/lit/ - Literature

>>18886340
Communism is a bad name for the ideology. Communism is the final mode of production. It is a system. The more accurate name for the ideology is Marxist-Leninsm. If you understood dialectics, you would see that in order for there to be a transition of the mode of production, the means of production must be adequately developed. To achieve socialism, China must first engage in capitalism to develop tools, infrastructure, technology, etc.

No refutation. What gives?

Still unrefuted. How come?

>>17385715
Pic. related gives one an idea of the fundamental presupposition of dialectical materialism - ie that matter is predominant over mind, and that humans are fundamentally powerless to their material situation - all human thought is shaped, even determined, by its socio-economic environment. The materialist presupposition is that material factors govern the minds of men, and that the minds of men do not fundamentally govern material factors (inserting my opinion: these can both be valid takes, depending on the situation). This is basically an inversion of Hegel's ideas. Yet, Marx is not obviously correct here; Marx's one advantage is that placing material, quantifiable things as causally primary means they can be analyzed scientifically and empirically, which cannot be done with Hegel's (in my opinion, not perfect, but more accurate and sophisticated) approach. This means that Marx gains the benefit of the doubt over Hegel, because he is more understandable and relatable to most people, and his theory can be more easily checked against hard data without as much abstract thought. But again, this does not mean Marx is correct, for the reasons I gave in the previous post, just that he has selected a position more tenable to modern thought. This is one area I fundamentally diverge from Marx, yet there is still merit in some of his material observations which Hegel himself didn't make. As I just said, both takes are conditionally valid. Fundamentally, depending on the given situation, man can supersede material, or man can be superseded.

One must realize that given certain conditions, situations can be reversed and one theory can dominate another in terms of its descriptive or predictive power. This is the case with Marxism in the modern age. It is a modern theory of society for modern times. It applies quite well to society as we know it, but only since the Industrial Revolution, or at most the dawn of global commerce and the rise of the merchant class. Marx knew the peak of this era well, and that's why he describes it so well. The only mistake is extending observations of a particular period to all of history. This paragraph is my view, so take it as you will.

There's quite a few things I've skipped over. Marx talks a lot about the "dehumanisation" (not his words, but I think it's what he was going for) and alienation caused by a capitalistic type of thought where everything is commodified (commodity fetishism, reification), which pulls the collective mind away from "social thought" or "real thought" and "reality", and into thought about money, produce, goods and such, which are fundamentally unreal abstractions. Most of this is accurate and insightful, so long as one remembers to equate these tendencies with capitalism, and not wealth inequality per se, where capitalism is the essentially modern preoccupation with trade, industry and commerce.

>>16059649
There are a lot of good articles expanding, I don't want to give you some inaccurate notion of what it is though, it's pretty complicated and I'm by no means an expert.

>>15631490
Essentially, matter and material interactions take precedence over idealism. Rather than matter being the subject of the mind, the mind is the subject of matter. To put it simply as I can, material reality is what drives and shapes history and not ideology. Think of the material conditions that made the French Revolution inevitable, all of the ideology that emerged in the aftermath was secondary. Marx was not some patsy idealist that everyone makes him out to be. He was incredibly practical and was disillusioned will all of the "talking" of the Young Hegelians and sought to establish a material basis for the ideological framework which up until then was seen as the ends rather than the means.

Whats your opinion on Dialectic Materialism?

>>14617993