capabilities of society and early ruling classes required a kind of “universal equivalent” to move around use-values better than simple bartering could provide. Bartering is only useful if you can make some use out of the commodity you’re bartering for directly. For example, if society is in a position where single individuals own like, a thousand kilos of grain, it would be far more useful to exchange the grain for a currency, or a “universal equivalent” to exchange for many different kinds of commodities than 1 or a small set of commodities you can obtain by simple bartering.
It is true that currency is a kind of “cultural technology” and that it is necessary for capitalism to exist but it evolved out of the necessity of material circumstances. Hope that helps to understand lol, I’m not so good at writing
Just a nitpick: the barter economy is a myth that came from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which has since been repeated ad infinitum in every economics textbook.
There is no evidence of barter economy ever existing in human society until after money has been invented, when anthropologists started to look into it (I think they found one in a primitive tribe in Polynesia and a couple other random cases but that’s about it).
Money has always existed as debt, both David Graeber and Michael Hudson have collaborated and written about the role of money in early human societies - Graeber on the anthropology side, and Hudson on the economic history side.
Yeahh, tbh I didn’t really mean all of what is implied by “barter economy”. “Simple bartering” was just a phrase I used to mean the process of 2 producers exchanging use-values for use-values directly.
That being said, I didn’t know that! I should know that lol. I’ll look into it, thanks.
Take a screwdriver as an example. Its purpose is to screw and unscrew screws. Screws are a social construct. I can use the social construct of screws to fix the social construct of my air conditioner. That’ll create the social construct of cold air, which will give me the pleasant sensation of staying cool in the summer. The screwdriver is just a tool for manipulating my perceptual interface to grant me pleasure. It’s a cultural technology.
Interesting ideas. But if all humans disappeared suddenly, the screw, air conditioner, and screwdriver would still exist as specific configurations of atoms. It is true that humans have conceptions of what those things are but they are merely reflections of the real material things, not the things themselves. If the air conditioner activated on its own, after all humans were gone, it would still measurably cool the air (as in slow the speed of interactions between the molecules of the air).
The more OP comments, the less I believe OP is here in good faith, tbh. It’s starting to feel like the user is here to waste people’s time, prodding others to jump through infinite hoops of explaining basic theory while brushing everything off by saying “it’s a social construct”, “it’s perception”, etc…
like an unstoppable force (hexbearian posters) meeting an immovable object (wrecker that says everything is imaginary and nothing is real)
Yeahh idk lol. I’m just having fun at least just vibing to some music and replying. It’s good mental exercise at least! I really need to reread Capital though
Haha, that’s valid. If nothing else, a good reminder for me not to take it so seriously 🙏 And also to read more theory
deleted by creator
Yeah, I feel bad about having to look at the user’s other posts, but I can see a lot more about its way of understanding itself and the world after doing that. It’s got a unique way of approaching things, which differ from and contradict what I know, have lived, and have studied about politics, psychology, etc. - so much so that the discussion is a bit frustrating, but I gotta remember not to become a bigger a stinker when I think I smell something afoul
It couldn’t measurably cool the air, because there would be nobody to measure it. But that’s beside the point. The real point is: there would be nobody to believe in those atoms, which would render then nonexistent, because atoms are a mental construct. Even a materialist would agree with me there, if they’d heard of protons and neutrons.
How do you explain matter existing before humans could conceive of it?
We didn’t discover atoms in the sense of revealing some True Thing. We slowly built successive models of a set of phenomena we identify as atoms, which we continue to revise to make more reliable in descriptive and predictive applications and from there host of other applications.
From the best of our understanding it seems like matter exists independent of our belief or observation, which works well enough that we continue to use this understanding.
OP seems to reject this in favor of something like phenomena behaving in a way that’s generated from our consciousness.
This is true. I didn’t mean to imply atoms are the final, completely true, and perfectly-reflective-of-reality model of matter that will be developed.
I decided to edit the comment you replied to.