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?

    • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      2 years ago

      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.

      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.

    • DroneRights [it/its]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I’m not sure what you mean by mills shuffling around symbol

      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.

        • very_poggers_gay [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          19·
          2 years ago

          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)

            • very_poggers_gay [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              7·
              2 years ago

              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

        • DroneRights [it/its]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          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.

            • Abraxiel@hexbear.netEnglish
              13·
              2 years ago

              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.