Can someone explain me these lines in more simpler way "A Marxist would correctly assert that any grand ideals one claim - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15113904
I'm not a native english speaker so sometimes it is hard to understand the actual meaning of lines. Please explain it to me.

Lines are -
A Marxist would correctly assert that any grand ideals one claims to be necessary in organizing a mass movement would merely be a reflection of material reality, and thus an indirect appeal to material relations and tendencies.
Last edited by Philosopher101 on 17 Aug 2020 20:13, edited 1 time in total.
#15113912
Philosopher101 wrote:I'm not a native english speaker so sometimes it is hard to understand the actual meaning of lines. Please explain it to me.

Lines are -
A Marxist would correctly assert that any grand ideals one claims to be necessary in organizing a mass movement would merely be a reflection of material reality, and thus an indirect appeal to material relations and tendencies.

Not sure if I’ll help much as the ideas aren't exactly self evident when written in English and require some background knowledge in philosophy.
...
Seems they’re appealing to a point that all ideas/ideals originate in human activity based in the material world and aren’t simply creations of people independent of their material/social relations.


https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613281/index.pdf
Even in the German Ideology, Marx explicitly points out that “circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstance” (GI. 165), and this sentence obviously shows that the real concrete’s relation to law, morality, religion, consciousness etc. is not one-sidedly determined. Of course, intellectual wealth directly depends on material conditions (GI. 154, 163, 166, and 172), but human beings affect and even change the material conditions and the circumstances in so far as it is possible for them to do so within the boundaries of the restrictions set by these conditions. Material conditions and intellectual wealth affect each other: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness; is at firstly directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men” (GI. 154 italics mine)


Although I’m not sure if it’d help much as its in English but the best summary of the Marxist view of ideality emerging out of human activity upon the material world is Evald Ilyenkov’s concept of the ideal.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm

It explains how things which don’t exist empirically a part of a thing but are percieved upon that thing comes about through how those empirical objects represent something other than themselves.
So look at some form of currency whether its a coin or a paper note. No where can one find the value which makes it worth exchanging with some other object. As such the value is ideal and its not simply a product of the mind but of social relations which give stable meaning and use to that money independently of an individuals perception of it. I can’t undo the fact that it has value by mere disbelief, its not an illusion to be dispelled as it is a “real” illusion.

I guess the crudest way to explain the origins of ideals is this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm
The ideal, as the form of social man’s activity, exists where the process of the transformation of the body of nature into the object of man’s activity, into the object of labour, and then into the product of labour, takes place. The same thing can be expressed in another way, as follows: the form of the external. thing involved in the labour process is ‘sublated’ in the subjective form of objective activity (action on objects); the latter is objectively registered in the subject in the form of the mechanisms of higher nervous activity; and then there is the reverse sequence of these metamorphoses, namely the verbally expressed idea is transformed into a deed, and through the deed into the form of an external, sensuously perceived thing, into a thing. These two contrary series of metamorphoses form a closed cycle: thing—deed—word—deed—thing. Only in this cyclic movement, constantly renewed, does the ideal, the ideal image of the thing exist.
The ideal is immediately realised in a symbol and through a symbol, i.e. through the external, sensuously perceived, visual or audible body of a word. But this body, while remaining itself, proves at the same time to be the being of another body and as such is its ‘ideal being’, its meaning, which is quite distinct from its bodily form immediately perceived by the ears or eyes. As a sign, as a name, a word has nothing in common with what it is the sign of. What is ‘common’ is only discovered in the act of transforming the word into a deed, and through the deed into a thing (and then again in the reverse process), in practice and the mastering of its results.

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