• Bedulge [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I mean, I'm not an expert on Marx, but wouldn't Marx say that these beliefs have come about due to the historical material forces?

    Like, Marx was writing in a time when belief in the supernatural was much higher than it is today, and he didnt go around like "How are we gonna get people to accept communism when they go to church?"

    Because according to base and super structure theory, ideas people believe in ultimately have their origin in the base, which is the economic structure.

    Thinking we need to convince people that materialism is true, seems (ironically) to be idealism.

    Am I off base here? I'm willing to walk this back because, like I said, not a marx expert

    • join_the_iww [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Thinking we need to convince people that materialism is true, seems (ironically) to be idealism.

      this is a fair point, in fact I was kind of getting this feeling as I was writing the post.

      • join_the_iww [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        For instance, Marx was big on universal suffrage, not because he was in favor of it as an endpoint but he thought it was the kind of demand that developed the consciousness of the working class movement, because it was feasible and achieving it would change political conditions such that new demands could be made...

        I think a good modern analog to this would be demanding electoral reform (particularly, proportional representation and ranked choice voting). We probably will not achieve it, but we can still get society to start talking about proportional representation, and we'll eventually get people to realize that their political interests have more to do with their economic situation as a worker (as well as their cultural preferences, if we're being honest) than with which town they happen to live in, and that basing our system of political representation on arbitrarily drawn geographical districts is stupid. We can get people to become more disillusioned with the political representation system, and if we do it right, that will lead to them being more disillusioned with capitalism as well.