BIG RAMBLING THOUGHTS AHEAD. Thanks for starting this convo, I felt like writing my thoughts on this.

It's interesting to me how often materialism and idealism seem to be misunderstood. I think it's because people's thinking, and the bourgeois sciences, are so inherently idealistic in their framework that people end up interpreting materialism vs idealism in an idealistic way.

To me, both materialism and idealism have the same start and context, they see the world and what happens inside it, they try to understand and describe things. Neither denies the real world, or the immaterial, they are different frameworks of how you abstract things, how you organize your understanding, which leads to different insights and conclusions.

Idealism accepts the material reality of things, but it is fundamentally Dualist and categorizing in a linear, hierarchical and context-less way.

Things are or are not, A is defined in this way, B is defined in another, there is a clear distinction between A and B.

A can be described with this finite and timeless list of attributes. etc etc. It tries to apply a framework that abstracts everything into discrete and distinct "things", separate from each other. If you were to try and draw it or visualize this abstraction (not the real world of idealists, but how they abstract. They are superficially aware that their abstractions aren't the real world), you would see separate things floating in a void, sometimes interacting or touching each other.

It tends to be context-less, blindingly linear, and binary.

A "thing" can be defined without including its history or future trajectory, the essence of a thing is timeless.

A thing happens, then another: Even when things are complicated, this method of abstraction leads to very linear understanding of causes and effects, everything needs to have a primary cause and primary effect, there is an almost constant work to reframe things in a hierarchy of cause and effect. If an idealist sees two things interacting with each other equally, they will abstract 2 little drawings, process 1 which goes from A to B, process 2 which goes from B to A.

I could go on but i'm getting a little lost. Basically, idealism to me is a limited framework of abstraction that sees things too linearly, discrete and distinct, context-less, hierarchical and ultimately essentializing. Their abstractions become traps, they can't help but apply them to the real world beyond simply abstracting. Their method of abstraction becomes a lens through which everything is reframed, and they become blind.

Going more into the mind (which idealism separates from the body/material), this framework can give you the impression that YOU are this discrete, distinct, context-less, linear thing. You are an individual, floating in the void, interacting with other separate things. In this view, you can easily imagine how someone could decide to just change things. A big void with floating things, doesn't seem very hard to just decide to push one or another, and you can do your interacting without being affected directly. This is obviously nonsense.

In contract, materialism in a very basic way would reject this and focus on observation from the real world, empiricism at least. But if you still function within the broader idealistic framework of abstraction, this is useless. You will keep the idealistic basis but simply "reverse" things. The "material" is now at the top of hierarchy, everything is still linear, so everything simply derives from it in this grand mechanical way. You still have things floating in the void, you simply put the "material" ones at the top as the largest things with the most gravity, and the "individual" and their "ideas" at the bottom, as illusions, fake. How could they be anything else when nothing they do can change anything? This becomes a very crude and mechanistic (sometimes called metaphysical) materialism, which sees everything as machine. Life is a mechanical process, living beings are basically robots, we are all automaton slaves to the material reality driving everything we do and think. Also nonsense.

Dialectical thinking is the important part, combined with materialism. The philosophy of Internal Relations is the key part. Things aren't distinct and discrete, defining a thing always includes it's context, history, trajectory and ALL relations. Everything is very messy, there are no clear borders, everything is always changing, and every interaction between 2 parts goes both ways. There is no hierarchy of cause/effect in the real world, everything interacts both ways. This is very difficult to get right as a system of abstraction, it's part of the reason Marx can be difficult to understand because he seems to constantly shift the way he uses or defines certain words or concepts, but it's always consistent.

The advantage of it is that it is a much better way of abstracting that doesn't become blind, doesn't distort how you view the world too much. And it doesn't separate "material" from" ideas", "real" from "unreal". Everything that is and that we do and think is "material", whether it's corporeal or incorporeal. What that means is that you can change things, because you refuse the illusory hierarchy of the idealistic framework. You understand how everything affects everything else, in different ways, changing over time. You can change things in a multitude of ways, including through ideas. A great change of ideas and thinking for a sufficient number of people is a huge material change, it will drive physical changes as well.

A great change of physical conditions that affects many people will also be a huge material change in the incorporeal, it will drive psychological and philosophical changes in everyone it affects. The world changes people as much as people change the world. But for every situation and thing you attempt to abstract, it has its specific context, it has its own contradictions and processes, and some are stronger or more "important" than others, but always within your lens of abstraction, always depending on how you decide to look at it, always with biases and dependent on what you are trying to understand and change.

A person is their body and mind, there is no reason to separate them except in the context of abstractions, but those abstractions should be self-aware and controlled so as not to distort how you view reality. A person is also all of their context, their environment, their social relations, their past, their trajectory towards the future. Gender as a concept is very useful in the way it has been redefined and explored in the past decades, because it acknowledges that your "gender", which is as much a part of who you are, is both inside and outside of you. It exists as relation, relation to your system, your country, your culture, your language, social norms, your relationship to society, family, friends. Gender defines the two-way process within which you perform a certain set of social behaviors and signifiers.

Gender is itself the two-way process of performing gender. It includes the actor, audience and stage in that performance. And Gender can be changed like everything else, in both ways. Gender changes when your relations change, when your environment sees you or treats you differently, where the physical conditions of the world, or your body, are changed. Gender also changes when your thinking changes, when your relation with yourself, how you see yourself, how you perform and present yourself to the world.

Anyone who claims to be marxist or dialectician and cannot reconcile gender with their framework is an idiot or a liar. They're revealing how idealistic their abstractions are.