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I Hate Western Philosophy (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
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I am learning the business side of western philosophy for a college class and I can already tell I hate Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and basically every Greek philosopher.

Edit: To clarify things, I do not hate all of Western philosophy like Karl Marx just the more mainstream parts which are being taught in American academia.

This is a vent post and I was using hyperbole and being dramatic. I am sorry for the confusion.

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[–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

Not to sound cheeky, but we have to make some assumptions to get anywhere. We have very strong reasons for accepting dialectical materialism, but I'm not sure even those could be a demonstration that it's true. So we're left with "if dialectical materialism is true, then __".

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

    We have very strong reasons for accepting dialectical materialism

    Such as?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    It's explanatory and predictive power. We can make sense of past events in terms of balance of forces. And, in the case of capitalism, it allows us to predict its replacement with socialism. Capitalism produces its own gravediggers, as Marx put it.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    I'm not understanding. Can you connect the dots between dialectial materialism and how it predicts socialism?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    Sure thing. So the dialectical materialist view of capitalism is that it is a relation between workers and capitalists. Crudely, the capitalist class wants the working class to produce as much as possible for as little as possible (provided the working class as a whole gets enough to reproduce itself). The working class resists the attempts of the capitalist class to do so.

    But the capitalist drive for profit (surplus value from exploited labor) leads to periodic crises. Worse, for capitalists, the means of production (think factories, farms, shipyards, etc) keep accumulating as well. This is a core contradiction in capitalism: the need to accumulate undermines the ability to accumulate.

    In short, capitalism gets so good at producing stuff that it requires different management techniques. This is socialism: very large enterprises under the democratic control of workers.

    Why? Again, because the contradictions inherent in capitalism require it.

    (Well, so long as capitalism doesn't succeed in overheating the planet first.)

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    I'm still trying to understand what "dialectical materialism" means.

    https://www.britannica.com/topic/dialectical-materialism

    For Marx and Engels, materialism meant that the material world, perceptible to the senses, has objective reality independent of mind or spirit.

    Sounds right to me. Although I want to clarify, are they including light? We observe it with our senses, but it is massless, technically not matter.

    Hegelian dialectics considers things in their movements and changes, interrelations and interactions.

    Sure, that makes sense.

    Everything is in continual process of becoming and ceasing to be, in which nothing is permanent but everything changes and is eventually superseded.

    This gives me pause. Do we know this to be true? There is not a hard line between when a seed becomes a fruit. The macro objects we observe change, but the underlying particles just move. Molecules change; atoms change; baryons do not.

    Marx and Engels change was inherent in the nature of the material world. They therefore held that one could not, as Hegel tried, deduce the actual course of events from any “principles of dialectics”; the principles must be inferred from the events.

    It sounds like it has little to no predictive power. We observe events and infer "principles" from them. In hard science terms, we observe, hypothesize, experiment, and theorize. Repeatable experiments help us predict what will happen under similar conditions.

    The concept of dialectical materialism—which is a theoretical basis for a method of reasoning—should not be confused with “historical materialism,” which is the Marxist interpretation of history in terms of the class struggle.

    Is that the one you were referring to?

    the contradictions inherent in capitalism require it. (Well, so long as capitalism doesn't succeed in overheating the planet first.)

    Right, so... I still have no reason to believe dialectical materialism. The argument was that it has predictive power, but we don't know what will happen.

    Another possibility I am thinking of: the capitalist class uses their resources to effectively enslave the working class through a combination of automation and surveillance. In this hypothetical, their control is airtight and revolution is impossible. Any dissent is punished with death. Forced breeding maintains the slave population if necessary, humans become more expendable. I am curious how that scenario might end.

    I agree that capitalism is unsustainable and I would like to try some form of socialism, but I don't see how socialism is the inevitable outcome.

    It's possible I'm just not understanding, or that I found a flawed definition. Thank you for the explanation.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago

    Well, I won't be able to do this topic justice due to limited time, but I hope I can at least point you in the right direction.

    Maybe the best place to start if you're new to this is the Communist Manifesto. It's short and to the point, and contains gems like:

    the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

    The serf-lord relation of feudalism came under threat with the development of productive forces. The lords/aristocrats had the basis of their economic power, land ownership, undercut by new economic power managed by the new capitalist class. The more the latter developed, the more unsustainable the former became, until the serfs were "liberated" from their feudal plots, becoming landless members of the new working class.

    The "dialectical" part here is the relationship between the opposing forces, and the "materialism" is the economic aspect. As you say, unlike Hegel, Marx and Engels rejected the idea that it was "thought" that caused such changes in class relations. Rather, changes in thought followed those changes.

    I'll have to leave it there for now, but some additional resources are:

    • this excellent study guide put together by comrade Cowbee (you could jump straight to section 3, but I'd highly recommend Why Socialism? by Einstein)
    • or, if you want to jump right in to the deep end, John Bellamy Foster has a great interview related to these topics here

    Most importantly, I hope you stick around on Lemmygrad. Keep reading, ask questions when you're not sure about things, and comrades will be here to answer!

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