this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
17 points (100.0% liked)
askchapo
22766 readers
295 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Surely the actual utility of a dollar, a warm coat, and a mill are not all the same, right? Your comment here kind of sounds like you're saying that because things are cultural technology (or symbols, which all things are), they therefore are purely symbolic, that they're somehow not real or useful outside of their cultural symbolism. This is true for money, which would be useless in a society that does not use money, but untrue for things like clothes (which can always keep people warm or protected from the elements) or mills (which can always act as shelter, or places for people to do things, for example).
A dollar, a coat, and mill are only useful because they can bring me pleasure. Which is a mental construct. If I were an organism that could not experience pleasure, like, say, an advanced robot, then all three of those things would be equally useless to me. Perhaps I'm a robot that believes in helping others and will give the coat to a cold human to make them feel better, but again, that's still just mental constructions - my philosophy and the human's pleasure.
ok now mentally construct a pig pooping on its own balls
The commodities are the materialization of our subjective needs, and our needs are a 'subjectification' of some practical experience, some interaction with the material world. It seems that the main problem with your arguments is that you assume the mind is it's own entity, without a beginning and without any relation to the material world, when, in fact, the mind is a product of the material world.
Are you arguing real life or a world that you thought up just now? Surely you can exemplify your point with real life, if you think it's correct?
Not quite. My problem with your ideas is that I think the material world is a product of the mind. I used to think it was the other way around, like you, but I got radicalised by intersectional feminism.
I was exemplifying my point about real life by imagining a situation in which I didn't value things for pleasure. I'll exemplify my point about a fictional world by referring you back to the point I was making about real life.
Actually, it's realism and materialism that are exclusionary to neurodivergent people. Because society always assumes that objective reality aligns with neurotypical perception, and that neurodivergent perceptions are wrong simply for being different. It's intersectional feminism that argues much of the world we live in, if not all of it, is made of social constructs.
Yes, the same thing I criticised - the mind preceding material reality, preceded by nothing. Needs springing into existence by themselves and emerging before the material.
Btw, how does the "the mind creates the material world" point of view analyses, let's say, groups of native amazonian tribes mostly not wearing any sorts of clothes before first interacting with europeans, or even today? Or the poverty of Haiti, for example?
Anyway, if you're really interest in finding arguments and not just adopting a point of view and ending thought right there, this question is maybe the most basic of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. That Vietnam book Luna Oi translated lays it out in very simple language while providing a lot of further sources, so it's a good place to start, and Bukharin wrote a book that goes a little bit deeper.