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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.
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Dec 2, 2020 02:50
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 21:26 |
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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 |
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Dec 2, 2020 04:26
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Ferrinus posted:Again, what you're feeding me right now is capitalist propaganda. We have ready-made, side-by-side examples of countries throwing off imperial rule and either going communist or not in India and China and the difference is staggeringly clear. It's an eternal thorn in capitalism's side that communism can promise better, faster development and a more complete fulfillment of the needs of the citizenry, and that's why people will constantly try to wave away the achievements of socialist states as something that capitalism would have done anyway while desperately praying that you haven't done your reading. Out of curiosity what makes India and China a better comparison than North and South Korea? With India and China one is a post-colonial country, one has 20 odd (30 odd?) different languages, one has many minority groups that get into violent conflict, etc. It's not a particularly natural experiment since there's huge differences.
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Dec 23, 2020 21:50
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The amount of wealth that was deprived from NK vs. the amount of wealth poured into SK makes the comparison unhelpful. In what sense? My recollection is that in the immediate post-war time frame SK did receive billions of dollars in aid but NK actually received more from China and the USSR. It's been a bit since I looked it up but I remember one year China sent something like 3% of its economic output to NK. NK was also able to trade with its immediate neighbors. I think you'd need to provide evidence of the wealth that was deprived from NK and whether it received less aid than SK in this comparison. I'm also not actually that interested in SK vs NK, that's a whole complex thing that goes into more than just whether Marx was right. I'm more curious how India vs China is the most natural comparison for this.
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Dec 24, 2020 00:15
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Purple Prince posted:1) China is post-colonial; it wasn’t fully colonised like India under the Raj, but sections of it were constantly being taken by Russia, Japan, and the UK at different stages. I'm going to be honest here, those look like nit picks to me. Sure you could make an argument about calling China post-colonial because of Macau and Hong Kong but India was literally ruled over by the British. Sure China has some different languages but everything you listed is in the same Sino-Tibetan subgroup IIRC and India has something like 6 or 7 different language families with significant populations. I'm not saying that Indians are Moon people and Chinese are from Saturn and you can't compare them at all but you're downplaying the things that make a direct comparison difficult.
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Dec 24, 2020 02:58
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Purple Prince posted:It’s more about which one comes first (or is ontologically prior to use jargon). A historical idealist like Hegel or Fukuyama holds that economic results are the result of language, culture, and so on - hence why both were committed to seeing economically successful nations of their time as having superior cultures and see the engine of history as ideas; while historical materialism (orthodox Marxism) holds that culture (and to some extent language) emerges from material conditions. I feel like this is basically the Marxist vs marxist question (well, this and "do I believe in dalectics") . You've split everything into superstructure vs base and you're asserting primacy of the base, but the question is how strong is the dominance of the base. 100% is obviously absurd, but if you can pin it very high then you've got an interesting theory. My experience is that after a few criticisms it gets bargained down to something similar to "the base exerts a strong influence on the superstructure" which is pretty obvious and uninteresting.
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Dec 26, 2020 06:46
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uncop posted:Trying to understand the relationship between base and superstructure through this sort of "domination" concept falls into the same trap as people who conceived evolution as a process to develop more complex, or "higher" lifeforms from less complex or "lower" lifeforms. What evolution actually does is throw poo poo at the wall and see what sticks. What sticks is a statistical event based on adaptation to the environment. The base is the equivalent of the environment to superstructural developments. And the superstructure feeds back on the base much like the development of life has changed natural environments. I think you might be thinking of the wrong definition of "dominates". I'm not speaking in a political sense, I'm talking about the mathematics of growth. If you have a graph defined by two functions, one of which shows constant growth and one which shows a sinusoidal pattern (so y = x + sin(x)) then the long term growth of the sinusoidal component is zero so you can model the long term growth using only the dominant component (y=x). If the base is dominant in this sense then you get to say interesting things like "Capitalism will inevitably fall and give way to Communism because of the fundamental contradictions". If it doesn't dominate then you're stuck saying things like "people that don't eat will die" that pretty much everyone already agreed on without historical materialism. I'm also not too interested in the whole materialist vs idealist thing. You'd probably need to be a bit more specific to have an interesting talk on it since I'm not entirely sure if you're trying to talk in the more general philosophical sense with Hobbes or if you're specifically talking about historical materialism. I'm also not sure if you're talking about it in opposition of critical realism, which I'm not an expert on but most of the more modern marxist things I've read seem to be based on that.
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Dec 26, 2020 19:21
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uncop posted:Nah, I understood what you meant, and my point was that trying to interpret the base and superstructure as simple numerical variables erases the actual theory. When you said: "...how strong is the dominance of the base. 100% is obviously absurd, but if you can pin it very high then you've got an interesting theory." it just sounded weird to me, because I can't see how you'd quantify this stuff in a manner that would allow you to come up with these percentages. We can pick out specific quantifiable phenomena and see how they interact, but we can't quantify "base" or "superstructure" altogether. That's the point, you can't come up with these percentages. Historical materialism is a lens for viewing the world, and it's only useful when it lets you say interesting things. You can only really say interesting things if the base dominates the superstructure, otherwise the lens doesn't provide any real clarity. Keep in mind that the whole "base vs superstructure" thing is artificial, you have to figure out why it's a useful distinction that's worth using. quote:The reason I brought up the details is to illustrate why IMO the correct question to ask isn't "how strongly does the base dominate the superstructure" but "how much can superstructural phenomena alter constraints set by the base that would imply them to be unviable" and "how much can basal phenomena alter constraints set by the superstructure that would imply them to be unviable". In other words: if a new social practice emerges that a society is ideologically against, how effectively can it affect ideology to condone the practice instead? If a new ideological practice emerges that is against society's material interests, how effectively can it affect social practice so that the material interests would be in line with it instead? You've just thrown away most of dialectical materialism in favor of masturbation then. The whole point is that it's capable of making strong predictions about the future, that's the whole thing about the contradictions in capitalism inevitably leading to its collapse. That's a prediction that you can make because you have identified a contradiction in the base that will be the antithesis to capitalism. If you pull back and just say that the base and superstructure are two things with no special relationship and you've just identified them so you can talk about them then you lose the predictive parts of historical materialism and you start just saying obvious things.
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Dec 26, 2020 22:54
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uncop posted:It's you who's talking about contradiction seemingly without having done much work trying to wrap your head around what it means. I'm telling you, seemingly-pinpoint predictions like communism coming after capitalism are produced by logical process of elimination based on constraints, as well as sufficiently vague definition of outcomes. First, we claim that capitalism can never change in a way that'd allow it to work long term. Then, we claim that capitalism has produced only one rising class that could take power over society. Finally, we define communism in a vague way that basically boils down to classlessness and planned production, basically designating it as the only way the proletariat could generalize its class power. Lol, that's not a logical process of elimination, that's the dialectic. If you don't hold that the result of the crisis will be a synthesis that overcomes the contradictions of the previous system then your conclusion does not logically follow, and there's no real proof that the dialectic is actually a real thing. You say that it's not magic but when it's applied as a system that history must follow it's basically magical. It's like a TODO list, it's not magical and it's a useful tool, but if you start assuming that things that are written down must be accomplished rather than could be accomplished then you've got a magical list. Without this assumption your logical process of elimination doesn't make communism any more likely than Mad Max.
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Dec 28, 2020 23:46
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Yeah, my understanding is that most of the claims of automation are exaggerated. In general we can automate rote steps on a piece of paper or rote steps for muscles but those are actually kind of rare. Most of the value add of technology is in giving people superpowers. A construction worker on a crane is stronger than a thousand men, and a scientist with access to computers can do calculations in seconds that would take years before. Neither of these is fully automated though, they still rely on a human brain for direction.
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Jan 23, 2021 19:40
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Cpt_Obvious posted:"Automation" does not necessarily mean "robots". The scientist using a computer is using an "automated" system, as is a construction worker and his crane. Lol, this is technically correct according to according to some definitions of the word in English and also completely useless for this conversation. I was responding to a point about FALC, not whether water mills that use a river to turn a grindstone are a form of automation. These are tools and capital and they don't fundamentally change how a worker relates to the means of production.
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Jan 23, 2021 21:48
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multistability posted:Kind of a nitpicky point I guess, but don't most of these processes actually subtract rather than add value to the commodity because they reduce the average socially necessary labour-time required to produce that commodity? Unless you're using "value" in a colloquial rather than marxist sense That's kind of complicated. My understanding is that LTV is usually presented in a very simple way but there's a ton of caveats that get added in before it's actually applied. This is pretty normal and not a bad thing, physicists teach with forces acting on points and you never actually see this in nature, but it can lead to a few head scratchers. The was I've heard it LTV is usually applied as the socially necessary labor time to produce a commodity in aggregate. These processes only remove value to the extent that change the aggregate production of a commodity and only to the degree that the object produced behaves like a commodity.
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Jan 23, 2021 22:13
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