He says this twice in TonF.

In neither of these quotes does he say this. I can’t even imagine how you got this from what you quoted. And if he did, all the worse for it, because this does not hold up at all.

You can nit pick this semantically or whatever, but semantics aren’t Marxist.

I don’t care if semantics are or aren’t “Marxist”; you need to get into semantics if you want to analyze the meaning of a sentence. There’s no nit pick, Marx isn’t saying anything close to this.

but, because the working class is the vast, vast majority, we create a more just and democratic society

You can’t just smuggle in the concept of justice. Wrt democracy, Engels said that the communist aim of overcoming the state also implies the overcoming of democracy. Wrt Marxism, democracy is not some virtue to be maximized nor does communism have anything to do with the concept of justice.

But you are going to have to provide something more substantive on your theory of individuals as pseudo-subjects. […] I think you’re being overly mechanical, and dismissing my point without evidence. It seems like you’re just chucking subjectivity out the window, and giving into determinism. There is a deterministic element to Marxism, the world dictates the limits and possibilities, but people change it. I really don’t buy what your selling here, and you’re not supporting your argument, on this very load-bearing point.

Oy vey. How could you misread my words so completely?

I’m not getting rid of goals. To me the goal is to determine what is happening here and now, and make predictions and plans based in concretion.

Here is where semantics would come in handy.

But I don’t see how something in the far flung future defines us, and you aren’t convincing me.

It’s just been established that you didn’t actually read what I said with any attention so this isn’t a very big issue for me.

Anyways, this is Marxism 101. This grand calculus is what justifies everything (you see this in the draft ch.6 of Capital quote). Without this view, what justifies the call for global proletarian revolt? Within Marxism there is no universal (real) justice or morality, so it cannot derive legitimacy from this; it can’t be immediate self-interest, because Marx wasn’t a proletarian (why not side with the bourgeoisie?). Who’s to say this world we know nothing about will be “better”? Who’s to say the global terror won’t backfire tremendously and lead to a world far worse than the one against which people revolted? Capitalism contains contradictions? Why don’t we work to alleviate them as much as possible? If you think about this for two seconds you realize there is no other option than that Marxism relies on the image of the future communist society/the historical necessity it traces from capitalism to it for the legitimacy of communism as a movement. If that’s idealist, then Marxism is idealist. This is the backbone of the movement, this is what defines it.

Marx’s theories about “communist society” are concrete enough to believe

I don’t think so. You didn’t seem to either: “The ‘comprehension’ of ‘communist society’ does not even reach the level of contemplating single individuals! Only an abstract civil society. So it does not even reach the level of bourgeois materialism, it’s not scientific, its pre-modern conception.”

“Since we can’t possibly imagine what those experiences will be in ‘communist society’ we can’t imagine a communist individual existing in that society.”

“while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (The German Ideology).

However CotGP is not a description of communism, but a criticism of Lassalle.

It’s a criticism of Lassalle that also contains a description of communism. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Since we can’t possibly imagine what those experiences will be in “communist society” we can’t imagine a communist individual existing in that society.

Marx violates this in TGI.

The issue you seem to be having throughout everything is the comprehension of revolutionary subjects as unconscious pseudo-subjects, where revolution comes about as a mechanical inevitability springing from capitalism, and ““communist society”” (unpredictably) from this (“communist society will be brought about”), hence the ability to preserve the movement towards communist society via ~“revolutionary praxis” but do away with this as the ultimate goal.

So communism isn’t actually defined by a future condition but by a present condition that will continually develop into the central characteristic of individuals in communist society.

For Marx, communism is defined by a present condition (“the premises now in existence” ~ TGI) which carries the possibility for the creation of a communist society (“Looked at historically this inversion appears as the point of entry necessary in order to enforce, at the expense of the majority, the creation of wealth as such, i.e. the ruthless productive powers of social labour, which alone can form the material basis for a free human society.” – Draft Ch. 6 of Capital). This possibility is immanent to these conditions and therefore Marx and Engels can sketch certain features of this possible society through studying present society and its historical premises, which is the actual basis for their call for the proletariat to become organized and unite.

I don’t care if you disagree with Marx but that is what you’re doing.

Ideas only exist in practice.

This isn’t what Marx is saying, nor is it true.

This is a total dismissal of the definition of communism as some future idyllic society. Right here at the beginning of part two of the manifesto.

I already addressed a very similar passage from TGI.

If imagining a better world is the impetus for actually engaging in the here and now, then that’s a subjective factor that is part of the process.

No, it’s absolutely not just motivation. Communist society being a real possibility/historical necessity (in what is effectively though not explicitly a moral “should”), is what Marxism rests on–this is where “historical materialism” is supposed to transcend the “social materialism” of classical political economy. You can’t justify the call for global proletarian revolution without this. If it turns out that Marx doesn’t manage to prove this, that it can’t be proven because of when the owl of Minerva spreads its wings, then the only thing to do is to drop Marxism.

You’re clearly alluding to the words in The German Ideology about communism being the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. And yet in the same work, and in several others, Marx and Engels also do talk about “communist society” and give some rough descriptions of how it would operate. The notion that communism is pure negativity and that it “goes away when capitalism goes away” (or that “the idea of socialism as the achievement of minimum demands, that leads to communism as the realization of maximum demands, is not a Marxist communist theory of change, it is a social democratic one”) is something you would have to take up with a lot of works, again, but this is most clearly put down in Critique of the Gotha Programme.

And I don’t think Marx would go so far as to say “communism exists now within the working class,” because there is no world-historic struggle by the collective proletariat to <upheave> the present state of things; struggle on the individual level is not communism, as is also made clear in TGI, nor would communism exist within the working class semantically regardless, as it is the <real movement> [which seizes upon the immanent negativity in capitalism and reorganizes production, thereby upheaving capitalist relations of production], it is not some rebellious spirit people come to possess.

I shouldn’t have to explain that repeating what you already said won’t somehow make it count as a justification.

I shouldn’t have to explain that telling you to read a specific book is not the same thing as saying “read theory” (nor is it a thought-terminating cliche, as just saying “read theory” could be); I shouldn’t have to explain why books aren’t five bullet points long in the first place or why “If their arguments are too complicated to present in a Lemmy post, they’re too complicated to be bothered with.” isn’t something anyone should unironically say.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that reading (thought-terminating cliche) about any nation will show you that the way you think things are presented (“It pretends that you only relate to people of your own ‘nation’, and that nobody in your nation relates to anybody outside of it. It’s drawing hard lines on a spectrum and trying to define portions of that spectrum as homogeneous groups, entirely distinct and different from others just on the other side of that line.”) isn’t actually how they’re presented. If only anyone had realized that ~the delineations between nations aren’t really so rigid and people of different nationalities have things in common and interact with each other! I shouldn’t have to explain that people of different regions have different cultures/languages, that the concept of nations is not a completely ideological invention and that conflicts between nations are not just caused by ideology.

I shouldn’t have to explain the difference between being an Aries and being of a particular nationality, how people of particular nationalities relate to each other in an actual way and how nationality can be changed, but that, as long as you stay in the US/retain US nationality you actually do have a stake in their position wrt other nations, whether you like it or not.

I shouldn’t have to explain to you how it’s arguing in bad faith to write out a condescending spiel about how you “understand” that I psychologically need the concept of nations to make sense of the world and that’s why I made fun of your “alternative.”

I have very little patience for bad faith arguments

Don’t laugh don’t laugh

It is still bad, and it is still wrong.

You have to actually justify the things you say. Anarchism is truly even worse than communisation theory.

Every state is its own little empire, enforcing its will against the individuals within it just as more powerful states try to impose their will on other states (and their own people).

Read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or any Winfield and you’ll immediately realize how philosophically incoherent your position is.

You don’t need national identity. You don’t need national cultural history. You can have individual identity and individual cultural history. These can be defined by yourself and the others you relate to.

Others you relate to! I wonder if this somehow inevitably transforms into national identity!

In the preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels say that the Russian commune could “pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership” only if the Russian Revolution (which he saw as inevitable, though it was not inevitable that it would “take[] place in time” (first draft of letter to Zasulich), and in the Letter to Otecestvenniye Zapisky he says that if Russia continues on its path, it will have lost this chance to skip the phase of capitalist development) is supported by wider revolution in the West. Otherwise, the Russian commune “must [] first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West.”

There’s zero approval by Marx here for the notion of skipping the phase of private production/property in one country without a wider revolution.

Marx told Zasulich at the time that education was one of the most crucial factors in the possibility of bypassing the agonizing stage of capitalism.

No he didn’t.

I’m sorry things have gotten aggressive, I didn’t intend for that at first. I appreciate your words on the state ownership of the mop thing. Things are going in a circle in both conversations and I just want to be done with it. I have things I’d like to say but at this point I’d just be repeating myself and fueling the argument again. Just forget everything.

You do not have a correct notion of science. You just ignored what I said.

Insisting on the existence of something outside of the material merely because it cannot be empirically disproven is still not evidence of this existing.

I feel like slamming my head against the wall. That isn’t what happened. I did not insist that things outside the material exist because this cannot be empirically disproven, I said that you cannot assert that nothing outside of the material exists because there is no way for you to prove this within your view of what constitutes proof.

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.

I did not accuse you of “reducing the entirety of idealist philosophy into a few paragraphs,” I accused you of listing as general features of idealism things which are not generally the case for “idealist” philosophers.

As for me “not understanding idealism” and “not reading any philosophy whatsoever,” both of these are false assumptions.

These are not assumptions. Read my explanation.

As for the existence of god, an Absolute, a being outside of physical limitations

The absolute cannot be outside of anything. Do you know what words mean? And the absolute is not a being, the absolute is being, and the fact of existence necessarily leads to the absolute. Read the Science of Logic.

Simply claiming that I would not accept proof does not excuse you from providing it for your arguments to land.

And I have; you refused to read where I told you the arguments are when they cannot be condensed to a quickly typed up message, and refused to acknowledge the arguments I gave directly or otherwise misunderstood them while simultaneously accusing me of arguing in bad-faith based on that misunderstanding. You haven’t made a single actual argument in this entire conversation.

Science is necessarily idealist, as the Logic proves (and you can read Winfield’s lectures on the logic as well, the first one explains the same thing); it’s very simple to prove this, since beginning with foundations (as “materialism” does) causes everything that follows to fall into opinion. Now I don’t think you know what you mean when you refer to “idealism,” since the first and third of the “3 basic teachings of materialism as counterposed to idealism” are not in opposition to “Hegel’s idealis[m].” The general features you give of “idealism” are not general at all and you would know that if you’d read any philosophy whatsoever. I just can’t believe you think you’ve reached the Truth as opposed to all of those idealist philosophers yet haven’t even bothered to try and understand any of the history or basics of philosophy. I mean you think the trivial notions that “everything is connected and should be understood in context” and “when you add on a bunch of little things then a big thing happens” are some big revelations that elevate “materialism” and that a “dialectical relationship” is just when two things act upon each other; no wonder you haven’t touched Hegel, because this is what you think he brought to the table.

Nothing exists out of the material universe, all thought, ideas, and matter exists in the material world.

There simply is no way to prove this from your perspective, relying on experience is already begging the question by assuming the determinacies of experience you intend to prove; anyways the notion that God would imply something existing outside of the material world already shows you don’t know what God is (the absolute). As far as I know, Hegel never posited anything existing outside of the material world.

not a single idealist notion has ever nor could ever be proven

More accurately you wouldn’t accept that proof because you assume that proof must be experiential (which is just begging the question again), despite “materialism” as a position referring to matter in general, which is an idealization that can never be directly experienced or observed, despite experience relying on onto-logical categories to be determined, and despite the myriad of logical arguments that can be found in Marx and Engels’ works.

Because this implies they exist outside of the material universe.

And how do you know nothing exists out of the material universe?

Relying on gods, supernatural forces, or other impossible phenomena to explain real, existing phenomena gets in the way of actually understanding reality around us

Only if these explanations are false (god is not impossible, in fact god necessarily exists, see the Logic), which you just presuppose. How do you know your assumptions are better than anyone else’s? This is the height of philosophy?

I can, because supernatural processes do not exist.

How do you know this?