Reading a few articles and posts, and I'm still just not getting it beyond a very basic understanding of dialectics being "stuff impacts other stuff and then affects other things including the original thing". Materialism is easier for me to get.

Can anyone recommend a good book about it that is good for non-philosophers? Something that would work as an audiobook? I love Marx and Engels and generally I would agree with first going to the original sources to tbh their language can be too arcane for me to understand a concept I struggle with this much.

  • comi [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The society, it’s beliefs and laws are created around the material reality (including production and exchanges) of this society, and influence further development, first assisting it, then starting to counteract it.

    It’s more about grounding society existence (as a web of laws, morals, power structures) into concrete reality instead of thinking “some good ideas take time to develop”, it’s about saying that if you don’t change underlying economic structure, the society will default into appropriate for its socioeconomic form laws and structures. Like new deal collapsing back into gilded age, or south collapsing into jim crow, or remarkable similarities between israel and western expansion in usa - the material things happening make other ideological contents fit them.