I’ve been thinking about social constructs a lot and doing a lot of research into them, and I’ve basically come to support the idea of constructivism: that essentially all of reality is a social construct, and that everything only exists through our subjective experience of it. That even science itself is our constructed understanding of the physical world, not the physical world itself. That basically everything new we experience is manipulated by the context of our own previous experiences, which is both shaped by and shapes our understanding of the world.
I think this understanding is important, because it disproves all arguments that essentially go “that’s just the way it is”, or otherwise try to root themselves in alleged objective truths about the world. For example, transphobes have used sex (as opposed to gender) as “objective” so they can argue about fairness in sports or some other transphobic bs. But our definition of sex is just as subjective - socially constructed - let alone any notion of fairness in sports being at all objective.
But on here, with everyone talking about materialism vs idealism, it sure seems like constructivism is the same idea as idealism, which Marx et al argued against. I’ve read through the prolewiki pages on idealism and dialectical materialism and it seems its just the part about objective reality that I disagree on. e.g. I agree with all but the first bullet point in the list in the introduction of https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism.
To put the sex and gender example above in idealist vs materialist terms, I think my understanding is that an idealist would argue that sex and gender are subjective, and that by changing our ideas about sex and gender we can make material change on things like trans rights. A materialist would argue that there is an objective natural phenomena that we refer to as sex, but that that phenomena is in constant motion and by guiding that change we can change our ideas of sex and gender. To me, the idealist just makes a lot more sense here, but I’m frustrated by that because apparently Marx considered materialism a foundational theory for leftist ideologies, and I don’t know how to reconcile this.
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Your key issue is in misunderstanding Materialism, and the Marxist stance on Gender. To put it bluntly, you’ve invented your own interpretation of what a Materialist believes about Gender and believe that to be the common stance of Materialists, without speaking to Materialists on that subject. Marxism is 100% compatible with non-binary, trans, plural, and other gender-nonconforming categories. Marxism does not believe gender does not exist, nor does it take a biological absolutionist stance on gender. This is a horrible misconception.
To dramatically simplify, and perhaps dangerously so if you don’t read the following works, gender is similar to, though not fully comparable to, class. Gender is as much an identity as a social relation. People are not biologically proletarian or bourgeoisie, but they fulfil those roles in society, which makes up very real social relations that have material consequences.
You need to read Elementary Principles of Philosophy to get a better understanding of Idealism and Materialism, and you need to also read The Gender Accelerationist’s Manifesto for an understanding on Materialist gender theory. I would also add Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue as additional reading, it’s well-loved here but I personally have not read it yet like I have the other 2.
I fully expect more experienced comrades on gender theory to speak up, but the idea that Marxism is not compatible with gender-nonconforming identity is simply wrong and requires more investigation on the issue than reading a single ProleWiki page on Materialism itself.
Thanks for the recommendations, I’ll get started reading them. I just want to make sure its clear, I was not trying to argue materialists must be biological absolutionists or otherwise have rigid views on sex and gender. Even as I was writing it, it just didn’t make sense to me that materialism would argue for objective natural phenomena but also argue its in constant motion, that just really seemed to be what the wiki page described. I know queer liberation is a strict requirement of the leftist movement, and I know everyone here are allies. I’ll gladly go improve my understanding on the subject with the resources you’ve provided, thank you.
No problem! I wasn’t trying to dog on you, just clearly point out that this is a dangerous current to go down. More specifically, I think your problem isn’t directly with your understanding of Materialism, but your method of learning. I think correcting your method of learning will help you greatly in becoming a better comrade, it certainly was a massive step forward for me!
To quote Mao:
Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn’t that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak? Quite a few comrades always keep their eyes shut and talk nonsense, and for a Communist that is disgraceful. How can a Communist keep his eyes shut and talk nonsense?
It won’t do!
It won’t do!
You must investigate!
You must not talk nonsense!
Subjective vs objective reality sure is a tricky dialectic. The natural conclusion of dialectical materialism is that all our knowledge is conditioned and yet we remain materialists. I don’t know what to do about it. I guess if all knowledge is subjective I can simply pick up different lenses of looking at everything. I can consider things experientially, analytically, materialistically, logically, scientifically, idealistly, with whatever philosophy and so on. As Lenin said in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, we can’t be sure about objective reality but assuming things exist materially is a pretty functional view. What matters is a perspective’s value to practice.
The idealist would look at patriarchy, racism and capitalism and naively conclude, that at some point our thinking went wrong. That the wrong ideas got popular, because people just happens to be wrong about them. A constructivist idealist might propose changing how we think about stuff to change these bad ideas.
A materialist, would realize that, patriarchy, racism and capitalism are more than bad ideas but really oppressive power structures with very real grounding in material contradictions in the way society is materially reproducing itself. As such, attacking them merely in the realm of ideas without also changing those structures, is doomed to fail.
For example the current rise of fascism, which threatens trans people, is not solely a consequence of people believing bad ideas, but a reaction of the ruling class to the growing crisis tendencies in a falling empire, which the materialist can ultimately trace back to things like the tendency of the rate of profits to fall. That’s why fascism will never be defeated under capitalism.
However, you can still think of constructivist techniques as useful tools for deconstructing oppressive structures and narratives, even while being a materialist.
The Marxist author Silvia Federici in her work “Caliban and the Witch” explains how emerging capitalism needed to enforce a gender binary, sexism and the separation of wage labor in the factories and unpaid reproductive labor at home (reproducing the ability to work). She treats it as a form of primitive accumulation similar to the enclosure of the commons and colonialism. This helped to provide capital with the push to get started and also served to divide the working class.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I appreciate the explanation.
I’m happy to hear that! If you want to look into Federici, the book I mentioned is online here: archive.org
The idea of sex is an abstraction, much like anything else we can think about. It is abstracted from the rest of reality so that we can think about it. The different abstractions of it are done for some purposes, some of which are better than others. Abstraction is a social process, and we should absolutely be critical of it.
The difference between social constructivism of nature and the Marxist dialectical view is that we think that the material reality has an objective (if ever-changing) structure that is not solely determined by human thought, and for example sex exists as far as the idea is useful for understanding this reality.
