[ants_everywhere]

Of course I'm familiar with it. But beyond an unfortunate name clash the ideas aren't very related.

Materialism is the view that everything is fundamentally matter. Historical materialism is almost the opposite. It's the idea that there's some supernatural force guiding human history.

To quote Bertrand Russell:

> His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology.

[GoblinSlayer]

Historical materialism is an idea that social constructs are formed by (obviously) material factors like economics and technology as opposed to historical voluntarism. The dialectical part is that economics and technology in their turn are created by society on the previous iteration of the historical process, but this part isn't much of a discovery. As a result everything is fundamentally matter.

[walleeee]

I am glad for our (rather dismissive) interlocutor's comment, because I can now ask you: do you see this in any tension with Marx as an early constructivist? Social construction as I think of it is hardly compatible with a teleological cosmology. What am I missing?

Another quibble: I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our sense of the latter; rather his sense of the natural (like that of many of his contemporaries) had an element of what we might call the supernatural, located in a certain directedness or inevitability.

I guess where you see Marx as an early advocate of modern relativisms, I read him as deeply bound up in positivisms pervasive at the time. Maybe these are not contradictory positions. Curious to hear your thoughts.

[ants_everywhere]

Marx in general wasn't self-consistent. That's part of why he wasn't taken seriously as a philosopher or economist until the Soviets evangelized for him as a sort of patron saint.

But you're right to raise the question. A closely related question is: "If Marx thought the revolution was inevitable, then why did he feel the need to advocate for it?". You can also ask this about any sort of prophecy: manifest destiny, the second coming of Jesus, the singularity, etc. There's of course a literature on this, e.g. [0].

But people do in fact hold both views simultaneously. A famous example is Karl Rove, unintentionally echoing Marx's ideas:

> We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

In other words, we construct reality and it's inevitable that we construct reality. Both historical inevitability and social construction in the same thought.

> I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our sense of the latter

I doubt he did either, but it's supernatural in the literal sense. It's not entailed by the collection of physical laws. In fact his theory is empirically false, but even if it wasn't, the existence of a causal force in history requires an additional assumption outside of natural science. Whereas other authors had previously talked metaphorically of a spirit of force in history (e.g. the invisible hand) Marx tried to turn it into a real force the way the ancients thought of gods intervening in human affairs.

[0] "Historical inevitability and human agency in Marxism" https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspa.1986...

[swed420]

You argue like a true capitalist whose underlying assumption is that free will isn't mostly illusory.

Modern science disagrees:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83817782-determined

Warning: ego might get bruised

[GoblinSlayer]

That's not science, just Sapolsky having no idea what he's talking about.

[swed420]

It's well sourced.

The people who seem to hate/misrepresent him tend to be capitalists, philosophers, religious types, and generally egotistical "individualist" types.

[GoblinSlayer]

What is his source for the definition of free will? Fairy tales?

[swed420]

See? You had no choice but to run sealioning.exe

[GoblinSlayer]

Because he's not doing science.