I see this term a lot, people saying “that’s just vulgar materialism!” I haven’t seen an explanation of what it is yet.

19 points
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Think clockwork. We used to believe that animals couldn’t feel pain. They weren’t complex subjects situated in a complex environment, but simple biological machines that would yelp in response to a stimuli. It was reductive and lost sight of the bigger picture. Animal cognition is the actual materialist understanding which then unlocks all of the other interdisciplinary scientific observations, its materialistic truth confirmed through those. We do vulgar materialism when we do something like MAGA Communism’s class reductionism. Throw out all of the superstructural issues that people experience the economy through in favour of a purely economic critique that abstracts them into one generic class. Sure you’re left with an observable number and you’ve stripped away everything that isn’t quantifiable, but your materialist critique is limited and acting on it would lead to something like the chauvinism that limited American communists in the 1930s.

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23 points

Me launching in to a diatribe about how trees are sentient but their sentience is so radically alien to ours, and happens on such a slow time scale, that we are unable to recognize it and unwilling to entertain the idea that radically alien intelligence exists all arounf us.

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13 points

If you haven’t read it yet, The Light Eaters is a fantastic book that just came out summarising the latest plant “cognition” research. It’s exciting to see how complex their communication and internal regulation are once we have the tools to detect those things.

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6 points
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Are you an actual pan psychic in the wild? I’ve always wanted to talk to someone who holds that view.

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14 points

What? No. Plants show problem solving ability and awareness of their surroundings in ways that go far beyond their traditional conception of being inert and and unaware of their environment. Panpsychism is woo woo nonsense. I’m talking about observable light, water, and nutrient seeking behaviors, apparently altruistic chemical signalling of danger, protection of offspring, some kind of communication with neighbors to mediate conflict over resources. You have to zoom way, way out to make it look anything like animal communication but these creatures are aware of their environment and interacting with organisms around them.

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4 points

You don’t need pan-psychism to recognize plants are living organisms. Like, you can anesthetize a tree. In fact, anesthetics work on… pretty much every living organism? I’m not aware of any exceptions.

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4 points
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3 points

Damn, well said mate

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It just means an analysis that’s not sufficiently dialectical. They neglect the dialectical part of dialectical materialism. In terms of politics, they fall for the exact opposite of Great Man Theory, the exact opposite being the idea that humans are completely powerless against the force of history and that humanity is destined to be cast adrift against structural forces beyond their control. They take that quote from Marx about man not making history of his own choosing and erroneously invert it to say that history makes man. They neglect the fact that history is ultimately made through human effort, which means history is at least forged through human will, sacrifice, and ingenuity.

Humanity itself is guided by its consciousness. After all, the working class will not liberated itself until it recognized that it itself constitutes a class and that it must strive to act within its own class interest. Revolutionaries are supposed to awaken the spark within the working masses so that its consciousness changes and workers go from a class in itself to a class for itself. And through their qualitative shift in consciousness, the working class can embrace a liberatory politics and seize control of their own collective destinies through the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The drivers of history will now drive history entirely on their own terms.

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9 points

My understanding was it’s really just boiling things down to two classes butting heads, while failing to account for race, gender, and various cultural elements that when failed to account for really leave folks in the dust.

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i might be dumb (philosopher) but i see it as the difference between claiming that consciousness is entirely nonexistent (techbro death cultist ‘meat computer’ shit) vs. claiming that consciousness is in a dialectical relationship with physical reality (whereas Idealism claims that physical reality is entirely nonexistent and ‘vulgar materialism’ claims that consciousness is entirely nonexistent)

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