this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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[–] buckykat@hexbear.net 40 points 1 year ago

Me calling people deeply unserious

[–] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 21 points 1 year ago

literally me, but i keep it to myself its funnier when they don't know it's an insult.

[–] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why don't you IDEALizeDEEZNUTZ boom gottem

[–] Asafum@feddit.nl 6 points 1 year ago

Damn, I am now devastated.

Could have at least salted them...

[–] EchoCT@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I am an idealist, in the same sense as Che's ideas about a revolutionary's love. I want desperately for us as humanity to make kind, informed, rational and appropriate decisions. I want to see the best in people... I also realize that's not realistic a lot of the time. But hey, have to have hope to keep going, no?

Idealism should never undermine the reality of the situation, but it can and should be a guiding force. I am an idealist in the sense that I believe given the tools and direction we can be incredible. Realistically, right now the fight is tough, it sucks, but we can make a better world, or at least, we gotta try.

As for idealism in relation to material condition, decisions cannot and should not be made with 'what if' positions. Plan for the worst but those plans should be made malleable enough to adapt should real material conditions allow.

[–] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 16 points 1 year ago

I think the better word is romantic.

[–] anarchoilluminati@hexbear.net 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just last week I called some people on my union team idealists to their face.

They're libs so I don't think they got the full impact of what I was saying.

[–] comrade_pibb@hexbear.net 10 points 1 year ago

deeply unserious idealists

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have to say, it feels like one issue that I have with a lot of socialists is not understanding what idealism is and not understanding when they are talking about non-material things (and there are a lot of important non-material things to talk about, like capitalism, value, social stuff in general, etc.). I am honestly still unsure why so many people assume that idealism is incompatible with major schools of thought associated with socialism.

[–] DrJenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I am still not super clear on it myself, but while you are correct that idealism isn't incompatible with socialism, it is incompatible with Marxism as idealism is the opposite of materialism and Marxism is rooted in materialism, not idealism.

And I think you are wrong on how you categorize things. Capitalism, value, and social stuff can be analyzed from an idealist perspective, but a Marxist would analyze those things from a materialist perspective. They don't merely exist as ideas, but also as real material institutions that have material affects on people.

[–] imogen_underscore@hexbear.net 11 points 1 year ago

thank you, you are completely correct. more marxists need to understand that idealism is the opposite of materialism.

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

it is incompatible with Marxism as idealism is the opposite of materialism and Marxism is rooted in materialism, not idealism

I have to disagree. Marxism does not seem to be rooted in either materialism or idealism, or, at least, I do not see any contradictions with either. A lot of people seem to hold this view out of gross misunderstanding of what idealism and materialism (as well as the relevant types of those, such as, for example, ontological idealism and materialism) are, and an assumption that idealism is some sort of a belief in magic.

Like, one of the schools of thought that I subscribe to is mathematical Platonism (perhaps with some modifications, as I have not seen any mention of concepts such as what I describe as 'manifestations of ideas' in sources regarding mathematical Platonism), which makes me an idealist in the ontological sense. In what ways are those views of mine incompatible with Marxism? I see no conflicts of any sort of significance whatsoever. I do not think that Marxism has any sort of dependency on ontology, or, at least, I do not see those dependencies.

Capitalism, value, and social stuff can be analyzed from an idealist perspective, but a Marxist would analyze those things from a materialist perspective

If we are talking about strict materialism, then such perspectives would posit that non-material things do not exist, and I am yet to find a Marxist who holds those views.
If we are talking about non-strict materialism, where non-material things can be said to exist, then how do those perspectives differ from idealist ones in this context? I do not see any dependencies of, say, Marx talking about various forms of values of commodities on making non-strict materialist assumptions.

They don't merely exist as ideas, but also as real material institutions that have material affects on people

However, that is not in conflict with idealism, and, furthermore, when relevant things are discussed in socialist spaces, including Marxist and Marxist-adjacent ones, people almost always talk about the non-material stuff. Not to the exclusion of material things, of course, like people getting sick, or some goods or materials being moved to somewhere, etc., but people also talk about and in terms of stuff like capitalists and workers' relations to capital, land, and labour, like laws being passed, enforced, and abolished, like policies of various states and organisations, etc.
And, of course, I am yet to encounter any sort of Marxist perspective where materialist assumptions are necessary, unless I am missing something.

[–] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have to disagree. Marxism does not seem to be rooted in either materialism or idealism, or, at least, I do not see any contradictions with either.

Marxism is dialectical materialism, that is what it means. When someone says "Marxist analysis", it means it's an analysis through the lens of dialectical materialism. It's method is dialectical, viewing things as a process, while it's theory is materialistic, matter being primary. Marxism is hitherto the most advanced development on materialist theory.

Obligatory "Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Stalin" recommendation, this book explains why Marxism is opposite to idealism and metaphysics: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

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[–] dead@hexbear.net 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Marxism does not seem to be rooted in either materialism or idealism

Marx was a young hegelian. Hegel was an idealist. Marxism was created by Marx changing Hegel's ideas. Dialectical materialism took Hegel's dialectic and changed it from idealist to materialist.

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can you, however, point to any Marxist positions that are in contradiction to idealism in general and/or, in my case specifically, to mathematical Platonism? As of right now, I see literally no conflict between Marxism and idealism.

[–] dead@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.

This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.

Karl Marx - The German Ideology
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

My understanding of this passage is that in idealist thinking, ideas shape reality but in materialist thinking, material reality shapes ideas.

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago

So, I finished going over the quoted part, and Marx is talking about specifically the type(s) of idealism that I do not subscribe to. He is addressing specifically the types of idealism that posit that only material stuff and mental stuff exist, and that the latter has some sort of 'primacy' over the former. My view on this sort of idealism is echoed by what you quoted, and I find that type of idealism rather silly.

The quoted part does not address the type of idealism that I subscribe to, one which posits that non-material non-mental stuff, like what mathematicians study, exists as well, and that some of it has no dependency on the other stuff, i.e. it has 'primacy' over, in particular, material stuff in this sense.

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[–] Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Look into historical materialism. Marx's materialist method of understanding how human societies evolved hinged on giving primacy to factors like energy, production, population and ecology. It allowed him to construct an understanding of anthropology so advanced for his time that when I was being taught anthropology by my uni professors I legit thought he was a Marxist. Only later did I realise that marx's method is today being rediscovered and being touted as some new revolutionary thinking.

Another point in which materialism is important to Marxism is with economics. Whole today's economic theories on value consider it to be subjective, marx analysed value through constraints on labour in an economy. The method that he used was a kind of primitive linear programming. It then inspired the creation of actual linear programming, which won Nobel prizes and forms the backbone of economic planning even in capitalist firms.

Really, marx's dialectical materialism was one of the first scientific approaches to fields and political movements (economics, history, socialism) dominated by idealism and hodgepodge theories. It is the reason why marx was so influential beyond his years and beyond his contemporaries like proudhon and fruerbach

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[–] cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

None of those things you mentioned are non material. They’re just patterns that exist in the material configuration of physical matter. For example, a stack of wood is only different from a wooden chair because of how that wood is arranged. That’s a material change even though the underlying substance is identical. Value is just a way of describing changes in configuration in the material world that are found to be useful to humans. Social relations are also more complicated but still exist in material form as they are embedded in the complex arrangements of neurons and chemicals within the human brain.

The problem then with idealism is that if you don’t understand how concepts like capitalism are embedded in the physical world, you are very unlikely to understand how to change them.

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