There is an enormous issue with dogmatism and a lack of properly understanding theory. People treat it like the bible, and will throw up quotes to debunk people who disagree with them without giving why the writer thought that way (I know because I have done the same). Lenin said a lot of things in his life. You can cherrypick individual quotes from obscure pamphlets to align Lenin with basically anything. I have done this before, quoting Stalin on imperialism without adding the text that explains his point. This is just dogmatism, with many posts basically being stereotyped party writing. This gets especially egregious with the letters of Marx and Engels. I honestly don't think these should be taken as theory at all. It literally does not matter what either one of them thought about africans or women. Their individual words were often wrong, it is their actual work that is important.
You don't have to agree with everything Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao said to be a good communist. In fact you should be disagreeing with some parts, you should be criticising them from a productive stance (this is what Mao did with Stalin). You need to understand the context behind each text. Full length books are probably completely what the person believed, but you don't need to necessarily listen to everything in a one page statement. Shorter pamphlets might not explain everything completely but they are often among the most useful pieces of theory. You have to read these critically and put in your own brain power to fill in the gaps. This is the way to be a scientific socialist.
Generally the worst examples of this are people who overanalyze every single word Marx wrote like the sublation debate or whatever. This is pure bourgeois intellectualism. It doesn't matter what he wrote, it matters what you take away from his work as a whole and end up believing. In general 'Marxology' is completely against the science of Marxism. If you only read Marx you are not a Marxist, you are a historian at best. Like how can you be a physicist if you only read Isaac Newton?
There is just ridiculous dogmatism, an unending and unchanging devotion to 19th and 20th century political figures without updating it at all to the modern time. Obviously anyone can think of examples of this, like the 'Orthodox Marxists' or the fringe ultra-left strain of Maoism which adopted the MLMpM designation (even if that is probably still a useful term, its just been kind of co-opted by these groups). But this ends up becoming ecclecicism because it has stopped being a science, it has become a myth. That is the path Trotskyism went down, as well as most of the revisionist parties. They ended up fully with ridiculous, vapid and completely un-Marxist positions. There was a material reason for this, it's not like they just became revisionists because whatever.
Then there is 'dogmato-ecclecticism', which many MLs suffer from. It's a kind of pick and choose mentality to history and theory. The ACP is an example of this, they dogmatically follow the revisionist strain until they end up in a completely ridiculous position (this is the case because of the bourgeois class character of the party). This is also the path most 'anti-revisionists' will inevitably go down because they are limited by their lack of adopting Maoism (for example the CPBG-ML which hates Kruschev but loves Deng). Bob Avakian is another example of dogmato-ecclecticism. Anyway I don't want to make this post too much about that, and instead just a general point about being scientific when reading theory.
>>2272254OK but part of the problem is that dialectics is pseudoscience where you can read into it a whole bunch of shit, so its hard to tell whats a genuine advance and what is "revisionism". So you get a circular firing squad of people claiming revisionism.
Hard/Natural science has a relatively rigorous process of empirical methods and peer review to determine science from pseudoscience, from stuff thats just too early to tell.
OTOH people introducing those kinds of methods today are called anglo autist.
>>2272256most people think Marx got some stuff wrong, they just disagree on what it is. Alot of people nowdays think Marx got the LTV wrong. I disagree - I think what he got wrong was sticking to too much Hegelianism (especially early on) including a unilinear theory of history.
OP mentions Mao, Mao was actually pretty good as far as the Marxist tradition is concerned but thats because he concretized dialectics by applying them to the situation of the Chinese revolution. Mao was not a Hegelian, but that actually makes him pragmatic and more useful than the people jerking themselves off over an 18th century pseudoscientific idealist philosopher.
>>2272259also this, dialectics is probably a mistake for most marxists.
You can't idealistically pull more info out of the starting conditions than is there.
anyway profit rate equalization is a nonsensical thing that only appears because of the way finance works.
Assume you have an ironworks industry and it has a 4% profit rate, and the average is 6%. PRE says the capitalist sells the ironworks industry for something closer to the average. But someone still has to
buy it or the entire industry just vanishes - and anything in the middle of an industry chain can't just
vanish without destroying the chain.
This is covered up by conglomeration and spreading out, credit, and stock markets, but it doesn't change the real rate of return on any given
industry, just the portfolios.
Even Marx himself was cherrypicking out the unusally low profit rates of the railway industry to make his argument at the time.
>>2272256The easy answer is the asiatic mode of production.
>>2272259Dialectical materialism is a hard science with a hard scientific method. But it's also completely tied to the people practicing it. In all science people get things wrong and argue about everything all the time. I'm not sure I can write more this minute but I can make a longer post later once I have thought it through.
The people who think Marx got LTV wrong didn't understand what Marx was actually writing. Marx described Labour-Value, not this apersonal LTV. It built off LTV, but was much more than it.
Anyway I actually do agree with you somewhat on Hegelianism. Though Marx absolutely did reject Hegel, Hegelianism bled through and now many people suffer from it. Like the idea that Communism is a historical inevitability. This is just a relic of German / Whig idealism. All the modes of production in the past were caused by the one previous, but that wasn't how it had to go. Slavery could have evolved into another system, still more efficient but completely different to feudalism, if the subjective historical conditions were different. We aren't certain to go to Communism, just as it isn't certain where we will go after Communism, just that it will be more efficient than the past. This really is something solved by modern Maoism though.
>>2272256Marx was WRONG that natural prices (prices corresponding exactly to values) fluctuate around a fixed
point but we know now that prices are a random variable so it's actually more correct to talk about a fixed
distribution of prices.
>>2272254 (OP)
>There is an enormous issue with dogmatism and a lack of properly understanding theory. People treat it like the bible, and will throw up quotes to debunk people who disagree with them without giving why the writer thought that way (I know because I have done the same). Lenin said a lot of things in his life. You can cherrypick individual quotes from obscure pamphlets to align Lenin with basically anything. <"Looking back, I can proudly say that the cunning but very simple tactics — the mechanisms of totalitarianism against the system of totalitarianism — worked. We had no other way of political struggle; Bolshevism completely rejected any democratic reforms, any dissent.For example, my works and speeches in 1987-1988, and partly in 1989, were densely stuffed with quotations from Marx and especially from Lenin. Fortunately, one can find in Lenin any number of mutually exclusive statements and on practically any fundamental issue." - Alexander Yakovlev
1. On the question of theory. The dogmatic interpretation of Marxism-Leninism is so unsanitary that any creative and even classical thoughts perish in it.Lucifer is Lucifer: his devilish hoof still tramples the shoots of new thoughts. Stalin's dogmas are slandering, and we will probably have to live with this for a long time.Social thought, developing from utopia to science, remained largely utopian at the stage of Marxism. Utopian, because the ideas about the temporary lag in the construction of socialism, the rapid jump to communism, the doom of capitalism, etc. were seen mechanically. The information fields that were processed by predecessors were too fluid.In our practice, Marxism is nothing more than a neo-religion, subordinated to the interests and whims of an absolutist power that has dozens of times exalted and then trampled into the mud its own gods, prophets and apostles.But since we are talking primarily about ourselves, we must at least try to understand how and why our country went into social chaos and what came of it. How we, striving upward, to the heights of material prosperity and moral perfection, simply fell behind. Resentment and bitterness do not give us peace.The political conclusions of Marxism are unacceptable for an emerging civilization seeking a path to reconciliation and mitigation of the original conflicts and contradictions of existence.We no longer have the right to ignore the consequences of dogmatic stubbornness, endless incantations of fidelity to the theoretical heritage of Marxism, just as we cannot forget the sacrifices made on its altar. -Alexander "mega wrecker" Yakovlev
Conservative dogmatism partly allowed reformists and outright traitors like Yakovlev to emerge.
>>2272254I think it's interesting that leftists in the past (particularly Maoists and their spawn) were much more open in declaring that Marx was incomplete/wrong and peddling their own revised doctrines and new thought-leaders. This practice has declined precipitously and nowadays every tendency blindly insists that "Marx supports us" with no changes needed.
Perhaps because current day leftists are so poorly-read? Or perhaps the opposite, they are so well-read that they can quote-mine Marx as you say to support whatever their orgs come up with.
>>2272654>Science is the modern method of understanding Science =/= scientific method
>and improving the world. Idealist nonsense.
>This is what Marxism does. Mr. Marxism does this? Sounds like a busy man.
>I only use the term 'hard science' to differentiate it from stuff like psychology Idealist division. Your disparagement of psychology is borne from ignorance. Psychology's subject of study is the psyche, the mind. Pray tell, what is the subject of study of Marxism?
>which isn't really a science at all Reasoning being: a psychologist once diagnosed you with mild retardation
>but claims the term 'soft science', How dare the study of the mind declare itself to be scientific!
>even though it isn't even that.Illuminate us, what is it then!?
>>2273647Funny you respond to only one point. It's clear you don't haven't done any research into psychology.
While there are a lot of problems in academic psychology, you're simply wrong. Of course you haven't made any meaningful investigation on the subject. The dunning Kruger here is outstanding.
>it is divorced totally from the real world. There is no practice in psychology, just theory.<Marketing is just theory!>[the definition of mental illnesses transforms] someone's individual conditon into a caste100% retarded. Schizophrenics aren't a caste you fucking retarded moron.
>and this erosion of the objective is extremely dangerous to MarxismEXTREMELY DANGEROUS! hahahaha idealist retardation.
>In practice psychology is just used to attack individuals and arrest them without any bourgeois legal chargeSchizo shit.
>[field of study] as it is is just metaphysics, trying to shape something we don't understand into patternsReally makes ONE THINK.
>>2273654Capital was only translated to Chinese like a decade after the CPC was founded…
>>2273669Can you just explain what we are even talking about? How is Marxism not a science? You're not explaining yourself at all. It's all the same shit, no explaining, all just snobbery. You need to work in a farm for 5 years.
>>2273919You're the one making the claim, boy. Explain why it's a science. What is the subject of Marxism? What is it studying? You should be able to answer as such:
Marxism is the study of:
__
>>2273919That must be also why Mao fabricated Lenin quotes as well :)
Idk seems bery consistent with his opposing 'book worship' policy
>>2272259>>2272270>>2272271>Dialectical materialism is a hard science with a hard scientific method.AHAHAHA Do you ever see physicists or chemists waffling about how dialectics helped them to make a discovery? No you don't.
See also the famous Marx quote about there being no "royal road to science". There is no universal method that you can apply to understand the world,
and dialectics aren't even a method to begin with. Dialectics are immanent in subject matter and only a concern at the end of an investigation.
Only on leftypol would you have an utter retard making a whole ass thread accusing others of "a lack of properly understanding theory" while spouting such bullshit.
>>2274224>dialectics aren't even a method to begin with.https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/xx/dialectic.htm>The simplest globule of protoplasm, the life of a society in the very earliest phase of evolution – one and the other exhibit diametrically conflicting properties. Manifestly, then, we must reserve for the dialectical method a very large place in natural science and in sociology. Since investigators have begun to do this, these sciences have advanced with rapid strides.https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm>The following are some comments on Vygotsky’s work as part of a discussion of the application of the dialectical method.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/mean10.htm> Lenin summaries the dialectical method in his Philosophical Notebooks as follows:
< "The determination of the concept out of itself [the thing itself must be considered in its relations and in its development];> the contradictory nature of the thing itself (the other of itself), the contradictory forces and tendencies in each phenomenon;< the union of analysis and synthesis".https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm>When describing their dialectical method, Marx and Engels usually refer to Hegel as the philosopher who formulated the main features of dialectics. This, however, does not mean that the dialectics of Marx and Engels is identical with the dialectics of Hegel. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels took from the Hegelian dialectics only its "rational kernel," casting aside its Hegelian idealistic shell, and developed dialectics further so as to lend it a modern scientific form.
<"My dialectic method," says Marx, "is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, … the process of thinking which, under the name of 'the Idea,' he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos (creator) of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea.' With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought." (Marx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Volume I of Capital.)https://www.marxists.org/archive/cornforth/1953/materialism-and-dialectical-method.pdfhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/1940/aug/x01.htm>The dialectical method of reasoning about material reality is the highest form of conscious thought. >>2274287>not even understanding the shit youre quotemining yourself>pasting trash from academics >unable to explain what the fuck """dialectical materialism""" even consists oflmfao
all pseuds are describing is the scientific study of history, which begs the question of why any knowledge of ""diamat"" as a special branch of knowledge is even necessary
plus they cant even describe scientific investigation correctly, since they virtually rule out abstraction
>>2274357The discussion started because of OP saying:
>Dialectical materialism is a hard science with a hard scientific methodDialectical materialism isn't even a real thing and dialectics has nothing to do with that description either. Can't read the context of a quote much less read the context of an imageboard convo LOL.
>>2274200This says nothing. Marxism is the study of an ontology+epistemology, and of a framework of historical analysis? So it's not a science. It's epistemology and ontological philosophy, and philosophy of history. You failed yet again to prove it is a science.
>>2274287Your quote mining does not disagree with the anon you're responding to. Read their post carefully.
>>2274358>a method of presentation but not a method of analysisAbsolutely wrong on this one. Sure it can be a method of presentation, but to pretend that Marxism isn't imbued with a specific ontology+epistemological method of analysis, namely the then novel dialectical materialism, is bizarre and outright wrong. You can disagree with Marx on this one, but please…. Don't kid yourself.
>>2274657If scientific socialism isn't a science then why does it make succesful predictions?
For example the tendency for rate of profit to fall as a secular (ie. long term) trend
Unique IPs: 31