Leftcoms, how would you address Halloway?
>The tradition of ‘scientific Marxism’ is blind to the issue of fetishism. If fetishism is taken as a starting point, then the concept of science can only be negative, critical and self-critical. If social relations exist in the form of relations between things, it is impossible to say ‘I have knowledge of reality’, simply because the categories through which one apprehends reality are historically specific categories which are part of that reality. We can proceed only by criticising, by criticising the reality and the categories through which we apprehend that reality. Criticism inevitably means self-criticism.
>In the tradition of scientific Marxism, criticism does not play a central role. Certainly there is criticism in the sense of denunciation of the evils of capitalism; but there is no criticism in the sense of the genetic criticism of identity. To be blind to fetishism is to take fetishised categories at face value, to take fetishised categories without question into one’s own thought. Nowhere has this been more disastrous in the tradition of orthodox Marxism than in the assumption that the state could be seen as the centre point of social power. A Marxism that is blind to the question of fetishism is inevitably a fetishised Marxism.[11]
>The core of orthodox Marxism is the attempt to enlist certainty on our side. This attempt is fundamentally misconceived: certainty can only be on the other side, the side of domination. Our struggle is inherently and profoundly uncertain. This is so because certainty is conceivable only on the basis of the reification of social relations. It is possible to speak of the ‘laws of motion’ of society only to the extent that social relations take the form of relations between things.[12] Non-fetishised, self-determining social relations would not be law-bound. The understanding of capitalist society as being bound by laws is valid to the extent, but only to the extent, that relations between people really are thing-ified. If we argue that capitalism can be understood completely through the analysis of its laws of motion, then we say at the same time that social relations are completely fetishised. But if social relations are completely fetishised, how can we conceive of revolution? Revolutionary change cannot possibly be conceived as following a path of certainty, because certainty is the very negation of revolutionary change. Our struggle is a struggle against reification and therefore against certainty.
>The great attraction of orthodox Marxism remains its simplicity. It provided an answer to the revolutionary dilemma: a wrong answer, but at least it was an answer. It guided the revolutionary movement to great conquests that, in the end of the day, were not conquests at all, but dreadful defeats. If, however, we abandon the comforting certainties of orthodoxy, what are we left with? Is our scream not then reduced to the childishly naïve and self-deceptive appeal to the idea of justice, do we not return, as Luxemburg mockingly warned, ‘to that lamentable Rosinante on which the Don Quixotes of history have galloped towards the great reform of the earth, always to come home with their eyes blackened'? No, we do not. We return, rather, to the concept of revolution as a question, not as an answer.
>In the tradition of scientific Marxism, criticism does not play a central role.
Has this guy read Marx?
>>2928332I think of you read the introduction, you'll understand better his criticism of Engels' interpretation
>>2928333Okay my bad for not clicking the source. I still disagree with the idea that Engels vulgarized Marx to a significant extent. Certainly he must have understood the negative part of Marxism based on his critique of Rodbertus and Duhring, no?
>>2928337>>2928339I actually agree, this personally though has a remained an unresolved paradox for me– I'm talking about Engels' positivist approach versus Holloway's negative. I think I ultimately side with Engels here, but the open Marxist tradition brings strong arguments to bare against it
>>2928337Also yes, Holloway imagines a complete rejection of tools created by capitalism to avoid falling into the same trap of new ruling classes emerging post-revolution, but Marx himself already conceded the new must necessarily contain the old in an uncomfortable dialectical tragedy
>We return, rather, to the concept of revolution as a question, not as an answer.We can see in the failed prophecies of Marxists that certainty, based in supposed laws of history and society, lead to humiliating error. This is perhaps why Jesus claimed that an apocalypse was imminent, but also said that no one knew the hour except the Father. As an example, the term "late capitalism" was coined over a century ago; are we now in a "very late capitalism"? Then again, some Marxians even claim that we no longer maintain capitalist social relations as such. For myself, I tend to reject the metanarrative of historical determination, in the idea of "progress", for example. If we abandon progress, we thus assume an existential responsibility, rather than an appeal to astrology. An idea of "revolution"; objectified as evental horizon, necessarily begins in oneself. Otherwise, revolution is an instrument of its own fetishism:
<The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.https://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/nechayev/catechism.htmTo treat oneself as a means to this imaginary end is truly horrible.
>>2928360I see you're with Holloway on this one, but without determining a mechanism for eradicating this fetishism from the subconscious of the masses, we're resigning liberation to hopes and prayers
>>2928361Liberation must begin in oneself.
Holding to the abstraction of "society" is the fundamental error.
If you're fat, try to lose weight, etc.
>>2928363Right but that's my point. That doesn't occur spontaneously.
>>2928360>the term "late capitalism" was coined over a century ago; are we now in a "very late capitalism"?Are people too stupid to realize it took a global imperialist war to revert a late stage of capitalism to an earlier stage
>>2928360"Historical progressiveness" is the most moralist, stupid idea people took from Marx tbh, if history is the history of class struggle, and everything that advance class struggle is progressive, then it logically follows that every event in the past was progressive, which makes the term meaningless, and also completely taken out of context to describe anything that is happening in the present or near future.
Marx and Engels also did not give any exemple of an "historically regressive" event (and in retrospective thank fuck for that) so there is nothing to compare it to too.
I think it's also part of the reason why rosa used the "socialism or barbarism" angle, that it's not actually historically determined that you can just end history and reach communism (it is also implied that communism is not supposed to be the religious utopia, but the next mode of production that WILL have contradictions and maybe will be supplanted by something else) eventually, and that there needs to be an actual effort made to birth it, an actual REAL movement, regardless of the mistakes and opportunism that happens along the way
>>2928342To get to the new, you have to get through the old. Marx critiques precisely those socialists who proclaim a new utopian vision for society without the self-conscious understanding of what they don't know (a post-capitalist society). Which is why he's very specific in his own position on the dictatorship of the proletariat and its distinction from communism. The DoTP is that old society without the bourgeoisie, as the first precondition towards abolishing capitalism as a whole. Not sure how Engels would disagree with that.
>>2928413Engels would absolutely not disagree with that, but Holloway might. Holloway's critique is predicated on this positivist view, in that human history evolves along certain lines according to laws of economics and associated social phenomenon in a very deterministic way. Holloway is saying this interpretation dooms us into a perpetual cycle of a class society since we are treating revolution and progress as tangible, measurable attributes that must yield results. In this vein, he's saying what we're actually doing is treating progress like a commodity, a product that we invest in to receive something in return. As the other anon pointed out, to achieve real liberation, the illusion needs to be abandoned.
>>2928370The idea of historical progress does not begin in Marx, but can be traced back to the Bible, with the New Jerusalem being a prelude to "Heaven on earth". The eschatology of Marxism is expressly Christian, but the soteriology differs, as Engels notes:
<Both Christianity and the workers’ socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity/So, Marxism is a type of active Christianity, we could say.
>>2928366I don't understand.
Could you explain what you mean, please?
>>2928368The consolidation of empires into a global hegemony is a graduation from the inter-imperialist conflicts which Hobson and Lenin write of. Michael Hudson calls our period "super-imperialism", for example.
>>2928423>The consolidation of empires into a global hegemony is a graduation from the inter-imperialist conflicts which Hobson and Lenin write of. Lenin refuted Kautskys idea of ultraimperialism as reactionary garbage, what the hell are you talking about
>Therefore, in the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons, or of the German “Marxist,” Kautsky, “inter-imperialist” or “ultra-imperialist” alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a “truce” in periods between wars
>Kautsky’s theoretical analysis of imperialism, as well as his economic and political critique of imperialism, are permeated through and through with a spirit, absolutely irreconcilable with Marxism, of obscuring and glossing over the fundamental contradictions of imperialism and with a striving to preserve at all costs the crumbling unity with opportunism in the European working-class movement. That’s a lot of cope stuffed into four paragraphs
>>2928430So the EU is not actually a union?
As far as I see, the EU opposes the US in its global section, which is why the UK leaving the EU just made the US grant more authority over it. This is an inter-imperialist conflict at a higher stage.
>>2928294>it is impossible to say ‘I have knowledge of reality’, simply because the categories through which one apprehends reality are historically specific categories which are part of that reality.well there's the more fundamental issue of the brain and sensory apparatus fundamentally giving you a filtered version of the phenomenon you are observing. just like the map is a representation of the territory, and not the territory itself, the brain's picture of reality is a representation of reality, and not the reality itself. when you see an apple, what you are really "seeing" is your brain's flawed reconstruction of the apple after the light has passed into your eyes, and your body has converted the light into an electrochemical signal that is then interpreted by the brain. the brain's interpretation can be very good, highly accurate, but never perfect. Science is only as good as our ability to use our bodies and tools to observe and record imperfect pictures of reality. Reality is the territory and science is the map. Lenin tried to square this circle in his Empirio-Criticism by saying that the brain really does observe reality directly. But neuroscience has proven that he was incorrect. Our brains furtheremore regularly hallucinate things that are not real. For example we all have blind spots in our eyes:
>A particular blind spot known as the physiological blind spot, "blind point", or punctum caecum in medical literature, is the place in the visual field that corresponds to the lack of light-detecting photoreceptor cells on the optic disc of the retina where the optic nerve passes through the optic disc.Here's the kicker:
>Because there are no cells to detect light on the optic disc, the corresponding part of the field of vision is invisible. Via processes in the brain, the blind spot is interpolated based on surrounding detail and information from the other eye, so it is not normally perceived.So our brain literally fills in our blind spot with statistically-likely hallucinations so we don't notice the blind spot. The brain does not only interpret reality, it also simulates the information it is missing.
The more vulgar version of all this is
tokes weed what if we like live in a simulation bro, what if we're like in the matrix bro. But we don't even need to live in a simulation for the basic fact of the matter is our brains are already partly simulator, partly observer. Our picture of reality will always only be approximate, no matter how advanced our tools, because the map is not the territory. This does not make idealism true of materialism false, but what it does do is limit our capabilities.
Computer science has a lot more to say about this than "Hegelian" philosophers.
Picture related, but also much longer than this post.
>>2928447Just when I think I'm done with this place I see an effortpost like that pic
>>2928440>So the EU is not actually a union?of course not, there's no political unity, just economic. the EU is merely a franco-german dominionship over the rest of the continent. If europe wants to compete with the rest of the world they need to federalize which will never happen because it involves giving up sovereignty to each other, something Powers have a hard time doing. This is why the french and germans just dropped plans for their jointly developed fighter jets, because working together is impossible
>>2928296>Engelsian>muh fetishismIt’s wack
>>2928468What's wrong with Engels?
>>2928537Nuthin. The wacko Holloway however seems all too keen on separating Marx and Engels, which is very much a problem.
>>2928451>working together is impossibleNationalist nonsense.
>>2928539Ey it is what it is bruddah
>>2928576no, the opposite, america is more successful than europe because each state has no political sovereignty