/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13642196]

Are there any good criticisms of historical materialism, or is it really infallible?

[Anonymous No.13642199]

Completely subjective

[Anonymous No.13642409]

i mean it's a better explanation than 'it's just like that" or "they thought of doing this" but marx >implies a lot when he tries to make a patterns out of historic events

[Anonymous No.13642446]

>>13642196
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/articles/cyril_01.htm

[Anonymous No.13642643]

>>13642196
Karl Popper
>is it really infallible
There's your problem

[Anonymous No.13642738]

[Anonymous No.13642754]

>>13642643
Even his own niche (phil. of science) has moved past Popper.

[Anonymous No.13642781]

>>13642196
It's deterministic, teleological, and highly reductionist. It also wasn't original to Marx. Plato pointed to economic change and class conflict as a catalyst for historical change. What makes Marx's vision for it unique is the concept of "base and superstructure," which is the weakest part of the theory.

[Anonymous No.13642793]

>>13642781
Also "primitive communism" is a quasi-religious (edenic) assertion

[Anonymous No.13642803]

>>13642781
Marx never actually talked directly about base and superstructure, that was a concept introduced later on by Marxists used to model the interpenetrative relationship between them

[Anonymous No.13642804]

>>13642196
for one, zizek himself calls the theory useless so there's that

[Anonymous No.13642957]

>>13642781
you're talking out of your ass

[Anonymous No.13643490]

>>13642804
>Zizek

[Anonymous No.13644886]

>>13642793
That's a lie, cognitive dissonance or ignorance. Other explanation: all the universities and researcher on the subject are in a conspiracy trying to make people believe that primitive tribe is communism. Because there a consensus in the scientific community, in case you didn't noticed. I've known about this way before i've known about Marx work.

[Anonymous No.13644895]

[Anonymous No.13644935]

>>13644895
started as based but ended as cringe

[Anonymous No.13644980]

>>13644935
just like your life

[Anonymous No.13644995]

>>13642754
Still the most logical line of attack

[Anonymous No.13645007]

martin luther king jr

[Anonymous No.13645105]

>>13642754
What has it moved to?

[Anonymous No.13645807]

>>13645105
Bayesianism

[Anonymous No.13645850]

>>13645105
Lakatos was fashionable for some time, but mostly they've given up the attempts to come up with a general account of "the" scientific method and general demarcation criteria due to the work of Kuhn and Feyerabend.

[Anonymous No.13645865]

>>13642738
Notice how people, from reactionaries to SJW's, who protest that "it's not as simple as class reductionism!", which is fair, then usually tend to go on to disregard class analysis altogether.

[Anonymous No.13645868]

>>13642196
the best criticism: the working class is the eternal cuckold of History

[Anonymous No.13645928]

>>13642196
Marxism is a rational theory that mirrors the inhuman logic of industrial capital but fails to understand humans, their motivations and their essence. Hence, it can only be a technocratic ideology the equally inhuman counterpart to capitalist rationality. The working class had to be created as an identity and drilled into an organised political mass by socialist intellectuals, who like pygmalion carved the shantytown dwellers into workers, alternatively inverting and upholding the institutions of bourgeoisie morality. All fine and good, but a dependance on industry means a dependence on war and the nation state, Marx' international couldn't stop WWI, and after much carnage the soviet empire degenerated into a mere simulacrum, the glorious future long promised never arrived and eventually people lost faith in it, as the absolute was plundered and sold for scraps. mass industrial unionism makes no sense under a post fordist mode of production. There are no workers anymore, just socially responsible consumers co creating corporate social responsibility and marketing with automated capital. Most radical leftists are atomised middle class people who want a sense of community and purpose not actual proletarians. A church with a claim to redemption more tenuous than that of the christian church.

[Anonymous No.13645960]

watch stefan molyneux and jprdan peterson on youtube, inferior being

[Anonymous No.13646801]

>>13645865
>Class analysis
who cares

[Anonymous No.13646840]

>>13646801
everybody but don quixote, hopefully

[Anonymous No.13646854]

>>13645865
>then usually tend to go on to disregard class analysis altogether.
Rightly so

[Anonymous No.13646872]

>>13642804
>good criticisms
>my celebrity said so!
really cunt

[Anonymous No.13646943]

>>13646801
>>13646854
no argumernt

[Anonymous No.13646960]

>>13645865
Yeah it's like class is an artificial identity created and pawned off onto people to push a certain ideology or something.

[Anonymous No.13646968]

>>13646801
the relation between elite and common shaped societies and the world into what they are today.
even if you believe that elites are justifiable, you can't dismiss class importance

[Anonymous No.13646970]

>>13642196
>laughs in David Gordon

[Anonymous No.13646981]

>>13646960
Your relationship to the means of production is not really a social identity but an objective economic fact. You basically have to be a moron to be a class denialist, which is why smart right wingers recognize it but seek to minimize or obscure it.

[Anonymous No.13646984]

>>13646801
>>13646854
>>13646960
If these posts come from right wingers, then I don't mind. But the left wing abandonment of "class" in favour of bioleninism is actually a massive tragedy.

[Anonymous No.13646992]

>>13646984
What in god's name is bioleninism?

[Anonymous No.13646994]

>>13646984
Let's be honest, it's not like the Left is going anywhere good. And even the working class doesnt care about class anyway, they have more important issues to worry about.

[Anonymous No.13646999]

>>13642643
Impeccable insight

[Anonymous No.13647011]

>>13646984
Class distinctions are nearly meaningless now. The nostalgia for class warfare is far worse than looking for new praxis.

[Anonymous No.13647028]

>>13647011
>Class distinctions are nearly meaningless now.
Good one, or it's more you're a spineless blob of gelatinous slime like the rest of the western left. General strikes would solve the climate issue pretty quickly but that's too hard so you're sanctifying perversion instead.

[Anonymous No.13647030]

>>13647028
>General strikes would solve the climate issue pretty quickly
LARPer

[Anonymous No.13647035]

>>13647030
Says the male LARPing as a woman.

[Anonymous No.13647064]

>>13646981
Classes don't exist, retard

[Anonymous No.13647267]

>>13647028
>General strikes would solve the climate issue pretty quickly

[Anonymous No.13647293]

>>13645865
People didn't like holy classes ruling over them, as their sense of inferiority started to ruin them. Hence they only accept being ruled by those they deem worse than them; be it liars, such as politicians and journalists, jews, niggers, gypsies -whatever. So long as it is deemed worse it is fine.
When the working class acknowledges that it cannot rule and that it is a good thing to have good classes and better people, then this civilization will once again produce humans.

[Anonymous No.13647308]

>>13642196
Raving babble is infallible.

[Anonymous No.13647320]

>>13642738
Is this supposed to be a criticism? The text here just amounts to Spengler saying "nuh uh! u can't be right because it doesn't feel like ur right!"

>the notion of international proletarian solidarity [...] exposed as illusory by 1914
>THE NOTION of international solidarity got proven wrong
???

[Anonymous No.13647330]

>>13642781
>deterministic
no
>teleological
no
>highly reductionist
no!

Why do people insist on having opinions about marxism without ever undertaking the bare minimum effort to learn anything about it?
>but Stalin/Mao/some random campus leftist said-
No.

[Anonymous No.13647338]

>>13645928
Marxism (and its offshoots, like Lacanian psychoanalysis and neo-left-Hegelianism, etc) is on the other hand THE ONLY way to understand humans that is consistent, scientific and true in general. You do not approach an understanding of humans, by taking what they say about themselves at face value. You don't believe the tribesmen when they attribute the success of their tribe to their dances and fetishes, and similarly you do not believe the modern nationalist when he claims that his passions, and history in general lie with "national identity" and national conflicts.

[Anonymous No.13647339]

>>13647338
>Marxism (and its offshoots, like Lacanian psychoanalysis and neo-left-Hegelianism, etc) is on the other hand THE ONLY way to understand humans that is consistent, scientific and true in general.

[Anonymous No.13647349]

Honestly it baffles me, I'd say in a good way if it weren't for the pitiful state of the left, how pathologically obsessed with marxism the modern ideologue is. Marxism, which was proclaimed to be dead 100 years ago, 70 years ago, 50 years ago, and 30 years ago (this time FOR REAL), yet modern right-wingers make up fantasies about universities and society in general being infested with underground commies which are out to destroy humanity.

[Anonymous No.13647369]

>>13647338
Is this pasta?

[Anonymous No.13647373]

>>13647338
>someone unironically wrote this down

[Anonymous No.13647378]

It seems like people can only reply by stating how baffled they are by my post. If it was really as dumb as you think, it would be really easy to expose it in one or two lines.

[Anonymous No.13647391]

>>13647378
There's nothing scientific about psychoanalysis.

[Anonymous No.13647401]

>>13647391
That's obviously wrong. What do you think science is? Even in the vulgar version of science, the one about "evidence", psychoanalysis' performance is completely misrepresented by mainstream understanding. And this qualification of "science" (which at this point, being 80 years past Popper, is more pop-science than anything real in intellectual circles) is not very apt in the first place so why should we care?

[Anonymous No.13647421]

>>13647401
People said the same shit about phrenology. You can pretend to apply heuristics to anything, it doesn't change the facts.

[Anonymous No.13647427]

>>13647421
People say "the same shit" about things that are in fact different all the time. Especially when they're motivated to discredit something by comparing it to a previously discredited thing, even though the comparison fails.

Phrenology appealed precisely to the sorts of ideological notions of "science" that I referred to, which is something it has in common with present-day evopsych (ie fake positivism that doesn't even meet positivist standards). Psychonalysis goes in the completely opposite direction, that of science as "wissenschaft" rather than the very narrow sense in which it came to be understood near the mid-20th century anglo world.

[Anonymous No.13647530]

>>13642196
Read Nicolas Berdyaev.

[Anonymous No.13647603]

>>13647330
How is it not deterministic

[Anonymous No.13647653]

>>13647349
It's just a cope to avoid confronting that the left are liberals with dildos and the right are liberals with bibles. Much easier to pretend the other side are commies or nazis.

[Anonymous No.13647656]

Can somebody explain Hegel's dialectics and how Marx derived his theory of historical development from it?

[Anonymous No.13647671]

>>13647656

[Anonymous No.13647700]

>>13647656
He didn't "derive" his theory of history from it. Dialectics concerns logic, Hegel used this form of logic to analyze a vast array of stuff, most influentially history where he was one of the forerunners of truly scientific historical investigation. Marx's developed his idea of history from the critique of Hegel's, and of course Marx made use of dialectics (not only for understanding history but also in places like Capital chapter 1 when talking about the concept of the commodity), but it's not that "dialectics" automatically yields a theory of history. This comes out of thorough historical investigation first, and only then you approach the theoretical edifice with which you organize the material (think of how Darwin came to the idea of natural selection, Marx was explicitly an admirer of Darwin's theory and considered it a model of natural history).

Dialectics concern the notion that concepts are not "merely" their face-value, or what Hegel calls "the moment of Understanding": when you take a concept (say, "being") and hold it as a fixed determination, isolated from its context, as if it is a self-sustaining entity. This fails on its own terms, because concepts are not self-sustaining entities, but processes in motion, and the realization of this motion (as something that comes out of considering the concept itself) is called the "Dialectical moment", where Hegel posits that a careful consideration of a concept ends up leading you to its opposite, or in other words negating it (ie from "being" to "nothing"). Hegel considers a third stage, the "speculative" where this negativity of the dialectic is given positive form ie is taken as a generative act in itself (so for example, the passage from "being" to "nothing" and from "nothing" back to "being" is understood, in the speculative moment, as "becoming").

This will always sound like crazy mumbo jumbo if you don't really know the context (heh) of Hegel's writing and what he was trying to address with all this stuff.

[Anonymous No.13647718]

>>13647700
Good post anon. Appreciate it.

[Anonymous No.13647736]

>crushes your historical analysis
Nothing personal kiddo

[Anonymous No.13647737]

>>13642196
COMMIE BAD
JEW GOOD

[Anonymous No.13647820]

>>13642196

Marx has no answer for why certain things appear recently despite being "imminent" for millennia, like the printing press, bicycle, internal combustion engine, or despite being unprecedented and unforeseen, like the internet. He just hopes you'll stop thinking about it once you've killed enough bougies.

[Anonymous No.13647872]

>>13647820
>despite being "imminent" for millennia
?

[Anonymous No.13648120]

>>13642804
Zizek is a dialectical materialist

[Anonymous No.13648384]

>>13647338
I agree.
Of course most people will disagree, because it takes humility to understand this.
It's the mode of production which determines the ideology, and not the opposite. An ideology can lives for a certain amount of time after the mode of production which created it is dead, but eventually, it will wane.
Currently, we are in Capitalism ideology.
National socialism was some remnant from feudalism (chivalry, courage, loyalty etc...) without actually any feudalism. It was some kind of a chimera.

[Anonymous No.13648409]

>>13648384
>Of course most people will disagree, because it takes humility to understand this.
You're actually talking about Marxism here as if it were the revealed word of God, rather than the particular economic theory of a hobo from the 19th century. Jesus Christ, it really is a secular religion.

[Anonymous No.13648462]

>>13647872

The "conditions" "required" for the printing press, both materially and regarding "class conflict" have existed since the stone age.

[Anonymous No.13648467]

>>13648120
He's a Hegelian-Lacanian

[Anonymous No.13648493]

>>13648467
His 1000 page book on Hegel and Lacan literally has dialectical materialism in the subtitle

[Anonymous No.13648667]

>>13646984
not cool man. 99% of the time class first ''leftism'' is just barely concealed reactionary white male anxiety, part of the authoritarian backlash against queers women and people of colour demanding recognition and justice. We all know were the real political divisions lie, tip its not top hat bourgeoisie and the white working class in overalls, but between those who are ok with the dehumanisation of marginalised people and those who will not tolerate it.

[Anonymous No.13648682]

>>13648667
>Let's push harder, this'll surely work
>Oh damn, fascism is actually making a giant return unseen since WW2
>let's just push harder anyway
You're going to die, commie

[Anonymous No.13648685]

>>13642196
go back to bunkerchan, commie cuck

[Anonymous No.13648717]

>>13645960
>peterson
OK, this is a good one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsWndfzuOc4

[Anonymous No.13648729]

>>13647320
He's saying Marx only looked at history from the view of a capitalist Industrial Revolution England and applies his theory of history to the entire human species, disregarding any cultural and historical differences outside of early modern Europe. He is critiquing Marx's Eurocentrism and linear view of history that sees capitalism as the "second last stage" of human development before communism, when in reality capitalism is the late economic form of Western civilization specifically, not applicable to any other civilization's economies. Capitalism would never have existed without Western culture's unique approach to economics and it will disappear with the decline and fall of Western civilization, whenever that may be.

[Anonymous No.13648804]

>>13648667
This has to be bait

[Anonymous No.13649804]

>>13648493
>the shadow of dialectical materialism