this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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It is definitely not that. The points about imperfection of perception are not relevant to either of idealism and materialism themselves.
I have not encountered Marx saying so, but that would be silly, as idealism isn't some sort of a detachment from practice, and I would argue that there are no serious incompatibilities between idealism and Marxism (at the very least, nobody has managed to bring any of such to my attention, so far).
You want to pin down absolute definitions of idealism vs materialism, capitalism vs socialism, but the precise meanings of these words are not agreed by all thinkers if they are consciously defined at all. Many thinkers who are called idealist did not self-identify as such, same for capitalist economists.
These terms ought to be considered as post-hoc groupings of an eclectic set of philosophies, even contradictory ones. So what definition of idealism are you applying?
How can this be? Marx wrote a bunch of polemics against idealism. The German Ideology notably, but also the Gotha Critique, Theses on Feuerbach, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844). Are you defining Marxism as the school that emerged after Marx, or Marx himself?
Empirical idealists are certainly not divorced from practice for example. Not that strict empiricism makes sense, but we do use practice is a criterion of truth.