"Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
—Karl Marx, introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
—Karl Marx, introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Marxism has conventionally found itself on the side of “materialism.” There has also been a hyper-separation, as against the overdetermination of “matter” and “spirit,” in much of Marxian thought and praxis. Scholars discussed this issue thread bare in a special issue of Rethinking Marxism.
http://rethinkingmarxism.org/editor-intro/28-3-4-intro.html
One of the aims of this issue is to explore why and how this separation happened and how Marxism historically found itself to be heavily tilted toward materialism while the mutual constitutivity of matter and spirit was relegated to the background. The authors have brought some of Foucault's insights regarding philosophy and spirituality to bear on Marxism in this special issue.
Why does a dialogue between Marxism and spirituality matter for Marxism? For one, almost all the essays in this issue are troubled by absence of the question of the ‘subject-self’ in Marxism and suggest a need to seek new ground for its connection with social and political transformation. The interrogation of self and of self-transformation unlocks a trail of questions allowing authors to address most critical hitherto uncomfortable moments within Marxism. The authors refer to the inflexion point at which Marxism—a supposed theory of emancipation—becomes a system of oppression and violence.
All the essays, draw attention to the need for self-refection in Marxism and address the question of self and self-transformation as an essential condition for endogenizing the vexed problems of modes of oppression and violence that continue to persist in “socialist” systems and in communist subjects.
The authors in the volume, however, do not question the ‘materialism’ world view presumed default by Marx and his followers, At the time of Marx-Engels this was the most likely route. But science has changed a lot. My purpose in this post is to briefly outline the recent works in physics that question the dominant ‘materialism-realism’ world view.
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Physicalists-materialists-philosophical naturalists hold that objective reality, often shortened to 'reality', is the world external to the self, also called nature, also called the realm of the physical sciences. Things and beings that exist as such in nature are real.
Some scientists and philosophers have countered the materialists with the following questions and data.
1. What could be more real than the awareness within which all objective reality is experienced?
2. If we assume that all that we know is mediated by the electrochemical mechanism in brain, then we can never know the actual world out there. There is something out there and the brain shows you some pixelated 3D model. How do we ever know what is out there?
3. Quantum Mechanics has shown us that so-called measurements are all contextual. I cite below five papers published in Nature, with links to full papers, that indicate that the so-called realism is not tenable.
a) The Mental Universe https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a
The author says "The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things."
In other words, the author points to the fact that the universe is our observation, but we forget the observation part and ascribe primacy to the 'observed'.
b) An experimental test of non-local realism | Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05677
The authors conclude that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned.
In other words, the authors indicate that 'locality' and 'realism', the two axioms of Physicalsitic worldview, are untenable in light of results of their experiments.
c) Experimental non-classicality of an indivisible quantum system | Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10119
The authors conclude "Our results illustrate a deep incompatibility between quantum mechanics and classical physics that cannot in any way result from entanglement."
Physicalists usually explain away the startling results of quantum mechanics by resorting to entanglement. This paper indicates that no non-contextual theory can be tenable -- there can be no a priori truth apart from the observation. All quantum theories are contextual and we surely constitute the most important context.
d) https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3343.pdf?proof=true
Manning et al., conclude "Our experiment confirms Bohr’s view that it does not make sense to ascribe the wave or particle behaviour to a massive particle before the measurement takes place."
Wheeler’s supposition that a choice affects the ‘past history’ (of the photon) has been shown to be correct in past experiments using photon paths. In this paper, authors re-demonstrate with slow-moving massive helium atom what was already known for massless fast-moving photons that a future event (the method of detection) causes the photon (or the helium atom) to decide its past.
e) Quantum erasure with causally disconnected choice https://www.pnas.org/content/110/4/1221
The paper recommends abandoning the ‘Realism’ worldview altogether, as no realistic picture is compatible with its results which hinge causally on disconnected choice.
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I AM A MARXIST WHO HAS HOWEVER DISCARDED THE MATERIALISTIC-REALISM WORLDVIEW. I will reiterate that Marxism needs to question its foundational worldview.