There are some misconceptions about what materialism is in Marxism, especially in that it is frequently conflated with bourgeois, or liberal, materialism.Before explaining bourgeois materialism, it might be helpful to begin with bourgeois idealism. A clear example of this liberal ideology can be found in Evola, who is a proponent of "magical idealism". What makes idealism bourgeois? Idealism is innately bourgeois and liberal when it begins with the individual, it reduces all the world down to the individual and makes the world itself synonymous with the individual. At one stroke it atomizes him and estranges him from society and social labor and ultimately his own past and future, which are also social creations. The very fabric of reality is individualist, and the individual is reality. So much for bourgeois idealism.Then we have bourgeois, liberal materialism. Two simple examples of this ideology can be found in Ayn Rand, and in the book Guns, Germs, and Steel.Ayn Rand reduces reality down to "entities", i.e. individuals. Again, despite ostensibly rejecting idealism, her premise and postulate and her fabric of all things is the individual. Immediately cutting him off from his past, even before he was born, and his future, even after he dies, and his present, are all woven of social labor.In Guns, Germs and Steel we have a thesis which Mao explicitly talks about in On Contradiction, which is worth reading, as the materialist bourgeois conception of history:>They ascribe the causes of social development to factors external to society, such as geography and climate. In this, again, society is reduced to entities (individuals), just fungible entities. They are all basically wind-up toys, so to speak, or lines of code, if/then, and all response according to the rat maze or whatever you will, that they are placed in. Society as the fundamental *emergent property* of groups of humans, does not really exist. Cont
>>25190435Now to explain Marxist materialismWhen someone comes to realize materialism in an instinctual sense, it occurs to him a manner similarly to that described by Mishima in Sun and Steel>As I pondered the nature of that “I,” I was driven to the conclusion that the “I” in question corresponded precisely with the physical space that I occupied.This sort of materialism provides a bare ontology: when we say something *is* intuitively we mean, on some level, it is material, just as when we say something is imaginary we mean it lacks material body. But it doesn't explain reality much beyond that, because it doesn't explain what animation is. Marxist materialism follows a process philosophy influenced by Hegel called dialectics which says that all change including motion is the result of *contradiction#. There is some antecedent for this in Heraclitus, who also was a nondualist and believed all flux was a product of strife.This contradiction, this dialectic, occurs from within and down to the subatomic level, all the way up to the massive level we see before our eyes. Thus the individual is not an identity (as Rand argues) but a *contradiction*, because an individual is not inert matter, he is a process, a dialectic, and dialectic of his consciousness relies on society like a flame relies on oxygen and is in fact an emergent property of society. Contradiction, dialectic and change take two major forms: nature and labor. Both are a process, and the latter always functions in synergy with the former. The resolution of contradiction results in commodities but it is never autonomous, it is an emergent property of thousands of years of history, billions of members of humanity, and limitless future without which nothing would ever be done or planned for or built for.When the individual, who is himself born in every sense from this process is abstracted from it and his place within it commodified and parcelled off, it is "labor alienation": he is separated from his labor that binds him to both nature and society, which separates him from himself, resulting in dread, neuroses, loneliness, nihilism and sense of redundancy, because he is a part-time robot and there is no such thing as a part-time man. Labor is the soil of the individual and he is torn from it, that is why itay feel as if your job is draining your very *soul*
Communism is satanic and jewish
>>25190435>when it begins with the individualall appreciation begins with the individual. you don't see or read this comment through a third person perspective, it is filtered and is first and foremost through an I. Is the I itself an aproximation? unknowable, since all things are filtered first through the I of the observer, any supposition after it is an approximate and abstracted process taken from third and forth degree assumptive sources more remote than the I. Society and labor are less real than me.
>>25190518I disagree, society and labor are more real than my sense of “I am”, for my sense of ego and associated mental phenomena have been repeatedly proven by psychology and sociology to be a product of unconscious processing, psychological schemas that I have constructed unknowingly, and the very society I was born into. “I” itself must be an approximation then, a convenient guide so that mental health is sustained. But just as how homeostasis of the body doesn’t entail that material reality is in balance, my sense of ego does not entail that it is more real.
>>25190999If there are no Is, then what is society? Why care about other people at all? Without I, there certainly can't be a You.
>>25191007The meaning of is, of the philosophical quality of existence, is itself shaped by our idea of existence itself. This changes with human society and existence in a dialectical manner: the contradictions of a particular definition of “is” with our current notions of existence, informed of course by our current existence in a society, are resolved by making another definition of “is” that is more in line with our current existence in society. And vice versa. Our idea of existence is intimately tied with the world we inhabit in this manner, and this idea has evolved historically instead of staying as a self-evident truth for that reason.
>>25190999>have been repeatedly proven by psychology and sociologypost facto products of the I as I said. to comprehend these things in the first place assumes an I to analyze them. Pragmatically however these things probably exist, but in terms of pure philosophical logic, the order of operation here starts with the subject before there is any idea of the object, the thesis before the antithesis.Pretty sure this is a fundament of empiricism and its rings true in Kantianism, Hegelianism and even stricter scientisms.
