Husky wrote:TIG, you seem to be wrapped up in the literature of Marx and Engels, sort of blind of the real world.
And is the analysis on authority somehow flawed?
Husky wrote:Your value theory, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, Marx's conclusion that aggregate price and profit are determined by, and equal to, aggregate value and surplus value are all false propositions. This result calls into question his theory that the exploitation of workers is the sole source of profit.
And is the analysis on authority somehow flawed?
Husky wrote:The intellectual base of your religion (it truly is a religion) rests on historical materialism. It is a pseudoscience; the concept and application of historical materialism are unfalsifiable.
And is the analysis on authority somehow flawed?
Husky wrote:Marxist theory is continuously re-interrupted, just as religious scripture is.
And is the analysis on authority somehow flawed?
Husky wrote:So, we can go two ways: towards the religious interpretations of the prophets Marx and Engels, where the state would wither away, or a march towards Stalinism and totalitarianism.
Here I will address the tangent.
The intellectual basis of Marxism is, indeed, historical materialism. But it is not a "religion," as libertarians in their belief in invisible hands and abstract morals from on high tend to frame every belief.
I don't think you understand this basic concept:
Encyclopedia Britannica wrote:materialism, also called physicalism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.
Encyclopedia Britannica wrote:idealism, in philosophy, any view that stresses the central role of the ideal or the spiritual in the interpretation of experience. It may hold that the world or reality exists essentially as spirit or consciousness, that abstractions and laws are more fundamental in reality than sensory things, or, at least, that whatever exists is known in dimensions that are chiefly mental—through and as ideas.
Marxists are the former. We are materialists. We examine the physical relationship of the physical world to our physical selves. By understanding that, we can draw some conclusions about the future.
You seem to be the latter. You have an idea about what things should be like and what to conform things to come to that idea.
I'm not saying one is better than the other (though I clearly think so) but casually undermining six thousand years of philosophy in order to ad hom your idealism into being better than materialism isn't going to work.
As for the idea in general, I'm still going to fall back on materialism. I see no compelling reason to put feelings in your idea.---This view hasn't been universally true in philosophy
since at least 500BC. In fact, Aristotle, who was the one who came up with the idea that you're advancing, came up with it as a means to try and undermine the standard Heraclitus view of thought by adding Plato's logic (which, as
I've covered at least once in this thread, is a form of idealism, which we marxists‚—as materialists—reject). So, again, the materialists believed in
the unity of opposites for a long time—the idealists came up with explanations having to do with the spirit and other things after that.
Aristotle carried the torch for a lot of western thought, but materialism came back into fashion in the 19th Century:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy wrote:Within the modern philosophical canon, Hegel has often been seen as the echt LNC-skeptic, well before his reputed deathbed lament, “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me.” Hegel saw himself as picking up where Heraclitus left off—“There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my logic”—and indeed the Heraclitean view of a world shaped by the unity of opposites through strife and resolution does seem to foreshadow Hegelian dialectic. In fact, however, an unresolved contradiction was a sign of error for Hegel. The contradiction between thesis and antithesis results in the dialectical resolution or superseding of the contradiction between opposites as a higher-level synthesis through the process of Aufhebung (from aufheben, a verb simultaneously interpretable as 'preserve, cancel, lift up'). Rather than repudiating LNC, Hegel's dialectic rests upon it. In Marxist theory, too, contradictories do not simply cancel out but are dynamically resolved (aufgehoben) at a higher level in a way that both preserves and supersedes the contradiction, motivating the historical dialectic.
This is true, after Hegel, for many philosophers of the modern era. The unity of opposites has been said to be so fundamental, in the internet age, that there's
a project showing that even children can grasp the concept.
So this idea that materialism is somehow religious is completely off kilter. Even the concept that it is, "continually re-interpreted," is to miss the entire point of a material analysis. We look at the present material reality, reflect on how things have worked in history, and then apply that knowledge.
Idealists are generally the ones that demand answers about what, exactly, a post-class society will look like and then act like we dodge the question when we admit we don't know. Because for us, we follow the strands of current society and take notes on what happens from there. We do not start out with an orthodox idealist position of the way things should be and follow the lines back—as you do and assume that we do.
It's the opposite conception of how the world works. While idealists like yourselves look at the human spirit and human faith in God and morals and whatnot, the materialists look at the material world to explain things in a historical way.
We developed the concept of the agricultural revolution in order to (correctly) undermine your idealism.
Put simply, for us the material leads to the idea. Since material conditions change, we do too. For you, the idea leads to the material. Which is probably why libertarians are laughably dependent on just changing definitions to ideas in order to try and distort a view of the material world.
Husky wrote:The subject of economics on the other hand... Marxism is an absurdity. A middle school student could point out its flaws.
And is the analysis on authority somehow flawed?
Husky wrote:Tell me TIG, if a project needed 2x10^3 grains of sand, 40 000 construction worker labor hours, 10 000kg of cement, and its income would be 20 000 litres of oil, would it be profitable?
Is the answer that the analysis on authority is somehow flawed?
Husky wrote:In summary, Marxism (thankfully) has been lambasted so hard by academia that its actual supporters in the real world of academia are almost unseen. Sure, in internet forums lurks (as seen here) a large amount of communists, but Marxist theorists have been bashed so devastatingly in real life... they have abandoned many of Marx's core principles...
And is the analysis on authority somehow flawed?
Husky wrote:The truth is, communists love authoritarianism. If violence and authoritarianism will allow them to achieve their goals, their goals being absolute equality, a hatred of talented men... then so be it.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!