|
Aruan posted:There are millions of parents who would easily pay $10,000 to make their kid taller. $50k to give your future spawn a magnum dong
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2020 21:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 06:00 |
|
|
Aruan posted:There are millions of parents who would easily pay $10,000 to make their kid taller. I'm sure Mini Mike would love that, and he has 60 Billion to spend.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2020 21:56
|
|
|
To try and get things back away from biology (sorry, this was mostly my fault). I think this article from Jacobin was pretty good in discussing the extent of neoliberalism and its interactions with neoconservatism and neofascism (and writing that out makes me wonder what else neo is going to get tacked onto). I also thought the points raised about the nihilistic core of the neoliberal project to be interesting. It's a pretty long read and touches on quite a bit of ground (from Hayek through to Q) but worth a read.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2020 22:02
|
|
|
He could become a thousand feet tall and stomp around like some kind of classical titan.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2020 22:02
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:He could become a thousand feet tall and stomp around like some kind of classical titan. No one said the tallness gene came with the other dimensions in proportion.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2020 22:08
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:He could become a thousand feet tall and stomp around like some kind of classical titan. Think of how much wealth he could accumulate then!
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2020 22:09
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:"Is Marxism a science" is a fascinating question, and one I was hoping to tackle in a later post. I'll try to work my way through an even handed analysis sometime soon. Doesn't Marxism predate the modern concept of science with peer review and falsifiable statements? My understanding is that the German words he used that are translated as "science" imply more that it's a methodical and structured study than an actual scientific pursuit.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 02:50
|
|
|
NovemberMike posted:Doesn't Marxism predate the modern concept of science with peer review and falsifiable statements? My understanding is that the German words he used that are translated as "science" imply more that it's a methodical and structured study than an actual scientific pursuit. I'm not entirely sure that "peer review" is as intrinsic a component of science as falsifiability (and the other pillar: Reproducibility). I'd honestly argue that peer review in the current era is pretty broken by false incentives and corruption. In terms of scientific methodology, the concepts date back to Ibn al-Haytham, if not Aristotle. The term "scientific method" itself appears in the 20th century, but it's precursor "Baconianism" was popular in the mid 19th, when Marx was writing, and dates to the publication of the Novum Organum (named after Aristotle's Organon) in 1620. I'm not entirely sure where the boundary actually lies between "methodical and structured study" and "science": That seems to be a pretty apt description of what science is, unless you are specifically refering to the concept of creating facts via falsifiable hypothesis and reproducible experiment.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 03:50
|
|
|
That's kind of the point. What is "science" here? It's almost certainly not going to fit a 20th century definition because he wasn't trying to tick boxes that hadn't been created yet. There's a more interesting question about whether it's "truth" or something and it's probably not, but there's Socialist/Anarchist/whatever philosophers that have built on top of it and gone in different directions. Some of those may or may not be "science". EDIT: I think the most important thing is that Marxism tends to make specific statements and predictions. They may or may not be right in the same way that Newton wasn't right about Gravity and Darwin was wrong about evolution (he was pre-genetics and pre-Mendel so many of his ideas are just wrong) but you can at least build on them and try to prove them right or wrong. NovemberMike fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Dec 2, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 04:26
|
|
|
NovemberMike posted:That's kind of the point. What is "science" here? It's almost certainly not going to fit a 20th century definition because he wasn't trying to tick boxes that hadn't been created yet. There's a more interesting question about whether it's "truth" or something and it's probably not, but there's Socialist/Anarchist/whatever philosophers that have built on top of it and gone in different directions. Some of those may or may not be "science". My point was that those boxes actually had been created by the time Marx was writing. Early 20th century science is basically the methodological monism of Bacon. If you want to get into late 20th century then Feyerabend is probably the main divergence from that and, honestly, pretty appealing to an anarchist mindset and also pretty relevent to earlier discussions around the intuition/logic hierarchy (he also addresses your comment about taking "things" in different directions although with regards to science not Marxism). IMO there isn't such a thing as "truth" to be discovered: Scientists are simply creating better models of the universe. In that context I wouldn't say that Newton "wasn't right" in the same way that Einstein isn't right. More that Einstein's model produces more accurate predictions. That raises the question of whether there are actually any "fundamental rules" (i.e. causal relationships that can be completely captured in a mathematical expression) or whether the nature of things is fractal and can never be completely captured.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 04:59
|
|
|
Disnesquick posted:You're effectively describing eugenics in the first paragraph and I think there's an important distinction to be made with the latter example. Aborting an entire foetus due to one bad allele has the massive twin problems of linkage and epistasis. By tying survival so closely to that one allele, any possible mitigating interactions are ignored (and in the case that the bad allele isn't actually fatal and doesn't preclude reproduction) and also those epistatic effects can't then come about later. I would actually say this is the extreme other end of the phenotypic robustness argument I presented in the OP: For these alleles you've reduced phenotypic robustness to zero. Since nature tends to favor phenotypic robustness, this seems like it would be generally a bad idea (and that's not yet getting into the slippery slope of more and more alleles getting added to the bad list). This seems like the kind of thing that could actually be modelled in an ALife system and might make an interesting paper (e.g. effect of direct gonotypic selection on an evolved population). yeah, I suppose I am. Which begs the questions- do we currently have a eugenicist approach to the developmentally disabled? Are we moving back further in that direction? And can being pro-choice in some ways veer into that kind of thinking? I think it was in USPOL last week where somebody posted this big Atlantic article that's apparently been showing up on every millennial woman's facebook wall, about how the recent advances in prenatal testing have redefined conversations about abortion, and comparing and contrasting the cultural, political, medical, and economic differences between mothering a child with Down Syndrome in Denmark and mothering a child with Down Syndrome in the US. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/ The TLDR is that while Denmark is arguably one of the best places in the world to have a child with DS in terms of social safety net, medical and developmental support, education and occupational therapy, long term care, etc. kids born with DS are becoming increasingly (and incredibly) rare because close to 100% of them are screened out in utero and aborted. Parents who have children with DS are almost always now choosing to have the child after a positive screen result, although not always. They are also increasingly facing scrutiny and stigmatization for having those children, for "subjecting them to a bad life of disability and illness". The article talks to a woman who runs an advocacy group on behalf of reaffirming the fullness of life with DS. The article also focuses on the United States, where the culture and politics around abortion are very different. Here there's no shortage of people who oppose aborting a fetus on any grounds. There is also a broader cultural acceptance (and, in many areas, drive) to carry fetuses that test positive or show signs of disability or even severe developmental problems. One infamous chapter in SomethingAwful's history involves the denizens of this website safariing into the online lives of deeply christian women who were choosing to have babies with anencephaly and/or at least partial brain death. Furthermore, as the article points out, the United States does not have the social safety net, resources, or access to medical care that most Danes benefit from. For profit medicine and inequality mean that millions of Americans don't have access to prenatal screening. And when babies with DS are born, often by surprise, those same two elements mean that the outcomes for them and their families can be radically variant. It is extremely expensive to have a disabled child in the US and there can be relatively few, paltry social supports for families that do. This is often state-dependent. But regardless of location or class, American families with disabled members face a lifetime of financial and physical responsibility for their care and survival. And being disabled is itself extremely expensive and difficult in the United States. Disabled people here often live in poverty, homelessness, and/or appalling conditions with little or no social oversight or care. Wealth, finance, and class directly affect people's access to necessary medical care, education and OT interventions during developmental critical periods, enrichment and time with parents, nutrition, living state in adulthood, and so forth. And they affect the lives and wellbeing of their siblings and parents. Wealthy white families with capital can generally weather these difficulties much better than queer couples of color or single parents without capital, for example. Also, if it isn't already clear, it's really hard to get an abortion in many parts of the US, in some areas it's essentially impossible. There is also a tremendous amount of inequality around abortion access. And there's also a tremendous amount of danger and social stigma. And so this all intersects with feminism, because ultimately women (and transmen and NB folk) have to bear much of the burden of raising and caring for disabled children, and also the social visibility/stigma/label. And people of color, transpeople, and queer people are overwhelmingly more likely to lack adequate access to medical care, prenatal screening, postnatal support and financial stability, and also abortion. So on the one hand we have a eugenics lens, and on the other we have a patriarchy and abortion access lens. Because if one of the tentpole, core, values of being pro-abortion is that a pregnant person has the right to a medical abortion for any reason, or no reason, then how do we square that with the argument that aborting fetuses that screen for certain developmental disabilities and genetic illnesses is eugenics? I don't really know. Do we try to work towards a world where it stops being acceptable to abort a fetus with certain disabilities because everybody is afforded great social support and access to resources, and therefore the burden is minimized? Would that contradict the values of reproductive rights? Do we try to cure trisomy 21, etc? These days gene therapy and marrow transplantation for something like severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) are quite effective for many patients, but without their existence I don't know that I could bear to bring a child into that particular kind of suffering (the deep tissue abscesses that SCID patients get alone are horrifying enough). Or Xeroderma pigmentosum. Or really severe developmental problems (IQ < ~50, I know IQ sucks but bear with me). By all means, I think we work toward curing as many genetic disorders as we can, but until then there is good reason for in utero screening and for giving parents to be proper guidance and counseling---and abortion options should always be on the table because abortion should always be accessible. I don't know whether that's ultimately eugenicist, but I don't know how to counter that without also limiting abortion access. Disnesquick posted:The second paragraph is, I feel, a different case because you haven't really "aborted" the gene (it's still there as a gene but only one configuration is allowed) True, but unless you're, like, directly modifying the faulty sequence or epigenetic state or whatever, let's assume that you're aborting that specific allele and replacing it with a "better" or at least more functional one. From a selfish gene standpoint that's pretty much a loss for that original deleterious allele in the selection game. (yippee, I've just described artificial selection  ) Disnesquick posted:I started writing a post on this subject (with specific reference to European aristocracy as a Petri dish of post-scarcity) and scrapped it. The epigenetics of socioeconomic status also profoundly complicate any argument you could construct here. It just seems like the kind of rabbit-hole that will lead to pseudo-scientific arguments about physical beauty and heritable capacity to accumulate wealth under capitalism. Well at least from a sexual selection standpoint, it's pretty visible. Classes have always tended to breed together or try to breed up, not down since class became a thing. And race/skin color correlates to class in most parts of the world. Many cultures also link beauty to whiteness, and you get practices like people using skin lightening treatments to appear more attractive to members of the opposite sex and their families. Mixed-race children in many parts of the world historically could/presently can expect radically different socioeconomic outcomes and treatment depending on which parent they wind up resembling more closely. Darker skinned children are more likely to be killed by police than their lighter-skinned kin. Many mixed-race children have also been rejected by one or both parents, their families, and/or their societies. It has been historically common for mixed race children to live as bastards, often denied by their white family and shut out of any of the benefits of their class or their wealth. Many mixed race children have lived their lives as slaves. At the same time, mixed race people like Alexander Hamilton and Alexandre Dumas were able to gain wealth, education, and prestige precisely because they descended from white aristocracy. This also brings up the issue of gender. Under patriarchy are men more reproductively fit than women because they can acquire more money, power, and social control? What about under China's one child policy? (yes, I know that the one child policy is literally eugenics). trilobite terror fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Dec 2, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 05:25
|
|
|
Disnesquick posted:To try and get things back away from biology (sorry, this was mostly my fault). I think this article from Jacobin was pretty good in discussing the extent of neoliberalism and its interactions with neoconservatism and neofascism (and writing that out makes me wonder what else neo is going to get tacked onto). I also thought the points raised about the nihilistic core of the neoliberal project to be interesting. It's a pretty long read and touches on quite a bit of ground (from Hayek through to Q) but worth a read. Thanks for sharing this btw, time consuming but rewarding read! One of the author's comments didn't quite make sense to me: quote:We might pause, though, and think about whether the anti-statism of the neoliberals is one of those inadvertent inheritances that is also part of what shapes and contours some of the understandings that emerge from these movements. I think the emphasis on mutual aid today that’s coming out of the anarchist wing of a lot of these social movements, the absolute suspicion of state forms of distribution, the way abolitionism has moved across every domain of state power and the suspicion of any possibility of democracy, social justice, or socialism entailing state power or the use of the state — I think we at least have to worry about it. Can someone help me parse this? I have a hard time connecting the dots between the anarchism/anti-statism she describes, capitalism, and visions of a better society. My best read on it is that she's voicing a concern that an anti-state position could be an impediment to achieving socialist progress, even if that progress happens under the guise of capitalism?
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 05:49
|
|
|
So the hypothesis discussed is whether there is a "rule that empires collapse into decay pretty soon after reaching a state of dominance." Meaning, in other words, that "reaching a state of dominance" generally causes an empire to "collapse" "pretty soon". The specific examples seem to be taken directly from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires. This introduces a number of issues which will be discussed below, such as many of these empires being very large on paper but not very dominant, and four of the five examples coming from a specific 200 year time period, but I can discuss these specific cases. Disnesquick posted:So, let's look at the top five largest empires on this planet of ours: The only one that I think does sort of fit Disnesquick's "brief flame" narrative is the Mongol Empire, which was the shortest on this list, lasting only 150-ish years. It aged and died like a human because it was for the most part tied to the life of a single human (in this case Kublai Khan). While Genghis carried out a number of reforms to make Mongol society more capable of managing an empire, he critically didn't get rid of partible inheritance, meaning most of the time when a leader died the empire descended into civil war. (Note that this is an extreme oversimplification, and and there's not a 1-1 "leader is dead time for a civil war", but that unclear methods of power transfer made incredibly frequent, especially for such a short-lived entity. Being the center of a black plague outbreak also doesn't help.) The point is that while this is the closest to the "brief flame" narrative (ignoring that many of the successor states like the Yuan Dynasty make up 50 years or so of that 150 year estimate), the collapse wasn't caused by "reaching a state of dominance" but by flaws in power transfer that they had been dealing with since Genghis' death (and the resulting civil war) in 1227. The interesting thing about the other four cases is that they were colonial powers operating in an age of colonial expansion, and the reason three of the four stopped expanding is getting wrecked by another colonial power. The Qing Empire didn't decline because they got bored, they were repeatedly defeated and colonized by various powers (note: mostly Britain). Similarly, at the time you're saying the Spanish Empire is supposedly at their greatest dominance, French troops are in Spain itself. (Note: the Spanish Empire as a colonial enterprise had a number of flaws like allowing productive and administrative forces to be built up in the colonies and extracted wealth de-industrializing rather than building up the core that the later British and French colonial empires would go out of their way to not repeat). Similarly, while the Russian Empire was gaining territory from the conquest of Central Asia up into the 1890s, it had been established in the Crimean War of 1853 that it was incredibly weak compared to modern European powers like Britain and France. The German Empire would strike the final blow, before itself dying to the British Empire, which in 1920 basically ends up being the last man standing of these colonial powers (although battered by WWI). And as in the above cases it doesn't end (to the extent that we can say that it has "ended") from too much winning but from a devastating war with a peer state and being absorbed into the new dominant empire of the United States. So even looking at these very specific and atypical (from a historical perspective) examples, we can see that "reaching a state of dominance" doesn't cause empires to collapse. In fact, the most common cause of collapse seems to be being insufficiently powerful. Disnesquick posted:So firstly, as pointed out I'm exactly not justifying that fascist narrative so that directly contradicts your first statement. However, I can see that the subtlety in distinction is getting lost so let me try and explain further. My observation here is that these mighty forces seem able to coalesce, for a short time, and create a unity of purpose, which is extremely powerful: All the normal internal conflict of class struggle is turned outward. Given an overwhelming advantage in power and technology, and the material ability to produce better technology and power, it should be the case that a super-power rapidly consolidates its eternal dominion over everything but this is never the case. This is not down to a weakness of spirit or some fascist narrative like that, but usually down to internal conflict, in the form of corruption, class struggle, power plays etc. taking precedence again. The larger the empire, the greater the scope is for fractures. You seem to be getting at the idea of asabiyyah, which was a social theory by the 14th century scholar Ibn Khaldun. At the time, it was pretty remarkable, as he was one of the first historians to propose a theory like it and it does do a good job of describing weakly consolidated empires built by nomadic peoples (i.e. the ones Ibn Khaldun would have been most familiar with, like the Rashidun Caliphate, the Umayyads, and the Abbasids). The issue, as discussed above and in the previous post on Rome is that it's poorly suited to discussing the fortunes of empires (ancient or modern) with developed, centralized state institutions. Disnesquick posted:The question that begs is "How to maintain a cooperative society forever?". Let's assume that humanity has achieved communism across the planet. At that point, what now? Do we stay on the planet and just enjoy a static life until the sun bloats? Would the ennui of knowing that no improvement is possible destroy the society from inside? After a million years of peace, could an individual rediscover violence, take over a group and restart history? Could we engineer our progeny to be better suited to that life of stasis? I don't think you've laid the groundwork to propose that individuals living stable lives causes societal collapse. Not only do I find the idea that people would feel more boredom pursuing self-actualization than slaving for 12 hours a day over a sewing machine ridiculous, the thought experiment also doesn't seem to match real-world data on how conflict affects happiness. And the idea of "restarting history" is ridiculous. The abolition of class doesn't cause history to end, it just means that the most powerful tools we've used to analyze the history of all hitherto existing society (which is the history of class struggles) will no longer be useful for predicting future events.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 06:36
|
|
|
Neoliberals don't like "the state" because they want everything left up to the free market. Taken a step further towards libertarianism, they don't like "the state" because they don't want corporations to be regulated, whether you believe that's because they think an unregulated free market is how it's supposed to work, or because they just want to run their companies more haphazardly and greedily. When a government ultimately gets taken over by neoliberal interests, it results in bad governance. When people experience bad governance, they tend to blame the government. This is not wrong, per se, but there is of course a difference between saying that "we should stop the government from being able to do things, because it keeps doing bad things", versus recognizing that the reason why the government is doing bad things and running things badly, is because it's being run by neoliberals. Some people are shifting towards mutual aid and anarchist forms of organization because they want to do something outside of getting the government to do it, whether it's because they think that the government cannot ever be made to do good, or because they think that it's too difficult right now to win electoral victories or immediate executive concessions, or because people need help Right Now and you can't wait around that long even if you could protest hard enough to win a second stimulus check. Or we might say that this is a line of thinking that isn't even particularly unique to the circumstances of 2020, because the American government has been bad for long enough that you could come out with an anarchist view of things just from everything that's happened in the last decade up to 2019, never mind the specific further radicalizing moments of how the US has handled COVID, or how the Democrats rigged the primaries against Bernie a second time. Having said all that, my read is that this person is worried about the tension between anarchism and the sort of social democrat programme that Sanders's movement wanted, because the latter is contingent upon placing a lot of power into the hands of the state, and people might be suspicious of that.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 06:38
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Having said all that, my read is that this person is worried about the tension between anarchism and the sort of social democrat programme that Sanders's movement wanted, because the latter is contingent upon placing a lot of power into the hands of the state, and people might be suspicious of that. Cool yeah that seems like a better articulation of what I was getting at, thanks. I suppose it’s a possible thing to worry about, although I imagine the number of anarchists who are so deeply anti-state that it creates meaningful tension with the Sanders movement is vanishingly small. Seems like a very marginal worry, in the scheme of the rest of the perils & crises of neoliberalism that the interview discusses.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 07:36
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:I suppose it’s a possible thing to worry about, although I imagine the number of anarchists who are so deeply anti-state that it creates meaningful tension with the Sanders movement is vanishingly small. Seems like a very marginal worry, in the scheme of the rest of the perils & crises of neoliberalism that the interview discusses. Yeah, I broadly agree. I think anyone who's meaningfully on the left is capable of recognizing that "make healthcare be government-run? what if the Republicans get ahold of it?" is a disingenuous argument, and especially when "government-run healthcare" is something that all Americans across the political spectrum approve of when polled about it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 07:55
|
|
|
Microcline posted:I don't think you've laid the groundwork to propose that individuals living stable lives causes societal collapse. Not only do I find the idea that people would feel more boredom pursuing self-actualization than slaving for 12 hours a day over a sewing machine ridiculous, the thought experiment also doesn't seem to match real-world data on how conflict affects happiness. This is absolutely not an argument I've made though. In fact, one of the points of my argument is exactly that such a society needs to find ways to provide that self-actualization. However, part of that self-actualization is to be able to effect change on society itself. If society is a static structure that only allows individual pursuit within those confines then it can't grow and can only decay. Microcline posted:And the idea of "restarting history" is ridiculous. The abolition of class doesn't cause history to end, it just means that the most powerful tools we've used to analyze the history of all hitherto existing society (which is the history of class struggles) will no longer be useful for predicting future events. See above. History doesn't get stuck because of classlessness, it gets stuck because a static structure allows no social change. EDIT: It's fairly clear to me that, if you've arrived at the above conclusions, then I've failed to articulate the argument well because a takeaway of "capitalism is more satisfying than communism" is antithetical to, well everything I believe really. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Dec 2, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 15:25
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:Cool yeah that seems like a better articulation of what I was getting at, thanks. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the author on the subject of mutual aid and how it's intrinsically anti-state. I don't even agree that anarchism is intrinsically anti-state, just anti-hierarchy (and a permant base of centralized power seems like it would almost certainly reproduce hierarchy). My take on mutual aid is that it's a mixture of Aid Needed Now and also a similar movement as the Anarch-Syndicalists of the early 20th century. We've seen electoralism fail in both the UK and USA over the last year. In both cases, the Left didn't really hold any actual leverage. Building small pockets of organization to create that leverage seems like an eminently sensible response to that and is compatible with a range of outcomes from Social Democracy to full-blown Libertarians Socialism.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 15:53
|
|
|
The classical Marxist argument is that communism is the end of history - in that it is an endpoint which the dialectic leads to. It's hard to reconcile that with a need for conflict/change/whatever.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 16:41
|
|
|
Aruan posted:The classical Marxist argument is that communism is the end of history - in that it is an endpoint which the dialectic leads to. It's hard to reconcile that with a need for conflict/change/whatever. I'm going to need to ask for a big ol' citation on this, because while I'm not super widely-read on the topic, this idea is diametrically opposed to what I do recall from the reading of Marxist thinkers I've done over the years.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 16:56
|
|
|
Aruan posted:The classical Marxist argument is that communism is the end of history - in that it is an endpoint which the dialectic leads to. It's hard to reconcile that with a need for conflict/change/whatever. I think you are confusing Marxism with neoliberalism. It was the neoliberals that declared an "end to history". What Marxism predicts is that communism will bring about its own set of contradictions that historical materialism will be unable to analyze without significant reformation. Think about it this way: Newton's model of physics was extremely helpful up until we developed technologies that disproved it, and so relativity and other new theories were required to keep pace with technological advances. Marxism is the same way. At a certain point, history will advance so that Marxism reaches obsolescence the same way Newton's theories were made obsolete by the advancement of technology. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 16:57
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:Someone correct me if I'm wrong. No, this is exactly my understanding as well. I'm left really scratching my head over that take, tbqh, because it feels to me like such a blatant misreading. But I don't want to be uncharitable because it's entirely possible I've missed something - it's not like I've read every single Marxist thinker out there (in fact, there are far more that I haven't read than ones I have).
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 17:03
|
|
|
if history is fundamentally driven by class struggle, it does stand to reason that history stops as a grand process once the motor is shut down fukuyama is basically satirising marx by way of hegel in his text, but he's wrong because he reverts to idealism, I.e puts hegel back on his head
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 17:13
|
|
|
Not necessarily, as you could find the evolution of new classes than proletarian/bourgeois, or it opens up the opportunity for new things to drive history. The point is you won't be able to know what strange and new things might dictate the course of history in the future until you resolve the current conflict. But it is assumed there would be some because it would be weird if history just loving stopped.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 17:20
|
|
|
V. Illych L. posted:if history is fundamentally driven by class struggle, it does stand to reason that history stops as a grand process once the motor is shut down E:FB
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 17:21
|
|
|
The quote that I think people are referring to is "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Which doesn't say that history has to stop but that history so far has been driven by class struggle. It doesn't say anything about what history will look like after class struggle. I think the Fukuyama quote is a good example of what I was getting at, and one of the reasons I find neoliberalism so deadly for society. It does seek to impose an end to history and therefore achieve the kind of stasis I'm arguing against. We're living in the results of that: It's a society that can only allow decay because no further intentional change in structure is permitted. I think that's one of the big appeals of fascism and other reactionary ideologies: It becomes difficult to even imagine a better world in that kind of environment but it still remains possible to remember a better one (and then tack a bunch of ideologically driven inventions onto that "remembered" history).
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 17:30
|
|
|
It also seems weird to me to think that any dialectical approach to just about any subject -- social relations, economics, power structures, etc. -- could flat out end. As long as there's poo poo to observe, there will be contradictions to be found, unless you believe humans are capable of obtaining perfect omniscience. Same deal with science, IMO.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 18:04
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:It also seems weird to me to think that any dialectical approach to just about any subject -- social relations, economics, power structures, etc. -- could flat out end. As long as there's poo poo to observe, there will be contradictions to be found, unless you believe humans are capable of obtaining perfect omniscience. Same deal with science, IMO. the net is vast and infinite
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 18:05
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:It also seems weird to me to think that any dialectical approach to just about any subject -- social relations, economics, power structures, etc. -- could flat out end. As long as there's poo poo to observe, there will be contradictions to be found, unless you believe humans are capable of obtaining perfect omniscience. Same deal with science, IMO. The idea that humans are capable of obtaining perfect omniscience is in direct contradiction with materialism: You'd have to be the entire universe to "know" it. The concept of a perfect understanding is firmly rooted in rationalism.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 18:15
|
|
|
A different read is that Marx considers everything pre-communism to be "prehistory", as in, the history proper of human society only starts when class struggle is over. Trying to remember a source that covers it in more detail, but this from the man himself will do: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htmMarx - Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy posted:In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient. feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 18:46
|
|
|
It's an interesting way to look at it, that society has hitherto been defined by antagonism between humans and their environment and humans and other humans, and we now have the hypothetical capacity to abolish both of those.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 18:53
|
|
|
Ok Comboomer posted:yeah, I suppose I am. Which begs the questions- do we currently have a eugenicist approach to the developmentally disabled? Are we moving back further in that direction? And can being pro-choice in some ways veer into that kind of thinking? I think there is a distinction to be made between Malthusianism and eugenics. The idea that reproductive capacity is tied to socioeconomics is firmly rooted in the former (and to be honest, not particularly plausible to disrupt outside a classless society for many of the reasons you've stated). Abortion ties into that because it's so strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. The distinction I'd draw is probably quite a fuzzy one: Malthus is an implicit intent, the 'system' is almost a given and the selective pressure it applies is an emergent property. Eugenics is an explicit intent: The selective pressure is chosen on the basis of some criteria. Given the tenuous correlation between phenotype and socioeconomics (compared to how e.g the disabled would manage in a "wild" situation, i.e. someone with a crippling disability will probably do just as badly in a paleolithic setting as in a modern capitalist environment) it's hard to argue that the Malthusian dynamics are actually applying much observable selective pressure and instead just reducing the effective population size by biasing reproduction to a subset of the population. Downes itself is probably a bad example of the above because it is so poorly heritable: Men with Downes are sterile and women have only a 50/50 chance of their offspring being trisomatic. There would have to be tremendous pressure in favor of Downe's to overcome those odds. All this begs the question of whether, in an actual post-scarcity society, where normally-fatal heritable conditions could be overcome, genetic drift would increase the prevalence of those phenotypes (and furthermore, whether that matters). It's an incredibly difficult question, and probably one that can only be answered from within that kind of society. We, as a society, understand the dangers of eugenics within the current social context all too well, but I don't actually think we are intellectually, or morally, capable of answering the question of whether eugenics in a post-capitalist society would produce the same catastrophic results. To address the last paragraph on a more personal note: My partner and I made a firm choice before having kids that we would abort a foetus with a genetic disorder. A big part of the rationale there was the burden such a child would place on any other children. Ultimately, the decision to abort any non-viable (by that I mean, the resultant adult will not reach maturity or would lack the capacity to reproduce) foetus cannot be considered eugenics because it has no effect on the population prevalences of the causative alleles. When it comes to the choice of abortion based on single recessives or non-fatal alleles, then you are in the territory of eugenics, but probably in the part that, for the most part, overlaps with the Malthusian outcomes (unless you are part of the booj). Ok Comboomer posted:True, but unless you're, like, directly modifying the faulty sequence or epigenetic state or whatever, let's assume that you're aborting that specific allele and replacing it with a "better" or at least more functional one. From a selfish gene standpoint that's pretty much a loss for that original deleterious allele in the selection game. (yippee, I've just described artificial selection ) I see what you mean. I guess my difficulty with the phrasing is with the linkage aspect (unless you consider the entire genome as one giant allele, which you could but... nah). I also don't particularly buy the selfish gene (or, taking it to its extreme, a selfish locus) idea because epistasis is such an important component in the fitness landscape. I can see your analogy in how the effect of limiting the space of possible adaptations is similar to "traditional" eugenics though. Taken to its extreme, of not just removing fatal alleles but pushing optimal alleles, it seems like it probably would fall into all the same evolutionary pitfalls (not even considering the moral angles). Ok Comboomer posted:Well at least from a sexual selection standpoint, it's pretty visible. Classes have always tended to breed together or try to breed up, not down since class became a thing. And race/skin color correlates to class in most parts of the world. Many cultures also link beauty to whiteness, and you get practices like people using skin lightening treatments to appear more attractive to members of the opposite sex and their families. Mixed-race children in many parts of the world historically could/presently can expect radically different socioeconomic outcomes and treatment depending on which parent they wind up resembling more closely. Darker skinned children are more likely to be killed by police than their lighter-skinned kin. Many mixed-race children have also been rejected by one or both parents, their families, and/or their societies. It has been historically common for mixed race children to live as bastards, often denied by their white family and shut out of any of the benefits of their class or their wealth. Many mixed race children have lived their lives as slaves. At the same time, mixed race people like Alexander Hamilton and Alexandre Dumas were able to gain wealth, education, and prestige precisely because they descended from white aristocracy. This also brings up the issue of gender. Under patriarchy are men more reproductively fit than women because they can acquire more money, power, and social control? What about under China's one child policy? (yes, I know that the one child policy is literally eugenics). The one-child policy is an interesting one because it looks to me like it should really be considered the opposite of eugenics. Narrowly defining eugenics as the increase of selective pressure based on certain traits (and I think that definition is supported by the etymology of the word) is at odds with a one child policy which reduces the capacity of anyone to out-compete anyone else. Obviously the possibility is there to have zero children so selective pressure still exists but (if applied rigorously) the policy stops a particularly successful (by whatever metric) family from having an RC > 0.5. To address one other point you made: My own child is mixed-race and we very intentionally chose a "white-sounding" name specifically because of the social biases you mentioned. OwlFancier posted:It's an interesting way to look at it, that society has hitherto been defined by antagonism between humans and their environment and humans and other humans, and we now have the hypothetical capacity to abolish both of those. I genuinely don't think we can, or even really want to, abolish the former. If we do ever get beyond the confines of the solar system and settle the galaxy then we will be in an antagonistic relationship with that vast, hostile environment, and that's something to be embraced, in my opinion. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Dec 2, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 18:57
|
|
|
My reply upthread is pithy, but yes there is an 'endpoint' to class struggle in Marxism - when the dialectic resolves - what comes next is 
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 19:09
|
|
|
Disnesquick posted:I genuinely don't think we can, or even really want to, abolish the former. If we do ever get beyond the confines of the solar system and settle the galaxy then we will be in an antagonistic relationship with that vast, hostile environment, and that's something to be embraced, in my opinion. I would probably make a distinction between antagonism, and stimulus. Like, it is possible for the environment to provide varied stimulus without antagonizing me. I like going for walks, I would not like to go for walks if it was 50C outside, or -50C. I like night and day, summer and winter, I would not like them if they lasted for years on end. To be hungry is good if there is food on the table, to be hungry and for there to be no food is poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 19:33
|
|
|
Up-thread there have been some lively discussions around Marx, Science, rationalism, materialism, intuition and logic. If anyone is interested in a somewhat weirdly written, but synthetic, take on all of these, then I would like to recommend "Against Method" by Feyerabend. It can be found online here on The Anarchist Library. Whilst it is primarily concerned with the application of anarchist/leftist thought to scientific though, it often cuts back the other way too, which makes it an interesting mirror on a lot of the more theoretical discussions we've been having. For example, from the Introduction of the book:Paul Feyereabend posted:This is indeed the conclusion that has been drawn by intelligent and thoughtful observers. “Two very important practical conclusions follow from this [character of the historical process],” writes Lenin, I think it's a great read regardless of whether you are looking for insight into science or insight into Leftist theory. OwlFancier posted:I would probably make a distinction between antagonism, and stimulus. In the case of e.g. terraforming another planet, I think "antagonism" is justified as the fundamental nature of that planet is being changed into something else. In the same vein, reversing the damage to our planet is an antagonistic action against the current status-quo. I think the difference opinion here is probably a semantic issue as I'm not applying a notion of aggression to antagonism but rather a notion of one force, humanity's will to improve the world around us, against another: The current state of things as they are (this probably ties into my previous framing of "conflict" as a much broader, metaphysical, definition than just "violent action"). Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Dec 2, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 19:35
|
|
|
I think there is a difference between choosing what improvements to make to the world, and being driven by momentary survival to make changes to the world. That, I think, is perhaps the commonality between class and environmental antagonism, you don't get to make a choice about either, it happens to you. The point at which people could choose what, if anything, they want to do, that would be the point at which antagonism has been eliminated and has been replaced with some other relationship.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 19:47
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I think there is a difference between choosing what improvements to make to the world, and being driven by momentary survival to make changes to the world. That, I think, is perhaps the commonality between class and environmental antagonism, you don't get to make a choice about either, it happens to you. The point at which people could choose what, if anything, they want to do, that would be the point at which antagonism has been eliminated and has been replaced with some other relationship. I think you're right here and part of the problem with expressing these concepts is that the language has been developed in a primitive context. To be precise my use of "antagonism" here is intended to mean the state of holding an ideal different from the current material and the desire to change that material to be closer to the ideal. One of the meanings of the Greek root (ἀγωνίζομαι) is "to endeavour with strenuous zeal, strive: to obtain something" which strikes me as an optimistic, vital description of a liberated human seeking to improve thr objective reality for others and themselves. Makes me wonder what kind of language would be used in a mature communist society, when the hierarchy and violence that is intrinsic to contemporary words have become obsolete. Edit: I'm reminded of the time that the hard right of the UK Labour party made a big push to stop people calling each other comrade in meetings. It's a powerful expression of equality and solidarity, and carries with it a history of class struggle and sacrifice. I can see why they are so afraid of just that word, and how it pulls kinda away from their Liberal orthodoxy. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Dec 2, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 20:16
|
|
|
Disnesquick posted:This is absolutely not an argument I've made though. In fact, one of the points of my argument is exactly that such a society needs to find ways to provide that self-actualization. However, part of that self-actualization is to be able to effect change on society itself. If society is a static structure that only allows individual pursuit within those confines then it can't grow and can only decay. As discussed previously, the idea that a society "not growing" is equivalent to "decay" is a decidedly modern one that doesn't reflect the majority of our historical knowledge. My fundamental disagreement is that you seem to have materialism backwards, i.e. viewing radical structural change as an intrinsic human need instead of something that's almost always the result of external pressures or internal contradictions. Disnesquick posted:I genuinely don't think we can, or even really want to, abolish the former. If we do ever get beyond the confines of the solar system and settle the galaxy then we will be in an antagonistic relationship with that vast, hostile environment, and that's something to be embraced, in my opinion. The obsession with space colonization seems to have come from internalizing modern frontier narratives, i.e. that society depends on there always being a new rugged frontier to conquer. Except once again this didn't come from some transcendental human need but from the peculiar material basis of colonial empires. A post-capitalist society would likely be interested in space and might want to go there, but this wouldn't be because a "vast, hostile environment" is something every person or society needs.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 20:45
|
|
|
Microcline posted:As discussed previously, the idea that a society "not growing" is equivalent to "decay" is a decidedly modern one that doesn't reflect the majority of our historical knowledge. Hmmm..... growth as a measure of success....sounds familiar... 
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 20:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 06:00 |
|
|
Microcline posted:As discussed previously, the idea that a society "not growing" is equivalent to "decay" is a decidedly modern one that doesn't reflect the majority of our historical knowledge. My fundamental disagreement is that you seem to have materialism backwards, i.e. viewing radical structural change as an intrinsic human need instead of something that's almost always the result of external pressures or internal contradictions. No. This view is not rooted in materialism at all. As is probably pretty obvious from my previous posts, I am a biologist. That has a great deal of influence on how I see the world. Biological systems exist in two states: Growth and decay and a human society is a biological system. As I've now made exceptionally clear several times now, that growth doesn't have to be physical growth but can be cultural or artistic growth. To seek actual stasis, however, is to seek death. Microcline posted:The obsession with space colonization seems to have come from internalizing modern frontier narratives, i.e. that society depends on there always being a new rugged frontier to conquer. Except once again this didn't come from some transcendental human need but from the peculiar material basis of colonial empires. A post-capitalist society would likely be interested in space and might want to go there, but this wouldn't be because a "vast, hostile environment" is something every person or society needs. No. It comes from my love of living things and a desire to see endless varieties of life explode across the vast dome of heaven. EDIT: You seem to be proposing a society that is almost ZARDOZ-like. An unchanging context for each individual to be born into, seek independent goals in comfort, and then die without leaving a trace behind so that subsequent generations can do the same. That's not a society that I would fight for. Hell, that's a society that I would vigorously fight against. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Dec 2, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2020 21:07
|
|