“Consequently, for correlationists, the sentence ‘X is’ means ‘X is the correlate of thinking’ - thinking in the Cartesian sense, that is: X is the correlate of an affection, or a perception, or a conception, or of any other subjective or intersubjective act” - Quentin Meillassoux.

There is a dispute between Marxist and bourgeois epistemology that goes (rather one-sidedly) something like this. According to the Marxist, bourgeois epistemology is fixated on statements of the kind “S knows that P”, and absorbed with the problems of a supposed Cartesian subject who “knows” in much the sort of way that the bourgeois individual “owns”. The Marxist, on the other hand, views knowing as a social act and the production of knowledge as a social relation: the known is a correlate of the social. “X is” means “X is at play, or at stake, in the social production of reality”. Because the social is not a unified field, but riven by class conflict, this further entails that “X is” means that “X is in dispute”: proletarian knowledge-of-X is different in terms of the relations that support it to bourgeois knowledge-of-X, even if the two positings of X are largely identical in their content.

A noteworthy feature of Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism is that it treats this distinction as unworthy of notice: “X as the correlate of a subjective act” is caught in the same snare as “X as the correlate of an intersubjective act”. But almost the entire point of Marxist epistemology is that the “intersubjective” production of knowledge never amounts to a single, univocal “act”: it is a process in which agency is multiple and multiply conditioned. (Interestingly, contemporary neuroscience suggests that this is true of the “subjective” production of knowledge too - see for instance the “multiple drafts” model of consciousness discussed by Daniel Dennett).

Correlationism in Meillassoux’s account subsumes the “real X” under the “image of X” constructed according to some subjective protocol: the “real X” only exists as the preimage of the “image of X”, and there is no “X” independently in the real. Marxist epistemology, however, asserts that there is no single stable “image of X” but rather a spectrum of “imagings of X” produced by various social agents at various conjunctures. It is not guaranteed that this spectrum ranges across the orbit of phases of some single consistent object: “X” may mark the spot of a site of material struggle, in which the very character of the referent has yet to be decided. Correlationism’s skepticism about whether consistent objects exist in the real (often backed up by some variety of mereological nihilism) is arguably less radical than Marxist epistemology’s assertion of the inconsistency of the very social field within which “imagings of X” occur.

Accordingly, Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism (or bourgeois anthropocentrism) is limited in its effectiveness against anthropocentrism in general, because it treats intersubjective knowledge-production as the distributed enactment of a single subjective protocol. Marxist epistemology cannot think the archefossil (or, rather, will not accept a definition of “thinking” in which any such thing is feasible or meaningful), but it cannot be subverted by the principle of factiality either.