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Cowbee@lemmy.ml 4 months agoHave you by any chance read The Communist Manifesto or Critique of the Gotha Programme? Both are very short reads, and give some level of idea of what Marx is directly advocating for, as opposed to his general critique of Capitalism or his philosophical work on Dialectical Materialism. Marx was no Anarchist, he advocated for building Communism over time. This didn’t mean “waiting for the state to one day turn on the Communism switch,” that ignores his entire philosophy of Historical Materialism, whereby societal contradictions are worked out over time, as nothing is inherently static and everything is in motion.
None of this requires any of Lenin’s work to be read at all.
If you’re saying that a “True Communist” would somehow magically create Communism directly via revolution and not over time, then Marx was not a “True Communist.” At this point, you’re deeply silly, and simply redefining Anarchism as “True Communism” to win a game of semantics and label all non-Anarchists as conservatives.
MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Dialectical materialism is a misnomer. I’ll give you an example. Suppose Alice’s boss pays her one dollar an hour, while Bob’s boss pays him a thousand dollars an hour. A dollar is not a material object. It’s a social construct. These quantities are, material, simply numbers in a bank account. Less than that, because numbers are social constructs two. Material, these are magnetised bits on a hard drive. There is no material sense in which Bob earns more than Alice. The fact that Bob earns a thousand times as much is purely social, not material. Yet, as a result of the exchange of social constructs, Alice lives in a slum and cannot afford medical care for the tumor that will kill her in a year’s time, and she is driven by necessity towards revolution. While Bob lives a life of privilege in a mcmansion with three healthy kids from three different ex-wives, and Bob is incentivised to maintain the status quo and oppose revolution.
If the dialectical philosophy of marxists were aptly named, it would be called dialectical determinism. Alice and Bob’s lives are governed by cause and effect, not by materials. They are governed by the cause and effect of social constructs. We can say that materially, Bob is more wealthy because he has a mansion, but why does he have a mansion when Alice does not? Because of a social construct. Not a material. It is wrong to say Alice’s desire for revolution is driven by materials. It is in fact driven by cause and effect, which is much more universal than mere matter.
Being a soulist does not make me the enemy of dialectical determinists, which is to say Marxists. But it does make me the enemy of realists, who misunderstand the lessons to be learned from Marx’s writing and fixate upon the physical to the exclusion of truth.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Oh, it appears I was wrong. You reject all of Marxism, including his critique of Capitalism via rejection of the Labor Theory of Value. Money is a representation of Exchange-Value, it doesn’t simply exist in our minds. Recognizing income differences is not an anti-Materialist take, pretending these happen for no reason is a rejection of attempting to understand Capitalism itself, and reality.
This is Idealism at its peak, and is a complete misunderstanding of what Materialists mean when referencing Social Relations. If you genuinely want to understand Dialectical Materialism, please read Elementary Principles of Philosophy by Politzer. Materialists understand social relations.
Alice’s drive towards revolution is due to her material conditions, which are caused by the material reality of Capitalism.
You are an enemy of Marxism and Marxists because you reject all 3 pillars of Marxism: Critique of Capitalism via the Labor Theory of Value, advocacy for Socialism as a way to build towards Communism, and Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Pretending to be the “One True Communist” while completely disavowing history’s most important Communist in every major manor is just anticommunism.
MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Love the argument. “No u”. Great job telling me my own beliefs incorrectly. With skills like that, you could be a politician in the US.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Yes, your beliefs about Marxist beliefs are wrong, and your beliefs about your own reality is wrong. Avoiding actually engaging with the points I made by replacing them with a “no u” and attacking me personally is again deeply unserious behavior.
Ella_HOD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
This is the worst thing that I have ever read, so bad that it made me make an account just to tell you how wrong you are.
First of all, if you even, for a second, thought about what you were saying this immediately crumbles. You dedicate a significant portion to talking about the material differences in the lives of those individuals, the property they own, the health care they can access, but then proceed to deny that it is the material conditions, that you have just laid out, that drive people towards certain ideas! You utterly contradict yourself.
Secondly, you just completely ignore how reality works and draw an arbitrary start line where everything just begins in a highly developed manner. The workers are not preordained to be workers, the bourgeoisie are not preordained to be such either. The people in your thought experiment would be in such a position due to a very very very very long history of subjective action arising from objective material conditions and social relationships (those relationships also arising from material conditions). So, dialectical materialism is very aptly named!
Thirdly, you have no idea what dialectical means and it is agonisingly obvious. A dialectic is the relationship between the opposite aspects inherent within a thing. So, with any morsel of philosophical thought it is readily apparent that “dialectical determinism” is an oxymoron. And I know you lack that said morsel of philosophical thought, so I’m going to explain it to you. The dialectic in question is the subject-object relationship, otherwise known as historical materialism: so if you remove subjectivity (which is a necessary consequence of a deterministic world view) you are debasing the subject to a mere object; and if there is no subject, there’s no subject-object relationship and thus no dialectic.
To wrap things up, stop trying to talk about things you’re beyond clueless about!