Philosophy of Mind: Marxism, Materialism, and Dialectical Monism
Rev Left Radio
Breht O'Shea
4.8 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2026
⏱️ 124 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante join forces for a deep philosophical conversation on Marxism, consciousness, and the mind-body problem. Using China Miéville's essay on consciousness and materialism as a starting point, they explore why the nature of subjective experience remains such a profound challenge for crude or reductionist forms of materialism -- and why this question matters for Marxists.
Alyson begins by carefully summarizing Miéville's original essay and its challenge to conventional Marxist materialism. From there, Breht lays out several major positions in the philosophy of mind, including dualism, physicalism, idealism, panpsychism, neutral monism, emergentism, eliminativism, and epiphenomenalism. Together, they then work through two responses to Miéville's essay, clarifying the arguments, tensions, and stakes of the debate.
In the second half, Breht argues for a different approach: a dialectical monism informed by dependent origination. Rather than reducing consciousness to matter, escaping into idealism, or treating mind and matter as separate substances, this view understands reality as a single, dynamic, relational process in which consciousness, embodiment, nature, society, and practice arise interdependently.
The conversation closes by bringing Buddhist philosophy and phenomenology into dialogue with Marxism, exploring emptiness, experience, nonduality, and the limits of conceptual thought. What emerges is not a rejection of materialism, but a call to deepen it -- beyond reductionism, beyond dualism, and toward a more dialectical understanding of consciousness & reality.
Find Fluss and Frim's response (Their Materialism and Ours) to Mieville HERE
Find Pineda's response (Naturalized Dialectics) to Mieville HERE
----------------------------------------------------
Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio
Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio
Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, everybody, welcome back to Red Menace. |
| 0:23.7 | All right, on today's episode, we have a fun, perhaps challenging, philosophically rich |
| 0:29.4 | conversation for you today. |
| 0:31.6 | And I'll toss it over to Allison to kind of, you know, set the table for what we'll be discussing. |
| 0:36.1 | It's one of those episodes where some |
| 0:38.2 | people are really going to love it. Some people are going to find it challenging, which is totally |
| 0:41.2 | good and fine. And some people might not be interested at all. But it's certainly in line with |
| 0:45.9 | Allison and I's interest. And I think it actually is a genuinely fascinating conversation. And if you |
| 0:51.9 | are one of our listeners that really likes the dialectical materialism |
| 0:55.8 | stuff and the philosophy stuff, I think you'll really get a lot out of this episode, too. |
| 1:00.7 | Yeah. Hopefully this episode is of interest to people. I think, yeah, there are some people who |
| 1:05.4 | listen to the show who will probably find this quite interesting. And I think the author who |
| 1:09.7 | we're engaging with makes a good claim that |
| 1:11.9 | we should be somewhat interested in this. So hopefully that is also a compelling argument. |
| 1:17.5 | But it's definitely one of those episodes where it's Brett and I getting into a topic that I think |
| 1:22.0 | both of us have some background and interest in, but that is kind of relevant in Marxism at the |
| 1:27.4 | moment. So in this episode, |
| 1:29.4 | we are going to be responding to an essay called Beyond Folk Marxism, Mind, Metaphysics, |
| 1:35.9 | and Spooky Materialism, which was published in Salvage Magazine by China Mayville. I suspect a lot of |
| 1:42.2 | people here recognize that name and are maybe familiar with his work, |
| 1:45.6 | but China Mayville is a, I think, relatively important British Marxist, who has made some |
| 1:50.7 | theoretical contributions to the field, who's written, I think, one of my favorite histories |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 27 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Breht O'Shea, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Breht O'Shea and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.