To be clear, the comment on false consciousness was separate to Gramsci, as an addendum to his theories of hegemony. I find both are good explanations, not that they are the same.
Science is necessarily materialist, it proceeds from the basis that matter is real and that the supernatural does not exist. It doesn't do this because of "opinion," but because there is not a single shred of evidence of the supernatural. Insisting on the existence of something outside of the material merely because it cannot be empirically disproven is still not evidence of this existing.
As for me "not understanding idealism" and "not reading any philosophy whatsoever," both of these are false assumptions. I have engaged with Hegel, and not just through Marx, Engels, etc. but through the source material itself. The purpose of this post is to give an extremely simplified introduction to dialectical materialism, not to give an expansive and comprehensive summary of idealism. I spent a few paragraphs on idealism, if you think I am genuinely reducing the entirety of idealist philosophy into a few paragraphs then this is just naked bad-faith.
As for the existence of god, an Absolute, a being outside of physical limitations and transcending them, this is without any base whatsoever. Simply claiming that I would not accept proof does not excuse you from providing it for your arguments to land, all you've done is insult me while utterly failing to disprove materialism.
Not really, we need to advance to make production more green, efficient, and to reduce our impact on the environment.
Despite your gut feelings, the data is understood to be accurate.
Progress doesn't mean the destruction of the environment. You cannot stop the clock. Progress is necessary to stop the destruction, and to take a more harmonious approach. See how China is combatting desertification, and is rapidly electrifying and adopting solar as the biggest new energy source. This is progress.
As for the state protecting the people, this is progressive. Nay, revolutionary. The people take political power in their own hands, and can radically transform the world and better meet their place in it. The wheel of history is pressed forward.
I fear you're on a pipeline towards eco-fascism. Not saying you're an eco-fascist, to be clear, but the combination of trying to stop progress while also adopting prop environmental policies can definitely lead people down that road. It's not a nice road.
It’s hard to call China communist any more. They’ve embraced the strengths of communism and capitalism, even maybe socialism. Using aspects of each where they’re most effective.
I think you're misunderstanding capitalism, socialism, and communism. China is and has been under communist leadership since 1949, yet not once has their mode of production been "communist." Communism is the goal of communist parties, itself a future, global economy where all production and distribution has finally been collectivized, and is run along a common plan to fulfill everyone's needs. Between capitalism and this future state of being is socialism.
Rewinding backwards, capitalism emerged out of feudalism, and is a mode of production and distribution where private ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and capitalists own the state. It is not an aspect of a system, but a system itself. Capitalism is really good at socializing production, bringing everyone together into one unified system, but as this goes on the contradiction between socialized production and privatized profits grows greater and greater. This results in revolutionary pressure.
Socialism, then, is a mode of production and distribution where public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and the working classes control the state. China has been socialist since 1949. China did not abandon socialism with the adoption of Reform and Opening Up under Deng Xiaoping, it opened up secondary and underdeveloped industry to foreign investment, while retaining public ownership of the large firms and key industries and working class control of the state. It borrowed the ability of markets to accelerate socialization for the least socialized aspects of the economy, while socializing the social surplus, rather than privatizing it.
This is all in the service of building communism, which has been laid out in a simple diagram by Cheng Enfu:
I hope that highly oversimplified synopsis can help explain how this is entirely within communist theory.
But that long term vision causes them to overlook and dismiss real short term pain and problems. Refusing to publicly acknowledge and correct their mistakes, will eventually be the weakness that brings them down in 50-150 years.
I don't believe this is accurate. China is a developing country, in developing rapidly there definitely arose new contradictions. There's now a larger capitalist class, a steeper urban/rural divide, and other problems. However, the CPC is not blind to them. State control over capital is increased as industries develop, the "birdcage" is tightened and capital's freedom to move is strictly controlled and ever-shrinking. Rural development has been a major focus, to bring the living standards in rural areas closer to that of urban living. This is all being done intelligently, in planned fashion.
There is no such thing as a society devoid of problems. What makes China (and socialist countries in general) special is the ability for humanity to take an active role in shaping the future, scientifically, without capital dominating us.
I understand, but at least if we are to consider the march towards communism as the continued development of humanity onto a qualitatively new level, this is a progression. We can be conservationists with respect to the environment, but certainly not conservative. To try to hold back the wheel of history is to be reactionary, not progressive.
The state is not opposed to the market, which is why I brought up the Nordic countries and China. In capitalism, the state serves capitalists. In socialism, the state serves the working classes. A socialist state is necessary for supremacy over capital, which is why revolution is necessary.
This is, again, not true. You have a caricature of China in your head, not an accurate picture of China. People don't live in fear, data is reliable. China has some of the best perceptions surrounding their country's democracy in the world:
They build whole cities for millions of people that are functional ghost towns.
This is the western cope for what is in practice intelligent economic planning. These "ghost towns" are regularly populated later, it's anticipated and planned growth.
They build incredible bridges in record time, while nearly 20% are closed or collapsed within 10 years
Not really true. China's infrastructure is good, the problem is the urban/rural gap due to how rapidly China is advancing.
They’re nearly as nationalist and xenophobic as most of the worst regimes in history.
Absurdly false. China is a strong internationalist country, and in government ethnic minorities are statistically better represented than Han Chinese, with strong minority protections. China raises multilateral development and cooperative agreements.
But it’s also true they’ve been killing it economically. And performed what was thought impossible over the last 40 years.
This part is definitely true, and as time goes on the cope arguments will also break down. The people who knew this was possible were the communists, both inside and outside of China. Communists are going to be the ones in power this century, and beyond.
China has prisons, what's your point? They don't have slave labor nor prison labor. The overwhelming majority of Chinese citizens support their socialist system thanks to the pro-social policies implemented and the real, material gains. Hitler was not economically efficient, he helped Nazi Germany colonize the surrounding regions, and committed the genocide of 10s of millions of people. The People's Republic of China has had steady, incredibly rapid growth consistently since it was founded in 1949. Socialism is good because it works, and works for the working classes. Nazism only benefited the ruling capitalists at the expense of mass repressions. What on Earth is this comparison?
China has never had gulags, the GULAG administration was a part of the early-mid Soviet penal system. Further, India is absolutely not combatting poverty nearly as effectively, purchasing power in 2022 was 25 times higher than 1978 in China. Do you know what the poverty alleviation campaign looked like in practice? The building of mass infrastructure, job creation, and directly building up rural economy.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/45041279
Stolen from r/Marxism_Memes
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/45041279
Stolen from r/Marxism_Memes
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43729189
Stolen from r/marxism_memes
1936: The Rights the U.S. Still Won't Guarantee - Lady Izdihar (3 min 51 sex)
Constitution of the Soviet Union - 8th All-Union Congress of Soviets
This Soviet World / (Audiobook) - Anna Louise Strong (1936)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43730786
Often times, Marxists use the term "material conditions," and "dialectics." What does this mean? Why do Marxists care so much about material conditions? The answer is that Marxists seek materialist explanations for observed processes as opposed to idealist, and do so dialectically, as opposed to metaphysically. In other words, Marxists apply dialectical analysis to find materialist explanations for phenomena. Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the proletariat as a class, and serves as the most vital ideological tool for overthrowing capitalism.
In order to understand dialectical materialism, we need to understand its component parts, materialism and dialectics, and their historical predecessors, idealism and metaphysics.
Idealism is, in short, to put ideas prior to matter. Idealism has been used by feudal lords to justify their position above the serfs, forming the ideological basis for feudalism. The 3 major assertions of idealism are as follows:
Idealism asserts that the material world is dependent on the spiritual
Idealism asserts that spirit, or mind, or idea, can and does exist in separation from matter. (The most extreme form of this assertion is subjective idealism, which asserts that matter does not exist at all but is pure illusion.)
Idealism asserts that there exists a realm of the mysterious and unknowable, "above," or "beyond," or "behind" what can be ascertained and known by perception, experience, and science.
Common idealist arguments are appealing to a supernatural "human nature," or "good vs. evil" explanations for processes. Materialism arose over time, as people grew to understand the world more deeply, and especially as a tool to overthrow the feudal aristocracy that justified its existence via the church. In other words, materialism rose to help the bourgeoisie. The 3 basic teachings of materialism as counterposed to idealism are:
Materialism teaches that the world is by its very nature material, that everything which exists comes into being on the basis of material causes, arises and develops in accordance with the laws of motion of matter.
Materialism teaches that matter is objective reality existing outside and independent of the mind; and that far from the mental existing in separation from the material, everything mental or spiritual is a product of material processes.
Materialism teaches that the world and its laws are fully knowable, and that while much may not be known there is nothing which is by nature unknowable.
The type of materialism that overthrew the feudal lords was still underdeveloped, and metaphysical. The bourgeoisie needed an explanation for why the feudal lords were illegitimate, but still needed to support their own static, permanent rule. This was called mechanistic materialism, for the bourgeois scientists saw the world as a grand machine repeating simple motions forever. Mechanistic materialism, therefore, makes certain dogmatic assumptions:
That the world consists of permanent and stable things or particles, with definite, fixed properties;
That the particles of matter are by nature inert and no change ever happens except by the action of some external cause;
That all motion, all change can be reduced to the mechanical interaction of the separate particles of matter;
That each particle has its own fixed nature independent of everything else, and that the relationships between separate things are merely external relationships.
This, of course, has proven false. History did not end with the dissolution of the USSR, despite what modern mechanistic materialists claim. Mechanistic materialism relies on metaphysics, seeing everything as a static abstraction, devoid of its context. It has no explanation for how new qualities emerge, and ultimately fell to idealism to explain the "first mover," ie "God." Dialectical materialism holds instead:
The world is not a complex of things but of processes;
That matter is inseperable from motion;
That the motion of matter comprehends an infinite diversity of forms which arise one from another and pass into one another;
That things exist not as separate individual units but in essential relation and interconnection.
This became remarkable for the proletariat, as it sees nothing as static, and therefore marks the eventual downfall of the bourgeoisie. Putting it all together, we get the following:
- Dialectical materialism understands the world, not as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which all things go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.
In other words, when analyzing events and contextualizing them, we must always viee them as a struggle between the rising and the falling, the old and the new, for example the concentration of capital in markets and the rise in socialize labor.
- Dialectical materialism considers that matter is always in motion, that motion is the mode of existence of matter, so that there can no more be matter without motion than motion without matter. Motion does not have to be impressed upon matter by some outside force, but above all it is necessary to look for the inner impulses of development, the self-motion, inherent in all processes.
In other words, all movement is a result of contradiction. Your foot presses on the Earth, and the Earth presses back on you.
- Dialectical materialism understands the motion of matter as comprehending all changes and processes in the universe, from mere changes of place right to thinking. It recognizes, therefore, the infinite diversity of the forms of motion of matter from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher.
In other words, dialectical materialism recognizes that development exists as a change of quantity into quality. Addition or subtraction gives way to qualitative change. A balloon is filled with air, until at a given point it pops due to pressure buildup. Water goes from liquid to gas at its boiling point, and back into liquid when cooling down to said point.
- Dialectical materialism considers that, in the manifold processes taking place in the universe, things come into being, change and pass out of being, not as separate individual units, but in essential relation and interconnection, so that they cannot be understood each separately and by itself but only in their relation and interconnection.
In other words, everything is connected, and must be analyzed in context to truly understand it. A worker isn't just an individual, but instead part of a social class of many workers. Wages are not something invented brand new every time, but instead are set by societal standards, controlled by the ruling capitalist class.
Karl Marx created dialectical materialism by turning Hegel's idealist dialectic into a materialist one. Then, he applied it to the progression of society, creating historical matetialism. By analyzing social structures and progress as a dialectical process based in materialism, we can learn from history and analyze where it's going. This is scientific socialism in progress.
If you keep these in mind, you can do your own dialectical materialist analysis. Always seek explanations based on the material, not the ideal, and always do so by contextualizing the processes, analyzing their contradictions, the unity and struggle of opposing tendencies. Quantitative changes lead to qualitative development, and progresses as a result of the conflict or struggle of opposite tendencies. There's much more to dialectical materialism, but this should help serve as a simple overview!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43732471
Rest in peace, comrade.
For those who haven't read or seen Parenti speak, I highly recommend both the "Yellow Parenti" Speech and Blackshirts and Reds | Audiobook both litanies against anti-communist mythos, an examination of the real successes and struggles in the USSR, and an analysis of fascism.
Michael Parenti's Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media has always been better than Manufacturing Consent. Considering Chomsky's appearance in the Epstein files as being good friends with billionaire pedophiles, On Chomsky is also a fantastic read for why the left should reject him.
Parenti has turned countless westerners into Marxists, and was vital in my own journey to the left. May we carry on his legacy.
Thumbnail is Marx's manuscript for The German Ideology. Summary below is a compilation of my notes I wrote when reading Materialism and the Dialectical Method by Maurice Cornforth, along with general knowledge from reading various Marxist authors.
Often times, Marxists use the term "material conditions," and "dialectics." What does this mean? Why do Marxists care so much about material conditions? The answer is that Marxists seek materialist explanations for observed processes as opposed to idealist, and do so dialectically, as opposed to metaphysically. In other words, Marxists apply dialectical analysis to find materialist explanations for phenomena. Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the proletariat as a class, and serves as the most vital ideological tool for overthrowing capitalism.
In order to understand dialectical materialism, we need to understand its component parts, materialism and dialectics, and their historical predecessors, idealism and metaphysics.
Idealism is, in short, to put ideas prior to matter. Idealism has been used by feudal lords to justify their position above the serfs, forming the ideological basis for feudalism. The 3 major assertions of idealism are as follows:
Idealism asserts that the material world is dependent on the spiritual
Idealism asserts that spirit, or mind, or idea, can and does exist in separation from matter. (The most extreme form of this assertion is subjective idealism, which asserts that matter does not exist at all but is pure illusion.)
Idealism asserts that there exists a realm of the mysterious and unknowable, "above," or "beyond," or "behind" what can be ascertained and known by perception, experience, and science.
Common idealist arguments are appealing to a supernatural "human nature," or "good vs. evil" explanations for processes. Materialism arose over time, as people grew to understand the world more deeply, and especially as a tool to overthrow the feudal aristocracy that justified its existence via the church. In other words, materialism rose to help the bourgeoisie. The 3 basic teachings of materialism as counterposed to idealism are:
Materialism teaches that the world is by its very nature material, that everything which exists comes into being on the basis of material causes, arises and develops in accordance with the laws of motion of matter.
Materialism teaches that matter is objective reality existing outside and independent of the mind; and that far from the mental existing in separation from the material, everything mental or spiritual is a product of material processes.
Materialism teaches that the world and its laws are fully knowable, and that while much may not be known there is nothing which is by nature unknowable.
The type of materialism that overthrew the feudal lords was still underdeveloped, and metaphysical. The bourgeoisie needed an explanation for why the feudal lords were illegitimate, but still needed to support their own static, permanent rule. This was called mechanistic materialism, for the bourgeois scientists saw the world as a grand machine repeating simple motions forever. Mechanistic materialism, therefore, makes certain dogmatic assumptions:
That the world consists of permanent and stable things or particles, with definite, fixed properties;
That the particles of matter are by nature inert and no change ever happens except by the action of some external cause;
That all motion, all change can be reduced to the mechanical interaction of the separate particles of matter;
That each particle has its own fixed nature independent of everything else, and that the relationships between separate things are merely external relationships.
This, of course, has proven false. History did not end with the dissolution of the USSR, despite what modern mechanistic materialists claim. Mechanistic materialism relies on metaphysics, seeing everything as a static abstraction, devoid of its context. It has no explanation for how new qualities emerge, and ultimately fell to idealism to explain the "first mover," ie "God." Dialectical materialism holds instead:
The world is not a complex of things but of processes;
That matter is inseperable from motion;
That the motion of matter comprehends an infinite diversity of forms which arise one from another and pass into one another;
That things exist not as separate individual units but in essential relation and interconnection.
This became remarkable for the proletariat, as it sees nothing as static, and therefore marks the eventual downfall of the bourgeoisie. Putting it all together, we get the following:
In other words, when analyzing events and contextualizing them, we must always viee them as a struggle between the rising and the falling, the old and the new, for example the concentration of capital in markets and the rise in socialize labor.
In other words, all movement is a result of contradiction. Your foot presses on the Earth, and the Earth presses back on you.
In other words, dialectical materialism recognizes that development exists as a change of quantity into quality. Addition or subtraction gives way to qualitative change. A balloon is filled with air, until at a given point it pops due to pressure buildup. Water goes from liquid to gas at its boiling point, and back into liquid when cooling down to said point.
In other words, everything is connected, and must be analyzed in context to truly understand it. A worker isn't just an individual, but instead part of a social class of many workers. Wages are not something invented brand new every time, but instead are set by societal standards, controlled by the ruling capitalist class.
Karl Marx created dialectical materialism by turning Hegel's idealist dialectic into a materialist one. Then, he applied it to the progression of society, creating historical materialism. By analyzing social structures and progress as a dialectical process based in materialism, we can learn from history and analyze where it's going. This is scientific socialism in progress. Human thought is shaped by our social experience, forming class consciousness and ideology. How we produce and distribute determines our ways of thinking.
Socialism and communism also have their own contradictions as well, and just because we progress on to socialism does not mean we cannot fall back to capitalism. The dialectical materialist world outlook understands that nothing is static, and there is always new contradiction and new movement from that.
If you keep these in mind, you can do your own dialectical materialist analysis. Always seek explanations based on the material, not the ideal, and always do so by contextualizing the processes, analyzing their contradictions, the unity and struggle of opposing tendencies. Quantitative changes lead to qualitative development, and progresses as a result of the conflict or struggle of opposite tendencies. There's much more to dialectical materialism, but this should help serve as a simple overview!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43729189
Stolen from r/marxism_memes
1936: The Rights the U.S. Still Won't Guarantee - Lady Izdihar (3 min 51 sex)
Constitution of the Soviet Union - 8th All-Union Congress of Soviets
This Soviet World / (Audiobook) - Anna Louise Strong (1936)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43729189
Stolen from r/marxism_memes
1936: The Rights the U.S. Still Won't Guarantee - Lady Izdihar (3 min 51 sex)
Constitution of the Soviet Union - 8th All-Union Congress of Soviets
This Soviet World / (Audiobook) - Anna Louise Strong (1936)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43728612
Stolen from r/Marxism_memes
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43728612
Stolen from r/Marxism_memes
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43726548
Stolen from r/Marxism_memes
You can both produce more efficiently and without excess without stopping advancement.