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Sudden thought that hit me that a lot of people who say they apply dialectical materialism have this weird arbitrarily narrow definition of "materialism" that doesn't factor in subjective interests (which of course arise from material conditions but which also influence actions).
Or like they use it as an analytical tool but then don't extend that to their own practice (i.e. addressing subjective interests that don't necessarily align with material conditions in their slogans, programs, etc.)
Actually just in general the great analysis followed by totally disconnected practice is a problem, that's just one aspect of it that randomly hit me out of nowhere
I guess it's also analogous and related to but not the same as an over-emphasis on base while ignoring superstructure.
To put it in regular language, there's a not-insignificant portion of Marxists who don't address what people care about, and only focus on what they assume people need. There's usually a lot of overlap so it's not totally wrong, but sometimes they don't line up.
The problems happen when Marxists spend so much time working on what they think people need that they get disconnected from what people actually care about. It's easy to make a checklist of things that need to be done, hard to make one for things people *want* to be done.
Because doing that means having to actually go out and survey people and try and find solutions to problems that are more abstract than just "we need clean drinking water" or "we need police to stop killing us". Problems like "we're so alienated and don't have a solid community".
And often those subjective, "immaterial" problems are what keep people from addressing the objective, "material" problems. If you only attract the small number of people that already know the problems and how to fix them, you won't have the numbers to actually fix them.
It's frustrating when the guy who the theory is named after specifically said that subjective thinking and desires have real consequences when enough people get on the same page. When a lot of people care about each other and understand solidarity, great things happen.
