theory

Thanks for that recommendation of Cornforth’s book. It’s one of those books that has been floating in my virtual bookshelf for years, but I never got around to it (frankly I forgot about it til you mentioned it). So it’s now fresher in my mind and maybe I’ll get to it soon.

Second, I should say welcome to Hexbear and certainly I’m glad that you felt the courage to post as a new member, and I hope you continue to join in!

Now, I finished the Medium article and to be honest, I disagree with it completely. I felt a little bad about my strong and somewhat contrarian earlier comment, but now I think it is justified.

I’ll save the long lecture but this author really needs to read Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach to understand that they are advocating for exactly the Feuerbachian mechanical materialism that Marx refuted. That this author can then advocate for mechanical materialism and call it the real or original Marxism is absurd. What they are advocating for isn’t Marxist. That’s fine, but it should not be called Marxism.

I am a physicist by education and this author managed to also annoy me by misrepresenting quantum mechanics lol. Pilot wave theory is by no means proof that quantum mechanics is deterministic. It is one interpretation which is deterministic, but which is not provably more correct than the Copenhagen interpretation. Actually, due to things like Bell’s Theorem, pilot wave theory has fallen out of favor. We most likely do live in a probabilistic quantum universe. But that really has no bearing on these questions about materialism anyway!