I would like to clarify some things. It is not exactly true that Marxism is a materialist philosophy. Marxism is a dialectical materialist philosophy. One of Marx’s key innovations in philosophy was to conceive of a feedback relation between ideas and matter. Matter constrains and guides the development of ideas, and ideas influence matter through human action
However, why call this ‘dialectical materialism’ if it can just as well be work just fine within an idealist framework/alongside subscription to idealist schools of thought? There doesn’t seem to be any conflict in this regard.
Because Marxists think of ideas as themselves being material things. Marxism is not a dualist philosophy. For us, ideas exist as brains, books, TV programs and so on. There is thus even some interesting theories about how the medium itself changes the ideas. Furthermore, in marxist theories, ideas are not given equal weight to the rest of the system. Ideas are only a small part of material reality.
