Philosophy of Mind: Marxism, Materialism, and Dialectical Monism

So in this episode, we are going to be responding to an essay called Beyond Folk Marxism, Mind, Metaphysics, and Spooky Materialism, which was published in Salvage Magazine by China Mayville.

I suspect a lot of people here recognize that name and are maybe familiar with his work.

But China Mayville is, I think, relatively important British Marxist who has made some theoretical contributions to the field, who's written, I think, one of my favorite histories of the Russian Revolution, the book October, as well as really fantastic fiction, largely in kind of the weird fiction genre.

And who is very much, I think, like I see him as an intellectual heavyweight in many ways in public discourse around Marxism.

I also wanted to say that we've had we've had China on the episode on Rev Left Radio to talk about his book, A Specter Haunting on the Communist Manifesto, which is really, really interesting, fascinating, sort of a literary analysis of the Communist Manifesto.

People can check out.

And we also I also went on the Workers Lit podcast to talk about his work of fiction called The City and the City.

You can find that as well if you're interested.

Yeah, and I would definitely recommend checking out his work.

I think he's a fantastic writer.

And yeah, I think we will be interacting somewhat critically here, but mostly because I think he's put out a very interesting piece that makes a very strong argument that has been somewhat scandalous.

So in this essay that Mayville put out that we'll get into a little more development of, he really is engaging in analytic philosophical discussions about the problem of consciousness, making an argument that this is a problem that Marxists ought to care about, and then quite scandalously in the essay, perhaps rejecting metaphysical materialism and embracing some sort of metaphysical idealism.

When this essay first came out, I saw a lot of people referring to this as basically like, oh my god, a major Marxist has renounced materialism.

And it certainly is an essay that I think is meant to be provocative and get that kind of response, and that has, I think, so far... garnered a few responses from other theoreticians trying to weigh in and engage in this.

And when this essay came out, I found it very interesting.